The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  Everything he knew about his daughter’s current activities was third-hand information. In twelve years not one spoken word had passed between him and Lisa; therefore, he jealously guarded these few minutes of reading, the first of every month.

  “That day in Jamaica,” he said, “you promised I’d get written reports of her progress, her life. Always written. You hand it to me, I read it by a flashlight in a moving car, then I give it back to you, and you destroy it. That’s how it works. I haven’t agreed to any changes in the routine, and I never will.”

  “Calm down, dear Tom.”

  “Don’t call me that, you bastard.”

  Peterson said, “I’ll take no offense. You’re distraught.”

  They rode in silence until Chelgrin said, “Do you have photos?”

  “Oh, yes. We have photos, as we do every month. Though these are exceptionally interesting.”

  “Let me see them.”

  “They need a bit of explanation.”

  The senator’s mouth went dry. He closed his eyes. All anger had been chased out by fear. “Is she... is she hurt? Dead?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that, Tom. If it was anything like that, I wouldn’t break the news this way. I’m not an insensitive man.”

  Relief brought anger back with it. Chelgrin opened his eyes. “Then what the hell is this all about?”

  As the driver slowed the Mercedes, turned left onto a narrow lane, and accelerated again, Peterson picked up his attaché case and put it on his lap. From it, he withdrew a white envelope of the type that usually contained photographs of Lisa.

  Chelgrin reached for it.

  Peterson wasn’t ready to relinquish the prize. As he undid the clasp and opened the flap, he said, “The report is spoken this time only because it’s too complex and important to be committed to paper. We have a crisis of sorts.”

  The fat man took several eight-by-ten glossies from the white envelope, and Chelgrin accepted them with trepidation.

  A flashlight lay on the seat between them. Chelgrin picked it up and switched it on.

  In the first photograph, Lisa and a man were sitting on a bench in a tree-shaded plaza.

  “Who’s she with?” the senator asked.

  “You know him.”

  Chelgrin held the flashlight at an angle to avoid casting glare on the photograph. “Something familiar...”

  “You’ll have to go back in time. Before he had the mustache. Go back at least ten years to the last time you might’ve seen him.”

  “My God, it’s the detective. Hunter.”

  “He’s become bored with his business and with Chicago,” Peterson said. “So he’s been taking a couple of month-long vacations every year. Last spring he went to Brazil. Two weeks ago—Japan.”

  Chelgrin couldn’t look away from the photograph, which ceased to be merely a picture and became an omen of disaster. “But Hunter turning up in the Moonglow Lounge, that place of all places—the odds must be a million to one.”

  “Easily.”

  “She’s changed over the years. Maybe he—”

  “He recognized her at once. He’s compared her fingerprints to Lisa’s. Encouraged her to call London. Took her to a psychiatrist for hypnotic regression therapy. We had the office bugged.”

  As Chelgrin listened to what Dr. Omi Inamura had achieved with Joanna, the motion of the car began to make him nauseous.

  “But why was this allowed to happen?” he demanded.

  “We didn’t expect this Inamura to be successful. By the time we realized that he was achieving a breakthrough with her, it seemed pointless to threaten or kill him.”

  Jagged lightning stepped down the dark sky, gouging the thick cloud cover with its spurred heels.

  “And why hasn’t Hunter contacted me?” the senator wondered. “I was his client. I paid him a hell of a lot of money to find her.”

  “He hasn’t contacted you because he suspects you’re part of the conspiracy that put her in Japan. He now thinks you hired him in the first place just to make yourself look good, playing the concerned father for political purposes. Which is true, of course.”

  Another flash of lightning illuminated the countryside beyond the car, briefly outlining clusters of leafless black trees.

  Fat droplets of rain snapped against the windshield. The driver slowed the Mercedes and switched on the wipers.

  “What’s he going to do?” Chelgrin asked. “Go to the media?”

