The Key to Midnight (38 page)

For such a severe-looking, even mannish woman, Ursula died gracefully, almost prettily. The bullets spun her around as if she were twirling to show a new skirt to a boyfriend. There wasn’t much mess, perhaps because she was too thin and dry to contain any substantial quantity of blood. She sagged against the wall, gazed at Peterson without seeing him, allowed a delicate thread of blood to escape one corner of her mouth, let go of her icy expression for the first time since he had known her, and slid down into death.

Four of the six people on Anson Peterson’s hit list had been eliminated. Marlowe. Paz. Chelgrin. Ursula Zaitsev. Only two others awaited disposal.

He sprinted across the hall and into the storeroom with that peculiar grace that certain very fat men could summon on occasion. He climbed through the open casement window and groaned when the bitter night air slapped his face. The only thing he disliked more than exertion and an unsatisfied appetite was physical discomfort.

He was having a very bad evening.

The wind was busily scouring the footprints from the newly fallen snow, but he was still able to follow Hunter and Carrera.

Shouting and a series of muffled noises arose in a distant part of the house. At first, Joanna hoped it was Alex coming for her—or someone from outside coming for both of them. But Rotenhausen ignored the uproar, either because he was so focused on her that he didn’t hear it or because there were other people to deal with whatever was happening; and when quiet quickly returned, she knew that she was finished.

He backed her into a comer, pinned her there with his body, spread his steel fingers, and gripped her throat. He placed his real hand over the battery pack to prevent her from pulling out the jacks.

She couldn’t look away from his extraordinary eyes: They now seemed as yellow as those of a cat.

He cocked his head and watched her quizzically while he squeezed her throat, as though he were observing a laboratory animal through the walls of its cage. His expression was not bland; on the contrary, in his face was a cold passion that defied description and, most likely, understanding.

When she began to choke, and when she saw that her choking only elicited a smile from him, she struggled fiercely to break free—twisted, thrashed, kicked ineffectually with her bare feet. She was too tightly pinned to be able to go for his eyes, but she clawed at his arms and flanks, drawing blood.

Until now, she’d held fast to the hope of being saved from both Rotenhausen and his treatments, but his unexpected reaction to her counterattack stole all hope from her. He flinched and hissed each time that she drew his blood—but each pain that she inflicted seemed only to arouse him further. Crushing her against the wall, he said excitedly, “That’s it, yes, fight for your life, girl, fight me, yes, fight me with everything you’ve got,” and she knew then that each wound she inflicted would have no effect other than to give him even greater pleasure later, when he subjected her to various tortures on the bed.

The steel hand tightened inexorably around her throat, and black spots glided like dozens of ink-dark moths across her vision.

Great surging rivers of snow poured out of the Swiss mountains, and Alex seemed to be carried through the deep night by the powerful currents of the storm almost as he would have been swept away by a real river. With the buoying wind at his back, he crossed a hundred yards of open land before he reached the shelter of the forest. The mammoth pines grew close together, providing relief from the wind, but a considerable amount of snow still found its way through the evergreen canopy.

He was on a narrow but well-established trail that might have been made by deer. The heavy white crusts that bent the pine boughs and the white winter mantle on the forest floor provided what meager light there was: He navigated the woods by the eerie phosphorescence of the snow, able to distinguish shapes but no details, afraid of catching a tree branch in the face and blinding himself.

He stumbled over rocks hidden by the snow, hit the ground hard, but scrambled up at once. He was certain that Carrera was close behind.

As he came to his feet, he realized that he had one of the loose rocks in his hand. A weapon. It was the size of an orange, not as good as a gun but better than nothing. It felt like a ball of ice, and he was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to keep a grip on it as his fingers rapidly continued to stiffen.

He hurried deeper into the woods, and thirty feet from the spot where he had fallen, the trail bent sharply to the right and curved around an especially dense stand of shoulder-high brush. He skidded to a halt and quickly considered the potential for an ambush.

