The Presence (37 page)

Almost involuntarily, her eyes went to the pair of headlights glowing in the polarized glass of the rearview mirror.

Biting down hard on her lower lip, Katharine moved into the left turn lane.

The car behind followed.

She let the car continue to slow until she was almost into the intersection, then pressed the accelerator hard and swerved back to the right, shooting into a break in the uphill traffic that was small enough to make the driver of the car she’d cut off blast furiously on his horn. Ignoring the sound, Katharine glanced in the side mirror.

The other car was just completing its left turn, its taillights disappearing down the road toward Haliimaile as she watched.

Feeling both relieved and a little bit foolish, she managed to keep the paranoia firmly in check until she came to the turnoff from Olinda Road into the dark, narrow lane that led to her house.

As if acting under its own volition, her right foot left the gas pedal and moved to the brake. The Explorer rolled to a stop, its headlights aimed down the drive, washing the shadows away as far as the first curve in the road that wound through the eucalyptus trees.

The road appeared to be deserted.

Too deserted?

Images flashed through her mind of a dark figure lurking in the shadows within the forest, peering through the windows as she quickly packed a bag so that the watcher would believe she was planning to spend at least this night at Takeo Yoshihara’s estate.

When would they come for her?

Would they use the cover of darkness to close in on the house, while she was helplessly blinded by the false security of the electric lights?

Or would they wait until she was at the estate itself?

No! No, no, NO!

No one had followed her; no one was waiting for her!

Then, just as she was about to move her foot back to the gas pedal, the cellular phone rang, startling her so badly she yelped out loud. Fumbling in her purse, she found the instrument, flipped it open, and held it to her ear. “Rob?”

“It’s me,” his familiar voice confirmed. “Two things. First, Al can’t get into the Serinus directory from any computer outside the estate. But he says there’s a workaround. Once you get there, get to any computer terminal—try the one in my office—and connect to this number. Got a pen?” Katharine rummaged in her purse, then told him to go ahead. Rob gave her a telephone number, then repeated it. “Once you hook up to him from my office, he should be able to use my terminal as a slave, and Yoshihara’s central server won’t realize he’s coming in from the outside.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“Michael,” Rob said. “We need a place to take him.”

“We have to get him out first.”

“We think we can do that. But the big question is, where are we going to take him?”

It was the question Katharine had been avoiding all the way home. Now she could put it off no longer. If Michael truly could no longer breathe fresh air, then where could they possibly go? Anywhere they took him, anywhere at all—

And then it came to her: the skull.

The skull from the Philippines—and the reason it was of such interest to the Serinus Project. The mutant boy—and Katharine was now convinced the murdered child had been a mutant—had been living on Mount Pinatubo, breathing the fumes spewing from the volcano. “The Big Island,” she said. “If we can get him to where the eruption is going on, he might be able to breathe!”

There was a silence, then Rob spoke again. “It might be possible. But he’s going to have to be able to breathe long enough for you to get him out of the building, plus maybe ten to fifteen minutes. Can he do that?”

Katharine didn’t hesitate. “I’ll make sure he can.”

“How long before you get back to the estate?”

Katharine glanced at her watch. It was just past nine-thirty. “I’m just getting home,” she said, calculating the time it would take to grab a few things, then drive to the estate. “I guess I should be there by ten. That’s if they let me get in at all.”

“Don’t talk that way,” Rob told her. “Don’t even think that way. Just get what you need and go. If we’re lucky, we’ll have what we need within a few minutes after you get online with Al. How much time will you need to figure out a way to get him out of the building?”

“How much can I have?” Katharine countered.

“I wish I knew.”

“All right. I’ll let you know when I get there. Will I be able to talk to Al on the computer?”

“Absolutely.” He paused. “It’ll be just like passing messages in school.”

In the darkness Katharine smiled bleakly. “Why don’t I quite believe that?”

“Well, I thought I’d give it a shot, anyway.” There was
a short silence, then Rob spoke again, his voice suddenly shy. “Katharine? Be careful, okay?”

It wasn’t just the words, but the way he said them. A tiny bit of Katharine’s tension eased, and she finally started the car slowly down the long driveway. “You have no idea how careful I intend to be,” she said softly. “And you also have no idea how much courage it will give me if you just keep talking while I drive down this road. Remind me never to take another house that’s at the end of a long, narrow, dark road.”

“What do you want me to talk about?”

“I don’t care. Tell me I don’t have to be scared, and that there’s nobody waiting in my house, and that Michael’s going to be all right, and that when all this is over you’re going to marry me and take me away from all this like a good knight in shining armor.”

“All right,” Rob said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said all right. To all of it. You proposed. I accept. Consider it a done deal. Listen to me carefully, Kath. There is no one in your house. You’re going to get what you need, and you’re going to go up to the estate, and we’re going to crack into the computer and find out all of Takeo Yoshihara’s dirty little secrets. Then I’m coming to get you and your kid, who is going to have to learn to like me, and we’re going to live happily ever after.”

Katharine was silent for a moment, then: “Promise?”

“Promise.”

The car emerged from the woods into the clearing. Katharine carefully swept the darkness with her eyes. There were no other cars in the clearing.

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” she said. “Call me again
in half an hour. If I don’t answer, then you lied to me and there was someone in the house.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you. I love you. I always did.”

“Hell of a time to tell me.” Katharine sighed. “Still, it does make me feel better. Talk to you in a while.”

Breaking the connection, she sat in the car for a few more seconds, summoning the nerve to go into the house. Switching on the lights as she entered, she glanced around, half expecting it to look like a scene from a movie after the Mafia had paid someone a visit.

It was exactly as she’d left it.

Nothing had been moved.

Nothing had even been touched.

