The Presence

CHAPTER 2

Pedro Santiago’s eyes snapped open as the 747’s altitude changed slightly, beginning its descent into Honolulu. Pedro hadn’t meant to sleep on the flight; ever since the moment the man in Manila had handed him the locked Louis Vuitton makeup case, he’d been determined to stay wide-awake through the entire trip to Hawaii. Not that he had actually been asleep, he reassured himself. Not really. His eyes had perhaps been closed, and his mind might have slipped into that state of relaxation that was almost as refreshing as true sleep, but he’d still been perfectly aware of his surroundings.

He’d heard the woman across the aisle order a third mai-tai, then a fourth, and, a few minutes ago, a fifth.

He’d listened to the man in the row ahead of him snoring.

His feet had rested against the makeup case tucked beneath the seat directly ahead of him, where the sleeping man unknowingly guarded it from the front as securely as Pedro himself guarded it from his position.

He’d bought two first-class seats for his trip. He hated having to make polite conversation with strangers on airplanes, but more important, an empty seat acted as one more buffer in his carefully unobtrusive security system.

An occupant of the seat next to him might, if he — or she, Pedro carefully reminded himself — were extraordinarily clever, be able to lull him into lowering his guard just long enough to …

To what?

Kill him?

Possibly. Certainly such things had happened before. Two members of his fraternity had died in the last three years, suffering “heart attacks” on airplanes, expiring quietly in their seats with no one but their killers any the wiser until the planes were preparing for landing. Poison could be delivered in so many ways:

A fresh drink, prepared by a stewardess who was momentarily diverted from her work by an overly friendly passenger.

A tiny needle, expertly placed in the neck by someone who seemed accidentally to lose his footing while making his way to the rest room.

Pedro Santiago always took a window seat, and drank only from cans he opened himself.

Still, the instincts of his profession had told him that this would be an easy run. If danger awaited him, it would strike on the return trip, after the delivery, when the fee had been paid.

He raised the window blind and peered out into the bright morning. Far below, a solid bank of clouds obscured the sea and all but the very tops of three large volcanoes. Pedro shrugged; Hawaii’s scenic splendor was of no interest to him. As the intercom came alive, announcing the imminent landing of the plane, Santiago picked up the makeup case and cradled it in his lap.

“All carry-on items must be stowed under the seat or in the overhead bin, Mr. Jennings,” the flight attendant reminded him as she moved down the aisle with the last tray of empty cocktail glasses.

He smiled, nodded, put the case back under the seat in front of him.

The plane touched down, slowed, then taxied to the gate.

Pedro Santiago emerged from the jetway into the gate area and ignored the sign that directed him toward Customs.

One thing Santiago had never done in his professional career was risk carrying one of his packages past a Customs inspector. That kind of work was reserved for the mules — the stupid college students who would risk years in jail for less money than he could spend on an evening with a whore in Amsterdam.

While the other passengers flooded toward the Customs area, Santiago approached a man in a blue uniform who stood a few yards from the flight’s arrival gate. “I believe you might be waiting for me,” he said in an English as accent-free as was his Spanish, his Portuguese, and his Turkish.

“I believe you might be right, Mr.…” The man let the end of the sentence hang between them.

“Jennings,” Pedro Santiago finished, completing the innocuous code that had been established when he’d agreed to deliver the Vuitton case.

“If you’ll follow me.”

The man in the uniform led Santiago to a locked door, punched a series of numbers into the combination plate, then held the door open to allow the courier to pass through ahead of him.

At the foot of a short flight of stairs, an electric golf cart waited. The man in the blue uniform steered it toward a helicopter waiting a quarter of a mile away. Following the man’s lead, Santiago climbed into the chopper, pulled the door closed, and strapped himself securely into the seat. The engine ground for a second or two, then caught and roared to life. Above him the helicopter’s huge rotor began to turn.

The pilot revved the engine, the rotor’s speed increased, and the aircraft lurched up, tipped forward, and sped off across the field, staying low as it crossed the shoreline. Once over water, it shifted course slightly, briefly following the coast toward Honolulu before veering off to the southeast toward Molokai and Maui.

Forty minutes later Pedro Santiago peered down through the Plexiglas bubble in front of him as the helicopter swept across the rugged southeast coast of Maui and the dark blue surface of the sea was abruptly replaced by the undulating green carpet of the rain forest. The chopper dropped low, until it seemed to Santiago as if it were barely clearing the treetops. Then the trees gave way to a clearing dotted with several buildings whose green-tile roofs would make them invisible from any altitude higher than that at which the helicopter hovered.

