Sole Survivor

“I was in San Francisco, where Delroy Blane-the Captain on Flight 353-had lived, overseeing a pretty intense investigation into his personal history, trying to discover any signs of psychological problems.”
        “Finding anything?”
        “No. He seemed like a rock-solid guy. This was also at the time when I was pressing the hardest to go public with what had happened to certain evidence. I was staying in a hotel. I'm a reasonably sound sleeper. At two-thirty in the morning, someone switched on my nightstand lamp and put a gun in my face.”
        After years of waiting for Go-Team calls, Barbara had long ago overcome a tendency to shed sleep slowly. She woke to the click of the lamp switch and the flood of light as she would have awakened to the ringing telephone: instantly alert and clearheaded.
        She might have cried out at the sight of the intruder, except that her shock pinched off her voice and her breath.
        The gunman, about forty, had large sad eyes, hound-dog eyes, a nose bashed red by the slow blows of two decades of drink, and a sensuous mouth. His thick lips never quite closed, as though waiting for the next treat that couldn't be resisted-cigarette, whiskey, pastry, or breast.
        His voice was as soft and sympathetic as a mortician's but with no unctuousness. He indicated that the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and he assured her that if she tried to call for help, he would blow her brains out with no concern that anyone beyond the room would hear the shot.
        She tried to ask who he was, what he wanted.
        Hushing her, he sat on the edge of her bed.
        He had nothing against her personally, he said, and it would depress him to have to kill her. Besides, if the IIC of the probe of Flight 353 were to be found murdered, inconvenient questions might be asked.
        The sensualist's bosses, whoever they might be, could not afford inconvenient questions at this time, on this issue.
        Barbara realized that a second man was in the room. He had been standing in the corner near the bathroom door, on the other side of the bed from the gunman.
        This one was ten years younger than the first. His smooth pink face and choirboy eyes gave him an innocent demeanour that was belied by a disquietingly eager smile that came and went like the flickering of a serpent's tongue.
        The older man pulled the covers off Barbara and politely asked her to get out of bed. They had a few things to explain to her, he said. And they wanted to be certain that she was alert and attentive throughout, because lives depended on her understanding and believing what they had come to tell her.
        In her pyjamas, she stood obediently while the younger man, with a flurry of brief smiles, went to the desk, withdrew the chair from the kneehole and stood it opposite the foot of the bed. She sat as instructed.
        She had been wondering how they had gotten in, as she'd engaged both the deadbolt and the security chain on the door to the corridor. Now she saw that both of the doors between this hotel room and the next-which could be connected to form a suite for those guests who required more space-stood open. The mystery remained, however, for she was certain that the door on this side had been securely locked with a deadbolt when she had gone to bed.
        At the direction of the older man, the younger produced a roll of strapping tape and a pair of scissors. He secured Barbara's wrists tightly to the arms of the straight-back chair, wrapping the tape several times.
        Frightened of being restrained and helpless, Barbara nonetheless submitted because she believed that the sad-eyed man would deliver on his threat to shoot her point-blank in the head if she resisted. With his sensuous mouth, as though sampling the contents of a bonbon box, he had savoured the words blow your brains out .
        When the younger man cut a six-inch length of tape and pressed it firmly across Barbara's mouth, then secured that piece by winding a continuous length of tape twice around her head, she panicked for a moment but then regained control of herself. They were not going to pinch her nose shut and smother her. If they had come here to kill her, she would be dead already.
        As the younger man retreated with his tremulous smiles to a shadowy corner, the sensualist sat on the foot of the bed, opposite Barbara. Their knees were no more than a few inches