The Presence (30 page)

As the clanging of the bell faded away, Michael packed his books into his bag and joined the throng of students pushing their way out the door. Emerging onto the covered walkway that edged the building, he had to pause to catch his breath before trusting himself even to make it to the locker room next to the gym.

Pulling open the door, he stepped into the humid room. The air was redolent with the mingled odors of perspiration, soap, disinfectant, and half a dozen other chemicals.
Michael went to his locker, opened it, and, stripping naked, pulled on the gym clothes that were still damp from his fourth-period workout. Then he fished around for a pair of clean socks, unwilling to subject his feet to the stinking pair he’d used earlier in the day.

As he put on his track clothes, he began to feel a little better, and flushed with pride for resisting the urge to skip practice. Finished dressing, he headed toward the rest room.

It was as he was standing at the urinal that he became aware of a new odor drifting into his nostrils. Instinctively, Michael expanded his chest, drawing it deep into his lungs. The pungency of the scent almost made him dizzy, but the constriction in his chest immediately eased and he felt some of the fatigue leave his body.

Glancing around, Michael searched for the source of the odor, but all he saw was the closet in which Josh Malani had found the bottle of ammonia yesterday. The door was slightly ajar. Finished at the urinal, Michael adjusted his shorts and pulled at the lever that flushed the porcelain basin. He moved to the sinks, which stood between the urinals and the closet, and the scent grew stronger. Unable to contain his curiosity, he approached the closet and pulled the door wide open.

The cleaning supplies were lined up on the shelf, just as they’d been yesterday. There were nearly a dozen different containers, holding chemicals ranging from window cleaner to scrubbing powder, from toilet cleaners to solvents powerful enough to remove practically anything from the school’s walls, be they painted, tiled, or bare concrete. But there was nothing that could account for the peculiar odor he’d been breathing for the last couple of minutes.

His eyes fell on the ammonia bottle that Josh had been sniffing. Almost without thinking, he reached out, picked it up, unscrewed its cap, and sniffed at it.

The odor grew stronger, and he felt a heat spread through his body.

Frowning, Michael studied the label. Something had replaced the familiar acrid ammonia odor he would ordinarily have recognized.

All the label contained was the usual list of warnings against using the product in an enclosed area, inhaling its fumes, or ingesting it.

Picking up the bottle’s cap to screw it back on, he hesitated. His frown deepening, Michael held the bottle to his nose and took another sniff, breathing more deeply this time. The warmth spread through him, setting his whole body tingling.

Was this what Josh had felt yesterday? Glancing around the rest room as furtively as if he were about to shoot heroin into his veins, Michael sucked the fumes in again, and then yet again. With each breath he felt more strength surge into his body, and the last of the fatigue and pain he’d been feeling all day evaporated. He drew a dozen more breaths, and was still holding the bottle in his hand when the rest room door slammed open.

“Jesus! It stinks in here!”

Quickly putting the cap back on the bottle, Michael stepped out of the closet to find himself facing the janitor. “Someone left the cap off the ammonia bottle,” he said.

“Musta been Joe,” the janitor said, so quickly that Michael was sure that Joe—whoever he was—got the blame for anything that went wrong in the maintenance department. “Christ! How can you stand to even be in here?” Obviously neither expecting nor wanting an answer to
his question, the janitor propped the door open to let the fumes out of the rest room and started pulling supplies out of the closet.

“See you later,” Michael offered as he walked back out into the locker room. The janitor barely grunted a reply.

Ten minutes later, the wondrous effects of the ammonia fumes still infusing his body with a strength he’d never felt before, Michael ran his first timed one-hundred-meter sprint of the afternoon.

He beat his own best time by nearly three-fifths of a second, and the school record by thirty-eight hundredths.

