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 Rose but also… flat out scared.”
“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.”