Sole Survivor
Page 28

Anger harms no one more than he who harbours it.
He was ashamed by how quickly and absolutely he had turned away from all the lessons that Michelle had taught him. With the fall of Flight 353, he too had fallen, had plummeted out of the sky into which Michelle had lifted him with her love, and had returned to the mud of bitterness. His collapse was a dishonour to her, and now he felt a sting of guilt as sharp as he might have felt if he’d betrayed her with another woman.
Nina, mirror of her mother, offered him the reason and the chance to rebuild himself into a reflection of the person that he had been before the crash. He could become again a man worthy of being her father.
Neen-ah, Nine-ah, no one finah.
He slowly leafed through his treasure trove of mental images of Nina, and the effect was soothing. Gradually his clenched hands relaxed.
He began the last hour of the flight by reading two of the four printouts of articles about Teknologik, which he had retrieved from the Post computer the previous afternoon.
In the second, he came upon a piece of information that stunned him. Thirty-nine percent of Teknologik’s stock, the largest single block, was owned by Nellor et Fils, a Swiss holding company with extensive and diverse interests in drug research, medical research, medical publishing, general publishing, and the film and broadcasting industries.
Nellor et Fils was the principal vehicle by which Horton Nellor and his son, Andrew, invested the family fortune, which was thought to be in excess of four billion dollars. Nellor was not Swiss, of course, but American. He had taken his base of oper­ations offshore a long time ago. And more than twenty years
ago, Horton Nellor had founded the Los Angeles Post. He still owned it.
For a while Joe fingered his astonishment as though he were a whittler with an intriguingly shaped piece of driftwood, trying to decide how best to carve it. As in raw wood, something waited here to be discovered by the craftsman’s hand; his knives were his mind and his journalistic instinct.
Horton Nellor’s investments were widespread, so it might mean nothing whatsoever that he owned pieces of both Teknologik and the Post. Probably pure coincidence.
He owned the Post outright and was not an absentee publisher concerned only about profit; through his son, he exerted control over the editorial philosophy and the reportorial policies of the newspaper. He might not be so intimately involved, however, with Teknologik, Inc. His stake in that corporation was large but not in itself a controlling interest, so perhaps he was not engaged in the day-to-day operations, treating it only as a stock investment.
In that case, he was not necessarily personally aware of the top-secret research Rose Tucker and her associates had undertaken. And he was not necessarily carrying any degree of responsibility for the destruction of Flight 353.
Joe recalled his encounter the previous afternoon with Dan Shavers, the business-page columnist at the Post. Shavers pungently characterized the Teknologik executives: infamous self-aggrandizers, 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.
He Who Must Be Obeyed. Horton Nellor.
Reviewing the rest of the brief conversation, Joe realized that Shavers had assumed that Joe knew of Nellor’s interest in Teknologik. And the columnist seemed to have been implying that Nellor asserted his will at Teknologik no less than he did at the Post.
Joe also flashed back to something Lisa Peccatone had said in the kitchen at the Delmann house when the relationship between Rose Tucker and Teknologik was mentioned: You and me and Rosie all connected. Small world, huh?
At the time, he had thought she was referring to the fact that Flight 353 had become a spring point in the arcs of all their lives. Maybe what she really meant was that all of them worked for the same man.
Joe had never met Horton Nellor, who had become something of a recluse over the years. He’d seen photographs, of course. The bil­lionaire, now in his late sixties, was silver-haired and round-faced
with pleasing if somewhat blurred features. He looked like a muffin on which, with icing, a baker had painted a grandfather face.
He did not appear to be a killer. He was known as a generous philanthropist. His reputation was not that of a man who would hire assassins or condone murder in the maintenance or expansion of his empire.
Human beings, however, were different from apples and oranges:
The flavour of the peel did not reliably predict the taste of the pulp. The fact remained that Joe and Michelle had worked for the same
man as those who now wanted to kill Rose Tucker and who — in some as yet incomprehensible manner — had evidently destroyed Nationwide 353. The money that had long supported his family was the same money that had financed their murders.
His response to this revelation was so complexly tangled that he could not quickly unknot it, so dark that he could not easily see the entire shape of it. Greasy fingers of nausea seined his guts. Although he stared out the window for perhaps half an hour, he was not aware of the desert surrendering to the suburbs or the suburbs to the city. He was surprised when he realized that they were descending toward LAX.
