The Key to Midnight (36 page)

They were in the middle of a blizzard. The wind was coming off the mountains at thirty—gusting to fifty—kilometers an hour. The preternaturally dense snowfall reduced visibility to a single block.

At the hotel when Alex and Joanna checked in, they were required to present their passports and, therefore, used their real names; but he asked that the Maurice Demuth nom de guerre be the only name kept in the registration file. In a town that was accustomed to playing host to privacy-conscious movie stars, dukes, duchesses, counts, countesses, and wealthy industrialists from all corners of the world, such a request was not unusual, and it was honored.

They had a small but comfortable suite on the fifth floor. When the bellmen left, Alex tested the two locks and double-bolted the door. He went into the bedroom to help Joanna with the unpacking.

“I’m exhausted,” she said.

“Me too.” He took the pistol out of the waistband of his slacks and put it on the nightstand.

“I’m too tired to stand up,” she said, “but still... I’m afraid to sleep.”

“We’ll be safe tonight.”

“Do you still have that feeling? That somehow we’re being manipulated?”

“Maybe I was just wired too tight,” he said.

“What will we do tomorrow?”

“Scout around. Find out where Rotenhausen lives, if we can.”

“And then?”

Alex heard a noise behind them. He turned and saw a tall, husky man standing in the open doorway between the bedroom and the living room.

So soon! Alex thought.

Joanna saw the intruder and cried out.

The intruder was holding an odd-looking gun and wearing a gas mask.

Alex lunged for the pistol that he had left on the nightstand.

The man in the mask fired the gas-pellet gun. Soft, waxy bullets struck Alex and disintegrated on impact, expelling clouds of sweet fumes.

He picked up the 9mm pistol, but before he could use it, the world dissolved in whirling white clouds, as though the blizzard beyond the windows had swept inside.

In the front room of the suite, Ignacio Carrera and Antonio Paz loaded the luggage into the bottoms of two large hotel laundry carts. Then they placed Alex Hunter and Joanna Rand into the carts, on top of the suitcases.

To Carrera, the woman was even more beautiful than she appeared in photographs. If the gas could have been counted upon to keep her unconscious more than just another half hour, he would have undressed her and raped her here, now. Helplessly asleep, she would be warm and exquisitely pliant. But he didn’t have time for fun just yet.

Carrera had brought two pieces of Hermes leather luggage with him. They belonged to the fat man. He put them in the bedroom.

Tomorrow, the day clerk would secretly alter the registration card. It would appear that Anson Peterson had checked in on Sunday. There would be no record of Hunter and the woman: They would simply have ceased to exist.

Paz covered the unconscious couple with towels and rumpled bed linens.

They wheeled the carts to the service elevator and rode down to ground level without encountering anyone.

When Alex regained consciousness, he wished he hadn’t. He tasted bile. His vision was blurry and tinted red, as if his eyes were full of blood. A demon donkey was inside his head, kicking to get out.

At least he was alive. Which was inexplicable. They had no use for him—only for Joanna—and should have wasted him by now.

He was lying on his left side on a white-and-black tile floor. A kitchen. A light glowed above the stove.

His back was against a row of cabinets, and his hands were tied behind him. Good, heavy cord. His feet were also bound together.

Joanna wasn’t with him. He called her name softly but received no reply.

He despised himself for letting them take her so easily. In his own defense, he could only argue that no one could have expected such a bold assault in a busy hotel and only minutes after their arrival.

He listened for movement or voices in another room. Nothing. Silence.

Knowing that the restraints wouldn’t break or come loose easily, nevertheless hoping for a bit of luck, he tried to jerk his wrists apart. Incredibly, impossibly, the rope snapped on the third try.

Stunned, he lay motionless, listening and wondering.

Deep silence.

Fear sharpened his senses, and he was able to smell items that were shut away in the cupboards: cloves of garlic, soap, a pungent cheese.

Finally he brought his hands out from behind his back. The broken rope was loosely draped around his wrists. He pulled it off.

