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.”