“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 Michael 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
