She kept returning to the pictures, peering at the images of the site that had been discovered beneath a thick layer of vegetation.
She’d gone through the museum’s library, comparing the photographs to every other image she could find of early Hawaiian ruins.
There was no comparison.
Yet the only way she could truly analyze the site would be to see it.
Now, once again putting aside the drab grayish fossil, and the photos of the equally drab grayish site from which it had been excavated, she again picked up the pictures of the site on Maui.
Though the site itself appeared to be little more than a collection of rough stones, it was surrounded by a lush forest of towering trees and flowering shrubs and vines, and while in some of the pictures the turquoise-blue of the Pacific Ocean could be seen in the distance, in others there were glimpses of a waterfall tumbling into a crystal-clear pool, a setting so beautiful it could have come straight from a Hollywood set designer’s vision of Eden.
Had Rob deliberately given her those seductive glimpses of the paradise surrounding his site?
And why was she even daydreaming about tropical flowers and trade winds? It was the site that counted!
But as she glanced around the windowless cubicle in the dismal cave that was her office, and remembered just how miserable the weather outside was, she knew exactly why she was as tantalized by the lush surroundings of Rob Silver’s site as she was by the discovery he had made.
She picked up the letter once more.
Thirty thousand dollars.
Rob Silver was offering her thirty thousand dollars to spend three months working with him on Maui. Plus expenses.
She remembered the tense meeting she’d had with the museum’s director last week. Her budget alone was about to be slashed by thirty percent.
The grant from the National Science Foundation — the grant she’d been counting on to fund fieldwork this summer — was “approved but not funded.”
So there, but for the offer on her desk, was the future: no fieldwork and a budget that was all but nonexistent.
The major problem was that Rob Silver needed her by the first of the month, which was as long as he could hold up his dig. That would mean taking Michael out of school — and away from the track team he’d become so enamored of lately — which she suspected he wouldn’t like at all. Well, maybe when she told him where they were going, his objections might evaporate.
She picked up the phone and called the director. “I may want to take a leave of absence,” she said. “Three months.” She hesitated, then spoke again. “Without pay, of course.” As she hung up the phone five minutes later, she wondered if Michael would be as easily convinced as the director had been.
When she got home that afternoon, though, and saw the cut on his arm and the ugly yellowish purple bruise that surrounded her son’s painfully swollen left eye, Katharine knew that the decision was made. Three months away from New York was just what both of them needed.
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.
