After being grabbed at the Puerto Princesa Airport and stuffed in the van, Marco remembered briefly waking up on the van’s floor. As he started stirring and moving, he heard a feminine voice saying he was awake. Marco, immediately felt a stabbing pain in his thigh, and then everything faded to black. It grieves me to say this, but Marco never wakes again. He is thereafter kept under constant sedation. Shortly after being injected with the sedative, he arrived at a darkened building and was placed on a gurney and rolled into an operating room, where various diagnostic tests were performed on him. All the while, his body was prepared for surgery by a team of gowned and masked surgical technicians.

After the tests are completed, it is decided that since he is such a healthy specimen and all of his organs are viable, his body will be processed as a total organ harvest. At first, it was only planned to do a quick snatch and grab, where only one kidney was removed. However, that plan was quickly nixed in favor of a more permanent procedure. An additional surgeon was quickly called in due to the increased operating time that would be required to remove not only his kidneys but his heart, liver, corneas, and large sections of his skin for grafts. They opted not to remove the lungs because they do not transport as well as the other organs. As the surgical procedure progresses and one organ after another is removed from Marco’s poor body, it is flushed with a cooled preservation solution to remove blood and preserve it. It is packed in a sterile container, placed in ice chests filled with dry ice, and readied for transport. Several vans and drivers are waiting in a queue, and delivery to airports for international transport.

Meanwhile, the dark net is being inundated with bids for Marco’s organs. The team gets five bids on the liver alone. The harvesters can accommodate all five clients because the liver can regenerate once placed into another body. By the time they are done harvesting Marco, there will be 12 different recipients for his organs, including two burn patients for skin grafts.

Now that Marco’s body is just a mere shell, and his spirit has long since departed his body, all that is left is to dispose of his body. If this harvest had taken place in a more industrialized country, his body would most likely have been cremated, making discovery next to impossible, but this is the Philippines. The same rules don’t apply here. Most crimes are never solved, and life has little value. Destitute parents frequently sell their children into slavery, and even sell one of their kidneys, just to put food on the table. So, who is going to miss an expat from Italy? Well, this is where the harvesters screwed up. Marco is not just any expat; he is the nephew of one of the most powerful men in the world, the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.

So when it came time for the body disposal, the hapless and clueless harvesters dumped Marco’s body in a dumpster behind a seafood packing plant. After all, what is just one more body?

The harvesting ring has no idea what fury they have unleashed. Once Devon is given this assignment, he will not rest until there are nothing but ashes left of this ring. Devon, however, won’t stop there; he will continue until the illegal organ harvesting industry ceases to exist in the Philippines. Devon will be the judge, jury, and executioner; no prisoners will be taken.