The Presence

CHAPTER 23

Katharine was just turning off the Hana Highway onto the long dirt road that led to the estate when she heard the unmistakable whup-whup-whup produced by the whirling blades of a helicopter. Though the sound was ominously close, she could see no sign of the aircraft. Instinctively braking the car to a halt, she gazed up into the sky, using her hand to shade her eyes against the brilliance of the morning sun. Like an iridescent dragonfly, the helicopter appeared, skimming low over the trees, seeming almost furtive as it bobbed and wove over the contours of the landscape. As it passed low overhead she thought she recognized Stephen Jameson and Takeo Yoshihara peering out of the Plexiglas shell, and she turned to watch it, expecting it to bank around to the left, toward the airport at Kahului.

Instead it turned right and disappeared behind a rocky parapet that rose nearly two hundred feet from the floor of the rain forest.

Only when the sound of the chopper’s blades had faded away did Katharine put the car in gear again and continue down the narrow road. Anticipating her arrival, as they did every morning, the gates swung open as she approached, and she barely had to slow the car as she rolled through. This morning, though, Katharine felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck rise as she sensed the camera that she was certain was watching her, and as she drove through the grounds of the estate, she had to consciously force herself not to look around for more cameras. She was nearing the research pavilion that housed Rob’s office when she noticed that most of the parking spaces in the lot behind it were empty this morning.

She surveyed the nearly deserted lot, an idea taking form in her mind. An idea that began to dispel the dark mood that had come over her during the long hours of the night when she’d lain awake, wondering how she might gain access to the laboratory under the north wing. Last night she had come up with nothing. But this morning things had changed.

First the helicopter, and now the all-but-empty parking lot.

Something, obviously, was going on.

Abandoning her intention to go out to the site in the ravine this morning, Katharine pulled the Explorer into one of the empty slots in the parking lot. Entering the main lobby — and again resisting the urge to look for security cameras — she started toward the doors leading to Rob Silver’s office, but then stopped abruptly, as if having just changed her mind. As she approached the security desk, the guard looked up, and she was certain she detected a look of surprise in his eyes. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to pump him for information; with a little luck, he might just tell her what was going on without her even having to ask. A second later he spoke the words she’d hoped for: “Thought everybody’d gone up to the meeting in Hana.”

She struggled not to betray her ignorance. Hana? What was he talking about? What was going on up there?

“I’m going up this afternoon,” she said smoothly.

Why had she felt the need to lie?

But of course she knew — the paranoia she’d felt last night as she’d watched the clandestine delivery, then driven home with the feeling that eyes were watching her all the way, was creeping over her again, wrapping its coils around her like a boa constrictor.

But at the same time, the inkling of an idea that she’d had in the parking lot was quickly taking shape. “Has Dr. Jameson already gone?” she asked, her mind working quickly as she tried to inject a note of anxiety into her voice.

The guard nodded. “Took off in the chopper with Mr. Yoshihara a few minutes ago.”

“Damn,” Katharine muttered, carefully setting her features into a mask of annoyance.

“Pardon me?” the guard asked.

Katharine sighed heavily. “My son thinks his keys might have fallen out of his pocket yesterday. I was going to ask Dr. Jameson if he’d found them.” She opened her mouth as if about to say something else, then closed it again, indicating a change of mind.

She hesitated, then fed out a little line, as though playing a fish: “Of course, he’s blaming it all on me. Kids.” She turned away as if having no expectation that the guard might offer to help her. But as she started toward the double doors leading to the north wing, she could almost feel him sniffing the bait, considering whether there was a hook in it.

“Maybe I could let you in for a minute, Dr. Sundquist,” he suggested.

Katharine turned back as if she could hardly believe what he’d said. “I couldn’t let you do that,” she said, risking everything to set the hook firmly. “With him being gone—”

“No problem,” the guard told her. “And I’ve got a sixteen-year-old of my own. I know how they can be. If the keys are there, we should be able to find ’em in a couple of minutes.”

