The Presence (36 page)

The warm Hawaiian evening seemed suddenly to have taken on a terrible chill. Katharine felt her whole body shiver as she realized the truth of what Rob had just said.

Returning to the car, she punched 911 into the keypad of Rob’s cellular phone and pressed the Send key. As she made the hurried call, hesitating when the operator asked her name, then ending the connection, her whole body was shaking.

All she could think about was Michael—getting back to the estate, getting Michael, and getting him out of there.

But she knew there was no way that Takeo Yoshihara’s security force was simply going to let her pick Michael up and drive him away. Even if they did let her take him, what good would it do? He’d die as soon as she took him out into the clean, fresh air.

For a moment she almost gave in to the sense of utter helplessness that washed over her, but then the thought of Michael in his Plexiglas prison coalesced her frustration and fear into a cold fury.

Michael wasn’t dead yet. So far, Takeo Yoshihara had no idea how much she really knew.

And the night wasn’t over yet, either.

Her body stopped shaking and the terrible cold loosed its grip. Still clutching the phone, she went back to the dive shop. This time, at the sight of Ken Richter’s body, the horror she felt was tempered by something else.

Rage.

“What have you found?” she asked Rob.

“Not much,” he admitted. While she’d been gone, he looked around the back room of the shop, but had neither touched anything nor gone into the front of the store. “There’s not much back here except the rental scuba equipment.”

“What’s that?” Katharine asked, pointing to a large white board on the wall, marked off into a grid filled with names,

“The dive schedule,” Rob said, looking carefully at it for the first time. “He always kept it—” His eyes widened and he moved toward the board, reaching out to it, pulling his fingers back just before he touched it. “Oh, Jesus! That’s it! Look!”

Katharine moved next to him. “Look at what?”

“It’s the board!” Rob said again. He was pointing to a section of the grid. “Look!” he repeated. “He had a VIP dive, the morning after Michael and his friends went on their night dive.”

Katharine frowned. “VIP? What’s that? Movie stars?”

Rob shook his head. “It was his special code. Every now and then Takeo Yoshihara’s office would call and set up dives for the kids of some of his business associates.”

“I still don’t see—”

“It wasn’t just that Yoshihara set up the dives,” Rob went on. “He sent over special equipment, too. Fins, masks, regulators, the whole works.”

“Including air tanks,” Katharine whispered, suddenly understanding.

Rob nodded. “If the boys took the tanks that were already here for the next morning’s dive—” Rob began, but Katharine was ahead of him.

Her notebook was out and she was already copying
down the names of the five boys who had been scheduled for the dive that Ken Richter had designated as VIP.

Four of those boys, thanks to Michael and his friends, had undoubtedly escaped the fate Takeo Yoshihara had planned for them.

The fifth one might already be dead.

She had just slipped the notebook back into her purse when the first police siren wailed in the night.

“What if he can’t do it?” Katharine asked. They were driving up Lipoa Street toward the Computer Center. In the fifteen minutes since they’d left the dive shop, Rob Silver had made two phone calls. Nick Grieco hadn’t answered, but Al Kalama had. On a terrible hunch, Rob had decided to swing by Nick’s apartment building. The presence of three police cars confirmed that his hunch had hit a bull’s-eye,

“I don’t think we have any choice,” Rob said, his voice grim. “You can’t leave Michael alone up at Yoshihara’s any longer, and there’s no way Phil Howell and I can find what we’re looking for by ourselves. We’ve got to have an expert.”

“But you said he’s a dive guide—” Katharine began.

“He’s also a computer freak. When he’s not diving, he’s messing around on the Net. If he can’t find the information we need, then it’s just not there. I don’t know why I didn’t think of him an hour ago.”

“If he’s such a genius, then why doesn’t he have a job?”

Rob glanced over at her, one eyebrow lifted. “Come on, Kath—this is Maui. Haven’t you noticed how many jobs only exist to pay for the rent and the sports equipment?
Besides, Al had a little problem a few years ago. Something to do with hacking into a government computer where he wasn’t supposed to be. The way he tells it, the only reason he didn’t go to jail was because no one was willing to acknowledge that what he’d done was possible. It’s hard to convict someone of a crime if you won’t admit it was committed.”

