“Where’s Nina, damn it?”
“Open your heart,” she said quietly.
“This is bullshit.”
“Open your mind.”
“Open it how far? Until I’ve emptied out my head? Is that what you want me to be?”
She gave him time to get a grip on himself. Then: “I don’t want you to be anything, Joe. You asked me where Nina is. You want to know about your family. I gave you the photograph so you could see. So you could see.”
Her will was stronger than his, and after a while he found himself picking up the photograph.
“Remember the feeling,” she encouraged him. “Let it come to you again.”
It did not come to him again, however, although he turned the photograph over and over in his hands. He slid his fingertips in circles across the glossy image but could not feel the granite, the bronze, the grass. He summoned the blueness and the brightness, but they did not appear.
Tossing the photograph aside in disgust, he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing with this.”
Infuriatingly patient, she smiled compassionately and held out a hand to him.
He refused to take it.
Although he was frustrated by what he now perceived as her New Age proclivities, he also felt that somehow, by not being able to lose himself a second time in the phantasmal blue brightness, he had failed Michelle and Chrissie and Nina.
But if his experience had been only a hallucination, induced with chemicals or hypnosis, then it had no significance, and giving himself to the waking dream once again could not bring back those who were irretrievably lost.
A fusillade of confusions ricocheted through his mind.
Rose said, “It’s okay. The imbued photograph is usually enough. But not always.”
“Imbued?”
“It’s okay, Joe. It’s okay. Once in a while there’s someone…someone like you…and then the only thing that convinces is galvanic contact.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The touch.”
“What touch?”
Instead of answering him, Rose picked up the Polaroid snapshot and stared at it as though she could clearly see something that Joe could see not at all. If turmoil touched her heart and mind, she hid it well, for she seemed as tranquil as a country pond in a windless twilight.
Her serenity only inflamed Joe. “Where’s Nina, damn it? Where is my little girl?”
Calmly she returned the photograph to her jacket pocket.
She said, “Joe, suppose that I was one of a group of scientists engaged in a revolutionary series of medical experiments, and then suppose we unexpectedly discovered something that could prove there was some kind of life after death.”
“I might be a hell of a lot harder to convince than you.”
Her softness was an irritating counterpoint to his sharpness: “It’s not as outrageous an idea as you think. For the past couple of decades, discoveries in molecular biology and certain branches of physics have seemed ever more clearly to point toward a created universe.”
“You’re dodging my question. Where are you keeping Nina? Why have you let me go on thinking she’s dead?”
Her face remained in an almost eerie repose. Her voice was still soft with a Zen-like sense of peace. “If science gave us a way to perceive the truth of an afterlife, would you really want to see this proof? Most people would say yes at once, without thinking how such knowledge would change them forever, change what they have always considered important, what they intend to do with their lives. And then… what if this were a revelation with an unnerving edge? Would you want to see this truth — even if it was as frightening as it was uplifting, as fearsome as it was joyous, as deeply and thoroughly strange as it was enlightening?”
“This is just a whole lot of babble to me, Dr. Tucker, a whole lot of nothing — like healing with crystals and channeling spirits and little gray men kidnapping people in flying saucers.”
“Don’t just look. See.”
Through the red lenses of his defensive anger, Joe perceived her calmness as a tool of manipulation. He got up from his chair, hands fisted at his sides. “What were you bringing to L.A. on that plane, and why did Teknologik and its friends kill three hundred and thirty people to stop you?”
“I’m trying to tell you.”
“Then tell me!”
She closed her eyes and folded her small brown hands, as though waiting for this storm in him to pass — but her serenity only fed the winds of his tempest.
“Horton Nellor. Once your boss, once mine. How does he figure in this?” Joe demanded.
She said nothing.
“Why did the Delmanns and Lisa and Nora Vadance and 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 tranquillity 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 dead-bolts. 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.