On the ground, as they taxied to the assigned gate and as the telescoping mobile corridor was linked like an umbilical between the 737 and the terminal, Joe checked his wristwatch, considered the distance to Westwood, and calculated that he would be at least half an hour early for his meeting with Demi. Perfect. He wanted enough time to scope the meeting place from across the street and a block away before committing himself to it.
Demi should be reliable. She was Rose’s friend. He had gotten her number from the message that Rose had left for him at the Post. But he wasn’t in the mood to trust anyone.
After all, even if Rose Tucker’s motives had been pure, even if she had kept Nina with her to prevent Teknologik from killing or kidnapping the girl, she had nevertheless withheld Joe’s daughter from him for a year. Worse, she had allowed him to go on thinking that Nina — like Michelle and Chrissie — was dead. For reasons that he could not yet know, perhaps Rose would never want to return his little girl to him.
Trust no one.
As he got up from his seat and started forward toward the exit, he noticed a man in white slacks, white shirt, and white Panama hat rise from a seat farther forward in the cabin and glance back
at him. The guy was about fifty, stockily built, with a thick mane of white hair that made him look like an aging rock star, especially under that hat.
This was no stranger.
For an instant, Joe thought that perhaps the man was, in fact, a lower-case celebrity — a musician in a famous band or a character actor from television. Then he was certain that he had seen him not on screen or stage but elsewhere, recently, and in significant circumstances.
Mr. Panama looked away from him after a fraction of a second of eye contact, stepped into the aisle, and moved forward. Like Joe, he was not burdened by any carry-on luggage, as though he had been on a day-trip.
Eight or ten passengers were between the day-tripper and Joe. He was afraid he would lose track of his quarry before he figured out where he had previously seen him. He couldn’t push along the narrow aisle past the intervening passengers without causing a commotion, however, and he preferred not to let Mr. Panama know that he had been spotted.
When Joe tried to use the distinctive hat as a prod to memory, he came up blank, but when he pictured the man without the hat and focused on the flowing white hair, he thought of the blue-robed cult members with the shaven heads. The connection eluded him, seemed absurd.
Then he thought of the bonfire around which the cultists had been standing last night on the beach, where he had disposed of the McDonald’s bag that contained the Kleenex damp with Charlie Delmann’s blood. And the lithe dancers in bathing suits around another bonfire. A third fire and the gathering of surfers inside the totemic ring of their upended boards. And still another fire around which sat a dozen enthralled listeners as a stocky man with a broad charismatic face and a mane of white hair narrated ghost story in a reverberant voice.
This man. The storyteller.
Joe had no doubt that they were one and the same.
He also knew there was no likelihood whatsoever that he had crossed this man’s path on the beach last night and again here sheerly by chance. All is intimately interwoven in this most conspiratorial of all worlds.
They must have been conducting surveillance on him for weeks or months, waiting for Rose to contact him, when he had finally become aware of them on Santa Monica Beach, Saturday morning.
During that time they had learned all his haunts, which were not numerous: the apartment, a couple of coffee shops, the cemetery, and a few favourite beaches where he went to learn indifference from the sea.
After he had disabled Wallace Blick, invaded their van, and then fled the cemetery, they had lost him. He had found the transponder on his car and thrown it into the passing gardener’s truck, and they had lost him. They’d almost caught up with him again at the Post, but he’d slipped away minutes ahead of them.
So they had staked out his apartment, the coffee shops, the beaches — waiting for him to show up somewhere. The group being entertained by the ghost story had been ordinary civilians, but the storyteller who had insinuated himself into their gathering was not in the least ordinary.
They had picked Joe up once more the past night on the beach. He knew the correct surveillance jargon: They had reacquired him on the beach. Followed him to the convenience store from which he had telephoned Mario Oliveri in Denver and Barbara in Colorado Springs. Followed him to his motel.
They could have killed him there. Quietly. While he slept or after waking him with a gun to his head. They could have made it look like a drug overdose — or like suicide.
In the heat of the moment, they had been eager to shoot him down at the cemetery, but they were no longer in a hurry to see him dead. Because maybe, just maybe, he would lead them again to Rose Marie Tucker.
