Sole Survivor

Captain Blane commit suicide? And how can their suicides be murder like you say? Who're those men upstairs? What the hell is this all about?” He was shaking. “ Where is Nina? ”
        Rose opened her eyes and regarded him with sudden concern, her tranquility at last disturbed. “What men upstairs?”
        “Two thugs who work for Teknologik or some secret damn police agency, or someone.”
        She turned her gaze toward the restaurant. “You're sure?”
        “I recognized them, having dinner.”
        Getting quickly to her feet, Rose stared at the low ceiling as though she were in a submarine sinking out of control into an abyss, furiously calculating the enormity of the crushing pressure, waiting for the first signs of failure in the hull.
        “If two of them are inside, you can bet others are outside,” Joe said.
        “Dear God,” she whispered.
        “Mahalia's trying to figure a way to slip us past them after closing time.”
        “She doesn't understand. We've got to get out of here now.”
        “She's having boxes stacked in the receiving room to cover the entrance of the elevator-”
        “I don't care about those men or their damn guns,” Rose said, rounding the end of the table. “If they come down here after us, I can face that, handle that. I don't care about dying that way, Joe. But they don't really need to come after us. If they know we're somewhere in this building right now, they can remote us.”
        “What?”
        “Remote us,” she said fearfully, heading toward one of the doors that served the deck and the beach.
        Following her, exasperated, Joe said, “What does that mean-remote us?”
        The door was secured by a pair of thumb-turn deadbolts. She disengaged the upper one.
        He clamped his hand over the lower lock, preventing her from opening it. “Where's Nina?”
        “Get out of the way,” she demanded.
        “Where's Nina?”
        “Joe, for God's sake-”
        This was the first time that Rose Tucker had seemed vulnerable, and Joe was going to take advantage of the moment to get what he most wanted. “Where's Nina?”
        “Later. I promise.”
        “ Now .”
        From upstairs came a loud clatter.
        Rose gasped, turned from the door, and pressed her gaze upon the ceiling again as if it might crash down on them.
        Joe heard voices raised in argument, filtered through the elevator shaft-Mahalia's and those of at least two or three men. He was sure that the clatter was the sound of empty packing crates and pallets being dragged and tossed away from the cab door.
        When the men in the leather jackets discovered the elevator and knew there was a lower floor to the building, they might realize that they had left an escape gate open by not covering the beach. Indeed, others might even now be looking for a way down the sheer forty-foot bluff, with the hope of cutting off that route.
        Nevertheless, face to face with Rose, recklessly determined to have an answer at any cost, fiercely insistent, Joe pressed his question: “Where's Nina?”
        “Dead,” she said, seeming to wrench the word from herself.
        “Like hell she is.”
        “Please, Joe-”
        He was furious with her for lying to him, as so many others had lied to him during the past year. “Like hell she is. No way. No damn way. I've talked to Mercy Ealing. Nina was alive that night and she's alive now, somewhere.”
        “If they know we're in this building,” Rose repeated in a voice that now shook with urgency, “they can remote us. Like the Delmanns. Like Lisa. Like Captain Blane!”
        “ Where is Nina? ”
        The elevator motor rumbled to life, and the cab began to hum upward through the shaft.
        “ Where is Nina? ”
        Overhead the banquet-room lights dimmed, probably because the elevator drew power from their circuit.
        At the dimming of the lights, Rose cried out in terror, threw her body against Joe, trying to knock him off his feet, and clawed frenziedly at the hand that he had clamped over the lower deadbolt.
        Her nails gouged his flesh, and he hissed in pain and let go of the lock, and she pulled open the door. In came a breeze that smelled of the ocean, and out went Rose into the night.
        Joe rushed after her, onto a twenty-foot-wide, eighty-foot-long, elevated wood deck overhung by the restaurant. It reverberated like a kettle drum