The French doors to the garden outside Rob’s office were wide open, but Katharine felt as if the walls were closing in around her. All day—ever since she’d arrived at the estate’s gate that morning—she’d been unable to rid herself of the feeling of being watched. Indeed, the creepy sense that unseen eyes were following her every movement had grown stronger with each hour that passed, until finally she’d found herself suspecting that even the gardener, who appeared after lunch with a rake and a broom and proceeded to remove every fallen leaf and blossom from every square inch of garden she could see, was there solely to spy on her. That she had never once been able to catch him even looking at her, let alone snapping pictures of her, or aiming something that could be an amplifying microphone in her direction, had done nothing to dissuade her. Not that she had any idea what an amplifying microphone would look like, even if she tripped over one. She had been unable to bring herself to make any more phone calls for fear that the instrument was bugged, and before lunch, she had actually unscrewed the handset of Rob’s phone, examining the inner parts for something that might be a tiny extra microphone, but had given that up, too.

The day had turned into an eternity, and if she hadn’t also convinced herself that leaving early would be considered suspect, she would have fled right after talking to Elaine Reynolds and Keith Shelby.

Instead, she had stayed in Rob’s office, her paranoia in full bloom, attempting to appear to whoever might be watching her as if she were proceeding with her normal work, establishing an identification for the skeleton from the site near the fumarole. But what she had actually been thinking about for the last three hours was what she’d seen in the Serinus Project laboratory.

And what Rob had said yesterday about canaries being lowered into mine shafts. The more she thought about it, the more certain she had become that the animals in the cages were precisely that. They were being used to test the levels of toxins that oxygen-breathing creatures could withstand in the atmosphere.

But there was a question that kept haunting her:

Given what they were breathing, and the levels at which they were breathing it, how were any of the animals surviving at all?

In mid-afternoon she’d gone onto the Internet, where she spent some time hunting for information about the effects on animals of the various chemicals being circulated through the Plexiglas boxes. The conclusions she came to were inescapable: given the levels of poisonous gases she’d seen on the gauges, every one of the animals should have been dead.

But they weren’t.

The only logical conclusion, then, was that the Serinus Project was far more than simply a study of the effects of pollution on various life-forms.

There must be experiments going on, as well. Experiments in which the animals were being treated to make them resistant to pollutants in the atmosphere.

Her thoughts kept returning to the strange object she’d seen in the last room she explored, and the odd thing the technician had said: “I thought maybe a new face might have a new idea.”

It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that the technicians in the lab knew only as much as they needed to know in order to do their jobs, and obviously Yoshihara had decided they did not need to know the precise nature of the spherical object or its contents. Yet he’d made no attempt to conceal the sphere.

Their job was to tend the animals, and, she suspected, administer doses to them of whatever substance was being obtained from the tube protruding from the sphere.

A gas? Possibly. Both the object’s spherical form and its heavy-looking metallic composition seemed designed to withstand tremendous pressures. Such as those that would emanate from a liquefied gas.

Though it seemed almost impossible to her, the logical conclusion appeared to be that whatever was being given to the animals was intended to counteract the effects of the poisonous gases they were breathing. And, since some of them were still living, it must be working, at least to some extent.

But if the gaseous contents of the sphere could change the metabolism of the animals, enabling them to survive in a poisonous atmosphere, what might the side effects be?

She stared at the strange skeleton she’d unearthed. Could it be some kind of anthropoid that had been altered right here in Takeo Yoshihara’s research pavilion, and simply been buried after it died?

But as she gazed at the skeleton, noting yet again that it was far more humanoid than anthropoid, and remembered Mark Reynolds’s body lying in the drawer downstairs, and the protected files on the computer, an insidious idea began to form:

Was it possible that it wasn’t simply animal experiments that were protected in the files of the Serinus directory?

What if the research was being carried out on people as well?

What if Mark Reynolds’s body hadn’t been brought to Maui because he had died from the effects of prolonged inhalation of carbon monoxide?

Her mind raced. More and more of the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place:

If you wanted to administer a gas to someone, how could it be done?

