The answer hit him, and his eyes widened. “Infrastructure,” Sebastian said.

Frank nodded sagely. “He doesn’t have the necessary money to become operational—and he needs a good amount of it to buy storage units for the blood and the necessary transfusion equipment, chemicals, and medications.”

“And a place to house his carriers.”

Another nod, and Frank said, “Paul needs to create a revenue stream because he doesn’t have a financial backer. Or he may not want one. I wouldn’t be surprised if Paul’s decided to do this all on his own.”

Which had been Sebastian’s theory all along, Paul wanting to go it alone so he could control everything. A financial partner would want to know what made Paul’s blood so different from what was currently out there—the secret ingredients for his special sauce, so to speak. There was no way Paul would give that up. Once he told someone, he would run the risk of being cast aside, or killed.

Early on, after the incident at the house, Sebastian had wondered if Paul would be stupid enough to approach either the Mexicans or the Armenians and try to partner with them. Such an action would have resulted in Paul’s death—which would have suited Sebastian just fine if it weren’t for the fact that Paul could easily hand over Sebastian’s name as that of the person who was manufacturing Pandora. Both organizations took what they wanted by force. When they found out Paul didn’t have an actual product, per se, just the recipe for one, they’d torture him until he spilled the information, and once it was verified, they would kill him.

But almost four months had come to pass, and neither the Armenians nor the Mexicans had made a move. Paul, it appeared, was determined to keep quiet, do everything on his own. But he had to have people working with him—people he trusted, like Bradley Guidry.

“And this is definitely carrier blood from a pregnant woman?”

“I can’t say for sure,” Frank replied. “I’m going to hand those capsules over to Maya, have her test them for the gene as well as the pregnancy markers.”

“Paul said he had a couple of carriers who were pregnant.”

“And he’s adding more to his stable. Seven weeks after your attempted murder, two female carriers were abducted. One was twenty-six, the other twenty-four.”

“You don’t know for sure Paul was behind the abductions.”

“Actually, I do.” Frank dipped his fingers into his inner suit jacket pocket. He came back with a folded piece of paper and handed it to Sebastian.

Two photographs, each taken of the front windshield of a different car—a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry. Both photographs showed the same man behind the wheel: Bradley Guidry.

Frank said, “The photos are from traffic cameras posted near where the women were abducted. I enhanced them.”

“Where’d you get these? Our LAPD contact?”

Frank shook his head. “I obtained them myself,” he said. “I now have what’s called root access to the servers used by highway patrol. I won’t bore you with the technical details—”