Quickly she returned the lifeless puppy to the cage from which she’d taken it.
She should leave — leave now, before she was discovered. But there was another room beyond this one, and even as she tried to bring herself to leave the strange laboratory complex, she knew she could not. She had to try to find out exactly what they were doing down here.
How was it possible that any of the caged animals remained alive, given what they were breathing?
She moved on through a series of laboratories that were deserted but for a few technicians in white lab smocks, most of whom seemed to be concentrating on their work.
She barely paused, and asked no questions, determining to go unnoticed as long as she possibly could.
And finally she came to the last room.
It was a small chamber. In its center, enclosed in a thick glass case, was a sphere, perhaps three feet in diameter, made of a gray-black substance that could have been either metal or stone. From the sphere a tube protruded, which curved around, then went straight down, apparently through the case and into its base.
On one wall of the room was an instrument panel that appeared to be monitoring every possible condition within the case, from temperature and humidity to air pressure and the presence of trace elements within the atmosphere itself.
Katharine circled the case, studying it from every angle, but each aspect of the sphere inside appeared to be the same as every other.
Her back was to the door when a voice startled her.
“First time you’ve seen it?”
She whirled around, realizing a second too late how guilty she must look, then did her best to recover. “My God! You have no idea how you startled me!”
“Sony,” the technician replied. Then he smiled, “I suppose you’re pondering the eternal question?”
“Excuse me?”
“ ‘What is it?’ ” the technician asked.
The question caught Katharine off guard. “That’s just what I was going to ask you,” she replied.
Now the technician’s expression turned slightly quizzical “That’s what we’re all trying to find out, isn’t it? I thought maybe a new face might have a new idea.”
Katharine floundered for a moment, then composed herself. “I wish I did,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’m as puzzled as everyone else. Actually, I was just looking for Dr. Jameson.”
“Not here,” the technician replied. “He went up to the meeting at Hana.” Now the last of his smile disappeared, and his eyes narrowed with a hint of suspicion. “Why aren’t you up there?”
Katharine decided simply to tell the truth. “I wasn’t invited,” she said. “And since Dr. Jameson isn’t down here, I suppose I might as well go back to my office and do something useful, huh?” Feeling the technician’s eyes watching her every step of the way, Katharine quickly retraced her steps, again resisting the urge to look over her shoulder.
But even when she was back in Rob’s office, the feeling that eyes were watching her every movement lingered on.
In a private conference room at the Hotel Hana Maui, tucked away at the end of thirty-five miles of some of the most winding highway in the world, Takeo Yoshihara faced the seven members of the Serinus Society who had flown in over the last thirty-six hours from every continent on the planet.
“I have good news,” he began. “Four of our latest canaries have not died. One of the two new subjects in Chicago, along with the newest ones in Tokyo and Mexico City, seem to be doing well.”
A murmur of excitement rippled through the room, which Yoshihara silenced with a slightly raised hand.
“We also have a problem. A boy died here on Maui two days ago, apparently after having been exposed to our compound.”
The excitement in the room turned to consternation.
“And there are three other boys here, all of whom are—” He hesitated, searching for the right word, then smiled faintly as he found it. “All of whom are, shall we say, ‘faring better’ to varying degrees. Dr. Jameson will tell you about them.”
Accompanied by uneasy whispers from the audience, Stephen Jameson rose to his feet. At the same time, photographs of Josh Malani, Jeff Kina, and Michael Sundquist appeared on a screen hanging on a wall behind him. “As you know, it was never our intention to carry out any of our human experimentation so close to our research headquarters. Be that as it may, at least four boys on Maui appear to have come in contact with the substance with which we are experimenting.” He glanced up at the three faces on the screen, then fixed a laser pointer on the image of Jeff Kina. “This is a seventeen-year-old male of Polynesian heritage. He is six feet two inches tall, and weighs 225 pounds. He was apprehended in a burning cane field some thirty-six hours ago, breathing comfortably in an atmosphere that was heavily polluted with smoke. He is now in our lab, and doing well.” The pointer moved on to Josh Malani’s image. “This is another seventeen-year-old boy, five feet eight, and weighing 135 pounds. Mixed heritage. Less than twenty-four hours ago, while under our surveillance, he collapsed in a parking lot near one of the beaches. He was kept alive by administration of a mixture of carbon monoxide, methane, and ammonia, and is also now doing well in our lab.”
“And the third boy?” someone asked from the back of the room.
Jameson studied the image of Michael Sundquist for several seconds. “This one is most interesting,” he finally said. “This is a sixteen-year-old Caucasian of Swedish descent, and though we didn’t specifically choose him for our project, any more than we chose the other three locals, he is proving to be one of our most intriguing subjects. We do not expect complete success with him, of course, but I think that at such time as he dies, his autopsy will greatly advance our understanding of precisely how the substance affects the human body.”
A heavily accented voice spoke from the back of the room. “And if, by chance, he doesn’t die?”
Jameson smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “Believe me, Herr von Schmidt, one way or another, all these boys will die.”
CHAPTER 24
“Mrs. Reynolds?” Katharine said when a woman’s voice answered the phone. Katharine, seated in Rob’s office, was staring through the French doors at the idyllic scene outside: flowers everywhere, filling the balmy Hawaiian morning with a rainbow of colors that stood in stark contrast to the cold, gray fear that had cloaked Katharine in the half hour since she’d emerged from the laboratories on the lower level of the research pavilion’s south wing.
The first thing she’d done upon returning to Rob’s office was to locate the village in the Philippines from which the skull had come. Exactly as she guessed yesterday, the skull had been collected from the slopes of Mount Pinatubo. And if it was, indeed, the skull of a child, it had been breathing fumes — pollution — from the volcano its entire life.
Then, from the depths of her pocket, she’d retrieved the identifying tag she’d found on the toe of the corpse. The boy’s name, neatly typed on the cardboard tag, was Mark Reynolds. Along with his dates of birth and death, the label revealed an address on North Maple Drive, in Beverly Hills, California. Right in the middle of metropolitan Los Angeles — one of the most polluted cities in the country. But polluted enough to have killed him? She had to know. First she’d called the hospital where Mark Reynolds had died, only to be told that she could be given no information over the phone. Perhaps if she’d care to make a request in writing?
No, she had not cared to make a request in writing. And so, reluctantly, Katharine dialed the number she’d found on the card, part of her burning to find answers to her questions, but another part hating to make this call to Mark Reynolds’s mother, who was listed as his next of kin. The phone had been answered on the second ring. Now there was no backing out.