As she trailed along, the guard led Katharine down the north corridor. When he stopped, searching his ring for the key to Stephen Jameson’s office, she glanced at the elevator at the far end. Above the call button was the drab gray plate, its red light glowing mockingly at her.

“Where should we start?” the guard asked.

Katharine shrugged a display of helplessness. “The examination room, I suppose. That seems the most likely place for him to have dropped them, doesn’t it? Why don’t I check the chair he used in Stephen’s office while you look around the examining room? It’s just a ring with half a dozen keys on it.” As they entered Jameson’s office, Katharine made a show of searching the chair while the guard went into the examination room. Alone then, she darted to the credenza, praying the drawer would not be locked.

It wasn’t. There, in plain sight, was the gray plastic card, not even concealed under so much as a sheet of paper. Snatching it up, she slid the drawer silently closed, then joined the guard in the examination room. “Well, they weren’t in the chair.”

“And I’m not finding them in here, either.” He nodded toward a cabinet containing half a dozen drawers. “Why don’t you go through those while I take these? Did you look in his desk?”

“If anyone’s going to prowl through someone else’s desk, it’s going to be you, not me,” Katharine replied. “I’m the new kid around here, remember? I just barely got my key to the elevator. I’m not about to start rifling through desks.”

They left Jameson’s office a few minutes later, chatting cordially.

The key to the elevator was in Katharine’s pocket.

And Michael’s keys, she assumed, were still in his pocket. As far as she knew, he’d never lost them once in his whole life.

She waited half an hour before setting out for the north corridor, pausing only to exchange a few words with her new friend, the guard. “Well, down to the salt mines,” she said, winking at him before pushing her way through the double doors and walking purposefully toward the elevator. It took all her self-control not to look back and glance up at the security camera she suspected was trained on her. When she took the card from her pocket and held it over the gray sensor plate, she prayed the trembling of her hand was not visible.

The light turned green. A moment later the elevator doors slid open. She stepped in and pressed the Down button, then tried to judge how far the car traveled. The ride was so smooth, though, that she had almost no sensation of movement; when the doors slid open fifteen seconds later, she could have been fifteen feet down, or fifty.

Or a hundred.

The corridor was deserted. Katharine walked along it as purposefully as she’d strode down the hallway above a moment ago, though she had no idea of precisely what she was looking for.

First, of course, she wanted to find the object that had been delivered last night. In her mind’s eye she summoned up the floor plan of the lower level as it had appeared on the security monitor, and tried to remember in which room she’d seen the coffinlike box being opened.

Third door on the right, she was almost certain.

When she came to the third door, she paused, resisted an overpowering urge to glance back at the camera above the elevator door, then twisted the doorknob. To her vast relief, the door opened.

She recognized the room the instant she stepped inside: immaculately clean, its floor was covered with white tile, a white-enameled metal examination table stood in its center, and there was a large lab bench against one wall. Another wall was lined with three rows of large drawers.

Drawers she immediately recognized from the morgue scenes in countless television shows.

Steeling herself, Katharine crossed the room and stood before the bank of drawers.

She was wrong, of course. She had to be wrong! It couldn’t possibly be a morgue.

Unsettling thoughts were tumbling through her mind. What if someone came in?

What if the guard was watching?

What if the room was alarmed?

Get out, a voice inside her head whispered. Get out, and go back upstairs, and mind your own business. All you have to do is work on one skeleton. One skeleton that Rob found two miles away. Whatever is in here is none of your business.

Get out.

Get out!

But even as the voice kept whispering to her, she reached out with a trembling hand and pulled one of the drawers open.

Empty.

The tension in her body easing only a fraction, she moved her hand to a second drawer.

Empty.

So was the third, and the fourth.

