The Presence

CHAPTER 11

Katharine gazed in awe at the office Rob Silver had been given on Takeo Yoshihara’s estate. Housed in a large pavilion that blended almost perfectly with the hillside abutting its far end, the two-room suite lay behind a beautifully carved koa-wood door. The smaller of the two spacious, airy rooms was equipped with a desk and filing cabinets, while the larger was filled with tables on which photographs, drawings, and models of native Polynesian buildings were laid out in a manner that was perfectly reflective of the innate tidiness they both shared. Beyond a set of French doors, she could see the gardens that spread across the estate. Aside from the view, Rob’s work space was at least eight times the size of her office at the museum in New York, and apparently whatever equipment Rob might need, Takeo Yoshihara supplied. Against one wall of the larger room was a second desk, supporting Rob’s computer, along with several printers, a scanner, and an array of other equipment Katharine didn’t recognize.

“Can you get me online?” she asked. “I want to start by looking at some files at the museum. I remember something that looks a lot like our skull—”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Rob said. “Let me have those Polaroids.”

Puzzled, Katharine fished the pictures she’d taken of the skull out of her bag, and watched as Rob placed them on the bed of a scanner, brought up a program that allowed him to manipulate images, and began rapidly entering instructions on the keyboard and clicking the mouse. A few minutes later eight views of the skull they’d uncovered in the rain forest appeared on the screen, each depicting it from a different angle.

Six more depicted the mandible.

Rob stood up. “What I want you to do is pick a few things that are unique, that you’d be looking for if you were hunting for similar skulls and mandibles.”

Lowering herself into the chair, Katharine experimented with the mouse and soon got the hang of zooming in on first one image, then another. Five minutes later she’d made her choices, and Rob showed her how to copy the small areas she’d outlined with the cursor so they lay on a blank screen like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “But they’re just fragments,” Katharine objected. “Even if you put them all together, you wouldn’t get a complete skull.”

Rob grinned. “Want to bet?” His tone was enough to warn her it was a bet she’d lose. “We’re going to tell the computer to search for graphic matches to these shapes,” he explained. “It’ll comb every database on the Internet and—”

“Are you crazy?” Katharine objected. “That’ll take months!”

“Maybe it would at your museum,” Rob placidly replied, “but this computer is hooked up to one of the two most powerful computers in the world.”

“You’re kidding.” But one look at his smug expression said he was not.

“It was put in to handle all the data from the telescopes up on top of the mountain,” Rob explained as he typed in a series of instructions to initiate Katharine’s search for a match to the skull they’d unearthed. “The Air Force has a big project up there that tracks spy satellites and space garbage and asteroids, and God knows what all.”

He hit the Enter key to start the search, the screen went blank for a moment, and then lines of type began scrolling down so fast that Katharine couldn’t read them. Reaching out, Rob hit the Pause key. The screen froze.

Katharine found herself gazing at a series of Internet addresses, each of them ending in file names that indicated one or another of half a dozen types of graphic formats. Each was followed by a percentage number.

On the screen Katharine was watching, the percentage numbers ranged from 1 all the way to 100.

Rob hit the Enter and Pause keys again, and more files appeared.

“My God, there’s hundreds of them,” Katharine said.

“Bad search,” Rob told her, hitting the Escape key, then typing in more instructions. “It was matching every image individually. We’ll narrow it down so it doesn’t give us anything that doesn’t have at least four matches for the skull and three for the mandible.” He ran the search again. Within a few seconds a list of 382 files appeared, each with its attached percentage-of-match rating. “Let’s rearrange these according to the match rate,” Rob said, his fingers flying over the keyboard. A moment later the screen blinked, and the list of files reappeared, this time with the closest matches at the top. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,” Rob said, double-clicking on the file at the top of the list. A graphic image appeared of a large fragment of jawbone very similar to the one they had unearthed. It was in a collection in a university in Sweden, and had been discovered in Africa forty years earlier.

Katharine stared at it in shock. “I’ve never seen that before” She studied the image and its caption, which identified it as a hominid collected in the Olduvai Gorge. Though the fossil was not ascribed to a species, Katharine thought she saw a definite resemblance to Australopithecus afarensis

She clicked on the second file.

This time an image of a skull appeared

A skull that looked to Katharine very much like the one they had unearthed.

The image bore no identification other than that it had been collected on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines. Other than the image and the brief notation, all that appeared in the window was a link to another file

Frowning, Katharine double-clicked on the link. A second later a new window opened, and a new picture appeared.

This one, though, wasn’t simply an image.

It was a movie or video, obviously made by someone whose skills with the camera were no further advanced than Katharine’s own. The crudeness of the photography, though, did nothing to lessen the fascination with which Katharine and Rob watched what unfolded on the computer screen.

The camera was trained on something that looked unlike anything either Katharine Sundquist or Rob Silver had ever seen before

It appeared to be some kind of humanoid, and though it was impossible to be certain, it gave the impression of being a young male.

His prognathic ridge jutted forward while his brow sloped sharply back. His features were large and coarse, his eyes peering fearfully from deep sockets. His jaw looked underslung, and his body, clad only in a loincloth, appeared to be almost covered with a light coat of hair.

Formed in a loose circle around the boy — if they could really call him a boy — was a group of perhaps fifteen tribesmen. The men seemed to be warily watching the boy they had encircled, as if they weren’t certain what to expect of him.

