Sole Survivor (13 page)

Bright points of flame irised wider on the tabletop, became glaring pools of fire.

Joe grabbed her and tried to pull her away from the spreading blaze, but without a word, she wrenched loose of him and seized the third lamp.

“Lisa!”

Granite and bronze ignited in the Polaroid of Angela Delmann’s grave, image and medium curling like a black burnt leaf.

Lisa tipped the third lamp, pouring the oil and the floating wick across the front of her dress.

For an instant Joe was immobilized by shock.

The oil washed Lisa, but somehow the slithering spot of flame slipped along the bodice and waist of her dress and was extinguished in the skirt.

On the table, the blazing pools overlapped, and molten streams flowed to all edges. Incandescent drizzle sizzled to the floor.

Joe reached for her again, but as if dipping into a wash basin, she scooped handfuls of flames off the table, splashing them against her breast. As Lisa’s oil-soaked clothes exploded with fire, Joe snatched his hand back from her and cried,
“No!”

Without a scream, which at least she had managed in reaction to Georgine’s suicide, without a groan or even as much as a whimper, she raised her hands, in which balls of flame roiled. She stood briefly like the ancient goddess Diana with fiery moons balanced on her palms, and she brought her hands to her face, to her hair.

Joe reeled backward from the burning woman, from the sight that scorched his heart, from the hideous stench that withered him, from an insoluble mystery that left him empty of hope. He collided with cabinetry.

Remaining miraculously on her feet, as calm as though standing only in a cool rain, reflected in every angle of the big bay window, Lisa turned as if to look at Joe through her fuming veil. Mercifully, he could see nothing of her face.

Paralyzed by horror, he realized he was going to die next, not from the flames that licked the maple flooring around his shoes but by his own hand, in some fashion as monstrous as a self-inflicted shotgun wound, self-evisceration, self-immolation. The plague of suicide had not yet infected him, but it would claim him the moment that Lisa, entirely dead, crumpled in a heap on the floor—and yet he could not move.

Wrapped in a whirlwind of tempestuous flames, she flung off phantoms of light and ghosts of shadow, which crawled up the walls and swarmed across the ceiling, and some shadows were shadows, but some were unspooling ribbons of soot.

The bone-piercing shriek of the kitchen smoke alarm cracked the ice in Joe’s marrow. He was jarred out of his trance.

He ran with the phantoms and the ghosts, out of that hell, past suspended copper pots like bright blank faces in a forge light, past three glasses of Chardonnay sparkling with images of flames and now the color of claret.

Through the swinging door, along the hallway, across the foyer, Joe felt closely pursued by something more than the blatting of the smoke alarm, as though a killer had been in the kitchen, after all, standing so still in a darkish corner that he had watched unnoticed. At the front door, as Joe grasped the knob, he expected a hand to drop upon his shoulder, expected to be spun around and confronted by a smiling assassin.

From behind him came not a hand and not, as he might have expected, a blast of heat, but a hissing cold that first prickled the nape of his neck and then seemed to drill into the summit of his spine, through the base of his skull. He was so panicked that he did not remember opening the door or leaving the house, but found himself crossing the porch, casting off the chill.

He hurried along the brick walk between the perfect box hedges. When he reached the pair of matched magnolias, where large flowers like the white faces of monkeys peered from among the glossy leaves, he glanced back. He was not, after all, being pursued by anyone.

The residential street was quiet but for the muffled blaring of the smoke alarms in the Delmann house: no traffic at the moment, no one out for a walk in the warm August night. On nearby porches and lawns, no one had yet been drawn outside by the commotion. Here the properties were so large and the stately houses so solidly built, with thick walls, that the screams might not have penetrated to the attention of the neighbors, and even the single gunshot might have been apprehended only as a car door slamming or a truck backfiring.

He considered waiting for the firemen and police, but he could not imagine how he would convincingly describe what had transpired in that house in a mere three or four hellish minutes. As he had lived those feverish events, they had seemed hallucinatory, from the sound of the shotgun to the moment when Lisa swathed herself in flames; and now they were like fragments of a deeper dream in the ongoing nightmare of his life.

The fire would destroy much of the evidence of suicide, and the police would detain him for questioning—then possibly on suspicion of murder. They would see a deeply troubled man who had lost his way after losing his family, who held no job, who lived in one room above a garage, who was gaunt from weight loss, whose eyes were haunted, who kept twenty thousand dollars in cash in the spare-tire well in the trunk of his car. His circumstances and his psychological profile would not dispose them to believe him even if his story had not been so far beyond the bounds of reason.

