John Saul

by The Presence (v5) (epub)

  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.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Takeo Yoshihara awoke, as he always did, as the first glow of dawn was lighting the eastern sky. As fully awake now as he’d been deeply asleep the moment before, he rose immediately from his bed and, dressing in the aloha shirt, white pants, and sandals that were his standard uniform on Maui, he went to the small dining pavilion. His breakfast of miso soup, fish, and tea was waiting for him, just as always when he was in residence at the estate.

  As he ate he reviewed the conditions of the financial markets and scanned the stack of reports that had come in from all over the world during the night.

  It appeared that he was thirty million dollars richer than when he’d gone to bed last night.

  Finishing the reports as he drained the last drop of tea from his cup, Yoshihara left the dining pavilion to make his way through the gardens to the research center, stopping only once to remove a wilting orchid bloom that the Filipino gardeners had overlooked.

  Entering the research pavilion through the main doors, he nodded to the guard as he passed the desk, pushed open the double doors leading to the south corridor, and strode quickly down the long passageway to the elevator at its far end. Pulling his wallet from his pocket, he passed it over a nondescript gray plate above the call button, and the red light at the top of the plate immediately blinked green. A moment later the door slid open. Yoshihara stepped into the car, and the door closed behind him.

  Less than a minute later he was in the laboratory to which the large wooden crate had been delivered late last night. The crate, though, had long since been taken away, as had the remnants of dry ice in which the contents had been packed, and the plastic sheeting in which it had been wrapped.

  Only the body itself remained, and it was all but unrecognizable.

  Stephen Jameson looked up as the laboratory door opened. Surprised to see his employer coming into the room, he glanced at the clock.

  Nearly six-thirty.

  Suddenly feeling the fatigue of the long night of dissection, Jameson took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and stretched.

  Nodding a greeting to the doctor, Yoshihara stepped closer to the table and looked down at what was left of the body that he’d had removed from its grave and shipped to Maui. If the sight of the carnage caused Yoshihara any discomfort, he gave no outward sign.

  The corpse had been laid open from the crotch to the neck, and what few organs still remained in the thoracic area lay in confused disorder, like the pieces of a quickly disassembled jigsaw puzzle. The rib cage had been split and spread wide to allow easy access to the lungs and heart—both of which were missing entirely—so all that now remained was a great yawning cavity that, since it was entirely free of blood, gave the body the odd appearance of never having been alive at all. Rather, the remains of the cadaver had an artificial and strangely impersonal look to them, as though what lay on the table had been sculpted of wax rather than flesh and blood.

  Yet Yoshihara knew that such was not the case, for he himself had seen pictures of the boy taken only a few weeks ago. A white male, seventeen years old, he’d stood a little over six feet tall, with the broad shoulders and narrow hips of an athlete. In one of the photographs Yoshihara had seen, the boy was smiling broadly, showing perfect white teeth, deep dimples, and a slightly cleft chin. In combination with his blue eyes and blond hair, he’d been the perfect example of the California surfer.

  Oddly, the boy’s good looks remained.

  His blond hair, neatly combed and sprayed for his funeral, had been slightly mussed by the packaging, and before Yoshihara realized quite what he was doing, he found himself reaching out to smooth the stray locks back into place.

  The pallor of death had been expertly covered with makeup, and the boy’s cheeks showed a rosy glow, as if he might wake up at any moment.

  The cleft in his chin was as clear as it had been in the photo, though in the solemn expression of death, he showed no signs of his dimples.

  Yoshihara turned his attention back to Jameson, who now held a manila folder in his hands. “Have you determined the exact cause of death?”

  Jameson opened the folder, scanning its contents. He’d had a team of laboratory assistants working all night, analyzing the tissues that Jameson himself had taken from each organ as he’d performed his dissection of the body.

  As Jameson had expected, most of the boy’s organs proved to be as healthy as they’d appeared. The lab tes
ts showed no signs of disease or toxic substances.

  Or at least there were no signs of any substances that one might have expected would kill a seventeen-year-old boy.

  No strychnine, or cyanide, or any other poisons.

  No drugs, either. No heroin, no cocaine, no uppers or downers.

  Not even any alcohol or marijuana.

  Yet the boy had died, and the lab report in Stephen Jameson’s hands clearly showed why.

