Night Watch--A Novel

by Iris Johansen

  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.”

  “That’s what worries me,” Biers said quietly.

  “Every physical and psychological trick,” Kendra repeated numbly. “Psychological. That’s why they tried to take me. They must be having trouble getting him to talk. The threat of violence might not work on him, but they think it might if it was directed at someone he cares about.”

  He nodded. “Possibly. From what I’ve heard, there are few people on Earth he cares for more than you, Kendra. You became the symbol of everything he wanted to accomplish in his career, then you became his friend and ally in the fight.”

  Kendra dug her nails into the railing. “This can’t be happening. We have to do something.”

  “We’re doing it,” Jessie said. “Everything we can.”

  “How can you say that? We don’t even know where Dyle is keeping him. What they’re doing to him right at this minute.”

  “We’ll find out,” Jessie said gently. “I can see what this is doing to you. But at least we know what’s happening. We can call Griffin and ask him to go after Dyle.”

  “And what if Dyle stalls him? What’s Waldridge going to go through while Dyle tries to get that information from him? He could die.”

  Jessie turned back to Biers. “But we do have time, right? This all means that they have to keep Waldridge alive.”

  “Not exactly.”

  Kendra whirled on him. “What in hell does that mean?”

  “There are years of documentation, formulas, and result reports. If they have to reverse-engineer our process, they might be able to do it with enough time and money. They’d probably prefer not to do it, I’m sure. But it could possibly be done. If they decide Waldridge is too much of a liability or just a pain in the ass, they might go that route.”

  Kendra stared at him, stunned. “So if torture doesn’t work, they might kill him. This keeps getting better and better.”

  “I know,” he said sympathetically. “I wish I could give you better news. But you want the truth.”

  “Yes.” But this truth was sending her spiraling into terror.

  Detach. Concentrate. She couldn’t let her emotions rule her now. Not when Waldridge might need her most.

  “I’ll call Lynch and tell him what’s happening,” Jessie said. “This all started in London, so maybe he can find something or someone there to get a lead to Dyle.”

  “No, I’ll call him.” Kendra took out her phone and moved down the pier. She could feel the panic rising through the haze of bewilderment surrounding her after listening to Biers’s incredible words. “Someone’s got to do something. We’ve got to do something. We can’t let him die. I won’t let that happen.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  “IT’S PRETTY MUCH WHAT I thought could be happening,” Lynch said slowly when Kendra had finished. “After I found photos in Rye’s cloud account that showed incubators with organs in a lab at that factory. It could have been harvesting, and I don’t have the medical knowledge to prove that it wasn’t. But that wouldn’t have been in keeping with the man you believed Waldridge to
be, so I had to trust your judgment.” He added ruefully, “Which meant I had to discard what seemed the obvious answer and look in another direction. You thought Waldridge was a miracle man, so I had to take a wild leap and start looking for miracles.”

  She stiffened. “You didn’t tell me about any other photos.”

  “The situation is a little dicey here with SOCA. They’re pretty skeptical of miracle cures and wanted to issue warrants for harvesting. I was having trouble convincing them to hold off until I could find some kind of proof one way or the other.”

  “We still don’t have proof. We just have Biers’s story. I’ve been pushing Griffin, but he’s not been able to pull up anything on Dyle that’s not clean as the proverbial whistle.” She shivered. “Harvesting. It’s the furthest thing from what Waldridge would ever do. For God’s sake, he was trying to save lives. Yes, I thought it was a miracle what he did for me. But this is in an entire different class.”

  “No, just on a bigger scale.” He paused. “But I can see how it would increase your hero worship to match that scale. Hell, I’m impressed.”

  “Then find a way to get those British authorities to stop trying to build a case against him.” Her mind was leaping forward to scenarios that were far from pleasant. “All he needs is to have Dyle decide he needs a scapegoat, preferably one that permanently disappears, so that Dyle can bring out the Night Watch Project a few years down the road as his own creation.”

  “Easy. I knew you’d be this upset. That’s why I didn’t call you until I could give you something concrete that was positive.”

  “I could use positive at the moment.”

  “It won’t be this moment. But I enlarged the photos of those incubators at the factory lab, and there were minute ID numbers on the sides. I traced the numbers to Cartwright Plastics in Brighton. It’s a small company, and there can’t be too many orders of the magnitude that Night Watch would need. But they’re not real efficient, and they’re dragging their feet. I’m driving down there as soon as they open in the morning and applying a little pressure to get them moving.”

  “You’re trying to find out where they delivered them,” Kendra said. “And if there might be another lab.”

  “When they took that equipment from the Croyden factory, they had to put it somewhere. And those organs could be worth millions to Dyle.”

  “But not the billions he’d net if he gets the answers he wants from Waldridge.”

  “If I can locate Dyle’s employees here, I might be able to get information that would help to find Waldridge,” Lynch said quietly. “And the first step is to find where they put those damn incubators. I’ll get back to you as soon as I know, Kendra.”

  “I know you will.” She also knew he would be fast and smart and probably come up with all the right answers.

  But it might not be in time.

  “I can practically hear that mind of yours clicking away, and I’m not liking what it’s saying,” Lynch said. “Once I locate any of Dyle’s people here, that will be the end of it. I’ll see that they tell me anything I need to know.”

  “You’ll hurt them,” she said dully.

  “Yes, if they don’t cooperate. Are you going to tell me I shouldn’t?”