Squinting at the trail, he could barely discern the disturbance that his own feet had made in the smooth skin of softly radiant white powder. He weighed the rock in his hand, backed against the wall of brush until it poked him painfully, and hunched down, becoming a shadow among shadows.

Overhead, wind raged through the pine and fir boughs, howling as incessantly as the devil’s own pack of hell hounds, but even above that shrieking, Alex immediately heard Carrera approaching. Fearless of his quarry, the bodybuilder made no effort to be quiet, crashing along the trail as though he were a drunk in transit between two taverns.

Alex tensed, keeping his eyes on the bend in the trail just four feet away. The subzero air had so numbed his hand that he couldn’t feel the rock any more. He squeezed hard, hoping that the weapon was still in his grip, but for all he knew, he might have dropped it and might be curling his half-frozen fingers around empty air.

Carrera appeared, moving fast, bent forward, intent on the vague footprints that he was following.

Alex swung his arm high and brought the rock down with all his strength, and it caught Carrera in the face. The big man dropped to his knees as if he’d been hit by a sledgehammer, toppled forward, and knocked Alex off his feet. They rolled along the sloping trail, through the snow, and came to a stop side by side, facedown.

Gasping air so bitterly cold that it made his lungs ache, Alex pushed onto his knees and then to his feet again.

Carrera remained on the ground: a dark, huddled, vaguely human shape in the bed of snow.

In spite of his still desperate circumstances and even though Joanna remained captive in the house, Alex felt a thrill of triumph, the dark animal exhilaration of having gone up against a predator and beaten him.

He looked up the trail, back through the woods, but he’d come too far to be able to see the house any more. Considering Carrera’s size and ferocity, the other men wouldn’t give Alex much chance of getting out of the woods alive, so his quick return would take them by surprise and might give him just the advantage he needed.

He started to go back for Joanna, but Carrera grabbed his ankle.

Joanna rammed her knee into Rotenhausen’s crotch. He sensed it coming and deflected most of the impact with his thigh. The blow made him cry out in pain, however, and he bent forward reflexively, protectively.

His mechanical hand slid down her throat as his cold, clicking fingers loosened their grip on her.

She slipped out of his grasp, from between him and the wall, but he was after her at once. His pain forced him to hobble like a troll, but he wasn’t disabled nearly enough to let her get away.

Unable to reach the door in time to throw the lock and get out, she put the wheeled cart between them instead. In addition to an array of syringes, a bottle of glucose for the IV tree, a packet of tongue depressors, a penlight, a device for examining eyes, and many small bottles of various drugs, the instrument tray on the cart held a pair of surgical scissors. Joanna snatched them up and brandished them at Rotenhausen.

He glared at her, red-faced and furious.

“I won’t let you do it to me again,” she said. “I won’t let you tamper with my mind. You’ll either have to let me go or kill me.”

With his mechanical hand, he reached across the cart, seized the scissors, wrenched them away from her, and squeezed them in his steel fingers until the blades snapped.

“I could do the same to you,” he said.

He threw the broken scissors aside.

Joanna’s heartbeat exploded, and the governor on the engine of time seemed to burn out. Suddenly everything happened very fast:

She plucked the glucose from the tray, thankful it wasn’t in one of the plastic bags so widely used these days, but the robotic hand arced down, smashing the bottle before she could throw it. Glass and glucose showered across the floor, leaving her with only the neck of the bottle in her grip. He shoved the cart out of the way, toppling it, scattering the instruments and the small bottles of drugs, and he rushed her, pale eyes bright with murderous intent. Desperately she turned. Scanning the floor. The litter. A weapon. Something. Anything. He grabbed her by the hair. She already had the weapon. In her hand. The bottle. The broken neck of the bottle. He yanked her around to face him. She thrust. Jagged glass. Deep into his throat. Blood spurting. Oh, God. Pale eyes wide. Yellow and wide. The robotic fingers released her hair, plucked at the glass in his throat
—click, click, click
—but only succeeded in bringing forth more blood. He gagged, slipped on the glucose-wet floor, fell to his knees, reached for her with his steel hand, working the fingers uselessly in the air, fell onto his side, twitched, kicked, made a terrible raspy effort to breathe, spasmed as if an electrical current had crackled through him, spasmed again, and was still.

