The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  Marlowe was jolted out of his reverie by the mighty blast of an air horn. A big lorry loaded with frozen poultry skidded and nearly sideswiped him. He glanced at the rearview mirror, saw that no one was close behind, and jammed his foot down on the brake pedal harder than he should have. The car began to slide, but he let the wheel spin as it wished, and a moment later he was in control again. The lorry slid past him, swayed as if it would topple, then regained its equilibrium, and sped on.

  Taking heart from the way he handled the car, he told himself that he would manage the current crisis at work with equal skill, once he’d had time to think out all courses of action open to him.

  Marlowe lived on the entire top floor of a large three-story, eighteen-room townhouse that had been converted into apartments. When he parked at the curb in front of the building and switched off the car engine, he sighed with relief.

  As he carefully negotiated the icy sidewalk to the front door, he was pelted furiously by sleet, but it couldn’t get under his coat collar because he’d wound a scarf around his neck and then buttoned the collar securely over it.

  At the third floor, Marlowe unlocked his apartment door and felt for the light switch as he stepped across the threshold. He smelled the natural gas even as his fingers touched the switch. But in the fraction of a second that his mind raced frantically through all the ramifications of the situation in search of the safest action, his right index finger recklessly completed its small arc and flicked the switch. Marlowe was blown to Hell with a flash of remorse at all the potato chips never eaten, the beers never drunk, and the women never experienced without the desensitizing barrier of a latex sheath.

  Across the street from the apartment house, Peterson sat alone in a parked car, watching as the third-floor windows blew out, the wall exploded, and Marlowe arced out into the rainy night as though he were a clown shot from a cannon. Briefly the dead man appeared to be able to fly as well as any bird—but then he plummeted to the pavement and did less damage to it than it did to him.

  A man and a woman ran from the front entrance of the building. No one was at home on the second floor, so Peterson figured these two were ground-floor residents. They rushed to Marlowe’s crumpled body—but they hastily drew back, sickened, when they got a close look at him.

  The fat man popped a butter-rum Life Saver into his mouth. He released the parking brake, put the car in gear, and drove away from that sorry place.

  Peterson hadn’t received permission to eliminate Marlowe. In fact, he had never expected to receive it, so he hadn’t even bothered to ask for it. Marlowe’s transgressions had been far too minor to generate a kill order from the directorate in Moscow.

  Nevertheless, Marlowe had to die. He was the first of six primary targets on the hit list. Peterson had made promises to an extremely powerful group, and if he failed to keep those promises, his own life would end as quickly and brutally as Marlowe’s.

  He had worked for an hour to set up the gas explosion so it would appear to have been an accident. The bosses in Moscow, who demanded absolute obedience from Anson Peterson, might be suspicious about an “accident” that killed one of their major London operatives, but they would blame the other side rather than one of their own best agents.

  And the other men, those to whom Anson Peterson had made so many commitments, would be satisfied. The first of his promises had been kept. One man was dead. The first of many.

  56

  Alex and Joanna ate dinner in the cozy, oak-paneled dining room at The Bell and The Dragon. The food was excellent, but Alex was unable to get a full measure of enjoyment from it. While he ate, he surreptitiously watched the other customers, trying to determine if any of them might be watching him.

  Later, in bed in the dark, he and Joanna made love. This time it was slow and tender, and they finished like a pair of spoons in a drawer. He fell asleep pressed against her warm back.

  The peculiar dream came to him again. The soft bed. The white room. The three surgeons in white gowns and masks, staring down at him. The first surgeon asked the same question he’d asked before—“Where does he think he is?”—and the same conversation ensued among the three men. Alex lifted one hand to touch the nearest doctor, but as before his fingers were transformed magically into tiny replicas of buildings. He stared at them, amazed, and then his fingers ceased to be merely replicas and became five tall buildings seen at a great distance, and the buildings grew larger, larger, and he drew nearer to them, dropping down from the sky, and a city grew across the palm of his hand and up his arm. The looming faces of the surgeons were replaced by blue sky. Below him was Rio, the fantastic bay and the ocean beyond. Then his plane landed, and he got out, and he was in Rio. The mournful but beautiful music of a Spanish guitar filled the Brazilian air.

  He mumbled and turned over in his sleep.

  And he turned into a new dream. He was in a cool dark crypt. Candles flickered dimly. He walked to a black coffin that rested on a stone bier, grasped the massive bronze handles, and lifted the lid. Thomas Chelgrin lay inside: blood-smeared, gray-skinned, as dead as the stone on which his casket rested. Heart pounding, overcome with dread, Alex gazed at the senator, and then as he started to lower the lid, the eyes of the corpse opened. Chelgrin grinned malevolently, exposing blood-caked teeth. He grabbed Alex’s wrists in his strong, gray, cold hands and tried to drag him down into the coffin.

  Alex sat straight up in bed, an unvoiced scream trapped in his throat.

  Joanna was asleep.

  He remained very still for a while, suspicious of the deep shadows in the corners. He had left the bathroom door ajar, with the light burning beyond it. Nevertheless, most of the room was shrouded in gloom. Gradually his eyes adjusted, and he could see that there were no intruders, either real or supernatural.

