The Presence (32 page)

Stop!
She spoke the word so sharply to herself that she reflexively stamped on the brake pedal, eliciting an instant and angry response from the car behind her.
Paranoia,
she reminded herself as she got the car back under control, moved into the left lane of the Piilani Highway, and turned up Lipoa Street.
It was just an innocent note!
And if Rob didn’t get there, she’d just have to convince Phil by herself that she wasn’t crazy.

But when she reached Howell’s office, he wasn’t there. She felt a moment of desperation as she thought of how far she was from the top of the mountain, but then the receptionist told her he hadn’t gone up Haleakala to work with the telescope. “He’s right across the street at the Computer Center.”

Relief flooded through Katharine, and she hurried out of the building. Just as she was crossing the street, a horn honked and she heard Rob Silver call out.

“Kath, what’s going on? I found your note and—” She turned around, and he saw the look on her face. “Katharine, what’s wrong? What is it?” A moment later he was out of the car, his arms around her.

She let her head rest against his chest a moment, then took a deep breath, trying to remember the words she’d so carefully rehearsed, and failing utterly. Instead she blurted, “Rob, something horrible is going on, and we have to convince Phil Howell to help us find out exactly how bad it is.”

For the next ten minutes she talked steadily, trying to separate what she knew from what she only suspected; trying to knit the fragmentary pieces of the story into a coherent structure. But even as she talked, she could see
the doubt in Rob’s eyes. “You don’t believe any of it, do you?” she asked when she was finally done.

Rob took a deep breath. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Kath,” he said carefully. “It’s just that so much of what you say is—well, it’s supposition.”

“I know what I saw in the lab, Rob,” Katharine said, her voice taking on an edge.

“I’m not questioning what you saw,” Rob went on quickly. “But the conclusions you’ve come to—
I
mean, what you’re implying about Takeo Yoshihara—”

“That he could be experimenting on human beings?” Katharine broke in. “Why is that such a difficult concept to accept? There have always been people willing to experiment on other people. And maybe I’m wrong. God, you have no idea how badly I want to be wrong. But I have to know, Rob. I have to know exactly what’s going on down there, and I can’t do it by myself. And I’m sure it’s all in that damned Serinus directory that we can’t break into! So you have to help me convince Phil to hack into it, or—” Katharine’s voice broke as all her pent-up fear crashed over her like a great wave bearing down, crushing her beneath its weight. Her eyes welled with tears and her body began to tremble. For a moment she felt as if her legs were going to give way beneath her and she was going to collapse, but then Rob’s arms were around her once again.

“It’s all right, Kath,” he whispered in her ear, his fingers gently stroking her hair. “It’s all right. Of course I’ll help you. Just don’t worry anymore, all right?”

Katharine’s arms went around him and she held him tight. “I’ll try,” she breathed. “But I’ve been so frightened that something terrible is going to happen to Michael—”

Rob pulled her closer. “It won’t,” he told her. “I promise you. Nothing bad will happen to Michael.”

Katharine listened to the words and tried to cling to them as she was clinging to Rob himself, but as they started across the road to the Computer Center and she struggled to put her faith in what he’d said, another voice was speaking to her.

That voice was telling her that despite what Rob was saying, and despite the clear evidence of Michael’s well-being, which she’d witnessed at the school only an hour earlier, it might already be far too late.

Phil Howell was still staring at the screen when he slowly became aware that he was no longer alone. When he looked up and saw Katharine’s ashen complexion and the worry in Rob’s eyes, he knew something had gone wrong.

“We need your help, Phil,” Rob said quietly. “And we need it now.”

Phil frowned, his eyes returning to the screen. If a match was found and he didn’t see it—

“Please?” Katharine begged. “I’m afraid—” Her quavering voice was enough to convince Phil that she was truly frightened.

Certain that whatever Katharine and Rob wanted of him involved the computer, he opened yet another new window on his monitor.

The signal was already fifteen million years old.

It could wait a little longer.

Katharine, clearly, could not.

