The Presence

CHAPTER 21

Katharine Sundquist was excited when she returned to Takeo Yoshihara’s estate, convinced she held the key not only to the missing computer files, but to the mystery of the skeleton in the ravine. Arriving just as Rob and one of his workmen were transferring the last of the carefully tagged bones from the back of the Explorer into his office, she’d barely been able to hold her impatience in check until the entire find had been carefully laid out on a lab table in the room that adjoined Rob’s office.

The sharp edge of her excitement had been blunted, though, when the files proved less easy to locate than she’d hoped. It should have been so simple: they had the file names, and Phil Howell was certain they were somewhere on Takeo Yoshihara’s computer. But when Rob brought up a directory of the drive, no such file names appeared. Sensing Katharine’s disappointment, he’d tried to reassure her. “Not to worry. This is only one drive, and there have to be a lot more than that. I’ll run a search.”

The search, though it had only taken a few minutes, seemed to Katharine to go on forever, but then two lines appeared on the screen, showing the results of the inquiry, and her hopes leaped again.

X: \serinus\artifact\Philippine\skull.jpg

X: \serinus\artifact\Philippine\video.avi

“If the directories are set up with any kind of logic, at least we know where the skull came from,” Katharine said as she gazed at the screen. “But what does ‘serinus’ mean?”

“It’s one of Yoshihara’s projects,” Rob Silver said. “It has something to do with pollution. Serinus is the genus designation for finches. Specifically, Serinus canaria — canaries.”

“Canaries?” Katharine repeated. “I’m not sure I see the connection.”

“The connection comes from the old practice of lowering canaries into mine shafts. If the birds came up alive, it was safe for the men to go down. If the birds were dead, then there were dangerous gases in the mine.” He paused. “I don’t know much about that particular project, but I suspect Yoshihara’s looking for new ways to stop killing canaries, as it were. Hence the name of the project. Corporate cute, if you ask me. Let’s see if we can take a look at those files.”

With growing anticipation Katharine watched as Rob pulled up a viewer, then copied in the full path of the jpg file. Almost there, she thought, we’ve almost got it. Until the screen went blank and a new message appeared:

PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSWORD NOW

Rob had tried a few possible passwords, ranging from anagrams of the words “artifact” and “serinus” to Takeo Yoshihara’s name spelled backward. To neither his nor Katharine’s surprise, none of them worked. “Who knows?” he’d finally sighed. “It could be someone’s mother-in-law’s birthday, or a random sequence of letters and numbers. And I suspect that if I just keep trying to break in, the computer will notice what’s going on and report me to someone.”

Katharine gazed dispiritedly at the monitor, unable to shake from her memory the disquieting images recorded on the strange video. “It’s probably not the right file anyway,” she said, disappointed. “What on earth would a tribe slaughtering some kind of primate have to do with air pollution?”

Rob shrugged. “I’m afraid you’d know a lot more about that than I would. You’re the bone person, remember?”

But Katharine had no answer. They spent a few minutes poking around in the directory named Serinus, but quickly discovered that without the password, only a single file was open to them.

A file that confirmed that Takeo Yoshihara and Mishimoto Corporation were indeed embarked on a major research project aimed at tackling the problem of global pollution head-on. “And making a fortune with whatever they discover, no doubt,” Rob remarked as they finished reading the file.

They’d abandoned the computer then, but for the rest of the afternoon, as Katharine concentrated on reconstructing the skeleton that had been exhumed from the ravine, the first faint tendrils of an idea kept reaching out to her. When Rob finally interrupted her to suggest they have dinner together, she realized that the afternoon had slipped away.

Though she was no closer to gaining access to the files containing the image of the skull and the video, the skeleton was almost complete. And the idea, though not yet fully formed, was starting to come together in her mind. “I think I’m going to finish this,” she said. “You go on, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

After Rob left, she called Michael and told him she’d be late.

“How late?” he asked.

“Only a couple of hours,” she promised. “And then we’ll go out for pizza, okay?”