  He got out of bed and went to the nearest window.

  Their room offered a view of the sea. Alex could see nothing, however, except a vast black emptiness marked by the vague lights of a ship behind curtains of rain. He shifted his gaze to something closer at hand: the slate-shingled roof that slanted low over the window, creating a deep eave. Still closer: The windows had diamond-shaped panes of leaded glass, and each pane was beveled at the edges. Closer: In the surface of the glass, he saw himself—his drawn face, his troubled eyes, his mouth set in a tight grim line.

  The case had begun with Joanna’s repeating nightmare. Now he had a recurring dream of his own. He didn’t believe in coincidence. He was certain that his dream of Rio har- bored a message that he must interpret if they were to survive. His subconscious was trying to tell him something desperately important.

  But for God’s sake, what?

  He had been to Rio for a month the previous spring, but he hadn’t been hospitalized while there. He hadn’t met any doctors. The trip had been perfectly ordinary—just one in a series of brief escapes from a job that had begun to bore him.

  He shifted his attention from his own reflection and stared into the distance again.

  We’re puppets, he thought. Joanna and me. Puppets. And the puppetmaster is out there. Somewhere. Who? Where? And what does he want?

  Lightning slashed the soft flesh of the night.

  57

  Rain was no longer falling. The morning air was piercingly clear. Judging by the window glass to which Joanna touched her fingertips, the day was also fearfully cold.

  She felt refreshed and more at ease than she’d been in a long time. She could see, however, that Alex had not benefited from the night at the inn. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed by dark circles of slack skin.

  He returned the 9mm pistol to its hiding place in the hollowed-out hair dryer and packed the dryer in Joanna’s largest suitcase.

  They checked out of The Bell and The Dragon at nine o’clock. The clerk wished them a swift, safe trip.

  They went to an apothecary and purchased a tin of body powder to replace the one that Alex had emptied into the toilet in London. In the car again, he slipped the extr
a magazines of ammunition into the talc. Joanna put the resealed can in her suitcase.

  They drove from the outskirts of Brighton to Southampton. No one followed them.

  At the Southampton airport, they abandoned the stolen Ford in the parking lot.

  Aurigny Airlines hadn’t yet sold out the Saturday morning flight to Cherbourg. Alex and Joanna sat behind the starboard wing, and she had the window seat. The flight was uneventful, with such an utter lack of turbulence that it almost seemed as though they hadn’t left the ground.

  The French customs officials thoroughly inspected the luggage, but they neither opened the can of body powder nor took a close look at the hair dryer.

  On the express turbotrain from Cherbourg to Paris, Alex’s mood brightened somewhat, apparently because Paris was his favorite city. He usually stayed at the Hotel George V; indeed, he was so well known by the staff that he might have gotten a room without a reservation. They stayed elsewhere, however, in less grand quarters, precisely because they didn’t want to go where Alex was well known.

  From their hotel, he telephoned another hotel in Saint Moritz. Speaking fluent French and using the name Maurice Demuth, he inquired about reserving a room for one full week, beginning Sunday, two days hence. Fortunately, a recent cancellation had made a room available, and currently there was no waiting list for week-long accommodations.

  When Alex put down the phone, Joanna said, “Why Maurice Demuth?”

  “So if anyone connected with Rotenhausen should go around Saint Moritz checking advance bookings at the hotels, he won’t find us.”

  “I mean, why Maurice Demuth instead of some other name?”

  “Well... I don’t know. It’s just a good French name.”

  “I thought maybe you knew someone with that name.”

  “No. I just plucked it out of the air.”

  “You lied so smoothly. I better start taking everything you say with a grain of salt.” She moved into his arms.

  “Like when you tell me I’m pretty—how can I be sure you mean it?”

  “You’re more than pretty. You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “You sound so sincere.”

  “No one has ever done to me what you do.”

  “So sincere... and yet...”

  “Easy to prove I’m not lying.”

  “How?”

  He took her to bed.

  Later, they ate dinner at a small restaurant overlooking the Seine, which was speckled with the lights of small boats and the reflected amber wedges of the windows in the buildings that stood along its banks.

  As she nibbled flawless oie rotie aux pruneaux and listened to Alex’s stories about Paris, she knew that she could never allow anyone or anything to separate her from him. She would rather die.

  58

  In Saint Moritz, Peterson had a gray Mercedes at his disposal. He drove himself, continuously peeling a roll of Life Savers and popping a series of butter-rum morsels into his mouth.

  Low over the towering mountains, the sky appeared to be nine months gone, bulging with gray-black storm clouds that were about to deliver torrents of fine dry snow.

  During the afternoon Peterson played tourist. He drove from one viewing point to another, enchanted by the scenery.

  The resort of Saint Moritz is in three parts: Saint Moritz-Dorf, which is on a mountain terrace more than two hundred feet above the lake; Saint Moritz-Bad, which is a charming place at the end of the lake; and Champfer-Suvretta. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Saint Moritz-Bad was the spa, but thereafter it lost ground to Saint Moritz-Dorf, which is perhaps the most dazzling water playground in the world. Recently, Moritz-Bad had been making a concerted effort to recapture its lost position, but its ambitious recovery program had led to a most unlovely building boom.

