Night Watch (Kendra Michaels #4)(88)

“Spare parts?” Jessie said.

“To put it crudely, yes. When vital organs are lost to disease, infection, cancer … It’s often a death sentence. But every cell in your body contains a genetic blueprint to create exact copies of each of your organs. If your liver is dying, what if we could grow a new one exactly like the original? What if we could do the same with your heart? Your kidneys?”

Kendra shook her head. “Sounds like science fiction.”

“So did your procedure twenty years ago. This is merely an extension of what Night Watch did with you. It’s much more complicated, though, and required more time and resources. Waldridge and Shaw were part of the team from the start, and I joined them later. My specialty was lab-based cellular reproduction.”

Kendra couldn’t believe it. Yet, if Charles Waldridge was involved, how could she not believe it? “Were you successful?”

“Not at first. There were a lot of hurdles to overcome, not just scientific, but social and moral. There was some question if we should be doing this at all. It was something that never really came up when Night Watch regenerated your corneas. Somehow, that was okay, but the higher-ups got squeamish when it came to generating entire organs. Playing God and all that bullshit. We were just using the blueprint already in the body, but there was still too much controversy. The British government withdrew its support, so Waldridge quietly went elsewhere for financing.”

“Ted Dyle,” Kendra said.

Biers looked at her in surprise. “Waldridge told you more than I thought.”

“Please, go on.”

He shifted uneasily. “We weren’t the only group working on this. There were—and are—others all over the world, so secrecy was vitally important. We had a lot of failures in the early years, but we eventually got there. Our success rate skyrocketed to well over 98 percent.”

“Then why haven’t we heard of it?” Jessie asked.

“Well, soon a problem presented itself. The donor recipients were rejecting these organs we felt were an exact match for their originals. Dr. Shaw developed a pair of medications that seemed to solve that problem, but in all likelihood, the patients would have to continue taking those medications for the rest of their lives.”

“Seems like a small price to pay,” Jessie said.

“Depends on how much the medications’ owner decided to charge. Night Watch would own the patent on the medication as well as the original procedure as soon as Waldridge released it to them. Suddenly, the project’s investors realized that the real money to be made could come from selling the patients medication for the rest of their lives. If they don’t take it, they die. It’s the very definition of a captive market.”

“Waldridge would never accept that,” Kendra said positively. “Not in a million years.”

“None of us liked it. We kept working on a way to solve the problem even as it became more and more apparent the project’s backers didn’t want us to succeed. The Night Watch directors, headed by Dyle, were getting more and more paranoid about security, so they let most of the staff go and put Waldridge, Shaw, and me in an old factory about an hour outside of London. They started requesting more and more documentation, and it became apparent that they were going to move forward with their own plans for the project even though we were very close to finding a solution that would totally negate the need for medication.”

“Nice guys,” Jessie said.

“They’re not, trust me. Not with potentially billions of dollars at stake. They were making veiled threats, so that’s when Waldridge, Shaw, and I decided to leave the country on separate planes and hide here in Southern California. The plan was to complete our work here on our own. Waldridge has a fair amount of money from his other patents, so he was going to bankroll us until we licked the problem. Unfortunately, we never got that far.”

Kendra nodded. “We know Shaw is dead.” She had to ask it. “What about Waldridge?”

“I’m fairly certain he’s still alive.”

She let out the breath she had been holding as relief soared through her. “Why?”

“Because he has something they need. They would be reluctant to kill him without having it.”

“What does he have?”

Biers was silent, then he bent closer to them. “He has the biochemical key that made the whole procedure work in the first place.”

Jessie looked at him incredulously. “Nobody else has it?”

“Waldridge developed it. I didn’t have it. Shaw didn’t have it, and the Night Watch directors certainly didn’t have it. They kept demanding we give it to them. Waldridge never trusted them. At first, his fear was corporate espionage, but he later became suspicious of people within our own organization. Good thing, because it may be the only thing keeping him alive right now. If they caught me, I might not last five seconds.”

Kendra was starting to shake as she realized what Biers was saying. “Billions of dollars. And they can’t touch it without Waldridge. They may be keeping him alive, but there’s no doubt they’ll be trying to get that information. They’ll be torturing him, won’t they?”

Biers nodded soberly. “They’re probably using every physical and psychological trick in the book to get what they need out of him.”

“I know him. He’s a strong, principled man. He’ll die first.”