“I guess,” Michael replied, and she heard the anxiety in his voice.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

There was a long silence, then: “I’ll be okay. See you when you get home.”

She hung up the phone and hesitated, wondering if she shouldn’t call it a day and go home now. But even as that thought came to her, the idea that had been poking at the edges of her consciousness all afternoon suddenly came together.

Once again she replayed the video in her mind, but this time, instead of trying to decide what kind of creature it was that she’d seen, she concentrated on how old it might have been.

If it was some kind of small primate, it would have been full-grown.

But if it wasn’t a primate?

More images flashed though her memory.

The way the tribesmen had stared at it.

The way its fear seemed to grow, and the look almost of surprise when the tribesmen had begun chasing it.

It had been so much smaller than the men.

And the woman had acted like …

The woman had acted like a distraught mother who had just lost a child.

A mutant?

Could what she’d seen on the video have been a mutated human child?

Mutated by what? Pollution?

Even as the question formed in her mind, so did a possible answer. Mount Pinatubo.

The volcano that had erupted in the Philippines less than ten years ago, spewing enough ash and poisonous gas into the atmosphere to make dozens of villages uninhabitable.

If alcohol and tobacco could harm a fetus, what might the gases disgorged from an active volcano do? Katharine’s eyes fixed once more on the skeleton on the table, but now her mind’s eye no longer saw the fire pit next to which the body had been buried, but the sulfurous vent a little farther up the ravine. What if the remains she’d unearthed were of someone who’d been born only months after an eruption of Haleakala?

Suddenly it became imperative to determine the age of the bones as exactly as possible, and try to correlate them to one of the last eruptions on Maui.

Or on the Big Island, where even now new vents were opening, releasing gases from the bowels of the planet?

She worked for three more hours, preparing bone samples and searching the Internet for the labs that could do the work most quickly and efficiently.

And now her mind was starting to fog with exhaustion and her whole body ached.

And she was already hours later than she’d promised Michael.

Leaving everything as it was, Katharine began closing up the workroom. She’d just turned the lights off and was about to lock the door when a sweep of headlights across the window caught her eye.

Leaving the lights off, she went to the window and looked out.

Michael sat staring at the television, trying to concentrate on the characters on the screen but unable to keep his attention on the movie for more than a few seconds at a time.

He kept thinking about Josh, clutching the bottle of ammonia in the rest room, sucking the fumes deep into his lungs, struggling to hang on to it when he’d taken it away from him.

And he remembered the look in Josh’s eyes just before he’d fled from the locker room. For a moment Michael hadn’t been able to recognize his friend at all. Josh had completely disappeared, replaced by …

What?

A wild animal.

The words came unbidden into Michael’s mind, but the more he thought about them, the more he realized that was exactly what Josh had looked like: a trapped animal, searching for a way to escape.

And for just a second, Michael recalled, he’d been afraid Josh was going to attack him, going to try to recover the bottle he’d yanked from Josh’s hands.

After school Michael had waited as long as he could, hoping Josh would come back, but when the bus had been ready to leave, he’d finally climbed onto it. All the way home he’d kept half an eye out, thinking he might see Josh’s truck racing up to overtake the bus, hear his horn blaring, and then find him waiting at the stop where he got off. But another part of him was just as sure that Josh’s pickup was not going to appear, that something terrible had happened to his friend.

Should he call the police?

And tell them what?

Repeat the weird story Josh had told him about Jeff’s strange behavior and his own flight from the cane field last night? But that would only get Josh in even more trouble than he was already in. And if something had happened to Jeff Kina in the cane field, wouldn’t someone have heard about it? After all, he’d heard the names of the two men who had died in the cane fire before he’d left school: fire workers on a routine patrol, killed in a freak accident. One of them had been the uncle of one of the guys on the track team. But nobody had heard anything about Jeff Kina.

When he got home, he called Josh’s house, but Sam Malani answered, sounding drunk, and ranting that when Josh got home he was going to beat the crap out of him.

Michael hadn’t called again.