The light at the Piilani Highway changed. As Rob pressed on the accelerator, a horn blasted behind them, and an ancient Honda Civic, its caved-in passenger door tied shut with a frayed rope, and a surfboard strapped to its top, shot past them. “Hey, man! Quit blockin’ the road with that beater, huh?” A hand appeared from the driver’s window, thumb and pinkie waggling.

Katharine’s heart sank. “That’s Al Kalama, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Believe me, he knows what he’s doing,” Rob insisted, but a quick glance at Katharine told him she didn’t believe him. A few seconds later Rob pulled the Explorer up next to the Honda.

Al Kalama, wearing nothing but a Speedo, a pair of sandals, and a grin, was already leaning against the door of his car. “So what’s the rush, man? The way you were talkin’, it sounded like someone was dyin’ or something.”

Rob Silver’s eyes fixed on the beach bum. “Ken Richter’s already dead, and I think Nick Grieco is, too.”

The grin wiped from his face, Kalama listened to what they had found, first at the dive shop, then at Nick Grieco’s condo complex. When Rob finished, he uttered a low whistle. “Jesus! What the hell’s goin’ on?”

“That’s why we need you,” Rob said. He handed Kalama the list of names Katharine had copied from the board in the back room of the dive shop. “We need to
find out where these five people are, or at least if they’re still alive.”

Al Kalama paled as he read the names. “I was on a dive with these guys a few days ago.”

Rob glanced at Katharine. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure! I remember the kids ’cause most of them were assholes. Plus, one of them had some trouble with his air tank, which was really weird, ’cause it was brand-new equipment that guy Takeo Yoshihara sent down.”

The words struck Katharine like nails being pounded into a coffin.

Michael’s coffin.

Until that moment she had been clinging to the hope, no matter how slim, that Michael’s illness was an accident, as Takeo Yoshihara had insisted. Now there was no more room to deny the truth. “The one who had trouble,” she said, her voice trembling, “is there any way you can find out if he’s still alive? Is he still on the island?”

Kalama shrugged. “Should be a piece of cake. All the kids on that dive were leaving that afternoon or the next morning. The guy who had the problem was from Chicago, and it seems like if he died, there ought to be some mention in the local papers.”

“Do it,” she said. “Please do it.” She turned to Rob. “I have to get back up there. I have to get Michael out.” She moved to get behind the wheel of the Explorer, but Rob stopped her.

“Katharine, are you crazy? How are you going to get him out?” he asked. “And even if you can, where are you going to take him? He can’t breathe outside that box, remember?”

Katharine brushed the questions aside. “I don’t know,”
she said. “I’ll find a way. But I have to get back to him! My God, Rob, don’t you see? Takeo Yoshihara doesn’t want him alive! He just wants to find out how Michael and his friends got into that stuff, and when he does, he’ll kill him!” Even as she spoke the words, new questions—questions Rob hadn’t yet thought of—came into her mind.

What if they wouldn’t let her back into the estate?

What if Michael were already—

She cut the last question off, unwilling even to let the thought come into her head. “Find out everything you can,” she begged Rob. “Find out what’s in the files. Find out what they’re really doing!” Putting her arms around him, she pressed close to him for a moment, then broke the embrace and got into the Explorer. She was just about to pull out of the parking slot when Rob produced his cellular phone from his pocket and shoved it through the open window.

“Take this,” he said. “I have a feeling we’re going to need to talk.”

“But if I have your phone—” Katharine began.

Rob cut her off. “I’ll find another one. Phil Howell has one—his car’s still here, so I’ll bet he is, too. I’ll call you with the number as soon as I get it.”

As Katharine’s car sped back down toward the Piilani Highway, Rob and Al Kalama hurried into the computer center.

In less than a minute Al was seated in front of the terminal next to the one at which Phil Howell was still working. Barely acknowledging the introduction Rob made, Kalama’s fingers were tapping at the keyboard even before the monitor had fully warmed up.

