“Absolutely.” He paused. “It’ll be just like passing messages in school.”
In the darkness Katharine smiled bleakly. “Why don’t I quite believe that?”
“Well, I thought I’d give it a shot, anyway.” There was a short silence, then Rob spoke again, his voice suddenly shy. “Katharine? Be careful, okay?”
It wasn’t just the words, but the way he said them. A tiny bit of Katharine’s tension eased, and she finally started the car slowly down the long driveway. “You have no idea how careful I intend to be,” she said softly. “And you also have no idea how much courage it will give me if you just keep talking while I drive down this road. Remind me never to take another house that’s at the end of a long, narrow, dark road.”
“What do you want me to talk about?”
“I don’t care. Tell me I don’t have to be scared, and that there’s nobody waiting in my house, and that Michael’s going to be all right, and that when all this is over you’re going to marry me and take me away from all this like a good knight in shining armor.”
“All right,” Rob said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said all right. To all of it. You proposed. I accept. Consider it a done deal. Listen to me carefully, Kath. There is no one in your house. You’re going to get what you need, and you’re going to go up to the estate, and we’re going to crack into the computer and find out all of Takeo Yoshihara’s dirty little secrets. Then I’m coming to get you and your kid, who is going to have to learn to like me, and we’re going to live happily ever after.”
Katharine was silent for a moment, then: “Promise?”
“Promise.”
The car emerged from the woods into the clearing. Katharine carefully swept the darkness with her eyes. There were no other cars in the clearing.
“I’m gonna hold you to that,” she said. “Call me again in half an hour. If I don’t answer, then you lied to me and there was someone in the house.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you. I love you. I always did.”
“Hell of a time to tell me.” Katharine sighed. “Still, it does make me feel better. Talk to you in a while.”
Breaking the connection, she sat in the car for a few more seconds, summoning the nerve to go into the house. Switching on the lights as she entered, she glanced around, half expecting it to look like a scene from a movie after the Mafia had paid someone a visit.
It was exactly as she’d left it.
Nothing had been moved.
Nothing had even been touched.
Katharine quickly threw enough clothes into a small suitcase to make it look as if she was prepared to stay at the estate for several days. Then, thinking about what she had to do in the hours to come, she added a few more items to the suitcase.
In less than five minutes she was back in her car, driving steadily toward whatever awaited her at Takeo Yoshihara’s estate.
CHAPTER 31
The cellular phone buzzed. “I’m almost at the gate,” Katharine said before Rob had even spoken.
“Is it opening?”
“I’m not worried about getting back in,” Katharine told him. “I have a feeling it’s getting back out again that’s going to be the neat trick. And I have no idea how I’m going to be able to communicate with Michael.” The murder of Kihei Ken proved to Katharine that the camera’s eye had seen the notes she and Michael had passed. No doubt they could hear every word she might say, as well.
“You’ll find a way,” Rob assured her, and she prayed he was right.
Ahead of her, the gate was swinging open, just as it always did when her car approached.
Katharine took a deep breath as the car passed through, then said, “I’m going through the gate, Rob. I’ll call you again if I can, but don’t be surprised at anything I might say. And I might not say anything at all.”
“I’ll do my best to decode.”
Shutting off the cellular phone, she caught herself watching in the rearview mirror as the gate swung closed behind her.
Like the gate of a prison?
Though the parking area next to the research pavilion was far emptier than it ever was during the day, it still held more cars than Katharine would have expected. For a moment she felt the courage she had carefully nurtured during the last half hour begin to crumble.
Not until Michael and I are out of here, she told herself. After you get him out, you can turn into a whimpering idiot, and it won’t matter. But not now!
Pulling the Explorer into an empty space, she took the suitcase out of the backseat, locked the car, and went into the lobby of the research pavilion. Perhaps, if she was lucky, the guard on duty would be the one whose friendship she had enlisted — dear God, could it really have only been this morning?
As the lobby door swung closed behind her, the guard at the desk looked up. She was looking into the face of a stranger. Then, as he rose to his feet and spoke, she realized that she was not a stranger to him.
“Dr. Sundquist. They said you’d be coming back tonight.”
They. Who were they? The security staff?
Stephen Jameson?
Takeo Yoshihara himself?
“My son,” she said, for the first time hoping she looked every bit as worried as she was. If she was going to get Michael out, she would have to appear to be so upset as not even to be thinking straight. “He — he’s …” She pretended to flounder, letting the words trail off as if she weren’t certain how much she should say in front of the guard.
“It’s all right, Dr. Sundquist,” the guard assured her. “They told me what happened to your boy. I’ll just let you into the elevator, and you can go right down.”
The elevator! She’d completely forgotten about the elevator.
But it was all right — she still had Stephen Jameson’s card.
Unless Jameson had noticed that it was gone? Would he have reported it already? Would the gray plastic square still activate the elevator, or would they have removed its code from the computer? Don’t worry about it now, she told herself. And don’t even think about trying it first. If they see that on the security cameras, it will be over before you can even start.
The computer! She had to get to Rob’s computer, even if only for a minute or two. She offered the guard a distracted smile and set down her small suitcase. “Could I leave this here a minute? I need to go to Dr. Silver’s office for a second.”
“No problem,” the guard replied, dropping back onto his chair.
Was he going to watch her on the monitor? Should she offer him some excuse? No! Why should she be explaining her movements to him? It would only make him wonder why she’d felt the need to explain herself.
Leaving the suitcase next to the guard’s desk, she strode down the north corridor to Rob’s office, turned on the lights, and switched on the monitor attached to his terminal. Finding the communications program, she quickly entered the number Rob had given her and touched the Enter key. The connection was completed almost instantly, and she heard a brief exchange of static as the computer on her desk established a link with the one in Kihei. A window containing two lines of text opened. A cursor flashed at the end of the second line. As she watched, the last digit of the first line changed as each second ticked by:
Pickup 04:00:0 °Current time is: 22:16:53.
Enter to Confirm.
Understanding the message immediately, Katharine glanced at her watch. It was almost exactly two and a half minutes ahead of the time displayed on the screen. Adjusting her watch to synchronize to the time on the screen, she hit the Enter key again. A new window opened and letters appeared as Al Kalama began his first efforts to open the Serinus directory. Before he’d finished typing the first line of his instructions, Katharine used the mouse on her desk to minimize the program so that all that showed on the monitor was the normal desktop screen.