Now her hand was no longer trembling, and she was starting to feel a little foolish. Whatever she’d seen last night, it couldn’t have been a—

The thought shattered in her mind as she pulled open the fifth drawer and found herself staring into the face of a boy.

A boy of seventeen or eighteen, perhaps, with strong features, blond hair, and a cleft chin.

And dead blue eyes that stared unblinkingly up at her from sockets that were sunk deep into his gray, expressionless face.

Katharine stood rock still, fighting the nausea that had risen in her belly. Don’t react, she told herself. If they’re watching you, you mustn’t react at all. You must act like you belong here.

Pulling the drawer all the way open, she gazed into the great Y-shaped incision that had been cut in the boy’s torso. What few organs remained were in a chaotic jumble, as if having been hastily put back after an autopsy. His lungs, though, had been completely removed.

His lungs?

Suddenly the description of the single file she’d been able to read in the Serinus directory came back to her.

Pollution? Could this boy have died from pollution poisoning?

She pulled the drawer farther open, looking for something — anything — that would identify the corpse. And then, as the drawer reached the limits of its extension hardware, she saw it.

A tag was attached to the big toe of the boy’s right foot. Tearing the tag loose, she dropped it into her pocket, closed the drawer, and was about to leave the room when she noticed a door in the left-hand wall, toward the back of the room. Moving close to it, she listened for a moment and heard a humming noise. She hesitated, then tried the knob.

It turned, and she eased the door open enough to see inside.

It was some kind of equipment room, filled with tanks of varying sizes, all of which seemed to be connected to a central tank with a series of hoses and valves. From the central tank a series of large ducts ran in several directions, passing through two of the walls.

Then she saw the source of the humming sound: a pump next to the large tank, apparently moving the tank’s contents through the ducts.

Both the wall opposite Katharine and the one at the far end of the room were pierced by doors as well as by the large ducts, and she quickly moved to the closest one, listened, and tried the knob.

Locked.

She moved to the other door, only to find it locked, too.

Frustrated, she rattled the knob hard. She searched for a card scanner, but there was no sign of one. Should she try to find a key? What if one of the cameras was watching?

She twisted the doorknob one more time, then gave up and went back to the autopsy room. She was tempted to return to the elevator right then — to press her luck no further — but when she stepped out into the corridor, its row of closed doors drew her like a magnet.

Deciding, she turned away from the elevator and moved slowly toward the far end of the hallway. Thirty feet farther on she saw a door that bore a plaque:

The Serinus Project

She stared at the sign, the realization slowly sinking in: she no longer needed the password to the protected directory that had so utterly frustrated her yesterday afternoon. Steeling herself, she reached for the knob, all but certain that this door, like those inside the morgue, would be locked.

It wasn’t; apparently, Takeo Yoshihara considered the elevator’s security system sufficient, for this area of the facility, at least.

She stepped into a wood-paneled anteroom, empty but for a deserted desk and a display case. As she realized what was in the cabinet, Katharine’s heart began to beat faster.

The skull?

Could it be the same skull she’d glimpsed on the monitor in Rob’s office? Katharine moved closer to the case, a sealed Plexiglas box fixed to the top of a black lacquered pedestal. As she studied the skull from every angle, her excitement grew. It was the one she’d seen! It had to be! And it appeared to be exactly like the skull she’d found in the ravine, in every aspect. Tearing her eyes away from it, she searched for something that would identify its provenance. For a moment there seemed to be nothing, but then she found it: a small plaque very much like the one affixed to the door through which she’d come in a moment ago. It identified the skull only as having been discovered in a village in the Philippines on a date two months earlier. Committing the name of the village to memory, Katharine studied the skull once more, then moved on.

And stopped in shock as she came to the next room. For a split second she had the strange sensation that she’d stepped into a veterinarian’s office, since one entire wall was lined with animal cages. Except they weren’t quite cages at all: rather, they were boxes made of Plexiglas. She moved farther into the room, her eyes rapidly taking in the details of its equipment. The cells — the word popped into Katharine’s mind out of nowhere, but even as it formed in her head she had the distinct feeling that it was exactly the right word to describe the plastic cages — were airtight, with what were apparently remotely operated systems allowing food and water to be provided to the animals isolated within each of them.