A tiny point of light glimmered faintly in the darkness, so dim that at first Michael was barely aware of it. As it slowly began to brighten, he found himself fastening onto it as the watchman on a ship might fasten on a beacon signaling
safe shelter from a storm. He concentrated on the glimmer of light, willing it to grow larger, burn brighter, and wash away the darkness that had enveloped him.

The empty silence that had embraced him along with the darkness was also starting to give way. At first all he could hear was what sounded like a distant droning coming from some unidentifiable source. But as the light expanded and the blackness began to gray, the sound grew louder, and finally he could distinguish a variation in it.

Whup-whup-whup-whup.

It was a sound he’d heard before, a sound he should be able to identify in an instant. But dark tendrils were still wrapped around his mind, confusing him, and it wasn’t until the sound became loud enough to frighten him that he finally recognized it.

A helicopter!

It grew louder and louder, but he couldn’t see anything at all, for the blackness had now been washed away by a brilliance that blinded him as completely as the total night of a few moments before.

The roar of the helicopter’s blades was deafening now. He knew he had only another second or two before those blades would surely crush him.

Run!

He had to get up and run!

But his entire body felt leaden. He could barely flex his muscles.

He tried to breathe, but his lungs hurt, and there was something over his face.

Was that why he couldn’t see?

He tried to twist his head away, and then, over the roar of the helicopter’s rotor, he heard something else.

A voice.

“Don’t, Michael. Don’t try to move. Just relax.”

He knew the voice, but he couldn’t quite place it. Dimly, he began to remember fragments of the last few minutes before the terrible blackness had closed around him.

He’d been running. And running better than ever. Running better because—

Ammonia!

He’d been breathing ammonia, and the coach had been asking him—

But this voice wasn’t Coach Peters’s. It was someone else, someone who—

Dr. Jameson!

That was it. When he’d gotten sick and passed out, they must have called Dr. Jameson.

The thing on his face was an oxygen mask, and they were taking him to the hospital.

No! He hated the hospital—from the very beginning, when the asthma had seized him in its grip for the first time and his mother had rushed him to the emergency room, he had hated everything about the hospital.

Not just the smell and the sickly green paint and the terrible food. The worst was the way they’d treated him, sticking needles in him, shoving pills in his mouth, doctors and nurses, all of whom he had learned to distrust, talking about him like he wasn’t even there. And there was nothing wrong with him today—not really. He had fainted, that was all. He could tell, because he was already feeling a lot better, and when he’d had asthma attacks, the oxygen they’d given him had barely helped. But now the pain in his chest was almost gone, and it wasn’t hard to breathe! If he could just get the mask off his face and tell them—

He struggled harder, and for the first time realized why
he couldn’t move his arms or legs: they were strapped down, immobilized.

He twisted his neck, trying to struggle free of the mask, and realized with astonishment what the blinding light was.

The sun, shining down from out of a blue sky through—

The bubblelike windshield of a helicopter! He could see the blur of the propeller spinning overhead, and feel the swaying of the machine as it hurtled through the sky.

“It’s all right, Michael!” He could make out a tinny quality to Dr. Jameson’s voice, and realized he was wearing a headset, as well as an oxygen mask. “If you can understand my voice, nod your head. Not hard, just a little.”

Without thinking, Michael nodded.

“All right. Now, someone back at the school said something about ammonia. Did you drink it?”

Michael froze for an instant, then shook his head.

“Then you breathed it.”

Not a question. A statement. But how did Jameson know?

“It’s all right, Michael,” Jameson told him. “We know what’s wrong. Just relax. You’re going to be all right.”

Again Michael struggled to speak, but couldn’t find the strength. Then he heard Jameson’s voice again, urging him to relax, not to fight against the straps that held him to the stretcher or the mask that covered his face. “Relax,” Jameson repeated, his voice taking on an almost hypnotic quality. “Just relax, Michael. You’re not going to die. Do you hear me? You’re not going to die.”

Concentrating on the voice, Michael felt himself begin to drift back into the darkness, and the steady whupping
of the propeller began to fade. But as he drifted back into unconsciousness, he heard another voice.

