Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

‘You were there to pick her up?’

‘Rose called me from New York and asked me to be at LAX with Bill Hannett.’

Hannett was the photographer whose images of natural and manmade disasters hung on the walls of the reception lounge at the Post.

The pale-blue fabric of Lisa’s eyes was worn now with worry. ‘Rose desperately needed to talk to a reporter, and I was the only one she knew she could trust.’

‘Charlie,’ Georgine said, ‘you’ve got to come hear this.’

‘I can hear, I can hear,’ Charlie assured her. ‘Just pouring now. A minute.’

‘Rose also gave me a list — six other people she wanted there,’ Lisa said. ‘Friends from years back. I managed to locate five of them on short notice and bring them with me that night. They were to be witnesses.’

Rapt, Joe said, ‘Witnesses to what?’

‘I don’t know. She was so guarded. Excited, really excited about something, but also frightened. She said she was going to be getting off that plane with something that would change all of us forever, change the world.’

‘Change the world?’ Joe said. ‘Every politician with a scheme and every actor with a rare thought thinks he can change the world these days.’

‘Oh, but in this case, Rose was right,’ Georgine said. Barely contained tears of excitement or joy shone in her eyes as she showed him the gravestone photo once more. ‘It’s wonderful.’

If he had fallen down the White Rabbit’s hole, Joe didn’t notice the plunge, but the territory in which he now found himself was increasingly surrealistic.

The flames in the oil lamps, which had been steady, flared and writhed in the tall glass chimneys, drawn upward by a draft that Joe could not feel.

Salamanders of yellow light wriggled across the previously dark side of Lisa’s face. When she looked at the lamps, her eyes were as yellow as moons low on the horizon.

Quickly the flames subsided, and Lisa said, ‘Yeah, sure, it sounded melodramatic. But Rose is no bullshit artist. And she has been working on something of enormous importance for six or seven years. I believed her.’

Between the kitchen and the downstairs hall, the swinging door made its distinctive sound. Charlie Delmann had left the room without explanation.

‘Charlie?’ Georgine rose from her chair. ‘Now where’s he gone? I can’t believe he’s missing this.’

To Joe, Lisa said, ‘When I spoke to her on the phone a few hours before she boarded Flight 353, Rose told me they were looking for her. She didn’t think they would expect her to show up in L.A. But just in case they figured out what flight she was on, in case they were waiting for her, Rose wanted us there too, so we could surround her the minute she got off the plane and prevent them from silencing her. She was going to give me the whole story right there at the debarkation gate.’

‘They?’ Joe asked.

Georgine had started after Charlie to see where he’d gone, but interest in Lisa’s story got the better of her, and she returned to her chair.

Lisa said, ‘Rose was talking about the people she works for.’

‘Teknologik.’

‘You’ve been busy today, Joey.’

‘Busy trying to understand,’ he said, his mind now swimming through a swamp of hideous possibilities.

‘You and me and Rose all connected. Small world, huh?’

Sickened to think there were people murderous enough to kill three hundred and twenty innocent bystanders merely to get at their true target, Joe said, ‘Lisa, dear God, tell me you don’t think that plane was brought down just because Rose Tucker was on it.’

Staring out at the shimmering blue light of the pool, Lisa thought about her answer before giving it. ‘That night I was sure of it. But then… the investigation showed no sign of a bomb. No probable cause really fixed. If anything, it was a combination of a minor mechanical error and human error on the part of the pilots.’

‘At least that’s what we’ve been told.’

‘I spent time quietly looking into the National Transportation Safety Board, not on this crash so much as in general. They have an impeccable record, Joey. They’re good people. No corruption. They’re even pretty much above politics.’

Georgine said, ‘But I believe Rose thinks she was responsible for what happened. She’s convinced that her being there was the cause of it.’

‘But if she’s even indirectly responsible for the death of your daughter,’ Joe said, ‘why do you find her so wonderful?’

Georgine’s smile was surely no different from the one with which she had greeted — and charmed — him at the front door. To Joe, however, in his growing disorientation, her expression seemed to be as strange and unsettling as might be the smile on a clown encountered in a fog-threaded alley after midnight, alarming because it was so profoundly out of place. Through her disturbing smile, she said, ‘You want to know why, Joe? Because this is the end of the world as we know it.’

To Lisa, Joe said exasperatedly, ‘Who is Rose Tucker? What does she do for Teknologik?’

‘She’s a geneticist, and a brilliant one.’

‘Specializing in recombinant DNA research.’ Georgine held up the Polaroid again, as if Joe should be able to grasp at once how the photo of a gravestone and genetic engineering were related.

‘Exactly what she was doing for Teknologik,’ Lisa said, ‘I never knew. That’s what she was going to tell me when she landed at LAX a year ago tonight. Now, because of what she told Georgine and Charlie yesterday… I can pretty much figure it out. I just don’t know how to believe it.’

Joe wondered about her odd locution: not whether to believe it, but how to believe it.

‘What is Teknologik — besides what it appears to be?’ he asked.

Lisa smiled thinly. ‘You have a good nose, Joe. A year off hasn’t dulled your sense of smell. From things Rose said over the years, vague references, I think you’re looking at a singularity in a capitalist world — a company that can’t fail.’

‘Can’t fail?’ Georgine asked.

‘Because behind it there’s a generous partner that covers all the losses.’

‘The military?’ Joe wondered.

‘Or some branch of government. Some organization with deeper pockets than any individual in the world. I got the sense, from Rose, that this project wasn’t funded with just a hundred million of research and development funds. We’re talking major capital on the line here. There were billions behind this.’

From upstairs came the boom of a gunshot.

Even muffled by intervening rooms, the nature of the sound was unmistakable.

The three of them came to their feet as one, and Georgine said, ‘Charlie?’

Perhaps because he had so recently sat with Bob and Clarise in that cheery yellow living room in Culver City, Joe immediately thought of Nora Vadance naked in the patio chair, the butcher knife grasped in both hands with the point toward her abdomen.

In the wake of the gunshot’s echo, the silence settling down through the house seemed as deadly as the invisible and weightless rain of atomic radiation in the sepulchral stillness following nuclear thunder.

Alarm growing, Georgine shouted, ‘Charlie!’

As Georgine started away from the table, Joe restrained her. ‘No, wait, wait. I’ll go. Call nine-one-one, and I’ll go.’

Lisa said, ‘Joey—’

‘I know what this is,’ he said sharply enough to forestall further discussion.

He hoped that he was wrong, that he didn’t know what was happening here, that it had nothing to do with what Nora Vadance had done to herself. But if he was right, then he couldn’t allow Georgine to be the first on the scene. In fact, she shouldn’t have to see the aftermath at all, not now or later.