Each cage had a ventilating system that kept the atmosphere within the cells constantly circulating, and a large computer monitor displayed the composition of the atmosphere within the confines of the plastic boxes. In an instant Katharine understood: the tanks in the equipment room she’d found a few moments ago were supplying the atmosphere for the boxes.

She moved closer to the wall of cages.

The cells were of varying sizes and contained various species.

In the smallest were mice, a few of them alone, some in pairs. In one there was a nursing female, with half a dozen babies suckling at her teats.

A row of larger cells contained cats and dogs. They were all caged singly, and most of the cats were curled on the floors of their prisons, some licking at their fur, others sleeping.

Or perhaps they had died?

Katharine’s gaze shifted to one of the monitors; the display, a series of letters and numerals, indicated the composition of the atmosphere within the confines of the plastic box. She picked out familiar chemical designations: NH₃, CH₄, CO.

Ammonia.

Methane.

Carbon monoxide.

There were half a dozen other chemical formulae, a few of which she was familiar with, most of which she was not.

But all of them, she suspected, were equally deadly gases. Dear God, what was going on here?

Katharine moved closer to one of the cages and rapped on it sharply. The cat within stirred, then settled down and appeared to go back to sleep.

All but one of the dogs were awake. Two of them sat staring at her, but with none of the eagerness of puppies hoping to be played with. Rather, their eyes seemed oddly empty, as if they understood they would never be released from the plastic boxes in which they were imprisoned. The other three were sprawled out, apparently looking at nothing at all. With a shudder of revulsion, Katharine recalled the meaning of the project’s name: canaries in the mines — that’s what these poor animals were! Impulsively, she reached out, opened one of the cages, and lifted the puppy inside into her arms, then quickly closed the cage door against the foul-smelling fumes that spewed from it.

The puppy, wriggling gratefully, snuggled against her bosom, and as she stroked its soft fur, outrage at the experimentation going on in this room rose inside her. How could anyone do something like this? To subject all these innocent animals to—

Her thoughts were interrupted by a strange wheezing sound from the puppy in her arms. Then it was wriggling, as if trying to escape her hold on it, and when she looked down, it was gazing up at her with frightened eyes, its mouth gaping as it gasped in a struggle to catch its breath.

Dying! The puppy was dying in her arms!

She cuddled it close, trying to ease its fear, but a moment later it was over. The puppy lay limp in her arms, silent and still. Katharine stared at it numbly for a moment.

What should she do with it?

And then she remembered where she was and what she was doing. If someone found her—

Quickly she returned the lifeless puppy to the cage from which she’d taken it.

She should leave — leave now, before she was discovered. But there was another room beyond this one, and even as she tried to bring herself to leave the strange laboratory complex, she knew she could not. She had to try to find out exactly what they were doing down here.

How was it possible that any of the caged animals remained alive, given what they were breathing?

She moved on through a series of laboratories that were deserted but for a few technicians in white lab smocks, most of whom seemed to be concentrating on their work.

She barely paused, and asked no questions, determining to go unnoticed as long as she possibly could.

And finally she came to the last room.

It was a small chamber. In its center, enclosed in a thick glass case, was a sphere, perhaps three feet in diameter, made of a gray-black substance that could have been either metal or stone. From the sphere a tube protruded, which curved around, then went straight down, apparently through the case and into its base.

On one wall of the room was an instrument panel that appeared to be monitoring every possible condition within the case, from temperature and humidity to air pressure and the presence of trace elements within the atmosphere itself.

Katharine circled the case, studying it from every angle, but each aspect of the sphere inside appeared to be the same as every other.

Her back was to the door when a voice startled her.