Then, about an hour ago, he started feeling kind of funny again. It wasn’t too bad — not at all like when he’d had asthma — but for a minute he’d been tempted to call his mother. He’d chucked that idea as soon as it crossed his mind. If she didn’t make him go to the hospital tonight—“Better to be safe than sorry”—she’d definitely drag him back to Dr. Jameson tomorrow.

Better not say anything; he’d probably be fine by morning anyway.

He scrunched lower on the sofa and once more tried to focus his mind on the movie he was staring at.

Stop it, he told himself. Just stop it. Nothing’s wrong with your lungs, and Josh is just pissed off, and you hardly even know Jeff Kina.

Except no matter how much he tried to tell himself that nothing was wrong, he kept remembering the one thing that gave the lie to that thought.

Kioki Santoya had died the night before last.

What if Jeff and Josh were dead, too?

What then?

To that question, he had no answer.

By the time Katharine’s eyes adjusted to the dim lights that illuminated the grounds of Takeo Yoshihara’s estate at night, the vehicle had stopped near one of the doors in the other wing of the building. As Katharine watched, the security guard who normally sat at the desk in the lobby emerged from the building and walked quickly to the vehicle, which Katharine could now see was a small van. As two men got out of the van, a second man came out of the building, and a moment later the four men had opened the back doors of the van and were unloading a box from it.

A box that appeared to be about three feet wide, three feet high, and perhaps seven feet long.

The image of a coffin came instantly into Katharine’s mind, and though she tried to reject it, the image wouldn’t let itself be so easily banished. Instead, the vision of the coffin was immediately reinforced by her recollection of the skeleton in the next room.

The skeleton that, though not of the species Homo sapiens, had been laid out for burial as if it were.

Leaving her office, Katharine strode down the long corridor to the lobby, then hesitated.

What was she going to do? Walk down the opposite hall, trying doors until she found one that was unlocked, and go in? Hardly, since the fact of the van arriving in the middle of the night suggested that her presence might not be welcomed.

The same reasoning also precluded going outside and simply walking up to the van to ask what was going on.

Changing course, she moved toward the security officer’s desk, a big wooden cube whose surface was bare save for two identical computer monitors. Circling the desk as warily as if it were a tiger ready to spring at her, Katharine perched nervously on the guard’s chair and studied the two monitors.

The first one — on the left — displayed a view of the area just inside the estate’s main gates. Though she could remember no light fixtures around the gates, the image on the screen was almost as bright as if it were full daylight.

So, the security cameras were equipped with a light-amplifying device, she realized, making the darkness around the gates utterly deceptive.

The other screen displayed nothing more than a series of images of sculpted buttons, some of them labeled, others bearing nothing more than graphics that identified their use in manipulating the camera. Reaching out, Katharine touched the screen where a button framing a magnifying glass was displayed.

Instantly the image on the other screen enlarged as the camera’s lens zoomed closer to the gate.

Now Katharine examined the labeled buttons, touching the one marked “North Wing.”

All the buttons except those that controlled the cameras disappeared, and in their place appeared a floor plan of the building’s north wing. Picking a room she thought was close to the area where the van had parked, Katharine touched the screen again.

The display monitor immediately responded, showing the interior of Stephen Jameson’s office.

His empty office.

She touched the room two doors farther down the corridor, and was rewarded by a view of the two men from the van and the two security guards placing the box onto a gurney. As the men from the van departed, the guards pushed the coffinlike box through the office and into the corridor. Switching the monitor to a view of the north corridor, Katharine froze as she saw the guards, one at each end of the gurney, apparently moving straight toward her. A split second later, when the guard who would normally be sitting in the seat she herself was now occupying looked directly into the camera, Katharine had the horrible sensation that he could see her as clearly as she could see him. Her heart pounded and she had to fight an urge to bolt in the opposite direction, fleeing back to her office. But when the guards and the box disappeared from her view — and didn’t come through the double doors at the end of the lobby — she realized they hadn’t been coming toward her at all. In fact, they were moving in exactly the opposite direction.