Quickly, expertly, the pilot let the big aircraft settle onto a lawn surrounded by several buildings. As Santiago unstrapped himself from the seat and opened the door beside him, a man emerged from one of the buildings, but did not come toward the helicopter.

Instinctively recognizing his employer, though he’d never met him before, Santiago ducked his head protectively low as he dashed out from under the helicopter’s downdraft, cradling the Louis Vuitton case in both his arms.

“Mr. — Jennings,” the waiting man said, hesitating just long enough before using the alias to let Santiago know he felt the use of the code name bordered on the moronic. Santiago couldn’t have cared less — code names had kept him alive and fattened his Swiss bank account beyond the dreams of most men who had been born in the slums of São Paulo. Nodding curtly, he followed the other man into the building, down a corridor, and into a small, windowless room bare of any furniture save a small table on which sat a case identical to the one Santiago carried.

The man nodded toward the table, and Santiago set his case down, then tried the lock of the duplicate. The latch snapped open and he lifted the case’s lid. Though his instincts told him all the money would be there, he nonetheless took the time to count it.

It was in fifty-dollar bills, as he’d requested.

He’d had no particular interest in whether the serial numbers of the bills were sequential, but as he began counting them, he noted that they weren’t.

Whoever he was dealing with knew what he was doing.

He finished his counting and looked up. “Two hundred thousand.”

“Exactly as we agreed,” the man replied.

Pedro Santiago packed the money back into the makeup case, changed its combination, and snapped its latch closed. “Then we’re finished.”

The man nodded and extended his hand. Santiago ignored the gesture, turning back toward the single door that provided the only access to the room. Accepting that Santiago had nothing more to say, the man escorted him back to the outside door and waited while the courier got back into the helicopter, closed the door, and strapped himself in. As the craft rose up from the lawn and moved back toward the sea, the man remained near the door, watching.

The moment the man disappeared from Pedro Santiago’s view, Santiago began thinking about his next job, a run from South Africa.

That job, he suspected, would be a lot more interesting than this one had proved to be.

As the helicopter disappeared over the green horizon of the rain forest, the man reentered the building and closed the door behind him. Returning to the room where he had completed his transaction with the person he knew only as “Mr. Jennings,” he closed and locked the door, then opened the Louis Vuitton makeup case.

His hands trembled as he lifted the lid.

Inside the makeup case there was a single object.

A skull.

Its empty eyes stared up at him.

The hairs on the back of Pedro Santiago’s neck suddenly rose and a tiny alarm sounded in his head.

Danger!

The helicopter was five miles off the coast of Maui, and though he couldn’t have said what it was that set off his internal alarm, something had changed inside the cabin.

Not a movement — at least not a movement of the aircraft itself.

The pilot?

He couldn’t be certain.

Being careful to give no sign that he was now on full alert, Santiago glanced over from the copilot’s seat, but the pilot was staring straight ahead, seeming almost to have forgotten his passenger’s presence.

Or was he looking for something?

Santiago’s eyes left the pilot, sweeping the panorama of sea and islands that lay beyond the Plexiglas bubble that formed the cabin’s front. A few boats were scattered over the ocean’s surface, and except for a single airliner far in the distance, the sky was empty.

Yet Pedro Santiago’s internal alarms were sounding louder than ever.

His body tensed, though he still had no idea what the threat might be, nor from what direction it would come.

Once again his eyes darted toward the pilot, and now he could see the tension in the other man’s body: the narrowing of his eyes, the tightening of his grip on the helicopter’s joystick.

Suddenly, a flicker of movement was reflected in the curve of the Plexiglas, a flicker so faint and distorted that Santiago almost missed it. Then, as his body tensed, he understood.

Behind him!

Someone was behind him!

But it was already too late. Even as Pedro Santiago instinctively started to duck away, the man who had hidden himself in the back of the helicopter during the few minutes the craft waited in the clearing released the latch on the door with one hand, while he freed Santiago’s safety belt with the other.

At exactly the same instant, the pilot pulled hard on the joystick, and the chopper yawed over to starboard.

Even before he quite realized what had happened, Pedro Santiago was tumbling toward the sea, four hundred feet below.