  “Not yet,” Peterson assured him. “He figures that if we wanted to remove the girl permanently, we could’ve killed her a long time ago. He realizes that after we’ve gone to all the trouble of giving her a new identity, we intend to keep her alive at nearly any cost. So he assumes she’s safe in pushing this thing, at least up to a point. He figures we’re most likely to turn nasty and try to kill them only when they go public. Therefore, he wants to be absolutely certain he’s got most of the story before he dares to speak out.”

  Chelgrin frowned. “I don’t like all this talk about killing.”

  “Dear Tom, I didn’t mean we’d actually kill Lisa! Of course, that’s not an option. Besides, good heavens, I feel almost as close to her as if she were my own daughter. A darling girl. No one would lift a finger against her. But Hunter’s another matter altogether. He’ll have to be taken out at the proper time. Soon.”

  “You should have killed him the moment he showed up in Kyoto. You screwed up.”

  Peterson was not disturbed by the accusation. “We didn’t know he was going until he was there. We weren’t watching him. No reason to. It’s a long time since he investigated Lisa’s disappearance.”

  “So after he’s been eliminated, what will we do with her?” the senator worried.

  Peterson shifted his great bulk, and the springs in the car seat protested. “She can’t live as Joanna Rand any longer. She’s finished with that life. We think the best thing is to send her home now.”

  “Back to Illinois?” Chelgrin asked, baffled by that impractical suggestion.

  “No, no. That’s not her real home. Neither is Jamaica nor even Washington.”

  Chelgrin’s heart pounded faster, but he tried not to let the fat man see how alarmed he was. He stared at the photograph and then out at the rain-swept night. “Where you want to send her... that’s your home and mine, but it’s not hers.”

  “Neither was Japan.”

  Chelgrin said nothing.

  “We’ll send her home,” Peterson said.

  “No.”

  “She’ll be well taken care of. She’ll be happy there.”

  Chelgrin took a couple of deep breaths before responding. “This is the same argument we had in Jamaica all those years ago. I won’t let you send her home. Period. End of discussion.”

  “Why are you so set against it?” Peterson asked, clearly amused by the senator’s distress. “And why is it that we even need to hold your daughter hostage in order to ensure your continued cooperation?”

  “You don’t have to do any such thing,” Chelgrin said, but he could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.

  “But we do,” said Peterson. “That’s clear to us. And why? Aren’t we on the same side? Aren’t we working toward the same goal?”

  Chelgrin switched off the flashlight and gazed out the window at the dark land rushing past. He wished the interior of the car were even darker than it was, so the fat man couldn’t see his face at all.

  “Aren’t we on the same side?” Peterson persisted.

  Chelgrin cleared his throat. “It’s just that... sending her home... Well, that’s an entirely alien way of life to her. She was born and raised in America. She’s used to certain ... freedoms.”

  “She’d have freedom at home. It’s all the rage now—freedom.”

  “And you’ll change that if you get a chance.”

  “Restore order, yes, if we get a chance. But even then she would move in the very highest circles, with special privileges.”

  “None of which woul
d equal what she could have here or what she has now in Japan.”

  “Listen, Tom, the likelihood is that we’ll never be able to restore the old order at home. This freedom is a virulent disease. We’re working hard to disrupt the economy, to keep the bureaucracy intact. And thanks to you and other politicians, the U.S. is helping us. But the disease is hard to eradicate. Freedom will most likely grow, not diminish.”

  “No,” Chelgrin said adamantly. “She wouldn’t be able to adapt. We’ll have to put her somewhere else. That’s final.”

  Peterson was delighted with Chelgrin’s bravado—perhaps because he knew that it was hollow, merely the tremulous defiance of a child crossing a graveyard at night—and he giggled almost girlishly. The giggle swiftly became a full-fledged laugh. He gripped the senator’s leg just above the knee and squeezed affectionately. Edgy, Chelgrin misinterpreted the action, detected a threat where none existed, and jerked away. The overreaction tickled the fat man. Peterson laughed and chortled and cackled, spraying spittle and expelling clouds of butter-rum fumes, until he had to gasp for breath.

