Organ Trafficking, the Red Devil Appears

Okamoto Taichi's fingers stopped on the ribs of his folding fan. His pupils shrank to pinpoints as he stared at the man strolling around the room with his hands behind his back.

Russell walked up to the calligraphy bearing the character for "endure." With his back to Okamoto Taichi, he tilted his head and studied it.

Under the fluorescent lights, his shadow stretched all the way to Okamoto Taichi's feet.

"Nice calligraphy," Russell said, as casually as if he were visiting an art gallery. "Sharp strokes, restrained force. Shame the person who wrote it doesn't know what it really means to endure."

Okamoto Taichi did not move. His left hand rested on his knee, while his right gripped the folding fan.

His hand edged toward the underside of his armchair's armrest. A fully loaded .45-caliber Colt M1911 was hidden there.

But halfway there, his hand stopped.

It was not that he could not move. He did not dare. The young man's glance made him feel like a mouse before a cat, a slab of meat before a butcher, an ant beneath God's gaze.

His face held no expression. It was not composure, but the almost Zen-like calm of someone driven to the brink of death who had finally let everything go.

"How did you get in?" His voice did not tremble, nor did he fly into a rage over being called a turtle.

"I walked in." Russell turned to face the man in his sixties. "Your men were too loud. The people in the casino were busy gambling, the bookkeepers were busy with their accounts, and no one noticed me."

He paused, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. "Also, your security system needs an upgrade."

Okamoto Taichi fell silent. He glanced at the underling kneeling on the floor, trembling all over, then looked back at Russell.

So this useless fool had led the killer right back here. Damn him.

If he had known, he would have sacrificed the fool along with the others last time.

But regret was pointless now. He rose slowly, walked to the wall, took down the calligraphy, rolled it up, and set it on the table.

When Okamoto Taichi turned around, his face was a little pale, and fine beads of sweat had formed on his forehead.

He did not know whether this was the end for him.

He did not know whether the magic he had just received from the Demon God could save him from this man.

This Mutant clearly meant to wipe them all out. He had deliberately let the underling return to lead the way. What a vicious move.

For all his cunning, Okamoto Taichi had been undone by his own creed of endurance.

No. He was not the one in the wrong. The world was.

This time, for instance, he had stayed home and had not gone out to cut off anyone's head. Disaster had come for him anyway.

Of course, in his line of work, he had long expected someone to come after him. Perhaps the masked vigilante Spider-Man, or the one with a skull on his chest.

This time, it was simply someone even more ruthless.

"What do you want?" Okamoto Taichi asked, though he had a fair idea.

Russell did not answer at once. He crossed to the other side of the room and pushed open a door.

Behind it was a narrow staircase leading down into darkness. The air reeked of disinfectant and something rotten.

Russell went through. Okamoto Taichi's eyes narrowed, but he did not try to stop him. He knew he could not.

This was the cold storage room on the third level.

Russell stood in the doorway, looking at rows of stainless-steel shelves. They were packed with clear glass containers holding organs in preserving fluid: hearts, livers, kidneys, eyeballs, even an entire spine.

Every container bore a label listing its "source" and "price." A whiteboard on the side wall showed a diagram of human anatomy, with prices marked beside each organ in red: hearts, one hundred thousand; livers, eighty thousand; kidneys, fifty thousand.

Several large freezers stood in the corner. Russell opened one and found more than a hundred bags of blood plasma stacked neatly inside, each labeled with a blood type.

Business is booming, Russell thought, aghast.

The operating room on the fourth level was colder still. Bloodstains remained on the operating table. A trolley beside it held scalpels, bone saws, hemostats, and medical instruments Russell could not name.

An operating schedule hung on the wall: Tuesday, kidney removal; Wednesday, liver removal; Thursday, heart removal. It was packed, like the appointment book of a thriving clinic.

The darkness on the fifth level was filled with crying. The sounds were faint but stifled, like kittens mewling in the night.

Russell did not descend from the third level, but he could see everything on the fifth clearly.

The room in the dark was small, divided into a dozen or so cubicles. Each held a bed, and each bed held a child.

The oldest looked no more than thirteen or fourteen. The youngest might have been only five or six. They all wore identical white hospital gowns, with plastic tags around their wrists. The tags had numbers, but no names.

In the cubicle nearest the door lay a girl of seven or eight. She had black hair, yellow skin, and large eyes, but her gaze was empty.

There was no fear in her eyes, nor did she cry out for help. She only stared into the darkness, like a bird that had spent so long in a cage it had forgotten how to fly.

She looked like a walking corpse.

Russell withdrew his gaze and returned to Okamoto Taichi's room. He walked slowly, each step firm against the floor.

Russell's expression had not changed, but his eyes no longer seemed blue.

They had turned a deeper, darker shade, a blue that seemed to swallow nearly all light. They were like the deep sea, the night sky, the edge of a black hole.

Okamoto Taichi watched him. The moment he met those indifferent eyes, even with all his experience, he could not help shuddering inside.

"You saw everything."

"Yes," Russell said. "All of it."

"Then you should know this isn't an ordinary business." Okamoto Taichi's voice was level, as though he were giving a work report.

"These organs are fresh. Most come from homeless people on the streets. But I'm not the one asking for them. The market is.

Some people need hearts. Some need kidneys. Some need... parts. I'm just a middleman taking a cut."

"So you think you've done nothing wrong."

"I think..." Okamoto Taichi stood, snapped his folding fan shut, and tucked it into the sash of his kimono. "Someone has to do these things. We aren't the only ones doing them."

Russell looked at him for a long time. Then he smiled. There was no warmth in that smile, no anger, no killing intent. Only one thing: amusement.

Or perhaps it was pity for a man who was about to die and was still making excuses for his crimes.

"You don't have to explain yourself to me. The rules this country runs on are murky. Put simply, it's the Dark Forest Law: the fittest survive, and the strong prey on the weak."