A voice he didn’t recognize.

“Why do you say he isn’t going to die, Stephen? Why should he be different from all the others?”

“I am a doctor, sir,” he heard Jameson reply. “I believe in comforting my patients, even if it means lying to them.”

The words rang and echoed in Michael’s mind. He wanted to cry out against them, to struggle one more time against the bonds that held him and the mask that was pressed to his face. But his strength was gone.

He let himself sink back into the darkness.

It was edging toward six o’clock. Katharine Sundquist and Rob Silver were still in the Computer Center, Rob watching patiently as Phil Howell worked, while Katharine paced, her frustration ballooning with every minute that passed. To her it seemed the computer itself had almost become an enemy. Her eyes hurt from having stared at the monitor for so long. “Now do you believe me?” she sighed. While one of the windows displayed on the monitor in front of them was filled with the unending stream of random combinations of the letters A, C, G, and T, another window—the one in which Phil Howell had been working for almost an hour—was flashing the same infuriating message that had been the result of everything the astronomer had tried so far:

The vertical line of the cursor blinked tauntingly just to the right of the colon on the second line of the message, as if daring them to try one more time to solve the puzzle of the elusive password that would allow them access to the Serinus directory.

“Well, I certainly believe your boss doesn’t want us getting into that directory,” Howell agreed. “But I still can’t believe it’s the only one guarded by a password. The man has business all over the world, and you can bet he wouldn’t want anyone to see most of what he’s doing. Even if all his transactions are perfectly legal—which I doubt—there must be an enormous amount of proprietary information in his memory banks.”

“But this computer is only for the research pavilion,” Rob Silver reminded him. “The business stuff is somewhere else. Japan, probably.”

“Cayman Islands would be more like it, if you ask me,” Howell muttered, then typed
Cayman
into the computer, pressed the Enter key, and watched the same box instantly reappear, flashing the same message. “That’s it for me,” he sighed. “It’s going to take a lot better hacker than I am to get into that directory.”

“Do you know one?” Katharine asked.

Howell thought for a moment. “No,” he said glumly. His gaze shifted to the window on the monitor that was displaying his own project, but nothing seemed to have changed, and he felt the gnawing pangs of hunger that reminded him he’d completely forgotten to eat today. “What do you say we break for something to eat? Then we’ll come back and try again.”

Katharine’s first impulse was to object that there wasn’t time for food, but with a glance at the dark circles under Phil’s eyes and the tight lines of his face, she knew his endurance was almost gone. “Maybe we’d better,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck to ease the soreness of straining to watch the changing display on the computer screen. “I want to see what Michael’s up to,” she said aloud, turning to Rob. “Have you got your cell phone?”

Rob fished the flip phone out of his pocket. “You want to go someplace in Makawao, and take Michael, too?”

When the answering machine at home picked up on the first ring, signaling that there was a message waiting, Katharine assumed it would be Michael, telling her his own plans for the evening. But when she punched in the playback code and the impersonal electronic voice announced, “Seven … new … messages,” a current of panic surged through her.

The phone at home rarely got even one message, let alone seven. She quickly punched in the code to play all the messages back. The moment she heard the tone of voice of the first caller, she knew it was about Michael.

And it was bad.

“Dr. Sundquist, this is Jack Peters, the track coach at Bailey High. I—I’m real sorry to have to tell you this way—I mean, I wish I could talk to you directly, but …” The voice trailed off, then started up again. “Michael collapsed on the track this afternoon. I don’t know exactly what the problem was, but we called the EMTs. The ambulance was just arriving when Dr. Jameson showed up in Takeo Yoshihara’s helicopter. I assume they took him to Maui Memorial. I just called there, but they haven’t admitted him yet. I’ll keep trying, though, and if you want to call me after you get this message, I’ll be at 555-3568. I just can’t figure what happened. I mean, he was running better than ever, and then …” For the second time, Jack Peters’s voice trailed off. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’ll keep trying the hospital, and if I find anything out, I’ll leave another message. I—well—God, I hate these things!”