  “No.” She swallowed. She had to ask it. “Biers said that Dyle is probably torturing Waldridge. And he said that he might kill him unless he gets what he wants. Do you think that’s the truth?”

  He was silent.

  “Lynch.”

  “Considering the stakes, it’s more than likely the route Dyle will take.”

  She had known that would be his answer because he was usually honest with her. But she still felt the panic race through her. “Considering the stakes,” she repeated unsteadily. “That’s all that’s important, isn’t it? Millions of people suffer or die, a good man who can save them suffers or dies. All because the stakes are so high that it makes it worthwhile to a man who wants to have enough power to rule the whole damn world.”

  “Did you want me to lie to you? I’ll never do that, Kendra. What I will do is knock Dyle down, so that he’ll never pick up those stakes. That’s all either of us can do right now.”

  “Of course I don’t want you to tell me stories and pat me on the head.” She was trying to think through the haze of panic and bewilderment she’d been in since she’d listened to Biers. “But we can’t let this happen. Dyle has had it all his own way. He’s killed and tortured, and he’s made his plans to ruin the lives of all those people whom Waldridge wants to save. And he’ll do it if we don’t stop him.”

  “Then we’ll stop him,” Lynch said. “I’ll call Griffin and see if I can put a fire under him. While I’m in Brighton, you go to the FBI field office and ask Metcalf to go with you to question everyone in Dyle’s organization to get any idea where he might have gone.”

  But, again, that would take time.

  “Kendra, I know how upset you are. I can feel it, dammit.” His voice was intense, urgent. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know that, Lynch.” She cleared her throat to ease it of the tightness. “Once, a long time ago, I told Waldridge that we’d go have a beer, and I’d toast the existence of miracles. I think this might be the time we might need one.” She hung up.

  She sat there for a moment, trying to get control. She still felt as if she was in the same shock into which she’d been thrown when Biers had told all the details of Night Watch and what was happening to Charles Waldridge. Speaking to Lynch had not really changed anything. Yes, he had a good lead. Yes, he would follow through with it and probably come up with something that could help them.

  But that would not be in an hour or even a day, and she desperately wanted to find Waldridge now. She had been so frightened at Biers’s words. He had already been missing too long. There was no telling what he was going through now.

  But, as she’d told Lynch, it seemed as if it would take a miracle to make that happen.

  But miracles could happen. She was a prime example. The blind had been made to see.

  She just had to find a way to make this miracle become reality.

  She turned and walked back down the pier toward Jessie and Biers.

  Detach.

  Concentrate.

  * * *

  “DID LYNCH THINK HE COULD HELP?” Jessie’s gaze was on her face. “You seem more … together.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. What did he say?”

  “I filled him in on everything. He’s been following a lead he picked up from Rye’s photographs at the old factory. It was a group of incubating organs.”

  “It was our last group before we left,” Biers said.

  “The incubators were moved. He’s trying to track them to Dyle’s men who took them. Can you help him? Was there another facility where the incubators were delivered before they came to you?”

  He frowned, thinking. “We never dealt with any of the equipment details. We placed our orders through Dyle, and anything we needed showed up on the loading dock. We were only concerned if it worked properly.”

  “So the answer’s no.”

  He nodded. “Sorry.”

  “So am I. Because that means Lynch is going to take too long to see if this search is another blind alley.” She turned to Jessie. “And that we can’t wait for him to do it. Dyle can’t be allowed to do anything more to Charles. We’re going to find him right away.”

  Jessie stiffened. “I don’t like this, Kendra. What the hell do you mean?”

  “Oh, I knew you weren’t going to like it. And I know Lynch would definitely go ballistic.”

  “I’m under the distinct impression you’re about to unload some crazy shit on me.”

  “You might be right.” She smiled mirthlessly. “Desperate times, desperate measures and all that. I can think of only one way to quickly find Waldridge. I have to let them find me.”

  Jessie’s blank expression froze on her face. “Wow. Crazy shit is right. Do you mean what
I think you mean? You’re going to set yourself up for them to take you?”

  “Abduction?” Biers was gazing at her in disbelief. “I thought I’d made it clear what that could mean.”

  “You also made it pretty clear what it could mean to Charles if we don’t get him away from Dyle as soon as possible. It’s the only way I can think of to do that.”

  “Then think again,” Jessie said bluntly. “I promised Lynch I’d keep you safe. This could be a suicide mission.”

  “It’s the only way,” Kendra repeated. “And I have no intention of doing anything suicidal. They won’t hurt me. They can’t if they want to use me as leverage against Waldridge. They need to put me in the same room with him and show that they’re willing to hurt me unless he gives them what they want.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that,” Jessie said. “They could Skype you in a video call.”

  “True. But if they’re holding him in a secure location, why wouldn’t they just take me there, too? It’s easier than guarding two people in two different places. The odds are on my side here. And if they’re going to inflict some kind of torture on me, it’ll have a much greater effect on Waldridge if I’m right there with him.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” Jessie asked.

  “I did just then.” Kendra tried to smile. “Kind of scary.”

  “Terrifying. And kind of batshit crazy.”

  “It’s not like I’m going in without a net. You’ll be tracking me.”

  “How?”

  “You’re the private eye. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I’m supposed to help you with this madness? No way.”

  “I’ll do it anyway.” She met Jessie’s eyes. “Only I might not do it as well without you.”

  Jessie stared at her in frustration. “You’re actually going through with it.” She looked away from her. “They’ll take your phone and any device that looks like a GPS radio.”

  “Can’t I swallow something or hide one in my hair?”