“Not a problem,” Katharine replied, picking up the empty mug from the desk. “Michael’s still sound asleep, and I’m tired of sitting in the dark. Any particular flavor this time?”
“Maybe another Chocolate Mocha?”
“Coming right up.”
Heading for the kitchen for the fourth time, Katharine once again set about making two mugs of coffee. But this time she removed one more tinfoil packet from the Ziploc bag.
This one, though, contained more than coffee, for before she left her house, she’d carefully slit it open and added to the original contents three of the Halcion tablets that her doctor had prescribed for her more than a year ago. That had been during one of Michael’s bad periods, when she’d worried so constantly about his asthma that she couldn’t sleep. Though she’d never taken the pills, she’d kept them, superstitiously, as though their mere possession would act as a charm against needing to use them.
“Does it ever seem like the nights will never end?” she asked now as she set one of the coffee mugs on LuAnne Jensen’s desk.
“Every one of them gets longer,” the nurse agreed, picking up the mug, blowing on the steam for a moment, then taking the first sip. “You have no idea how much this helps.”
“Have as much as you want,” Katharine replied. “I brought plenty.” Leaving with her own mug of coffee, Katharine went back into Michael’s room.
In the darkness, she stripped off the clothes she’d been wearing all day and put on the jeans and shirt she’d brought from home. The cellular phone went into one of the front pockets of the jeans, where she’d feel its vibration if Rob tried to call her.
At three-forty she cracked the door to the anteroom open just wide enough to allow her a glimpse of the desk. LuAnne Jensen was still in her chair, but her head had rolled forward so her chin nearly touched her chest, and a rhythmic snoring was emanating from her open mouth. Katharine silently closed the door.
At three forty-five she felt the cellular phone vibrate in her pocket. Slipping it out, she flipped it open and was about to utter Rob’s name when she thought better of it. “Michael?” she asked. “Are you awake?”
Instantly, her son’s voice crackled from the speaker. “Uh-huh.”
At the same time, she heard Rob’s voice coming through the telephone: “If you don’t say anything, we’ll pick you up in exactly fifteen minutes. If there’s a problem, speak to Michael again.”
Katharine hesitated. She had a plan, but she had no idea whether it would work. If it didn’t … But what choice did she have?
Silently, she pressed the End button on the cellular phone, closed it, and returned it to her pocket. Then she went over to the bed. In the dim light emanating from the monitor, she could barely make out Michael’s face. But he was staring at her, his eyes wide open, and she no longer had any doubt that he’d been as wide-awake as she through the long hours of the night.
She held a finger to her lips, then took the bundle of clothes she’d brought for him out of the suitcase and pushed them into the air lock. He immediately began wriggling into them, staying under the covers and doing his best to move as little as possible. When he was done, she signaled him to pull the covers up and pretend to go back to sleep. Then she stepped out into the anteroom.
“Are you ready for—” she began, then cut herself off. “LuAnne? LuAnne, what’s wrong?” Moving around behind the desk, she shook the nurse, who slid off the chair onto the floor. Straightening, she looked wildly around the anteroom as if uncertain what to do, then picked up the telephone and pressed the button that was labeled “Lobby Desk.” Someone picked it up in the middle of the second ring.
“Jensen?” a voice asked.
“It’s Dr. Sundquist,” Katharine said. “Something’s happened to LuAnne. I just came out to make us some more coffee, and I thought she’d fallen asleep. But when I tried to wake her up, she slid off the chair.”
“Oh, Jesus,” the guard swore. “I’ll be right there.”
Katharine darted back into Michael’s room and took three more items out of the suitcase.
Two of them were large plastic garbage bags.
The other was the fossilized femur of an anthropoid that had become extinct several million years ago.
Shoving the garbage bags into the air lock, Katharine finally risked speaking to Michael out loud. “Hold these up to the intake tube,” she said. “Get them as full as you can.” Then, taking the femur with her, she went back to the anteroom and once again pressed the Lobby Desk button on the phone. When there was no answer by the second ring, she hung up, left the anteroom, and went to stand by the elevator door, her back pressed against the wall.
As she counted the passing seconds, she prayed that the camera above her was being monitored only by the guard who should be stepping out of the elevator in five more seconds.
In at least partial answer to her prayers, the doors slid open exactly five seconds later and the guard stepped out.
As the second hand of Katharine’s watch ticked one more time, she raised the femur high, then brought it down on the back of the guard’s neck as hard as she could.
Grunting, he dropped to his knees.
Katharine smashed the fossilized bone down one more time.
The guard sprawled out on the floor, facedown, and lay still.
Grabbing both his hands, Katharine dragged him down the hall and into the anteroom. Closing the door, she tied his hands behind him with the telephone cord, then pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.
If the elevator card stolen from Jameson didn’t work, the guard’s would.
Rising to her feet, she looked once more at her watch.
Seven minutes had gone by.
Going back into Michael’s room, she finally turned the lights on. Inside the plastic box, one of the garbage bags was inflated, and Michael was pulling its drawstrings tight.
“Don’t tie them,” she said. “Hurry, and get the other bag filled, and—” Her words died on her lips as she realized for the first time that none of the corners of the Plexiglas box had hinges.