Before Joe could win his freedom, Teknologik and its associates would find him. They had tried to shoot him down merely because Rose
might
have told him something they didn’t want known—and now he knew more than he’d known then, even if he didn’t have any idea what the hell to make of it. Considering Teknologik’s suspected connections to political and military power grids, Joe more likely than not would be killed in jail during a meticulously planned altercation with other prisoners well paid to waste him. If he survived jail, he would be followed on his release and eliminated at the first opportunity.

Trying not to break into a run and thereby draw attention to himself, he walked to the Honda across the street.

At the Delmann house, kitchen windows exploded. Following the brief ringing of falling glass, the shriek of the smoke alarm was considerably more audible than previously.

Joe glanced back and saw fire writhing out of the back of the house. The lamp oil served as an accelerant: Just inside the front door, which he had left standing open, tongues of fire already licked the walls of the downstairs hallway.

He got in the car. Pulled the door shut.

He had blood on his right hand. Not his own blood.

Shuddering, he popped open the console between the seats and tore a handful of tissues from a box of Kleenex. He scrubbed at his hand.

He stuffed the wadded tissues into the bag that had contained the burgers from McDonald’s.

Evidence,
he thought, although he was guilty of no crime.

The world had turned upside down. Lies were truth, truth was a lie, facts were fiction, the impossible was possible, and innocence was guilt.

He dug in his pockets for keys. Started the engine.

Through the broken-out window in the backseat, he heard not only the smoke alarms, several of them now, but neighbors shouting at one another, cries of fright in the summer night.

Trusting that their attention would be on the Delmann place and that they would not even notice him departing, Joe switched on the headlights. He swung the Honda into the street.

The lovely old Georgian house was now the domicile of dragons, where bright presences with incendiary breath prowled from room to room. While the dead lay in shrouds of fire, multiple sirens rose like lamentations in the distance.

Joe drove away into a night grown too strange to comprehend, into a world that no longer seemed to be the one into which he had been born.

THREE

ZERO POINT

9

This Halloween light in August, as orange as pumpkin lanterns but leaping high from pits in the sand, made even the innocent seem like debauched pagans in its glow.

On a stretch of beach where bonfires were permitted, ten blazed. Large families gathered at some, parties of teenagers and college students at others.

Joe walked among them. The beach was one he favored on nights when he came to the ocean for therapy, although usually he kept his distance from the bonfires.

Here the decibels of chatter were off the top of the scale, and barefoot couples danced in place to old tunes by the Beach Boys. But here a dozen listeners sat enthralled as a stocky man with a mane of white hair and a reverberant voice spun a ghost story.

The day’s events had altered Joe’s perception of everything, so it seemed he was looking at the world through a pair of peculiar glasses won in a game of chance on the midway of a mysterious carnival that traveled from venue to venue in whisper-quiet black trains, spectacles with the power not to distort the world but to reveal a secret dimension that was enigmatic, cold, and fearsome.

The dancers in bathing suits, bare limbs molten-bronze from the firelight, shook their shoulders and rolled their hips, dipped and swayed, beat their supple arms like wings or clawed at the radiant air, and to Joe each celebrant seemed to be two entities at the same time. Each was a real person, yes, but each was also a marionette, controlled by an unseen puppet master, string-tugged into postures of jubilation, winking glass eyes and cracking wooden smiles and laughing with the thrown voices of hidden ventriloquists, for the sole purpose of deceiving Joe into believing that this was a benign world that merited delight.

He passed a group of ten or twelve young men in swimming trunks. Their discarded wetsuits glistened like piles of sealskins or flayed eels or some other harvest of the sea. Their upended surfboards cast Stonehenge shadows across the sand. Testosterone levels were so high among them that the air virtually smelled of it, so high that it made them not rowdy but slow and murmurous, almost somnambulant with primal male fantasies.

The dancers, the storyteller and his audience, the surfers, and everyone else whom Joe passed watched him warily. This was not his imagination. Though their glances were mostly surreptitious, he was aware of their attention.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if all of them worked for Teknologik or for whoever funded Teknologik.