  “The cause of death,” he said, “was a violent allergic reaction to the substance in question.” He gave Yoshihara a smug smile. “When the ambulance arrived, his mother was trying to get him out of his car, which was running in the garage with the door closed.”

  Yoshihara nodded. “And so they gave him oxygen.”

  “And he died,” Jameson said.

  “And the weather in Los Angeles that day?” Yoshihara asked.

  Jameson smiled thinly. “Close to perfect. A Santa Ana condition had developed; the weather reports spoke of a crystalline day such as Los Angeles hardly ever experiences anymore.”

  “But not good for our subject,” Yoshihara observed. “What would the result have been if they hadn’t applied pure oxygen?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Jameson replied. “But it appears that our latest subjects are doing better. So far, four of the five seem to be doing fine. Of course, the air in Mexico City has been particularly bad the last few days, but in Chicago it’s been pretty good.”

  “And how long have they been in place?”

  “Only two days,” Jameson told him.

  “Interesting,” Yoshihara mused. “What about the local boy who died? What was his name?”

  “Kioki Santoya,” Jameson replied. “He wasn’t given oxygen, of course—he was already dead when his mother found him. But our lab work shows that his lungs are in very much the same condition as this subject’s.” He nodded toward the cadaver on the table.

  Takeo Yoshihara was silent for a moment, thinking. “The other two locals,” he finally said. “I would like to see them. Not on the monitors. I wish to look at them directly.”

  Stephen Jameson’s eyes clouded. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he began. “If either of them recognizes you—”

  “It won’t matter if they do,” Takeo Yoshihara cut in. His expression was grim. “After all, it’s unlikely they’ll be leaving here, isn’t it?”

  Stephen Jameson tilted his head noncommittally. It would not do to expose his feelings to his employer. “As you wish,” he said, leading Takeo Yoshihara through a door. They passed through a chamber filled with tanks of compressed gas and a large pump, and then into yet another room.

  This room was empty, except for a large Plexiglas box.

  The box was filled with a brownish fog.

  Barely visible through the haze were the figures of two young men. Naked, they lay sleeping on the floor, their heads resting on their arms. But as Takeo Yoshihara stared at them, the eyes of one—the larger of them, and as Yoshihara could now see, a Polynesian by ancestry—suddenly snapped open. In an instant he was crouched low to the floor, as if ready to spring.

  Like an animal, Takeo Yoshihara thought. Like a wild animal sensing danger. Yoshihara stepped closer, exactly as he might have to get a closer look at an ape in a cage at the zoo.

  The figure sprang at him, his hands extended as if to seize Yoshihara’s neck, until, crashing against the Plexiglas wall, he dropped back to the floor of the cage with a howl of pain.

  Now the other, smaller specimen was awake, too, staring through the transparent wall, his eyes burning with fury.

  “We still have no idea how they became involved in our experiments?” Yoshihara asked, turning away from the box to gaze once more at Jameson.

  “Since I’m sure they don’t know themselves—” he began, but once more Yoshihara cut him off.

  “I’m not interested in what they know,” he said. “I wish to understand how they became exposed to our compound. Find out. I want an answer by the end of the day. Is that clear?”

  Stephen Jameson swallowed nervously, but nodded his assent, knowing no other response would be acceptable.

  “Good,” Yoshihara said softly. Then, without so much as a backward glance at the two boys imprisoned in the Plexiglas box, he made his way back through the series of rooms, rode the elevator up to the main floor, and left the building to stroll for a while in the gardens.

  He had an hour before it would be time to leave. Except for the small hitch involving the local boys, things seemed to be progressing nicely. And even the problem with the locals was being contained.

  “Contained,” he repeated silently to himself. It would have been better if all the research subjects could have been kept far from Maui, as originally planned, but since the error had occurred—and he would find out precisely how that error had occurred—there was no point in not turning the mistake to his own advantage.

  For as long as they lived, the two young males down in the laboratory would make valuable research subjects.

  For as long as they lived.

  For Takeo Yoshihara, the life spans of Jeff Kina and Josh Malani were of no concern. Far more important—indeed, the only matter of any importance—was the essential scientific data their corpses would provide.

  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.”

  Sh
e 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.”