“My God,” she whispered, staring at Michael in horror. “How am I going to get you out of there?”
Holding the second garbage bag up to the intake tube, Michael jerked his head toward the corner of the room. “Over there. There’s a button.”
Katharine searched the corner where he’d gestured, saw nothing for a moment, then spotted a small button mounted flush into the wall. When she pressed it, nothing seemed to happen, but then she saw Michael pointing toward the ceiling.
A small panel had slid open directly above the center of the Plexiglas box. From it a stainless steel rod, perhaps an inch thick, was descending. A knob on the rod slipped into a socket on the box’s top. She heard a click as something locked in place.
A second later the box began to rise up off the floor. Instantly the room filled with the noxious gases with which the cube had been filled. Katharine, already coughing from the fumes, lurched toward the anteroom door.
“Take one of the bags,” she heard Michael say as the box cleared the bed. Grabbing the strings of the bag he had shoved in her direction, she darted out into the anteroom, yanking the door shut behind her.
Nine minutes had gone by.
She waited as another minute passed, and was about to go back into the inner room when suddenly the door opened and Michael, clutching the second garbage bag, came out.
“Follow me,” Katharine told him. Pulling the door to the hallway open, she raced down the corridor to the elevator, the key card already in her hand. Holding it up to the panel, she uttered a silent prayer.
The light on the gray panel changed from red to green, but nothing happened.
The doors remained closed.
Then she understood: the elevator had returned to the upper floor.
The fifteen seconds it took for the elevator to arrive back on the lower level seemed to take forever, but at last the doors slid open.
Katharine almost shoved Mic
hael inside, stepped in after him, and pressed the Up button. Then, as the doors began to slide shut, she saw someone come out of one of the doors down the hall.
The door to the Serinus Project.
The man stared at her in surprise and started toward her, but the elevator doors closed before he could get to them.
The elevator was only halfway up when Katharine heard the faint ringing sound. An alarm.
As the doors slid open at the top and the sound of the alarm battered against her eardrums, Katharine looked at her watch again.
Five minutes left.
“Come on,” she told Michael.
She raced down the corridor toward the double doors at the far end, the inflated garbage bag bouncing clumsily behind her. Michael, pausing only to suck a deep breath from the second bag, ran after her, catching up to her just as she came to the lobby doors.
She pushed them open.
Here, the sound of the alarm was even louder, but the lobby was still empty.
“Outside,” she said.
They ran for the front door, and a few seconds later burst out into the night. For an instant, seeing no pursuers, Katharine dared to hope that, after all, they might escape. Then the blackness was washed away by a brilliant beam of white light.
Like two insects caught on a pin, Katharine and Michael cowered in the brilliance.
Over the alarm, Katharine heard another sound.
The familiar whup-whup-whup of a helicopter.
Shielding her eyes against the glare of the light, she looked up. As suddenly as the beam had appeared, it disappeared, and finally she saw it.
The helicopter dropped down no more than twenty yards away.
She froze in horror, thinking:
Takeo Yoshihara.
Then, as lights all over the estate began to go on, she caught a glimpse of a face inside the chopper’s cabin.
Rob Silver’s face.
Grabbing Michael with one hand and still clutching the garbage bag with the other, Katharine stumbled toward the hovering aircraft and shoved Michael inside.
As Rob’s strong hands closed on her wrists and began to lift her into the cabin, she heard the helicopter’s engine roar.
Even before she was fully on board, it lifted off, wheeled around, and began racing away into the darkness.
From the lanai outside his bedroom, Takeo Yoshihara watched the helicopter disappear into the night, then spoke into the telephone he had picked up the instant the alarms had wakened him from sleep.
“Track them on radar,” he ordered. “Find out where they are going. We will bring them back. Do you understand? Both the mother and the son.” Before hanging up, he spoke once more: “And when we go, I shall want a special guard with us. One who has been trained as a sniper.”
CHAPTER
33
The headset that Rob clamped over Katharine’s ears the moment after he dragged her into the helicopter’s cabin cut the rotor’s roar just enough so she could make out that he was trying to talk to her, but the words themselves were lost in the din coming from above. When she finally trusted herself to speak after the sickening series of dips and turns the helicopter made as the pilot raced it away from the estate, she had to raise her voice to a shout, even though the headset’s microphone hung only a fraction of an inch from her lips.
“I said, how long will it take to get to the Big Island?”
Rob started to reply, then went silent as the pilot jerked on the joystick and the helicopter yawed sharply to port as it banked away from the face of a cliff. It plunged straight down, then stabilized and began to rise, finally cresting the top of the cliff and swooping away to the west.
“Maybe forty minutes,” Rob finally answered.
Forty minutes? But before, she recalled, Rob had said Michael would have to breathe for only ten or fifteen minutes! And though one of the two plastic bags was still full—she herself was clutching its top to make sure none of its contents could escape before Michael needed them—the bag Michael had carried out of the research pavilion was already nearly half empty. He’d never make it! Before she could say anything, though, Michael spoke.
“I’m gonna try breathing regular air!” he shouted into his microphone. “Maybe I can save what’s in the bags!”