  “I wish I knew what was so funny,” Chelgrin said.

  At last Peterson got control of himself. He mopped his big moon face with his handkerchief.

  “Dear Tom, why don’t you just admit it? You don’t want Lisa to go home to Mother Russia because you don’t believe in what either of the major power blocs wants to do there. You lost faith in Marx and communism a long time ago, while we still ruled. And you don’t like the crowd of socialists and thugs who’re contesting for power these days. You still work for us because you have no choice, but you hate yourself for it. The good life here diverted you, dear Tom. Diverted, subverted, and thoroughly converted you. If you could get away with it, you’d make a clean break with us, cast us out of your life after all we’ve done for you. But you can’t do that, because we’ve acted like wise capitalists in the way we’ve handled you over the years. We repossessed your daughter. We have a mortgage on your political career. Your fortune is built on credit we’ve extended to you. And we have a substantial—actually, enormous—lien against your soul.”

  Though Peterson now appeared willing to accept a relationship without pretense, Chelgrin remained wary about admitting to his true convictions. “I don’t know where you get these ideas. I’m committed to the proletarian revolution and the people’s state every bit as much as I was thirty years ago.”

  That statement elicited another spate of giggling from the fat man. “Dear Tom, be frank with me. We’ve known about the changes in you for twenty years, maybe even before you yourself were aware of them. We know the capitalist facade isn’t just a facade any longer. But it doesn’t matter. We aren’t going to give you the axe merely because you’ve had a change of heart. There’ll be no garroting, no bullets in the night, no poison in the wine, dear Tom. You’re still an extremely valuable property. You help us enormously—though in a different way and for much different reasons now than when we all started on this little adventure.”

  For many years, as a congressman and then a senator, Chelgrin had passed military secrets to the Soviet regime. Since the fall of the Soviet, he’d been instrumental in arranging for tens of billions of dollars in loans to the new elected government of Russia, aware that none of it would ever be repaid. A large portion of those loans were misappropriated by the still Byzantine bureaucracy, going not to help the Russian people but to line the pockets of the same thugs who had ruled under the Soviet banner and to maintain a war chest for their indefatigable campaign to return to the pinnacle of power.

  “All right. Honesty,” said Chelgrin. “Every day of my life, I pray to God that the help I give you will never be enough to ensure your success, never enough to harm this big, bustling, freewheeling, wonderful country. I want you all to fail and rot in Hell.”

  “Good. Very good,” said Peterson. “Refreshing to be open and direct for a change, isn’t it?”

  “All I care about now is my daughter.”

  “Would you like to see the other photographs?” Peterson asked.

  Chelgrin switched on the flashlight and took the stack of eight-by-ten glossies from the fat man.

  Rain drummed relentlessly on the roof of the car. The spinning tires sang sibilantly on the wet macadam.

  After a while the senator said, “What’ll happen to Lisa?”

  “We didn’t actually expect you to be enthusiastic about sending her home,” Peterson acknowledged. “So we’ve worked out something else. We’ll turn her over to Dr. Rotenhausen—”

  “The one-armed wonder.”

  “—and he’ll treat her at the clinic again.”

  “He gives me the creeps,” Chelgrin said.

  “Rotenhausen will erase all the Joanna Rand memories and give her yet another identity. When he’s finished, we’ll provide forged papers and set her up in a new life in Germany.”

  “Why Germany?”

  “Why not? We knew you’d insist on a capitalist country with the so-called ‘freedoms’ you cherish.”

  “I thought perhaps she could... come back.”

  “Back here?” Peterson asked incredulously. “Impossible.”

  “I don’t mean to Illinois or Washington.”

  “There’s not a safe place in the States.”

  “But surely if we gave her a solid new identity and stuck her in a small town in Utah or rural Colorado or maybe Wyoming—”

  “Too chancy.”

  “You won’t even consider it?”

  “Dear Tom, this trouble with Alex Hunter should make it obvious why I can’t consider it. And I can’t resist reminding you that she could’ve been here in the States all along, instead of Japan, if you had only agreed to plastic surgery along with the memory tampering.”