Alex fell, jerked free of Carrera, rolled back down the trail, and sprang to his feet, acutely aware that he was not likely to get up again if he gave the big man a chance to get atop him.

The bodybuilder was badly enough hurt that he wasn’t able to reach his feet as quickly as Alex. He was still on all fours in the middle of the path, shaking his head as if to clear his mind.

Seizing the advantage, Alex rushed forward and kicked Carrera squarely under the chin.

The thug’s head snapped back, and he fell onto his side.

Alex was sure the kick had broken his adversary’s neck, crushed his windpipe, but Carrera struggled onto his hands and knees again.

Alex took another kick at Carrera’s head.

The bodybuilder saw it coming, grabbed Alex’s boot, toppled him, and clambered atop him, growling like a bear. He swung one huge fist.

Alex wasn’t able to duck it. The punch landed in his face, split his lips, loosened some teeth, and filled his mouth with blood.

He was no match for Carrera in hand-to-hand combat. He had to regain his feet and be able to maneuver.

As Carrera threw another punch, Alex thrashed and bucked. The fist missed him, drove into the trail beside his head, and Carrera howled in pain.

Heaving harder than before, Alex threw Carrera off, crawled up the slope, clutched a tree for support, and pulled himself erect.

Carrera was also struggling to his feet.

Alex kicked him squarely in the stomach, which gave no more than a board fence.

Carrera skidded in the snow, windmilled his arms, and went down on his hands and knees again.

Cursing, Alex kicked him in the face.

Carrera sprawled on his back in the snow, arms extended like wings. He didn’t move. Didn’t move. Still didn’t move. Didn’t move.

Cautiously, as though he were Dr. Von Helsing approaching a coffin in which Dracula slept, Alex crept up on Carrera. He knelt at the bodybuilder’s side. Even in that dim and eerily phosphorescent light, he could see that the man’s eyes were open wide but blind to any sight in this world. He didn’t need to fetch a wooden stake or a crucifix or a necklace of garlic, because this time the monster was definitely dead.

He got up, turned away from Carrera, and ascended the trail, heading back toward the house.

Anson Peterson was waiting for him in the open field just beyond the forest. The fat man was holding a gun.

Rotenhausen was dead.

Joanna felt no remorse for having killed him, but she didn’t experience much in the way of triumph either. She was too worried about Alex to feel anything more than fear.

Stepping carefully to avoid the broken glass scattered across the floor, she found her ski clothes in a closet.

As she was hurriedly dressing, she heard the steel fingers—
click-click-click-click
—and she looked up in terror, frozen by the hateful sound. It must have been a reflex action, a postmortem nerve spasm sending a last meaningless instruction to the mechanical hand, because Rotenhausen was stone-cold dead.

Nevertheless, for a minute she stared at the hand. Her heart was knocking so loudly that she could hear nothing else, not even her own breathing or the wind beyond the windows. Gradually, as the hand made no new move, the fierce drumming in her chest subsided somewhat.

When she finished dressing, as she knelt on her left knee to lace up the boot on her right foot, she spotted the small bottle from which Ursula Zaitsev had filled the syringe. It was among the litter on the floor, but it had not broken.

She laced both boots, then picked up the bottle and pulled the seal from it. She shook a couple of drops of the drug onto the palm of her hand, sniffed, hesitated, then tasted it. She was pretty sure that it was nothing but water and that someone had switched bottles on Zaitsev.

But who? And why?

Puppets. They were all puppets—as Alex had said.

Cautiously she unlocked the door and peered into the hall. No one in sight. But for the background noise of the storm, muffled by the thick walls, the house was silent.

Room by room, she inspected the rest of that level but found no one. For almost a minute she stood on the second- floor landing, looking alternately up and down the steps, listening intently, and at last descended to the ground floor.