The three typed sentences would not prove that Dr. Tucker had survived Flight 353 or that something about the crash was not kosher. He could have composed them himself. Dr. Tucker’s name was typed, as well, so there was no evidentiary signature.
Nevertheless, he was loath to dispose of the message. Although it would never prove anything to anyone else, it made these fantastic events seem more real to him.
He called Demi’s number again to see if she would answer it in spite of what she had said.
To his surprise, he got a recorded message from the telephone company informing him that the number he had called was no longer in service. He was advised to make sure that he had entered the number correctly and then to call 411 for directory assistance. He tried the number again with the same result.
Neat trick. He wondered how it had been done. Demi clearly was more sophisticated than her grits-and-collard-greens voice.
As Joe returned the handset to the cradle, the telephone rang, startling him so much that he let go of it as if he had burned his fingers. Embarrassed by his edginess, he picked it up on the third ring. “Hello?”
“Los Angeles Post?” a man asked.
“Yes.”
“Is this Randy Colway’s direct line?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you Mr. Colway?”
Startlement and the interlude with Demi had left Joe slow on the uptake. Now he recognized the uninflected voice as that of the man who had answered the phone at Rose Marie Tucker’s house in Manassas, Virginia.
“Are you Mr. Colway?” the caller asked again.
“I’m Wallace Blick,” Joe said.
“Mr. Carpenter?”
Chills climbed the ladder of his spine, vertebra to vertebra, and Joe slammed down the phone.
They knew where he was.
The dozens of modular workstations no longer seemed like a series of comfortably anonymous nooks. They were a maze with too many blind corners.
Quickly he gathered the printouts and the message that Rose Tucker had left for him.
As he was getting up from the chair, the phone rang again. He didn’t answer it.
On his way out of the newsroom, he encountered Dan Shavers, who was returning from the photocopying centre with a sheaf of papers in his left hand and his unlit pipe in the right. Shavers, utterly bald with a luxuriant black beard, wore pleated black dress slacks, red-and-black chequered suspenders over a grey-and-white pinstripe shirt, and a yellow bow tie. His half-lens reading glasses dangled from his neck on a loop of black ribbon.
A reporter and columnist on the business desk, Shavers was as pompous and as awkward at small talk as he thought he was charming; however, he was benign in his self-delusion and touching in his mistaken conviction that he was a spellbinding raconteur. He said without preamble, “Joseph, dear boy, opened a case of ’74 Mondavi Cabernet last week, one of twenty I bought as an investment when it was first released, even though at the time I was in Napa not to scout the vintners but to shop for an antique clock, and let me tell you, this wine has matured so well that—” He broke off, realizing that Joe had not worked at the newspaper for the better part of a year. Fumblingly, he tried to offer his condolences regarding “that terrible thing, that awful thing, all those poor people, your wife and the children.”
Aware that Randy Colway’s telephone was ringing again farther back in the newsroom, Joe interrupted Shavers, intending to brush him off, but then he said, “Listen, Dan, do you know a company called Teknologik?”
“Do I know them?” Shavers wiggled his eyebrows. “Very amusing, Joseph.”
“You do know them? What’s the story, Dan? Are they a pretty large conglomerate? I mean, are they powerful?”
“Oh, very profitable, Joseph, absolutely uncanny at recognizing cutting edge technology in start-up companies and then acquiring them—or backing entrepreneurs who need cash to develop their ideas. Generally medically related technology but not always. Their top executives are infamous self-aggrandisers, think of themselves as some kind of business royalty, but they are no better than us. They, too, answer to He Who Must Be Obeyed.”
Confused, Joe said, “He Who Must Be Obeyed?”