  “I won’t even discuss the possibility.”

  “Your ego leaves no room for common sense. You see elements of your face in hers, and you can’t bear to have them altered.”

  “I said I won’t discuss it. I’ll never let a surgeon touch her face. She won’t be changed in any way.”

  “Stupid, dear Tom. Very stupid. If the surgery had been done immediately after the screw-up in Jamaica, Alex Hunter wouldn’t have recognized her last week. We wouldn’t be in trouble now.”

  “She’s a beautiful woman. She’ll stay that way.”

  “The point of the surgery wouldn’t be to make her ugly! She’d still be beautiful. It would just be a different beauty.”

  “Any difference would make her less than she is now,” Chelgrin insisted. “I won’t allow her to be carved into someone else.”

  Outside, the storm grew more violent by the minute. Rain fell in dense cataracts. The driver slowed the Mercedes to a crawl.

  Peterson smiled and shook his head. “You amaze me, Tom. It’s so strange that you’ll fight to the death to preserve her face—in which you can so readily see yourself—yet you don’t feel any remorse for letting us carve away at her mind.”

  “There’s nothing strange about it,” Chelgrin said defensively.

  “I suspect you didn’t care about the brainwashing because she wasn’t intellectually or emotionally your disciple. Her beliefs, her goals, her dreams, her hopes, were different from yours. So it didn’t matter to you if we erased all that. Preservation of the physical Lisa—the color of her hair, the shape of her nose and jaw and lips, the proportions of her body—was enormously important to your ego, but the preservation of the actual person called Lisa—those special patterns of the mind, that unique creature of wants and needs and attitudes so different from your own—was none of your concern.”

  “So you’re calling me an egotistical bastard,” Chelgrin said. “So what? What am I supposed to do? Try to change your opinion of me? Promise to be a better person? What do you want from me?”

  “Dear Tom, let me put it this way—”

  “Put it any way you like.”

  “I don’t think it was a loss to our side when you were won over to their philosophy,”
the fat man said. “And I’d bet that the average capitalist wouldn’t look at you as much of a prize either.”

  “If this is meant to wear me down somehow and make me agree to plastic surgery for her, you’re just wasting your time.”

  Peterson laughed softly. “You’ve got thick armor, Tom. It’s impossible to insult you.”

  Chelgrin hated him.

  For a while they rode in silence.

  They passed through woodlands and open fields between suburbs. Thin patches of fog drifted across the road, and when lightning flashed, the ground mist briefly glowed as if it might be an unearthly, incandescent gas.

  Finally the fat man said, “There’s some danger involved if we tamper with the girl’s memory a second time.”

  “Danger?”

  “The good Dr. Rotenhausen has never worked his magic twice on the same patient. He has doubts. This time the treatment might not take. It might even end badly.”

  “What do you mean? What could happen?”

  “Madness perhaps. Or she might wind up in a catatonic state. You know—just sitting, staring into space, a vegetable, unable to talk or feed herself. She might even die.”

  Chelgrin stared at Peterson, trying to read his round, smiling, inscrutable face. “I don’t believe it. You’re making this up so I’ll be afraid to send her to Rotenhausen. Then my only choice would be to let you take her home. Forget it.”

  “I’m being honest with you, Tom. Rotenhausen says her chances of coming through a second time are poor, less than fifty-fifty.”

  “You’re lying. But even if you were telling the truth, I’d rather send her to Rotenhausen. I refuse to have her taken to Russia. I’d rather see her dead.”

  “You might,” said Peterson.

  Rain was falling with such force and in such tremendous quantity that the driver had to pull off the road. Visibility was no more than twenty to thirty feet. They parked in a roadside rest area, near trash barrels and picnic tables.

  Peterson slipped another butter-rum circlet between his pursed lips, scrubbed his fingers with his handkerchief, and made a small wordless sound of delight as the candy began to melt on his tongue.