“First time you’ve seen it?”

She whirled around, realizing a second too late how guilty she must look, then did her best to recover. “My God! You have no idea how you startled me!”

“Sony,” the technician replied. Then he smiled, “I suppose you’re pondering the eternal question?”

“Excuse me?”

“ ‘What is it?’ ” the technician asked.

The question caught Katharine off guard. “That’s just what I was going to ask you,” she replied.

Now the technician’s expression turned slightly quizzical “That’s what we’re all trying to find out, isn’t it? I thought maybe a new face might have a new idea.”

Katharine floundered for a moment, then composed herself. “I wish I did,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’m as puzzled as everyone else. Actually, I was just looking for Dr. Jameson.”

“Not here,” the technician replied. “He went up to the meeting at Hana.” Now the last of his smile disappeared, and his eyes narrowed with a hint of suspicion. “Why aren’t you up there?”

Katharine decided simply to tell the truth. “I wasn’t invited,” she said. “And since Dr. Jameson isn’t down here, I suppose I might as well go back to my office and do something useful, huh?” Feeling the technician’s eyes watching her every step of the way, Katharine quickly retraced her steps, again resisting the urge to look over her shoulder.

But even when she was back in Rob’s office, the feeling that eyes were watching her every movement lingered on.

In a private conference room at the Hotel Hana Maui, tucked away at the end of thirty-five miles of some of the most winding highway in the world, Takeo Yoshihara faced the seven members of the Serinus Society who had flown in over the last thirty-six hours from every continent on the planet.

“I have good news,” he began. “Four of our latest canaries have not died. One of the two new subjects in Chicago, along with the newest ones in Tokyo and Mexico City, seem to be doing well.”

A murmur of excitement rippled through the room, which Yoshihara silenced with a slightly raised hand.

“We also have a problem. A boy died here on Maui two days ago, apparently after having been exposed to our compound.”

The excitement in the room turned to consternation.

“And there are three other boys here, all of whom are—” He hesitated, searching for the right word, then smiled faintly as he found it. “All of whom are, shall we say, ‘faring better’ to varying degrees. Dr. Jameson will tell you about them.”

Accompanied by uneasy whispers from the audience, Stephen Jameson rose to his feet. At the same time, photographs of Josh Malani, Jeff Kina, and Michael Sundquist appeared on a screen hanging on a wall behind him. “As you know, it was never our intention to carry out any of our human experimentation so close to our research headquarters. Be that as it may, at least four boys on Maui appear to have come in contact with the substance with which we are experimenting.” He glanced up at the three faces on the screen, then fixed a laser pointer on the image of Jeff Kina. “This is a seventeen-year-old male of Polynesian heritage. He is six feet two inches tall, and weighs 225 pounds. He was apprehended in a burning cane field some thirty-six hours ago, breathing comfortably in an atmosphere that was heavily polluted with smoke. He is now in our lab, and doing well.” The pointer moved on to Josh Malani’s image. “This is another seventeen-year-old boy, five feet eight, and weighing 135 pounds. Mixed heritage. Less than twenty-four hours ago, while under our surveillance, he collapsed in a parking lot near one of the beaches. He was kept alive by administration of a mixture of carbon monoxide, methane, and ammonia, and is also now doing well in our lab.”

“And the third boy?” someone asked from the back of the room.

Jameson studied the image of Michael Sundquist for several seconds. “This one is most interesting,” he finally said. “This is a sixteen-year-old Caucasian of Swedish descent, and though we didn’t specifically choose him for our project, any more than we chose the other three locals, he is proving to be one of our most intriguing subjects. We do not expect complete success with him, of course, but I think that at such time as he dies, his autopsy will greatly advance our understanding of precisely how the substance affects the human body.”

A heavily accented voice spoke from the back of the room. “And if, by chance, he doesn’t die?”

Jameson smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “Believe me, Herr von Schmidt, one way or another, all these boys will die.”