Sole Survivor

they get started.”
        Picking up the Polaroid snapshot, Georgine gazed needfully at it, as though she wished not merely to burn it into her memory but to absorb the image and make it a physical part of her, leaving the film blank.
        With a sigh, Lisa launched into a revelation: “I have my own weird piece to add to the puzzle, Joey. A year ago tonight, I was at LAX, waiting for Rosie's plane to land.”
        Georgine looked up from the photo. “You didn't tell us that.”
        “I was about to,” Lisa said, “when Joey rang the doorbell.”
        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 Rosie but also… flat out scared.”
        “You were there to pick her up?”
        “Rosie 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. “Rosie 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.”
        “Rosie 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 Rosie 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, Rosie 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, Rosie 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, “Rosie 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 Rosie 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,