She tried to run faster, but the aisles stretched longer and longer before her, and with every turn, there were more of them to choose from. But no matter which way she turned, how many times she dodged from one aisle into another, her pursuer drew ever nearer.
Whup-whup-whup …
She cried out Michael’s name, praying he would answer her, that she would be able to find him before—
“Katharine!”
Her name! Someone was calling her name! But not Michael!
“Katharine!”
She jerked awake, the dream dissolving around her, and with a start remembered where she was. She’d escaped from the estate, and Michael was with her, and so was Rob, and they were safe.
WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP!
The noise was still there, and now that she was wide-awake, she knew exactly what it was.
She struggled to her feet, ignoring the stiffness that had crept into her body as she’d dozed against Rob’s shoulder, still huddled close to the small fire Puna was nursing. “Where is it?” she asked, searching the brightening sky for the source of the noise.
Then she saw it. Flying high and coming in from the direction of Maui, she instantly recognized Takeo Yoshihara’s helicopter. “Michael,” she whispered, clutching at Rob’s arm while her eyes remained fixed on the aircraft. “Where’s Michael?”
“He hasn’t come back yet,” Rob told her. “Let’s go find him.”
“There!” Takeo Yoshihara said, pointing to the slope of Kilauea where Arnold Berman’s helicopter was clearly visible in a small clearing.
“Shall I land?” the pilot asked.
“Not until we find the boy!” Takeo Yoshihara, a satisfied smile curling his lips, gazed down at the landscape below. Though the glow of the lava flowing through the cracked and fissured tubes was fading in the breaking dawn, the flames dancing above the fire pits and calderas were still visible, as were the plumes of smoke and steam from the fumaroles that lined the great fissure — the point where an immense chunk of the island of Hawaii would eventually slide away into the sea, creating a tidal wave a thousand feet high. It wouldn’t happen this morning, or tomorrow, or this year or next. Indeed, it probably wouldn’t happen in Takeo Yoshihara’s lifetime, or for generations to come. Which was too bad: a natural phenomenon of that magnitude and the devastation it would wreak, was something he would like to see. This morning, though, there were more important things to do than contemplate the scene below.
The timing, as he had intended, was perfect.
They’d taken off from Maui in darkness, but by the time they found the boy — and they would find him — it would be light.
Light enough to pursue and capture him.
Or to kill him.
But still so early that there would be few witnesses. Only the mother, the besotted Dr. Silver, and their pilot, none of whom would survive.
“Fly lower,” he ordered. “We should be able to see …” His words died on his lips as he caught a flicker of movement that was neither flame nor smoke nor any of the churning gases that swirled up from below. Raising the pair of Leica binoculars that hung from his neck, he peered downward. “Yes,” he said softly. “There he is.”
Keeping the binoculars fastened on Michael Sundquist, Takeo Yoshihara began guiding the pilot toward the spot where the boy stood.
Nearly two hours had passed, but Michael, mesmerized by the undulating rhythm of the fires dancing above the caldera’s surface, had long ago lost any sense of time. After he’d left the small oasis in the lava where the kiawes grew and the others could still easily breathe the air, he’d moved quickly through the tortured landscape. His senses, heightening every minute as his lungs absorbed the nutrients his body now craved, guided him from one vent to another. He’d stopped at each of them, breathing in the thick fumes that steamed out of the cracks in the earth’s crust, inhaling the pungent odors issuing forth from the fumaroles. Finally he’d come to the caldera. There, crouched at its rim, the night had closed around him, wrapping him in a blanket of darkness from which he watched in silent wonder as the fires boiled up from deep within the earth. Through the hours, the flames danced, weaving intricate patterns above the molten rock that seemed to Michael to throb like the heart of the planet itself. Now, as the black mantle of night began to lift from the mountain, he sensed a change coming.
The rhythm of the flames seemed to intensify, as if they had some urgent message to impart before the brilliant fires of the sun made their own luminescence fade to invisibility.
As he was released from the folds of darkness, Michael flexed his body, but found no stiffness in it, despite the hours of crouching near the edge of the caldera’s lip. Then he felt, more than heard, a new rhythm beat into his consciousness. At first he tried to ignore it. Finally, it became so strong that he tore his eyes from the pulsating flames and gazed upward.
The helicopter hovering in the distance took on an iridescent glitter like that of a dragonfly searching for prey in the first rays of the rising sun. Michael watched it in fascination, but as it swooped down, moving steadily toward him, his fascination gave way to a tingling uneasiness.
It was, indeed, a predator out hunting in the morning sun like a dragonfly.
Hunting for him.
But at the same time that he realized he was the prey for which the great metal dragonfly searched, so also came an absolute conviction that he must remain where he was, close to the fires, where smoke and fumes sustained him, and would also now, somehow, protect him.
Rising to his full height, Michael waited.
Katharine, with Rob right behind her, was stumbling along the rocky path that led out of the oasis and onto the lava flow when suddenly a shadow flicked over her. Reflexively, she looked up into the sky, then stopped in her tracks as she watched Takeo Yoshihara’s helicopter, hovering high above for the last several minutes, make a sudden descent.
“They’ve found him!” she told Rob. “Hurry!”
“Land!” Takeo Yoshihara commanded.
His employer’s command ringing in his ears, the pilot searched for a likely looking spot, but found nothing. Already he was beginning to feel the effects of the churning thermals rising from the shattered landscape below, some of them so strong that they shot the helicopter straight up, but at the same time so narrow that by the time he’d adjusted for the added lift, he was out of it, and the aircraft would yaw giddily, or plunge for a second or two like an out-of-control elevator. “There’s no place to land,” he finally replied.
“Find one!” Yoshihara demanded, his eyes fixed on Michael Sundquist, who was standing near the edge of the caldera’s highest wall, only a few yards from a hundred-foot vertical drop into a lake of seething lava.
“No chance,” the pilot replied. “My job is to fly you, not kill you.”
Takeo Yoshihara’s eyes went flat and the single brief look he gave the pilot was enough to tell him that this might be his last flight. After raking the pilot, Yoshihara’s glare shifted to his chief of security.
“Shoot the boy,” he ordered.
The security man reached behind the seat and picked up the laser-sighted rifle he’d brought on the flight for exactly this purpose. Placing its stock firmly against his right shoulder, he switched on the laser, kicked open the door of the cabin, then peered through the telescope mounted above the barrel. The helicopter, now buffeted not only by the thermals, but by the rising trade winds as well, was swinging far too wildly for him to get anything resembling a clear shot at Michael. “Too high,” he said.
“Lower,” Takeo Yoshihara commanded the pilot.
The pilot, weighing the dangers to the craft against the loss of his not-inconsiderable salary, carefully began to drop the helicopter toward the lacerated surface of the mountain.
Yoshihara’s sniper, still peering through the telescope, saw the red dot of the laser flick across Michael Sundquist’s face far too quickly for him to squeeze the rifle’s trigger.
Better if he’d brought an AK-47, he thought, or even an Uzi.