Evidently they weren’t aware that he had been at the Delmann house, among other places, during the hours they had lost contact with him. If they knew he’d seen what had happened to the Delmanns and to Lisa — even though he could not understand it — they probably would terminate him. Take no chances. Terminate him ‘with extreme prejudice,’ as their kind phrased it.
During the night, they had placed another tracking device on his car. In the hour before dawn, they followed him to LAX, always at a distance where they were in no danger of being spotted. Then to Denver and perhaps beyond.
Jesus.
What had frightened the deer in the woods?
Joe felt stupid and careless, although he knew that he was not either. He couldn’t expect to be as good at this game as they were; he’d never played it before, but they played it every day.
He was getting better, though. He was getting better.
Farther up the aisle, the storyteller reached the exit door and disappeared into the debarkation umbilical.
Joe was afraid of losing his stalker, but it was imperative that they continue to believe that he was unaware of them.
Barbara Christman was in terrible danger. First thing, he had to find a phone and warn her.
Faking patience and boredom, he shuffled forward with the other passengers. In the umbilical, which was much wider than the aisle in the airplane, he finally slipped past them without appearing to be alarmed or in a hurry. He didn’t realize that he was holding his breath until he exhaled hard with relief when he spotted his quarry ahead of him.
The huge terminal was busy. At the gates, the ranks of chairs were filled with passengers wailing to catch a late-afternoon flight in the fast-fading hours of the weekend. Chattering, laughing, arguing, brooding in silence, shuffling-striding-strolling-limping-­ambling, arriving passengers poured out of other gates and along the concourse. There were singles, couples, entire families, blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos and four towering Samoan men all with black porkpie hats, beautiful sloe-eyed women wil­low graceful in their turquoise or ruby or sapphire saris, others in chadors and others in jeans, men in business suits, men in shorts and bright Polo shirts, four young Hasidic Jews argu­ing (but joyfully) over the most mystical of all documents (a Los Angeles freeway map), uniformed soldiers, giggling children and shrieking children and two placid octogenarians in wheel­chairs, a pair of tall Arab princes in akals and keffiyehs and flowing jellabas, preceded by fierce bodyguards and trailed by retinues, beacon-red tourists drifting homeward on the astrin­gent fumes of medicated sunburn lotion, pale tourists arriving with the dampish smell of cloudy country clinging to them —and, like a white boat strangely serene in a typhoon, the man in the Panama hat sailing imperiously through the polygenic sea.
As far as Joe was concerned, they might all be stage dress­ing, every one of them an agent of Teknologik or of institutions unknown, all watching him surreptitiously, snapping photographs of him with trick cameras concealed in their purses and attaché cases and tote bags, all conferring by hidden microphones as to whether he should be permitted to proceed or gunned down on the spot.
He had never before felt so alone in a crowd. Dreading what might happen — might even now be happening — to Barbara, he tried to keep the storyteller in sight while also searching for a telephone.
FOUR
PALE FIRE
1
The public telephone, one in a cluster of four, was not in a booth, but the wings of a sound shield provided a small measure of privacy.
As he entered Barbara’s Colorado Springs number on the keypad, Joe ground his teeth together as though he could bite off the noise of the crowded terminal and chew it into a silence that would allow him to concentrate. He needed to think through what he would say to her, but he had neither the time nor the solitude to craft the ideal speech, and he was afraid of committing a blunder that would pitch her deeper into trouble.
Even if her phone had not been tapped the previous evening, it was surely being monitored now, following his visit to her. His task was to warn her of the danger while simultaneously convincing the eavesdroppers that she had never broken the pledge of silence which would keep her and Denny safe.
As the telephone began to ring in Colorado, Joe glanced toward the storyteller, who had taken up a position farther along — and on the opposite side of — the concourse. He was standing outside the entrance to an airport newsstand and gift shop, nervously adjusting his Panama hat, and conversing with an Hispanic man in tan chinos, a green madras shirt, and a Dodgers cap.
Through the screen of passing travellers, Joe pretended not to watch the two men while they pretended, less convincingly, not to watch him. They were less circumspect than they should have been, because they were overconfident. Although they might give him credit for being industrious and clever, they thought that he was basically a jerk civilian in fast-running water way over his head.