On the other hand, although wading deep in paranoia, he was still sane enough to realize that he carried with him the unspeakable things he had seen at the Delmann house—and that these horrors were visible in him. The experience carved his face, painted a dull sheen of desolation in his eyes, and sculpted his body into angles of rage and dread. When he passed, the people on the beach saw a tormented man, and they were all city dwellers who understood the danger of tormented men.

He found a bonfire surrounded by twenty or more utterly silent young men and women with shaved heads. Each of them wore a sapphire-blue robe and white tennis shoes, and each had a gold ring in his or her left ear. The men were beardless. The women were without makeup. Many of both sexes were so strikingly attractive and so stylish in their raiment that he instantly thought of them as the Cult of the Beverly Hills Children.

He stood among them for a few minutes, watching them as they watched their fire in meditative silence. When they returned his attention, they had no fear of what they perceived in him. Their eyes were, without exception, calm pools in which he saw humbling depths of acceptance and a kindness like moonlight on water—but perhaps only because that was what he needed to see.

He was carrying the McDonald’s bag that contained the wrappers of two cheeseburgers, an empty soft drink container, and the Kleenex with which he had scrubbed the blood off his hand. Evidence. He tossed the bag into the bonfire, and he watched the cultists as they watched the bag burst into flame, blacken, and vanish.

When he walked away, he wondered briefly what they believed the purpose of life to be. His fantasy was that in the mad spiral and plummet of modern life, these blue-robed faithful had learned a truth and achieved an enlightened state that gave meaning to existence. He didn’t ask them, for fear their answer would be nothing other than one more version of the same sad longing and wishful thinking on which so many others based their hope.

A hundred yards up the beach from the bonfires, where the night ruled, he hunkered down at the purling edge of the surf and washed his hands in the inch-deep salty water. He picked up wet sand and scrubbed with it, scouring any lingering traces of blood from the creases in his knuckles and from under his fingernails.

After a final rinse of his hands, without bothering to take off his socks and Nikes or to roll up his jeans, he walked into the sea. He moved into the black tide and stopped after he passed the break line of the quiet surf, where the water was above his knees.

The gentle waves wore only thin frayed collars of phosphorescent foam. Curiously, though the night was clear and pierced by a moon, within a hundred yards the sea rolled naked, black, invisible.

Denied the pacifying vista that had drawn him to the shore, Joe found some solace in the surging tide that pressed against his legs and in the low, dumb grumble of the great watery machine. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions, the peace of indifference.

He tried not to think about what had happened at the Delmann house. Those events were incomprehensible. Thinking about them would not lead to understanding.

He was dismayed to feel no grief and so little anguish about the Delmanns’ and Lisa’s deaths. At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had learned that following the loss of a child, parents often reported a disturbing inability to care about the suffering of others. Watching television news of freeway wrecks, apartment-building fires, and heinous murders, one sat numb and unaffected. Music that had once stirred the heart, art that had once touched the soul, now had no effect. Some people overcame this loss of sensitivity in a year or two, others in five years or ten, but others—never.

The Delmanns had seemed like fine people, but he had never really known them.

Lisa was a friend. Now she was dead. So what? Everyone died sooner or later. Your children. The woman who was the love of your life. Everyone.

The hardness of his heart frightened him. He felt loathsome. But he could not force himself to feel the pain of others. Only his own.

From the sea he sought the indifference to his losses that he already felt to the losses of others.

Yet he wondered what manner of beast he would become if even the deaths of Michelle and Chrissie and Nina no longer mattered to him. For the first time, he considered that utter indifference might inspire not inner peace but a limitless capacity for evil.

The busy service station and the adjacent twenty-four-hour convenience store were three blocks from his motel. Two public telephones were outside, near the rest rooms.

A few fat moths, white as snowflakes, circled under the cone-shaped downlights that were mounted along the building eaves. Vastly enlarged and distorted shadows of their wings swooped across the white stucco wall.

Joe had never bothered to cancel his phone-company credit card. With it, he placed several long-distance calls that he dared not make from his motel room if he hoped to remain safe there.

He wanted to speak to Barbara Christman, the IIC—Investigator in Charge—of the probe of Flight 353. It was eleven o’clock here on the West Coast and two o’clock Sunday morning in Washington, D.C. She would not be in her office, of course, and although Joe might be able to reach a duty officer at the National Transportation Safety Board even at this hour, he would never be given Christman’s home number.