Katharine nodded vigorously, then shouted into the microphone again: “Just don’t waste any of it trying to talk!”
Michael made a thumbs-up sign. Then, as she watched, he exhaled the last breath he’d taken from the bag, and inhaled his first breath of air from the cabin.
For a second, just a second, Katharine felt a surge of hope. Then a fit of coughing seized Michael, and she could see the pain he was experiencing. He buried his face in the mouth of the bag, sucked in some of the gas it held, and the coughing subsided.
The bag, though, had collapsed still further. When Katharine glanced at her watch, she saw that only three minutes had gone by since they’d left the estate. At this rate, both the bags would be depleted before they were even halfway to the Big Island. “What are we going to do?” she asked, struggling to control the panic rising within her. Michael couldn’t die now! He couldn’t! They were supposed to be rescuing him, not killing him!
“Don’t worry!” Rob shouted over the noise of the rotors. “By the time he finishes them, we should be okay!”
Katharine gazed out through the Plexiglas bubble into the darkness outside. The route they were taking was leading them up the side of the mountain, and the pilot was keeping the chopper low, hugging the ground. The rain forests around the estate had already given way to the lush pastureland above Makawao and Pukalani, and just ahead and off to the port side Katharine could see a few lights she assumed must be at Kula. In the distance, strung along the edge of Maalaea Bay like a string of glittering diamonds, were the lights of Kihei and Wailea.
Farther to the south there was a vast expanse of darkness, broken only by a faint glow from the Makena Surf Condominiums and the Maui Prince Hotel, then a scattering of glimmers marking the dozen or so houses strung along the beach until the beach itself ended abruptly at the lava flow. Beneath the helicopter the landscape was changing again, the lush up-country pasturage giving way to the scrubby ranch land that dominated the leeward side of Haleakala. Even in the starlight she could make out the dense thickets of prickly pear cactus and scraggly kiawe trees that made up much of the sparse vegetation that grew there.
She glanced over at Michael; the first of the two bags was all but depleted, but as his body began to recover from the burst of energy he’d expended during the escape, his breathing, like her own, had started to return to normal, and the remaining gas contained in the bag had lasted far longer than she would have thought possible. But even so, the bag was deflated long before they had even crossed over the coastline and started out over the broad channel that separates Maui from the Big Island.
As Michael discarded the first bag and took his first breath from the second, she realized that instead of turning southeast, en route to the Big Island, the helicopter was still moving southwest. In the darkness, she could see the silhouette of a small island etched against the night sky. But there were no small islands between Maui and the Big Island. A glance at the compass confirmed her suspicion, and a new fear took root inside her as she searched for some plausible reason that they would be going in the wrong direction.
And why had Rob assured her that Michael would have to breathe no more than fifteen minutes?
Then, as the helicopter held a steady course almost ninety degrees away from the only place where Michael had a chance of surviving other than in Takeo Yoshihara’s laboratory, the truth dawned on her.
Rob was still working for Takeo Yoshihara!
Not only was he still working for him, but he’d led her—and Michael—directly into a trap.
Frantic, she looked wildly around, trying to decide what to do. Should she attempt to take control of the helicopter herself? She dismissed the idea the instant it occurred to her—perh
aps in the movies someone who’d never flown a helicopter before could simply take over the joystick, but in real life it simply wasn’t possible.
“Why aren’t we going to the Big Island?” she demanded, shouting to make herself heard over the din of the rotor.
Rob cupped his hand over his ear, as if he hadn’t been able to hear her. But he must have heard! How could he not have? Furious now, she jabbed her finger toward the compass, then the island beyond. “That’s not the Big Island, God damn you! You lied to me! You’re going to kill us, aren’t you?” As Rob’s eyes widened in the face of her fury, she shouted at him again. “Why? Why are you doing this?” Suddenly it all made sense: of course she’d managed to pull off the escape—they’d always intended for her to! And they’d timed it perfectly:
The man from the laboratory appearing in the hallway just seconds too late to prevent her from using the elevator.
The alarms going off just seconds too late for the guards to prevent her from getting to the helicopter.
Even the arrival of the helicopter itself, unchallenged, its searchlight blinding her, confusing her, scaring her into shoving Michael into it with no questions at all.
An idiot! She’d been a complete idiot! Her frustration and fury overwhelming her, she lunged at Rob, wanting to smash him even harder than she’d smashed the guard with the fossilized bone half an hour ago. She wanted to hit him, to strangle him, to shove him out the door of the helicopter. “Damn you!” she screamed. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
Rob’s hands instinctively came up to defend himself, then his fingers closed on her wrists, holding her arms immobile. “What are you talking about, Katharine?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” she screamed. “For God’s sake, Rob! How stupid do you think I am? Don’t you think I’ve figured out why you told me Michael was only going to need to breathe for—what did you say? Ten to fifteen minutes, wasn’t it?”
“Kath—”
“I should have known then, shouldn’t I? I should have been able to figure out there was no way to get to the Big Island in that short a time. But I thought you had a plan! I trusted you, God damn it! I trusted you!”
John Saul Page 31