But where?

She studied the control screen again, and discovered a button marked “LL.”

Lower Level? Of course! The “downstairs” Dr. Jameson had mentioned just this morning.

She touched the button. It seemed to produce no effect.

The same floor plan and control buttons showed on the right-hand monitor, and the same image of an empty corridor was displayed on the screen on the left.

Yet she’d been all but certain that both screens had flickered slightly, as if their displays had in fact responded to her touch. Then, as she examined the control screen more closely, she realized that one thing had changed: the “LL” button was now labeled “UL.”

So there was another level beneath this one.

As if to confirm the thought, the two guards reappeared, now moving in the opposite direction, away from the camera. Halfway down the corridor a door opened, and the guards maneuvered the box through it. Once again Katharine had to press two of the rooms depicted on the control monitor before she found the right one, and the image on the camera monitor changed again.

The room was obviously a laboratory of some kind. As Katharine watched, two men wearing orderly uniforms started to unscrew the top of the box. Katharine’s fingers moved to the buttons that gave her control over the camera, and she zoomed in on the box. As the lid was raised, wisps of fog curled from the container.

Dry ice?

The lid came free, and Katharine could see that whatever was in the box was wrapped in plastic.

She watched as four hands, clad in rubber surgical gloves, worked at the plastic, loosening it.

Four hands.

Where were the other four, the hands that belonged to the security guards?

Katharine zoomed the camera to its widest angle.

The two guards were gone.

Touching the control screen again, she found them.

In the corridor, once again walking toward her.

No! Away from her, by the far end, where apparently there was an elevator. How long did she have before they would be back on this level and coming toward the lobby?

A minute?

Two?

Certainly no more.

She touched the screen again, and once more the orderlies appeared. They had finished unwrapping the outer layer of plastic and were taking out what was left of the dry ice the contents of the box had been packed in. Silently urging them to work faster, wanting to reach through the camera and tear the second layer of plastic from whatever lay within, Katharine could barely contain her impatience.

Her nerves screaming, she switched back to the corridor. The security guards were still standing there, waiting for the elevator. Then, just as she was about to click back to the room where the orderlies were working, the guards stepped out of her view.

They were in the elevator, and the elevator would already be moving.

How fast?

She had no idea.

She switched the screen back to the laboratory. At last, the orderlies seemed to have finished with the dry ice. Unconsciously holding her breath, Katharine gazed into the container. One of the orderlies reached for the layers of almost transparent plastic — all that remained to block Katharine’s view of whatever had arrived at the estate in the middle of the night. Then, in a movement that made her want to scream with frustration, the orderly suddenly pulled away.

The zoom!

Her fingers trembling, she touched the adjustment buttons for the camera. It zoomed in and refocused slightly. For just a moment, before one of the orderlies abruptly leaned in and blocked her view completely, she thought she saw something.

A face.

A human face?

The glimpse had been too brief, the distortion of the wrinkled plastic too much.

How much time did she have left? If she could get just one more look—

She touched the UL button, then the hallway.

The guards were on their way back down the hall!

Her heart racing, Katharine rose from the chair and started back toward the double doors leading to the south corridor and Rob’s office.

The display! As soon as the guards came in, they’d see what she’d been doing! Whirling around, nearly stumbling in her haste to get back to the desk, she searched the screen again, finding a button marked “Main.” She hit it, and instantly the menu that had been displayed when she’d come in no more than five minutes earlier reappeared.

The gate!

Where was the button for the gate?

There — down near the bottom, at the right!

She stabbed at it, waited just long enough to see the image on the display monitor change, then fled across the lobby. Pushing her way through the double doors, she paused to make them stop swinging, then dashed down the hall to Rob’s office, slipped inside, and switched the lights back on.

Leaning heavily against the desk, she waited for her heartbeat to return to normal and her breathing to even out, then picked up her purse. Switching the lights out, she left the office for the second time in ten minutes, locked it, and started toward the double doors.

