Sole Survivor

“We’ve already told Lisa.” Georgine glanced across the room. “I’ll wait until Charlie’s here to tell you, Joe.”

Lisa said, “It’s damned weird, Joey, and I’m not sure what to make of what they’ve said. All I know is it scares the crap out of me.”

“Scares you?” Georgine was astonished. “Lisa, dear, how on earth could it scare you?”

“You’ll see,” Lisa told Joe. This woman, usually blessed with the strength of stones, shivered like a reed. “But I guarantee you, Charlie and Georgine are two of the most level-headed people I know. Which you’re sure going to need to keep in mind when they get started.”

Picking up the Polaroid snapshot, Georgine gazed needfully at it, as though she wished not merely to burn it into her memory but to absorb the image and make it a physical part of her, leaving the film blank.

With a sigh, Lisa launched into a revelation: “I have my own weird piece to add to the puzzle, Joey. A year ago tonight, I was at LAX, waiting for Rosie’s plane to land.”

Georgine looked up from the photo. “You didn’t tell us that.”

“I was about to,” Lisa said, “when Joey rang the doorbell.”

At the far end of the kitchen, with a soft pop, a stubborn cork came free from a wine bottle, and Charlie Delmann grunted with satisfaction.

“I didn’t see you at the airport that night, Lisa,” Joe said.

“I was keeping a low profile. Torn up about Rosie but also…flat out scared.”

“You were there to pick her up?”

“Rosie called me from New York and asked me to be at LAX with Bill Hannett.”

Hannett was the photographer whose images of natural and man-made 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. “Rosie 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.”

“Rosie 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 Rosie 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, Rosie 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, Rosie 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, “Rosie 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 Rosie all connected. Small world, huh?”

Sickened to think there were people murderous enough to kill three hundred and twenty-nine 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 Rosie 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