Free Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz

every time he saw it. He would never be able to work at the
Post
again.
    He went directly to his former workstation in the Metro section, grateful that no old friends saw him. His place had been assigned to Randy Colway, a good man, who wouldn’t feel invaded if he found Joe in his chair.
    Tacked to the noteboard were photographs of Randy’s wife, their nine-year-old son, Ben, and six-year-old Lisbeth. Joe looked at them for a long moment—and then not again.
    After switching on the computer, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the Department of Motor Vehicles envelope that he’d filched from the glove box of the white van at the cemetery. It contained the validated registration card. To his surprise, the registered owner wasn’t a government body or a law-enforcement agency; it was something called Medsped, Inc.
    He had not been expecting a corporate operation, for God’s sake. Wallace Blick and his trigger-happy associates in the Hawaiian shirts didn’t seem entirely like cops or federal agents, but they smelled a lot more like the law than they did like any corporate executives Joe had ever encountered.
    Next he accessed the
Post’
s vast file of digitized back issues. Included was every word of every edition the newspaper had published since its inception—minus only the cartoons, horoscopes, crossword puzzles, and the like. Photographs were included.
    He initiated a search for
Medsped
and found six mentions. They were small items from the business pages. He read them complete.
    Medsped, a New Jersey corporation, had begun as an air ambulance service in several major cities. Later, it had expanded to specialize in the nationwide express delivery of emergency medical supplies, refrigerated or otherwise delicately preserved blood and tissue samples, as well as expensive and frangible scientific instruments. The company even undertook to carry samples of highly contagious bacteria and viruses between cooperating research laboratories in both the public and the military sectors. For these tasks, it maintained a modest fleet of aircraft and helicopters.
    Helicopters.
    And unmarked white vans?
    Eight years ago, Medsped had been bought by Teknologik, Inc., a Delaware corporation with a score of wholly owned subsidiaries in the medical and computer industry. Its computer-related holdings were all companies developing products, mostly software, for the medical and medical-research communities.
    When Joe ran a search on Teknologik, he was rewarded with forty-one stories, mostly from the business pages. The first two articles were so dry, however, so full of investment and accounting jargon, that the reward quickly began to seem like punishment.
    He ordered copies of the four longest articles for review later.
    While those were sliding into the printer tray, he asked for a list of stories the
Post
had published about the crash of Nationwide Flight 353. A series of headlines, with accompanying dates, appeared on the screen.
    Joe had to steel himself to scan this story file. He sat for a minute or two with his eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to conjure, in his mind’s eye, an image of surf breaking on the beach at Santa Monica.
    Finally, with teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw muscles twitched continuously, he called up story after story, scanning the contents. He wanted the one that, as a sidebar, would provide him with a complete passenger manifest.
    He skipped quickly past photographs of the crash scene, which revealed debris chopped into such small chunks and tangled in such surreal shapes that the baffled eye could not begin to reconstruct the aircraft from its ruins. In the bleak dawn caught by these pictures, through the gray drizzle that had begun to fall about two hours after the disaster, National Transportation Safety Board investigators in biologically secure bodysuits with visored hoods prowled the blasted meadow. Looming in the background were scorched trees, gnarled black limbs clawing at the low