The Presence

CHAPTER 1

NEW YORK CITY

“Whatcha tryin’ ta do, Sundquist? Kill ya’self?”

A harsh laugh followed the mocking words, ricocheting off the bare concrete walls of the high school gymnasium, echoing louder in Michael Sundquist’s ears as it resonated. What should he do? Abandon the bench presses he was doing and confront the jerk?

Not a good idea. The jerk, whose name was Slotzky — first name unknown, at least to Michael — was about a foot taller than he, and outweighed him by maybe fifty pounds, all of it solid muscle. Confronting Slotzky would be a good way to get his ass whipped, and getting his ass whipped was definitely not high on Michael Sundquist’s priority list this morning.

Finishing the bench presses, however, was very high on the list, as were doing fifty push-ups and fifty chin-ups, followed by as many laps around the track on the gym’s mezzanine as he could manage before the ten-minute bell sent him to the showers. If he ignored Slotzky, avoided a fight, and kept his mind firmly on his work, he could easily achieve his goal.

A varsity letter.

That was all he really wanted.

He would never be tall enough for basketball, or heavy enough for football. He suspected it was way too late for him to take up baseball. That left track. And the thing he’d always been best at was running. Even when his asthma had been so bad he could barely breathe, he’d still been able to beat the rest of the kids in his class in short sprints. In fact, it had been kind of a joke: don’t bother trying to beat Sundquist off the block, just keep trotting along behind him and sooner or later he’ll run down like a broken watch.

The joke had been all too true. Only a year ago he’d often found it impossible to run more than a quarter of a mile. Though he invariably led at the beginning of races, he never quite managed to win a fifty-yard dash, and in the hundred he always came in dead last.

But even when the asthma was at its worst, he never ever gave up. When his mother claimed it was no big deal — that no one on either side of his family had ever been an athlete — it only made Michael more determined. What did she know, anyway? It was a guy thing. The kind of thing his father would have understood if his father were still alive.

Whenever Michael ran, battling for breath, forcing his body beyond its capacity, determined to conquer the frightening condition that had held him in its power ever since he’d been a little boy, he imagined his dad cheering him on. Though his father’s face was becoming cloudy, and sometimes he could barely remember that deep, booming voice, Michael clung to his vision of his dad. And kept at it until finally, last year, he’d begun to outgrow the asthma.

Finishing the bench presses, he dropped to the floor to do fifty quick push-ups — still barely breathing hard — then started toward the high bar to begin his chin-ups, glancing as he passed at his reflection in the wire-mesh window that separated the gym from the coaching room. Yes, his chest was deepening — he could see it.

Every day, bench press by bench press, push-up by push-up, lap by lap, his work was paying off.

The other guys weren’t laughing at him anymore, except for Slotzky. And even Slotzky would stop tormenting him if he could actually make the varsity track team.

And not as a sprinter, either.

No, Michael had set his sights on a higher goal — long-distance running, where endurance counted every bit as much as speed, if not more.

He finished the last of the chin-ups and checked his respiration again. He was breathing a little harder than at the start of the hour, but he wasn’t anywhere near panting, no sign of the onset of those terrible attacks that used to grip him in clammy, gasping terror. He loped over to the metal stairs leading up to the track that was suspended from the walls twelve feet up, just below the rafters and well above the basketball hoops. Taking the stairs two at a time, he glanced at the clock on the far wall.

Twenty minutes left. He could run a couple of miles before heading for the showers.

He broke into an easy jog, pacing himself carefully so he wouldn’t have to break his stride as he approached the sharp turns at each of the gym’s four corners. There was no one else on the track; the rest of the class was on the floor below, some of them playing a game of basketball, a few lifting weights, but most of them just sprawled out on the floor, waiting for the hour to end.

“Hey, Sundquist,” Slotzky yelled, an ugly grin splitting his lips. “Ain’t ya afraid ya might pass out up there?” As Slotzky’s friends laughed obediently, Michael, stopped by Slotzky’s shout, spontaneously raised the middle finger of his left hand.

Big mistake.

Slotzky’s grin disappeared. He rose from the floor and started up the stairs, three of his friends following him. As he searched for an escape route, Michael wondered what misguided impulse had led him to do something so stupid.

He also wondered if there were any truth to the rumor that Slotzky had once thrown someone off the roof of a building.

As Slotzky and one of his friends approached him from one direction, the others circled around the opposite way, catching him in a heavy-duty pincers.

“Whatcha gonna do, chickenshit?” Slotzky taunted as he advanced on Michael, closing the distance between them.

Michael glanced at Slotzky, then at the bully’s friend. There was only one way out. Dropping down onto his stomach, he swung his legs out over the edge of the track, then lowered himself until he was hanging by his fingers. Slotzky was running toward him now, and though the bigger boy was still thirty feet away, Michael could already feel the soles of Slotsky’s Nikes grinding down on his fingertips. Without so much as glancing down at the floor below, he released his grip and let himself drop, falling into a rolling tumble the moment his feet touched the hardwood planks.

A twinge of pain shot through his shoulder, but he ignored it, scrambling to his feet and looking up to see what his pursuers would do.

Slotzky leaned over the rail, glowering at him. Then, with a skill perfected by years of practice, he spat on Michael. “See ya after school,” he said.

Wiping Slotzky’s slimy glob from his face, Michael backed away a few paces, then turned and trotted off toward the showers.

He wondered if Slotzky would be carrying a knife or a gun after school today.

Or both.