Tanks, of course.

There was certainly no reason that air tanks couldn’t be filled with something other than air, and both Mark Reynolds and Shane Shelby had been scuba diving when they’d been on Maui.

What if Mark Reynolds and Shane Shelby weren’t the only ones?

The files! The damned protected files that she had no way of getting into! But surely she knew someone—

Phil Howell!

He was on the computer all the time!

She reached for the phone to call him, but instantly changed her mind as paranoid thoughts of cameras and hidden microphones rose up, stopping her. Except, she thought, if there was even a scintilla of validity to the horrifying theory that had taken shape in her mind, then there was nothing paranoid about her fears at all.

She glanced at the clock—nearly four.

A perfectly reasonable time to leave, and plenty of time to get to Phil Howell’s office in Kihei. If he weren’t there, surely she’d be able to find him at the Computer Center across the street She prepared to leave Rob’s office, doing her best to appear as if nothing were amiss.

Every move she made seemed self-consciously over-casual, and in her own mind she gave herself away a dozen times When she wrote a carefully worded note to Rob—“Meet me at Phil’s office. I’ve had an idea”—she could almost feel a camera peering over her shoulder, not merely reading the words, but translating their meaning as well. But when she finally passed through the lobby a few moments later, the guard only nodded to her, barely looking up from his magazine.

She kept the car at exactly the speed limit as she started toward Kahului, and was about to pass the shortcut to Makawao when she thought once more of Michael.

For the last hour, since she began to consider the possibility that Mark Reynolds and Shane Shelby had inhaled something other than air from their scuba tanks, she’d been trying not to think about the possibility that the same thing could have happened to Michael.

And one of the boys with whom he’d gone diving was already dead!

She told herself that she was letting her paranoia get out of control, that Kioki Santoya’s death was just a terrible, but meaningless, coincidence. But as she came to the turnoff to Makawao, she knew she had no choice Michael had track practice this afternoon He should still be out on the field. If he was there, she would continue on to Kihei. If he wasn’t ….

Her skin crawled and her heart pounded as she tried to
reject even the thought that what might be happening to Michael was what had already struck Mark Reynolds and Shane Shelby.

As the school came into view, she slowed the Explorer, pulling to a stop as close to the track as she could get. There were a dozen boys standing along the track on the opposite side. For a moment Katharine couldn’t make out Michael at all. Then she saw him, crouched low, his feet braced against a pair of starting blocks. A man she assumed must be the coach was holding his hand high in the air, and then, as the man’s hand dropped, Michael took off, pushing off the blocks and sprinting down the track, the other boys cheering him on.

As she watched him run the hundred meters, Katharine felt at least part of her fear finally begin to diminish.

No matter what had happened—no matter what might have been done to Mark Reynolds and Shane Shelby and Kioki Santoya, Michael was safe.

In fact, it looked to her as if he was in better condition right now than he’d ever been in his life.

As she pulled away from the curb she barely noticed the dusty sedan that had been parked ahead of her.

She certainly didn’t notice that the man sitting behind its steering wheel had also been watching Michael.

Watching him even more carefully than she.

Michael released the breath he had unconsciously been holding as he watched his mother’s car pull away from the curb and head toward the Haleakala Highway. At least she hadn’t gotten out of the car—that would have been all he needed! It had made him self-conscious enough when the rest of the team stopped practicing and lined up along the track to watch him run, but if his
mother had actually gotten out of the car and come over to watch, too

Just the thought of it made him flush with embarrassment.

On the other hand, if she’d stayed around and watched, then at least he’d have had a chance of convincing her he was telling the truth when he told her about the records he’d set today.

Though the times were unofficial, he’d broken the school records in the fifty-, hundred-, and two-hundred-meter sprints, and though he’d had to go inside and breathe a little more ammonia before the last run, he still felt really good. As his mother’s car disappeared around a bend, he turned his full attention back to the track.