  An hour after nightfall, Peterson kept an appointment in Saint Moritz-Bad. He left the Mercedes with a valet at one of the newer and uglier hotels. Inside, he crossed the lobby to the lakefront cocktail lounge. The room was crowded and noisy.

  The hotel’s day-registration clerk, Rudolph Uberman, had gone off duty fifteen minutes ago and was waiting at a corner table: a thin man with long, slim hands that were seldom still.

  Peterson shrugged out of his overcoat, hung it across the back of a chair, and sat facing Uberman. The clerk was nearly finished with a brandy and wanted another, and Peterson ordered the same.

  After they were served, Peterson said, “Any word?”

  Uberman was nervous. “Monsieur Maurice Demuth tele- phoned four hours ago.”

  “Excellent.”

  “He will arrive Sunday with his wife.”

  Peterson withdrew an envelope from an inside coat pocket and passed it to Uberman. “That’s your second payment. If all goes well on Sunday, you’ll receive a third envelope.”

  The clerk glanced left and right before quickly tucking the payoff out of sight—as if anyone who witnessed the exchange would immediately know that it was dirty business. In fact, none of the other customers was the least bit interested in them.

  “I would like some assurance,” Uberman said.

  Peterson scowled. “Assurance?”

  “I would like a guarantee that no one...”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “That no one will be killed.”

  “Oh, of course, dear man, you have my word on that.”

  Uberman studied him. “If anyone were killed in the hotel, I’d have no choice but to tell the authorities what I know.”

  Peterson kept his voice low, but he spoke sharply. “That would be foolish. You’re an accomplice, sir. The authorities wouldn’t deal lightly with you. And neither would I.”

  Uberman tossed back his brandy as though it were water. “Perhaps I should return the money.”

  “I wouldn’t accept it. A deal is a deal.”

  “I guess I’m in over my head.”

  “Relax, sir. You’ve a tendency to melodramatize. It will all go very smoothly, and no one will ever know it happened.”

  “What do you want with them anyway?”

  “You wouldn’t care to know that. Just think of all those Swiss francs in the envelope and the rest to come, and forget the source of it all. Forgetting is always best. Forgetting is safe. Now, tell me, is the restaurant here any good?”

  “The food is terrible,” Uberman said.

  “I suspected as much.”

  “Try Chesa Veglia.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Or perhaps Corviglia at the top of the funicular.”

  Peterson put enough money on the table to cover the bill. As he stood and struggled into his overcoat, he said, “I’m a heeder of my own advice. I’ve already forgotten your name.”

  “I never knew yours,” Uberman noted.

  “Did someone speak?” Peterson asked, looking around as though he couldn’t even see Uberman.

  Smiling at his own joke, he left the hotel for dinner at Chesa Veglia.

  59

  On Saturday they flew from Paris to Zurich. Their hotel, Baur Au Lac, stood in its own lakeside park at the end of Bahnhofstrasse.

  In their room, Alex dismantled the hair dryer yet again and put the pistol under his belt. He took the spare clips of ammunition from the talcum powder.

  “I wish you didn’t have to carry that,” Joanna said.

  “So do I. But we’re getting too close to Rotenhausen to risk going without it.”

  They made love again. Twice. He could not get enough of her—but he wasn’t seeking sex as much as closeness.

  That night he had the dream again.

  He woke shortly before three o’clock, gasping in panic, but he regained control of himself before he woke Joanna. He couldn’t go back to sleep. He sat in a chair beside the bed, the pistol in his lap, until the wake-up call came at six o’clock.

  He was grateful for his peculiar metabolism, which allowed him to function well on little sleep.

  Monday morning they boarded a train at Zurich’s Haupbahnhof, a
nd they headed east.

  As the train pulled out of the station, Joanna said, “We’re sure going roundabout. No one’ll be able to track us down easily.”

  “Maybe they don’t need to track us down,” Alex said. “Maybe they knew our route before we did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. But sometimes I feel... manipulated... programmed. Like a robot.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” he said wearily. “Forget it. I’m just edgy. Let’s enjoy the scenery.”

  At Chur they changed trains to follow the fertile Rhine Valley downstream. In summer the land would be green with vineyards, wheat fields, and orchards, but now it lay dormant under a blanket of snow. The train chugged into the towering Rhaetian Alps, passed through the dramatic Landquart Gorge, and followed a new river upstream. After a long, winding, but for the most part gentle ascent, past a handful of resort villages, they came to Klosters, which was nearly as famous as Saint Moritz.

  They debarked at Klosters and left their luggage at the station while they outfitted themselves in ski clothes. During the trip from Zurich, they had realized that nothing they’d packed was adequate for high-altitude December weather. Besides, dressed in the usual winter clothes of city dwellers, they were conspicuous, which was precisely what they did not want to be. They changed in the dressing rooms at the ski shop and threw away the clothes they had been wearing, which amazed the clerk.

  After lunch they boarded a train to Davos. It was crowded with a large party of French skiers bound for Saint Moritz. The French were happy, noisy, drinking wine from bottles that were concealed in plain paper sacks.