For a moment she had the terrible feeling that the two guards would be waiting for her, knowing what she’d been doing. If they questioned her, what could she say? That she’d been worried when the guard hadn’t been at his post and was looking for him?

Would they believe her?

Pushing the doors open, she stepped into the lobby. To her vast relief, the two guards were not waiting for her. One of them, the one who had been there before the van’s arrival, was seated behind the desk again, thumbing through a magazine. As she entered the lobby, he looked up.

“Dr. Sundquist. I thought you’d left.”

Was there suspicion in his voice? “Just finishing up a few things,” she replied. Then, when she was halfway across the lobby, she suddenly knew exactly what to say to put any suspicions to rest. “What was that van that came in a few minutes ago?” she asked, turning back to face the guard. “Isn’t it awfully late for deliveries?”

The guard smiled. “One of our trucks,” he said. “The driver just stopped to find out where we wanted him to park it.”

“Well, it’s nice to know we’re not the only ones working late,” Katharine said, returning the guard’s smile. “But how come that doesn’t make me feel any less tired?”

The guard chuckled. “Doesn’t ever make me feel less tired, either.”

With a final good night, Katharine left the building and hurried toward her car.

The guard had lied.

Obviously, something was going on she wasn’t supposed to know about. But what was it?

And how could she find out?

Was the corpse that had been delivered tonight — if it truly was a corpse — somehow connected to the alarming video and the skeleton in Rob’s laboratory? That was ridiculous. There was no reason to make such a connection.

But the images of the anomalous skull from the Philippines and the film of the slaughtered creature were also still fresh in her mind. An image and a film that were stored in files locked away behind a password, just as whatever had arrived in the van was now hidden away in a lower level she hadn’t known existed until tonight.

Every instinct she possessed told Katharine that somehow all these things were related.

The body — if that’s what it was — that had been delivered just now.

The mutant — if that’s what it was — that had been killed in the Philippines.

And the skeleton she herself had excavated right here on Maui.

But how was she going to find out what the connection was? As she drove through the darkness toward the gates of the estate, she wondered how she might gain access not only to the files hidden away in the computer, but to the lower level of the north wing as well. Slowing to let the gates open, she came to a disturbing realization: security here was far tighter than Rob Silver had told her.

Just as she’d remembered, there were no lights illuminating the gates, yet she was positive that as her car passed through them, the guard in the lobby was watching her as clearly as if it were high noon. The thought sent a shiver down her spine, and though she kept telling herself that she was being silly, she couldn’t rid herself of the eerie feeling that she was being watched until she emerged from the narrow road from the estate onto the Hana Highway. Even then it didn’t quite leave her, and as she sped toward Makawao, she continued to glance in the rearview mirror, searching for some sign that someone was following her.

Though she saw nothing, the creepy feeling stayed with her.

Though the television was droning as Katharine entered the house, Michael was not watching it. Sprawled out on the sofa, he was fast asleep, and when she bent down to kiss his forehead, he barely stirred. Dropping her leather bag on the floor next to her sleeping son, Katharine used the remote control to turn off the television, then went into the kitchen to find something to eat. The remains of a pizza — not quite half of it — sat on the kitchen counter, cold in its grease-stained box. Transferring two pieces to a plate and slipping them into the microwave, Katharine poured herself a glass of wine while the pizza heated. Taking the pizza back to the living room, she set it down on the coffee table, but then, before settling down onto the floor to have her meal, she moved though the house, locking the doors and windows.

And pulling the curtains.

Before she pulled the last one, she stared out into the night, nearly shivering with the strange sensation that someone was watching her.

But that’s ridiculous, she told herself. There’s no one out there. No one’s watching you!

Repeating those words to herself, though, did nothing to dispel the paranoia that had come over her as she’d left the research pavilion that night. She closed the curtain before going back to the coffee table to eat the pizza Michael had left for her.