As Katharine watched, the circle tightened, and she could see the boy in the center tense, his eyes darting from one person to another. Then, in a movement that came so quickly it was little more than a blur, the boy darted out of the circle and disappeared into the jungle. Stunned into momentary inaction by the sudden movement, the tribesmen appeared to talk animatedly among themselves for a few seconds, and finally vanished into the jungle themselves, obviously intent on tracking the fleeing boy.

The screen went black, and for a moment Katharine and Rob thought the video had come to an end.

They were wrong.

After several seconds the computer screen filled with a jungle scene. The village was gone, and for a moment, as the image on the screen hovered in stasis, Katharine wondered if perhaps whoever had made the video was merely checking his camera. But then the lens zoomed in, and finally Katharine saw it:

The face — the hominid face of the boy, if that was truly what he was — gazed out from a thicket of vines in a way that made Katharine shiver as a wave of déjà vu passed over her. Then she realized what it was: not déjà vu at all. The image on the screen was triggering a genuine memory, a memory of a museum exhibit she’d seen years ago, depicting a family of Homo habilis, perhaps the earliest of the hominids to make tools.

The being on the screen, but for the color of its skin and the pattern of hair on its face, might have stepped out of that diorama and into the jungle scene she and Rob Silver were watching.

But of course it was impossible; Homo habilis had been extinct for two million years.

Therefore, what they were watching was a hoax.

“Can you pause it?” Katharine asked as the camera lingered on the face.

Rob reached out and clicked the mouse on a button on the screen. The image froze. Katharine leaned forward, examining the face. This had to be an actor expertly made up, a work of cosmetic wizardry worthy of a Hollywood special effects team. But how had they managed to slope his forehead so perfectly? It would have been a simple thing, of course, to add anything necessary to give the actor’s features the proper look, but enough prostheses to lend the boy such authentic features should have enlarged his head.

Yet it seemed to be in perfect proportion to the body.

Reaching out to manipulate the mouse herself, Katharine restored the picture to its former size and set it running again.

A split second later the first spear struck.

The lens of the camera was still in close-up, and the look of shock that came into the boy’s eyes was perfect. They widened, then moved, as if searching for the source of the stick that protruded from his chest.

A second and third spear struck, and the boy’s expression of shock twisted into an agonized grimace of pain so genuine that Katharine was glad the video had no sound track — even in the silence of the room she could almost hear the howl that must have torn from his throat.

His mouth gaped open, and then he pitched forward onto the ground, twitched spasmodically for a few seconds, and lay still.

Rob reached over and took Katharine’s hand as they watched the rest of the video unfold:

The men and boys of the tribe gathered around the body, poking at it until they were certain it was dead.

They tied it to a pole, securing it by its hands and feet, letting it hang as they carried it back to their village.

In the village, the men dressed the corpse, slitting open its belly and throwing the entrails to a pack of dogs who snatched them up, fought over them, then settled down to gobble their feast in an atmosphere of uneasy suspicion.

The men roasted the body over a fire as the tribe gathered around to share in the unexpected delicacy.

For a moment the camera settled on the face of a woman who stood apart from the rest, her eyes glistening as she watched.

The tribe ate, but instead of throwing the bones to the dogs, they tossed them into a large kettle, where the remaining flesh would simmer into a rich broth.

The scene changed again, and now darkness had fallen over the village.

A form moved in the darkness, and Katharine had to strain to make out the details.

It was the woman. As Katharine watched, the woman used a net to lift the bones from the kettle, and piled them on a cloth she had spread on the ground. She kept fishing until she was certain there was nothing left to find. The woman began folding the cloth around the bones, and for a moment the camera lingered on the grotesque pile.

The woman seemed to have found all the bones but one.

The skull was missing.

The window in which the video had been playing abruptly closed. Once more, Katharine and Rob found themselves staring in silence at the image of the skull.

The implication was clear.

It was Rob who finally broke the silence. “What do you think? Any chance at all that the film was real?”

Katharine shook her head. “Absolutely not. Nothing like that has lived—” But then she cut her own words off as she remembered the skeleton that even now lay by the fire pit only a few miles away.

The skeleton that could have belonged to the very creature they’d just seen on the computer screen.

Yet she still couldn’t believe it. The video had to be an elaborate fake. “Let’s look at the film again,” she said.

Rob reached for the mouse to click on the link a second time. But even as he was moving the cursor across the screen, the window displaying the skull closed. “Damn,” he said softly. “Sorry about that.” Where the window had been a second ago, now only the list of files appeared. Rob once more manipulated the mouse, trying to highlight the file name again.

The file name, like the window, had vanished.

“Where is it?” Katharine asked.

They hunted for the vanished file for an hour, but finally gave up. It was almost as if the file had never been there at all.

In his private office, Takeo Yoshihara leaned back in his chair, staring at the skull that had been delivered to him by the courier from Manila. He’d photographed the skull himself, using a digital camera, and transferred the contents of the videotape that had accompanied the skull into a digitized graphics file. The videotape itself was now locked in the safe in this very office, to which only he had the combination.

Before he left his office, the skull would join the videotape.

The graphics files in his computer were equally secure, protected by security codes known only to himself and the few trusted lieutenants to whom he had transmitted copies of the files an hour ago.

The money he had spent on the skull had been well worth it. It was too bad, though, that the boy had to die.

Still, no progress came without a price, and what was the harm in spending a few lives, given what he was trying to accomplish?