you want to hear what I learned?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Your ex-wife lives in New York and has severe osteoporosis. I know some of the drugs she’s taking, and you do as well. You’ve paid over twenty thousand in the last eighteen months for drugs for her. I found that out searching medical resources we’re dialed into at the foundation.
‘I know you like wine. You belong to two local wine clubs. It turns out certain types of wine drinkers tend to donate to foundations like mine so we track the club lists. We pay a fee and get their lists.’
The waiter arrived and after they ordered she started on the interconnectivity of the Internet again. She was accustomed to having people listen to her, but Raveneau wasn’t that interested in a lecture today. He glanced out of the windows and followed the gray suspension span of the Bay Bridge.
‘I’m boring you.’
‘There’s a lot going on today.’
‘And you think I’m full of myself. You don’t know why I’m going on about Internet connectivity. You think I suggested lunch to make sure you don’t suspect me.’
‘I think you’re smarter than that.’
Raveneau ate Vietnamese rice cakes with rock shrimp and mung beans. Other than a glass of a Sauvignon blanc, Lafaye had ordered next to nothing.
‘I invited you to lunch because I’ve known Alex longer and better than the impression I left you with. When she worked for me she was on the computer looking for that connectivity I was boring you with. I didn’t know it at the time but Alex was already looking for that same connectivity in the market for identity theft.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Actually, it came up in a joking way one night when I said that I needed another identity, including a passport for traveling in countries where my real name could put me in danger. I’ve been very active trying to shut down illegal trade in human organs and other things like aid dollars that end up buying Mercedes instead of medicine for poor children. Things that could get me killed. My name is known some places and combined with the foundation website and the growth of the Internet I wasn’t as anonymous traveling as I used to be. Some areas became dangerous to go to with the reputation I’d started to get.’
‘So Alex got you a false identity.’
‘Yes. She knew someone who wanted to shed their current identity. I bought that identity so I could use it when I traveled in certain countries, and I only did it after there’d been an attempt to kill me. Mind you, this was quite a few years ago.’
Lafaye held her hands up, showed her fingertips, the scarring and deformation.
‘I did a lot of things that seem crazy now, but one thing I knew was I didn’t want this to happen again because I got recognized in the wrong locale. If you want to travel with me I’ll introduce you to a man named Huarang. He did the manicure work on my hands, though we’re on speaking terms now.
‘Huarang deals in organs, mostly kidneys, but he’ll get you a young healthy heart if you need a transplant. He’s very computer literate, or the people who work for him are, and they’re adept at locating potential donors by scouring hospital records. They match donors to recipients via databases they’ve built up during the years he’s been collecting UN money to inoculate and do blood tests at his clinic. He also gets grants from the Red Cross. In fact, his clinics do many good things. With me, he’s happy to provide the names of competitors.’
‘Now you can lecture me; how does it work with a kidney?’
‘When he gets an order for a kidney he searches his database and then front guys go out and locate the donor. If the donor is poor and the police are bribed, and it’s easily proved that the donor was paid well for his kidney, then often there’s nothing the unwilling donor can do later. He may have been drugged when he signed papers or had no idea what the papers said because he doesn’t read, and of course he had no idea that any of this connects to Huarang’s charity work, or that Huarang is connected to it in any way. He wakes up with stitches in his back and a check for the equivalent of five thousand dollars, which in the areas where Huarang works is a fortune.
‘Usually, the donor is a young man with a match