While Kalama navigated through the Internet, Rob turned to Phil Howell. “I need to borrow your cell phone,
Phil,” he said. When he got no response, he glanced at the monitor in front of the astronomer, where the results of the substitution program he’d been running had finally come up. The screen was now displaying a new window, and inside the box was a list of the twenty-four files the computer had generated, each of them containing the results of one of the twenty-four possible substitution equations that could be applied to the original sequence of four letters.

Next to each file was the probability that the letter sequence could represent DNA code.

The fourth one from the bottom was highlighted, and read: ninety-seven percent.

Rob frowned, then felt his pulse begin to quicken. “Does that mean what I think it does?” he asked Howell.

The astronomer nodded. He had broken out in a cold sweat a few moments ago when the window opened and he’d seen the fourth line from the bottom of the report. He spoke, his voice quavering with excitement: “I think so. At least the computer thinks so.” He slowly shook his head, as if still unable to accept what he was seeing. “My God,” he breathed. “What if it’s really true?”

“What if what’s true?” Al Kalama asked from the next terminal, but Phil Howell had already returned to his work, so engrossed that he didn’t even hear the question. Then, before Al could repeat it, a window on his own terminal filled with a brief paragraph—an obituary from the
Chicago Tribune
noting the death of Kevin O’Connor, a sixteen-year-old boy, from an unnamed “respiratory problem.”

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked Rob.

Rob Silver, who had been staring at Phil Howell’s screen in fascination, turned back to Al. “Takeo Yoshihara
is experimenting on people,” he said without preamble. “Katharine’s son is one of the ones he’s experimenting on.”

Al Kalama emitted a low whistle, but he made no argument, asked no questions. Instead, he simply said: “So how do we nail the prick?”

“There’s a directory on the computer up at his estate,” Rob told him. “Those are the files Katharine was talking about just before she left. We think those files hold all the information on the project.”

“What about the kid?” Al Kalama asked. “What are we going to do about him?”

To that question Rob had no answer.

Knowing there was no chance of regaining Phil Howell’s attention for something as trivial as a cellular telephone, Rob began searching for it himself, and when he found it—in the right front pocket of Howell’s shirt—the astronomer didn’t even notice as he fished it out.

“Kath?” Rob said a moment later after he’d dialed his own number. “It looks like you’re right. Be careful.” Giving her the number of the phone he’d just appropriated, he hung up.

And still had no idea of what to do about Michael Sundquist.

Katharine was being followed.

She knew it, as surely as she knew her own name.

The car’s lights had switched on as she’d made a left turn in Puunene. She watched in the rearview mirror as it pulled up behind her, following closely when she took the quick right onto Hansen Road, the shortcut to the Hana Highway.

How had he known she’d be coming this way?

Was the car bugged?

Of course it was—the same device that automatically opened the gate no doubt sent out a signal that Takeo Yoshihara’s men could home in on.

Twice she considered turning off Hansen Road to take one of the narrow cuts through the cane fields that would lead her up toward Kula, but both times she lost her nerve as she slowed the Explorer to a near stop to peer up the long stretches of deserted road that quickly disappeared into the blackness of the night.

A blackness that seemed far darker than usual.

If she took one of these roads and got lost, she could poke around in Kula or Pukalani for an hour and never find the road to Makawao. Worse, if the car that was following her overtook her, and forced her off the road—

She cut off the thought, telling herself her sense of being followed was brought on by paranoia, but, unbidden and unwanted, an image of Ken Richter’s body sprawled in a pool of fresh blood rose up in front of her, and the terror that had been escalating inside her all day notched up yet again. If they hadn’t hesitated to gun down Ken Richter, why would they hesitate to kill her, too?

When the car behind her blasted its horn and ducked around her to speed away into the night, Katharine’s body jerked so convulsively that she wrenched her shoulder against the restraining seat belt.

That’s it!
she scolded herself.
If you don’t calm down, you don’t have a hope of saving Michael.

Bringing the Explorer back up to speed, she held it steady until she came to the intersection with the Hana Highway, then turned a few hundred yards farther on, where the road ascended the slope of Haleakala. She remained steadfastly calm until she neared the Haliimaile
cutoff that wound through the cane fields to the left and would eventually take her to Baldwin Road, just a mile or so below Makawao.