Katharine quickly threw enough clothes into a small suitcase to make it look as if she was prepared to stay at the estate for several days. Then, thinking about what she had to do in the hours to come, she added a few more items to the suitcase.

In less than five minutes she was back in her car, driving steadily toward whatever awaited her at Takeo Yoshihara’s estate.

The cellular phone buzzed. “I’m almost at the gate,” Katharine said before Rob had even spoken.

“Is it opening?”

“I’m not worried about getting back in,” Katharine told him. “I have a feeling it’s getting back out again that’s going to be the neat trick. And I have no idea how I’m going to be able to communicate with Michael.” The murder of Kihei Ken proved to Katharine that the camera’s eye had seen the notes she and Michael had passed. No doubt they could hear every word she might say, as well.

“You’ll find a way,” Rob assured her, and she prayed he was right.

Ahead of her, the gate was swinging open, just as it always did when her car approached.

Katharine took a deep breath as the car passed through, then said, “I’m going through the gate, Rob. I’ll call you again if I can, but don’t be surprised at anything I might say. And I might not say anything at all.”

“I’ll do my best to decode.”

Shutting off the cellular phone, she caught herself watching in the rearview mirror as the gate swung closed behind her.

Like the gate of a prison?

Though the parking area next to the research pavilion was far emptier than it ever was during the day, it still held more cars than Katharine would have expected. For a moment she felt the courage she had carefully nurtured during the last half hour begin to crumble.

Not until Michael and I are out of here,
she told herself.
After you get him out, you can turn into a whimpering idiot, and it won’t matter. But not now!

Pulling the Explorer into an empty space, she took the suitcase out of the backseat, locked the car, and went into the lobby of the research pavilion. Perhaps, if she was lucky, the guard on duty would be the one whose friendship she had enlisted—dear God, could it really have only been this morning?

As the lobby door swung closed behind her, the guard at the desk looked up. She was looking into the face of a stranger. Then, as he rose to his feet and spoke, she realized that she was not a stranger to him.

“Dr. Sundquist. They said you’d be coming back tonight.”

They.
Who were
they?
The security staff?

Stephen Jameson?

Takeo Yoshihara himself?

“My son,” she said, for the first time hoping she looked every bit as worried as she was. If she was going to get Michael out, she would have to appear to be so upset as not even to be thinking straight. “He—he’s …” She pretended to flounder, letting the words trail off as if she weren’t certain how much she should say in front of the guard.

“It’s all right, Dr. Sundquist,” the guard assured her.
“They told me what happened to your boy. I’ll just let you into the elevator, and you can go right down.”

The elevator! She’d completely forgotten about the elevator.

But it was all right—she still had Stephen Jameson’s card.

Unless Jameson had noticed that it was gone? Would he have reported it already? Would the gray plastic square still activate the elevator, or would they have removed its code from the computer?
Don’t worry about it now,
she told herself.
And don’t even think about trying it first. If they see that on the security cameras, it will be over before you can even start.

The computer! She had to get to Rob’s computer, even if only for a minute or two. She offered the guard a distracted smile and set down her small suitcase. “Could I leave this here a minute? I need to go to Dr. Silver’s office for a second.”

“No problem,” the guard replied, dropping back onto his chair.

Was he going to watch her on the monitor? Should she offer him some excuse? No! Why should she be explaining her movements to him? It would only make him wonder why she’d felt the need to explain herself.

Leaving the suitcase next to the guard’s desk, she strode down the north corridor to Rob’s office, turned on the lights, and switched on the monitor attached to his terminal. Finding the communications program, she quickly entered the number Rob had given her and touched the Enter key. The connection was completed almost instantly, and she heard a brief exchange of static as the computer on her desk established a link with the one in
Kihei. A window containing two lines of text opened. A cursor flashed at the end of the second line. As she watched, the last digit of the first line changed as each second ticked by:

Understanding the message immediately, Katharine glanced at her watch. It was almost exactly two and a half minutes ahead of the time displayed on the screen. Adjusting her watch to synchronize to the time on the screen, she hit the Enter key again. A new window opened and letters appeared as Al Kalama began his first efforts to open the Serinus directory. Before he’d finished typing the first line of his instructions, Katharine used the mouse on her desk to minimize the program so that all that showed on the monitor was the normal desktop screen.

Shutting off the monitor, she turned off the lights in the office and started back down the corridor.

“All set?” the guard asked as she reentered the lobby.

Katharine nodded and picked up her suitcase, glancing at her watch one last time as she followed the guard through the doors that led to the south corridor and the elevator at its far end.

“Nothing worse than having your kid get sick, is there?” the guard asked as he passed his card over the gray panel next to the elevator door. Katharine shook her head but made no reply. After what seemed to her to be an eternity, the elevator car arrived and she stepped inside.

To her relief, the guard remained where he was, nodding his head a fraction of an inch, then turning away as the doors slid closed.

Glancing at her watch, she saw that “eternity” had amounted to fifty-two seconds.

Katharine counted the seconds it took for the car to descend to the lower level.

Fifteen, including the time it took for the doors to open.

Leaving the car, she moved down the corridor to the door behind which Michael lay.

An anteroom guarded the chamber in which Michael had been put. Behind a desk, empty of anything except a telephone, a woman sat. A nurse, or a guard? Though she wore a white uniform, her posture and her steely gaze told Katharine that here was no angel of mercy. This woman would not simply sit still as she and Michael walked out of the room.

If Michael could walk.

“You can go right in, Dr. Sundquist,” the woman said. “Dr. Jameson is with your son.”

She went through the door into Michael’s room, and felt a terrible fury begin to rise in her as she looked at her son.

The atmosphere inside the box was now so foul that a brown film was building up on the inside of the Plexiglas. In places, it had grown so thick that it was actually running down the surface of the plastic, leaving behind long, slimy-looking trails.