He scooted around on the shiny tile floor until he was sitting with his back to the cabinets. He untied the rope at his ankles, threw it aside, and got to his feet.

His skull seemed to be cracking under the punishing hooves of that indefatigable donkey. His vision dimmed-brightened-dimmed in a dependable rhythm, but gradually the red tint was fading.

He picked up the length of rope that had been around his hands and took it to the stove. Examining it under the small fluorescent light, he saw why he’d been able to snap it with so little effort: While he’d been unconscious, someone had cut most of the way through the line, leaving only a fraction of the diameter intact.

Manipulated. Programmed.

He had the uncanny conviction that everything that was going to happen during the next few hours had been planned a long time ago.

But by whom? And why?

He wondered if he and Joanna would be the winners or the losers of the game.

Joanna woke with a vile taste, swimming vision, and a fierce headache. When she began to be able to see, she discovered that she was in a hospital bed in a white room with a high window: the familiar setting of her nightmare. An electroencephalograph, an electrocardiograph, and other machines stood nearby, but she wasn’t connected to them. The air reeked of a melange of disinfectants.

Initially she thought that she was dreaming, but the full horror of her situation quickly became apparent. Her hammering heart pounded a cold sweat out of her.

Broad leather straps with Velcro fasteners restrained her wrists and ankles. She wrenched at them, but she was well secured.

“Ah,” a woman said behind Joanna, “the patient’s awake at last.”

She had thought that the head of the bed was against the wall and that she was alone, but she was in the center of the room. She twisted her neck, trying to see the person who had spoken, but the straps and the inclined mattress foiled her.

After a taunting moment, a woman in a white smock walked around to the side of the bed where she could be seen. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Sharp features. Unsmiling. Rotenhausen’s assistant. Joanna remembered the pinched face and hard eyes from one of the regression-therapy sessions in Omi Inamura’s office.

“Where’s Alex?” Joanna asked.

Without answering, the woman picked up a sphygmomanometer from a tray of medical instruments and wrapped the pressure pad around Joanna’s arm.

She tried to struggle, but the straps rendered her helpless. “Where’s Alex?” she repeated.

The physician took her blood pressure. “Excellent.” She unwound the pad and put it aside.

“Unbuckle these straps,” Joanna demanded, trying to quell her terror by focusing on her rage.

“It’s over,” the woman said, tying a rubber tube around Joanna’s arm, forcing a vein to bulge. She swabbed the skin with alcohol.

“I’ll fight you,” Joanna promised.

“If it makes you happy.”

The woman had an accent, as Joanna had recalled in regression therapy. It wasn’t German or Scandinavian. A Slavic accent of some kind. Russian? The senator had said something about Russians when he’d telephoned Alex in London.

The woman tore open a plastic packet that contained a hypodermic syringe.

Joanna’s heart was already slamming. The sight of the syringe made it throb painfully harder than before.

The physician thrust the needle through the sterile seal on the end of a small bottle that contained a colorless drug. She drew some of the fluid into the syringe.

When the woman took hold of her arm, Joanna twisted and jerked in the restraining straps just enough to make the vein a difficult target. “No. No way. Get away from me.”

The doctor backhanded her across the face, and in the instant that Joanna needed to recover from the shock and pain, the needle slipped into her.

With tears running down her face, she said, “Bitch.”

“You’ll feel better in a minute.”

“You rotten, stinking bitch,” Joanna said bitterly.

“I’ll give you a name to hate,” the physician said with a small smile. “Ursula Zaitsev.”

“That’s you? I’ll remember. I’ll remember your name, and I’ll destroy you.”

Ursula Zaitsev’s economical smile grew broader by a millimeter or two. “No, you’re quite wrong. You won’t remember it—or anything else.”

Alex slowly pushed open the swinging door from the kitchen. The dimly lighted hallway was deserted, and he eased into it.

