The Presence Read Online Free PDF

movement of the aircraft itself.
    The pilot?
    He couldn’t be certain.
    Being careful to give no sign that he was now on full alert, Santiago glanced over from the copilot’s seat, but the pilot was staring straight ahead, seeming almost to have forgotten his passenger’s presence.
    Or was he looking for something?
    Santiago’s eyes left the pilot, sweeping the panorama of sea and islands that lay beyond the Plexiglas bubble that formed the cabin’s front. A few boats were scattered over the ocean’s surface, and except for a single airliner far in the distance, the sky was empty.
    Yet Pedro Santiago’s internal alarms were sounding louder than ever.
    His body tensed, though he still had no idea what the threat might be, nor from what direction it would come.
    Once again his eyes darted toward the pilot, and now he could see the tension in the other man’s body: the narrowing of his eyes, the tightening of his grip on the helicopter’s joystick.
    Suddenly, a flicker of movement was reflected in the curve of the Plexiglas, a flicker so faint and distorted that Santiago almost missed it. Then, as his body tensed, he understood.
    Behind him!
    Someone was behind him!
    But it was already too late. Even as Pedro Santiago instinctively started to duck away, the man who had hidden himself in the back of the helicopter during the few minutes the craft waited in the clearing released the latch on the door with one hand, while he freed Santiago’s safety belt with the other.
    At exactly the same instant, the pilot pulled hard on the joystick, and the chopper yawed over to starboard.
    Even before he quite realized what had happened, Pedro Santiago was tumbling toward the sea, four hundred feet below.

CHAPTER
3
    Michael stared down at the islands that had finally appeared out of the endless expanse of sea. Three months! Three whole months! What was he supposed to do here for three months? A couple of weeks, sure! But three months? He could barely believe his mother had actually yanked him out of school just as he was about to make the track team. Still, he sort of knew why she’d done it.
    It was the black eye and the cut on his arm that had made up her mind. If he’d just managed to give Slotzky the slip that day …
    But he hadn’t, so now here he was, out in the middle of the ocean! He didn’t know anybody at all, and he’d never really been very good at making friends, always afraid that his asthma would get in the way. So what was he supposed to do while his mom was working the dig? From what she’d said, there wasn’t even a city on Maui—only a couple of little towns, and they weren’t even going to be living in one of them! On the other hand, the islands
did
look beautiful, and there was always the possibility that maybe his mom would finally let him learn to scuba dive. Even now, he could remember his father promising to take him diving as soon as he was strong enough to pick up the tanks. But then …
    A vision of the burning airplane in which Tom Sundquist had died filled Michael’s mind, and he felt the familiar sick sensation that still came into his stomach whenever he remembered that morning when his whole life had literally blown up in front of his eyes. And now, just when it seemed like things were starting to go okay, his mom had made him come out here! “Will you at least let me learn to dive?” he asked, peering out the window at the islands below.
    There was a bleakness in her son’s voice that twisted Katharine’s heart. It hadn’t been as easy as she’d hoped to convince him that this was going to be a great adventure. Still, Michael had finally accepted the fact that they were going to go, and switched from trying to talk her out of the trip to attempting to convince her he should be allowed to go scuba diving. Rather than refuse outright, she’d taken the coward’s way out. “We’ll see,” she now said yet again, wondering how much longer she could put off the inevitable