Katharine Sundquist knew she should be concentrating on the work at hand. Before her, on the desk in her office in the Natural History Museum, was a fragment of a hominid jaw that had arrived from a dig in Africa a week ago. Not that there was much work to be done: she had tentatively identified the specimen as Australopithecus afarensis the moment she’d seen it, and her subsequent examination failed to suggest that it might be anything else. It had been discovered in an area where Australopithecus afarensis was, if not common, certainly not unheard of, and excavated at a depth that, barring something unusual turning up in the carbon dating of the site, generally corresponded to the level where that particular precursor of Homo sapiens might be found. The problem was, she kept getting distracted by a series of photographs that had arrived the day after the australopithecine jaw.

There were half a dozen pictures, along with a letter describing the site more fully. The name on the letterhead — Rob Silver — had caught Katharine’s attention immediately, for though she’d seen Silver only a few times in the twenty-odd years since they’d been in graduate school together, she still had a clear mental image of him: tall, muscular, with an unruly mop of light brown hair and blue eyes that had — at least for a while — never failed to set her heart beating faster every time she saw him. The romance, though, had quickly faded when his interest in Polynesian culture and hers in early man had sent them in opposite directions, putting not only a scientific gulf between them, but an entire planet as well. Within four years she’d met and married Tom Sundquist and given birth to Michael.

When Michael was six, Tom Sundquist had died.

Died in Africa, on a perfect summer morning, a decade ago. But the image of it was as clear in her mind now as if it had happened only yesterday. Tom was leaving for Nairobi to catch a flight to Amsterdam, where he was scheduled to read a paper on the dig they’d been developing together for the past five years. She and Michael were staying on at the dig, where Katharine would supervise the work in Tom’s absence while Michael happily played with the African children with whom he’d made fast friends. She and Michael had stood together, hand in hand, as Tom’s single-engine Cessna accelerated down the dirt landing strip and rose into the morning sky. As always, the pilot swung around to pass over them one final time, but that morning he’d decided to show off.

As Katharine and Michael watched — she with growing apprehension, he with growing excitement — the pilot put the little plane through a series of twists and loops, then sent it straight up until it went into a stall, flipped over, and plunged toward the earth in an accelerating nosedive.

Katharine had seen it before — it was one of the pilot’s favorite stunts — and it always terrified her. At the last second the pilot would pull out of the dive, waggle his wings, and head off toward Nairobi, flying low enough to send the herds of animals below him into panicked stampedes.

But that morning, as she and Michael watched, the plane smashed nose first into the ground, instantly exploding into a ball of fire.

She and Michael had left the dig that day and never returned.

Within a year Michael’s asthma attacks began, triggered, Katharine was convinced, by what he’d seen on the morning his father died. In the years since Tom’s death, Katharine had concentrated on only two things: her son’s health and her work. For most of that time, it had been enough. But lately, especially the past few months, when Michael seemed finally to have freed himself from the crippling attacks, she’d been wondering if she wasn’t turning into just another of the fossils she spent so much of her time studying.

And then, last week, the letter from Rob Silver arrived, along with the photographs. The site, he explained, was on the flank of Haleakala, on Maui. For the last five years he’d been working in Hawaii, studying the evolution of Polynesian architecture as it moved from the South Pacific into the Hawaiian Islands. But the site in the photographs, he wrote, bore no resemblance to anything he’d ever seen in Hawaii. He had money in his budget for a consultant, and wanted to know if Katharine would be interested.

She kept returning to the pictures, peering at the images of the site that had been discovered beneath a thick layer of vegetation.

She’d gone through the museum’s library, comparing the photographs to every other image she could find of early Hawaiian ruins.

There was no comparison.

Yet the only way she could truly analyze the site would be to see it.

Now, once again putting aside the drab grayish fossil, and the photos of the equally drab grayish site from which it had been excavated, she again picked up the pictures of the site on Maui.

Though the site itself appeared to be little more than a collection of rough stones, it was surrounded by a lush forest of towering trees and flowering shrubs and vines, and while in some of the pictures the turquoise-blue of the Pacific Ocean could be seen in the distance, in others there were glimpses of a waterfall tumbling into a crystal-clear pool, a setting so beautiful it could have come straight from a Hollywood set designer’s vision of Eden.

Had Rob deliberately given her those seductive glimpses of the paradise surrounding his site?

And why was she even daydreaming about tropical flowers and trade winds? It was the site that counted!

But as she glanced around the windowless cubicle in the dismal cave that was her office, and remembered just how miserable the weather outside was, she knew exactly why she was as tantalized by the lush surroundings of Rob Silver’s site as she was by the discovery he had made.

She picked up the letter once more.

Thirty thousand dollars.

Rob Silver was offering her thirty thousand dollars to spend three months working with him on Maui. Plus expenses.

She remembered the tense meeting she’d had with the museum’s director last week. Her budget alone was about to be slashed by thirty percent.

The grant from the National Science Foundation — the grant she’d been counting on to fund fieldwork this summer — was “approved but not funded.”

So there, but for the offer on her desk, was the future: no fieldwork and a budget that was all but nonexistent.

The major problem was that Rob Silver needed her by the first of the month, which was as long as he could hold up his dig. That would mean taking Michael out of school — and away from the track team he’d become so enamored of lately — which she suspected he wouldn’t like at all. Well, maybe when she told him where they were going, his objections might evaporate.

She picked up the phone and called the director. “I may want to take a leave of absence,” she said. “Three months.” She hesitated, then spoke again. “Without pay, of course.” As she hung up the phone five minutes later, she wondered if Michael would be as easily convinced as the director had been.

When she got home that afternoon, though, and saw the cut on his arm and the ugly yellowish purple bruise that surrounded her son’s painfully swollen left eye, Katharine knew that the decision was made. Three months away from New York was just what both of them needed.