Night Watch (Kendra Michaels #4)(85)

“Who are you talking to?” Kincaid asked, his gaze on Lynch’s flying fingers on the keyboard.

“The cloud. The magic cloud,” Lynch murmured. “Rye had a private cloud account connected to his devices. I’m hoping that there might be something on it that he didn’t manage to transmit to me.”

“Do you think he could—”

“Yes.” Lynch had managed to bring up those first photos he’d received from Rye. He flipped through them quickly, and then froze. His gaze was on the last photo, one that he had never received on the night Rye had died. “Holy shit.”

Kincaid moved closer, staring at the photo. “It’s that lab at the factory.”

Lynch nodded. There was no doubt that area was a lab now. In this photo, the space was no longer empty but filled with equipment and workstations with over a dozen incubators.

He stiffened, his gaze narrowed on those incubators. He enlarged the picture, zeroing in on close-ups of what those incubators contained. He gave a low whistle. “My God.”

There were human organs in those incubators—hearts, livers, kidneys …

Kincaid swallowed. “What the hell was going on there?” he asked hoarsely. “Were those sons of bitches harvesting organs?”

That had been Lynch’s first thought, too. But it didn’t feel right with what he and Kendra had pieced together about what was going on. So now his eyes were narrowed intently on the photo, and he was studying it more carefully. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I think this is something else entirely…”


Los Angeles

Figuroa Street

Kendra and Jessie arrived at Ted Dyle’s downtown office building after a customarily hellish weekday morning drive up the I-5 freeway. For most of the trip, Jessie used her iPad to read aloud about several news stories and blog posts about Dyle’s history of backing ideas that had made him billions of dollars. None of the stories made any mention of the Night Watch Project, but Dyle apparently functioned as a silent investor on many of his endeavors.

At one point in the journey, Jessie cast a quick glance back.

Kendra tensed. “See something?”

“No black panel van. That doesn’t mean they aren’t switching vehicles.” She paused. “I did see a white utility truck a block from your condo. And I caught sight of one about four miles back on the freeway.”

“Utility trucks are all over the place in Southern California.”

“Which would be an excellent reason to use them. But if you’re still being followed, they’re very, very good.”

Kendra smiled. “You know, there’s a thin line between protectiveness and out-and-out paranoia.”

“Paranoia is good. If I’m wrong, we take a few precautions we don’t really need to. But if I’m right, it can mean the difference between life and death.”

Kendra couldn’t argue with that. Particularly since that life was her own.

Jessie glanced at her and nodded. “I guarantee Lynch would approve.”

“At the moment, I don’t give a damn what Lynch would or would not approve.”

“Oops. You were a little less antagonistic toward me this morning. But I gather Lynch is taking the full brunt?”

“You’re not out of the woods yet,” she said coolly.

Jessie nodded. “Well, you didn’t let me drive. I figured that was a punishment.”

Kendra looked at her in exasperation. “It’s my car, dammit.”

Jessie held up her hand. “It’s okay,” she said soothingly. “We would have just gotten to L.A. a lot sooner if you’d let me behind the wheel.”

“Or ended up in traffic court.” She paused. “Are you trying to distract me? You glanced in that rearview mirror twice.”

She grinned. “I should have known you’d notice. I didn’t think I should worry you. There just appear to be a lot of utility trucks out this morning. But that one got off at the last exit.”

“Jessie, since it involves my life and well-being, I do think I should worry, don’t you?”

“I stand corrected. In your bad books, but not as deep shit as Lynch. That cover it?”

“That covers it.”

“Well, we can get over that.” She looked back down at her iPad. “Still no reference to Night Watch on any of these blogs. We need to ask him questions about why he was that secretive. For some reason, he buried his association with them very deep…”

After parking on a Figuroa lot, Kendra and Jessie strode through the Dyle Pacific Building’s cavernous lobby. It featured three large fountains continuously exchanging short bursts of water that leaped with the intensity of salmon leaping upstream to spawn.

They took the elevator to the nineteenth floor, which was occupied entirely by Dyle’s offices. A young man in an elegant brown suit and horn-rimmed glasses lorded over the reception desk, slightly elevated from the rest of the room.

He smiled. “May I help you?”

“We’re here to see Ted Dyle,” Kendra said.

“Your name?”

“Kendra Michaels.”

He checked the screen. “I don’t see an appointment for you.”

“No appointment. Tell him we have a mutual friend. Dr. Charles Waldridge.”