Five other doors opened off the corridor before it reached the head of the stairs. Three were closed. Past the two open doors were dark rooms.

He stepped to the closed door across the hall, hesitated, opened it, and peered into a bedroom with exquisite contemporary furnishings in lacewood and bird’s-eye maple, which somehow didn’t seem at odds with the considerable age of the house. The lamp on the nightstand cast warm light on a deeply sculpted, predominantly green carpet. He checked the adjacent master bath but found no one.

Beside the bed were half a dozen books. Five dealt with new discoveries in the behavioral sciences. The sixth was a heavily illustrated, privately printed collection of pornography: The subject was sadism; the beautiful, vulnerable-looking women in the pictures appeared to be suffering in earnest. The blood appeared to be real. It turned Alex’s stomach.

In one of the bureau drawers were two pairs of fine leather gloves. No. Not pairs. When he looked closer, he saw that the four gloves were all for the same hand.

Unquestionably, this was Franz Rotenhausen’s house.

In the corridor again, Alex went to one of the open doors. He found the light switch, flipped it on, and immediately snapped it off again when he saw that it was a deserted dining room.

The second open door led to a living room with more low modern furniture and what might have been two Picasso originals. The big casement windows framed a dramatic view of Saint Moritz at night, aswirl with snow, revealing that the house was slightly above the town and at the edge of the forest.

The fourth door led to a large guest bedroom with its own bath. It had not been used in a long time and had an unpleasant musty odor.

The house remained unnaturally quiet. The walls were so thick and the bronze windows so well made that even the howling of the storm wind was a distant threnody.

Alex was impressed with the size of the building. Evidently, Rotenhausen lived in this sprawling top-floor apartment, which left an enormous amount of space below for unknown purposes.

The final door opened on a library furnished in a traditional style more in keeping with the house itself: mahogany paneling and bookshelves, a magnificent antique desk with an intricate marquetry top, a few wing-backed chairs upholstered in well-aged red leather. A Tiffany desk lamp with twelve trumpet-newer shades cast a light so golden that it seemed palpable.

Alex stopped just over the threshold, overwhelmed by déjà vu, frightened almost to the point of immobility. Although he had never been in the house on any prior occasion, he had seen this library before. Even the smaller objects were eerily familiar: a carousel-style pipe rack on the desk, a huge globe softly lighted from within, a sterling-silver magnifying glass with a long ornate handle, a two-bottle brandy chest...

He had broken his paralysis and walked around behind the desk before he even realized that he was moving—as if half in a trance.

He opened a desk drawer and then another. In the second drawer he found the 9mm pistol that he had taken off the man in the alleyway in Kyoto several days ago.

The instant he saw the pistol, he realized that he had known it would be there.

After she administered the injection, Ursula Zaitsev left Joanna alone in the white-walled room.

The winter storm huffed at the high window that Joanna had recalled in one of her regression-therapy sessions with Dr. Inamura, but it also whined and whispered at another window behind her, which she could not see.

She strained against the straps once more, but she was so well secured that any attempt to pull free was useless. She finally fell back against the mattress, gasping for breath.

A minute passed. Two. Three. Five.

Joanna expected the drug to take hold of her, because Ursula Zaitsev had implied that it was a sedative or a depressant. She ought to be getting drowsy—but, instead, she was thinking faster and more clearly by the minute.

She figured she was on an adrenaline rush. It would fade in a minute or two, and the drug would begin to affect her.

But she was still clearheaded when Rotenhausen entered the room. He closed the door after himself. Locked it.

Sitting at the library desk, Alex thoroughly examined the gun. He was suspicious. They could have disabled the weapon.

The pistol appeared to be in perfect working order. Unless the ammunition had been replaced with blanks.

He assumed that he was being set up somehow. Suckered into a trap. But the nature of that trap seemed more incomprehensible the longer that he tried to puzzle out what it might be.

Though he was reluctant to be manipulated any further, he could not simply sit there all night. He had to find Joanna and get her out of the house.