Nevertheless, he got the NTSB’s main number from information and placed the call. The Board’s new automated phone system gave him extensive options, including the opportunity to leave voice mail for any Board member, senior crash investigator, or executive-level civil servant. Supposedly, if he entered the first initial and first four letters of the surname of the party for whom he wished to leave a message, he would be connected. Though he carefully entered B-C-H-R-I, he was routed not to voice mail but to a recording that informed him no such extension existed. He tried again, with the same result.

Either Barbara Christman was no longer an employee or the voice-mail system wasn’t functioning properly.

Although the IIC at any crash scene was a senior investigator operating out of the NTSB headquarters in Washington, other members of a Go-Team could be culled from specialists in field offices all over the country: Anchorage, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Kansas City, New York City, and Seattle. From the computer at the
Post,
Joe had obtained a list of most if not all of the team members, but he didn’t know where even one of them was based.

Because the crash site was a little more than a hundred miles south of Denver, he assumed at least a few of the team had been drawn from that office. Using his list of eleven names, he sought phone numbers from directory assistance in Denver.

He obtained three listings. The other eight people were either unlisted or not Denver-area residents.

The ceaseless swelling and shrinking and swelling again of moth shadows across the stucco wall of the service station teased at Joe’s memory. They reminded him of something, and increasingly he sensed that the recollection was as important as it was elusive. For a moment he stared intently at the swooping shadows, which were as amorphous as the molten forms in a Lava lamp, but he could not make the connection.

Though it was past midnight in Denver, Joe called all three men whose numbers he’d obtained. The first was the Go-Team meteorologist in charge of considering weather factors pertinent to the crash. His phone was picked up by an answering machine, and Joe didn’t leave a message. The second was the man who had overseen the team division responsible for sifting the wreckage for metallurgical evidence. He was surly, possibly awakened by the phone, and uncooperative. The third man provided the link to Barbara Christman that Joe needed.

His name was Mario Oliveri. He had headed the human-performance division of the team, searching for errors possibly committed by the flight crew or air-traffic controllers.

In spite of the hour and the intrusion on his privacy, Oliveri was cordial, claiming to be a night owl who never went to bed before one o’clock. “But, Mr. Carpenter, I’m sure you’ll understand that I do not speak to reporters about Board business, the details of any investigation. It’s public record anyway.”

“That’s not why I’ve called, Mr. Oliveri. I’m having trouble reaching one of your senior investigators, whom I need to talk with urgently, and I’m hoping you can put me in touch. Something’s wrong with her voice mail at your Washington offices.”

“
Her
voice mail? We have no current senior investigators who are women. All six are men.”

“Barbara Christman.”

Oliveri said, “That had to be who it was. But she took early retirement months ago.”

“Do you have a phone number for her?”

Oliveri hesitated. Then: “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Maybe you know if she resides in D.C. itself or which suburb. If I knew where she lived, I might be able to get a phone—”

“I heard she came home to Colorado,” Oliveri said. “She started out in the Denver field office a lot of years ago, was transferred out to Washington, and worked her way up to senior investigator.”

“So she’s in Denver now?”

Again Oliveri was silent, as if the very subject of Barbara Christman troubled him. At last he said, “I believe her actual home was Colorado Springs. That’s about seventy miles south of Denver.”

And it was less than forty miles from the meadow where the doomed 747 had come to a thunderous end.

“She’s in Colorado Springs now?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know.”

“If she’s married, the phone might be in a husband’s name.”

“She’s been divorced for many years. Mr. Carpenter…I am wondering if…”

After long seconds during which Oliveri failed to complete his thought, Joe gently prodded: “Sir?”

“Is this related to Nationwide Flight 353?”

“Yes, sir. A year ago tonight.”

Oliveri fell into silence once more.

Finally Joe said, “Is there something about what happened to Flight 353…something unusual?”

“The investigation is public record, as I said.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The open line was filled with a silence so deep that Joe could half believe that he was connected not to Denver but to the far side of the moon.

“Mr. Oliveri?”

“I don’t really have anything to tell you, Mr. Carpenter. But if I thought of something later…is there a number where I could reach you?”

Rather than explain his current circumstances, Joe said, “Sir, if you’re an honest man, then you might be endangering yourself by calling me. There are some damned nasty people who would suddenly be interested in you if they knew we were in touch.”