“We can help you,” Jessie said.
“Help me wind up like Shaw? Or maybe Waldridge?”
Kendra felt a bolt of panic that he’d linked the dead man with Waldridge. “Of course not. We just need to talk to you.”
He glanced around again. “Whatever we do, we can’t stay here. If you found me, so can they.”
“Who’s ‘they?’” Kendra asked.
“Not here.”
“How about my office?” Jessie said. “It’s just a few miles down the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica.”
Biers thought about it and shook his head. “No offense to either of you, but I’d prefer to stay in slightly more public locations right now.”
“No offense taken,” Kendra said. “Name a spot where you’d feel comfortable. We’ll talk there.”
“How about… the Redondo Beach Pier. You can’t get much more public than that.”
Jessie nodded. “Fine. You lead the way.”
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON, Dr. Biers?” Jessie asked with her customary bluntness.
Jessie had only waited until she, Kendra, and Biers had staked out a relatively quiet spot toward the end of the pier before she had turned to confront the doctor.
“It’s a long story.”
Jessie shrugged. “It’s why we’re here. Start with where you’ve been.”
“Hiding.”
“That I figured. But where? And why?”
“I’ve been in San Clemente. I was sure I’d been found out here, so I immediately took off. I destroyed the disposable phone I’d been using and left without even going back to my apartment. Then when Waldridge disappeared, and Shaw turned up dead, I knew I’d done the right thing.”
“But you came back anyway,” Kendra said.
“There are some things in my apartment I really wanted to get my hands on. I left with barely the clothes on my back. I broke in through a back window. I thought I could get in and out without anyone’s knowing about it. I really didn’t think anyone would have twenty-four-hour surveillance on that place.”
Jessie smiled. “Two hundred dollars at Best Buy will get you all the surveillance you need. I stashed some motion-activated webcams there. I received a texted photo the second you walked in there.”
Biers looked out at the ocean. “Of course. Technology is making us both safer and less safe at the same time. I’m glad I insisted on getting out of there quickly. Someone else might have done the same thing.”
“Possibly. But it hadn’t been done when I installed my webcams.”
“Please. We need to know what’s going on, Doctor,” Kendra said.
He turned back toward her. “I’m sorry, but it’s hard to know whom to trust. Shaw died trying to protect this project.”
“But you know who I am,” Kendra said. “You can trust me.”
Biers stared at her for a long moment. “Charles Waldridge does think the world of you.”
“I feel the same about him. But I can’t help him unless I get some answers.”
Biers hesitated, then nodded. “How much did Waldridge tell you?”
That Waldridge hadn’t trusted her with information would only make him less likely to do so. “I need to hear it from you.”
“Everything,” Jessie said. “We can’t help you if we’re stumbling around in the dark.”
Biers took a deep breath. “But you’ll find a way to keep me safe?”
“I give you my word,” Jessie said.
He was silent. “Okay. As you know, the Night Watch Project began with Waldridge and his cornea-regeneration treatment. It was wildly successful, obviously, but the team was soon exploring new frontiers, pushing even more exciting boundaries.”
“I don’t know, getting my eyesight was pretty exciting for me,” Kendra said.
“Of course it was. And it’s something that has always been a constant source of inspiration to Waldridge and the team. But just imagine… if we could replace any organ in the body at any time. Not just transplants, but perfect genetic replacements.”
“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.”