She was just finishing the first piece when Michael stirred on the sofa and the rhythm of his breathing changed, taking on a labored quality. Within seconds his feet began kicking and his arms thrashed in the air. Katharine tensed, terrified that the awful scene of last night, when he’d fled into the darkness and not come back until hours later, was about to be replayed. Getting up from the floor, she went around the coffee table, crouched down, and laid a gentle hand on him. “Michael? Michael, wake up! You’re having a bad dream.”

He moaned and tried to turn away from her, but she put her hand firmly on his shoulder and shook him. “Michael! Wake up!”

Abruptly, Michael’s whole body convulsed, and then he was sitting up, instantly awake. Startled, he stared at her.

“What was it?” Katharine asked. “What were you dreaming about?”

“The night di—” Michael began, but instantly cut himself off.

“The what?” Katharine asked. Her eyes fixed on him as she tried to figure out what the word was that he’d cut off.

Michael, reddening, knew by the way his mother was looking at him that there was no point in trying to lie about it. “I went on a night dive,” he finally said.

“A night dive?” Katharine echoed uncertainly. Then, as the meaning of his words sank in, her eyes widened. “You mean you went scuba diving at night?”

Michael hesitated, then nodded unhappily. “With Josh Malani, and some other guys.”

“What other guys?” Katharine asked.

Michael hesitated. “Jeff Kina and Kioki Santoya. And Rick Pieper.”

The first two names rang a faint bell in Katharine’s memory. They sounded familiar, but where had she heard them? Before she could even ask the question, Michael answered it.

“Kioki’s the guy whose mom found him in the cane field yesterday morning.”

Katharine remembered the radio report they’d heard that morning. “It was the night before that, wasn’t it?” she asked. “The night you came home late.”

Michael nodded.

“And that’s what you dreamed about last night? And tonight?” Again Michael nodded.

Katharine’s eyes fixed on Michael. “Did something happen?” she asked. “On the dive?”

Michael thought quickly, but he’d hesitated just long enough to let her know that the forbidden dive had not been uneventful. “It wasn’t anything serious,” he said. “The tanks weren’t quite full, so we had to quit early, that’s all. No big deal.”

“But it’s given you nightmares,” Katharine told him. “And after what happened to—”

Michael groaned. “Aw, come on, Mom. They don’t even know what happened to Kioki!”

Katharine studied her son. Not only had he lied to her, but what he’d done had been both stupid and irresponsible. She should ground him, she thought, take away all his privileges, do whatever it took to make certain he’d never do anything like it again. But right now, after having been up almost all last night, she was too tired to cope with it. Besides, he was alive, and at home, and nothing terrible had happened to him. And maybe the fact he hadn’t told her what he was planning was partly her own fault — after all, she’d been overprotecting him for years. If it hadn’t been for Rob Silver, she wouldn’t have let him go scuba diving at all.

The exhaustion that had been crawling through her body all day finally caught up with her, and she decided that this, at least, could wait until another time. “Go to bed,” she told him. “Go to bed, and get some sleep.” Then an idea came to her. “And Michael? You’re the one who screwed up, so you decide how you should be punished. I’m just too tired and too angry to deal with it. So you figure it out. Okay?”

Michael looked at her for a long time, and she could see by the expression on his face that she’d come up with the right answer: she was certain that whatever punishment he finally decided to mete out to himself would be far worse than anything she could have come up with.

“Okay,” he said at last. “I guess that’s only fair.” He got up and had almost reached his room when he came back, bent down, and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it, and I should have told you.” He straightened up. “G’night,” he said softly as he started once more toward his room.

“Michael?”

He turned to face her.

“Try not to be too hard on yourself. A year’s grounding will be way too much.”

By the time she collapsed into bed a few minutes later, Katharine’s exhaustion had reached the point where she was too tired even to sleep. Finally, feeling the house grow stuffier, she got up and opened all the windows. Not that it helped much; a kona wind had begun carrying a faintly acrid, smoglike miasma in from the erupting volcano on the Big Island.

Before she went back to bed, Katharine paused to listen at Michael’s door. Though she herself was wide-awake, her son was sleeping peacefully.