The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  He was about to investigate the first of the closed doors when he heard voices. He crouched, prepared to run or open fire, but then he realized that he was hearing a conversation in progress downstairs and that no one was approaching. Deciding to explore the second floor later, he descended toward the ground floor.

  In the dimly lighted lower hallway, he edged close to a door from behind which the voices arose. It was ajar an inch, and as he reached it, he heard someone say Joanna’s name and then his.

  He risked looking through the crack between the door and the jamb. Beyond was a conference room. Three men sat at a large oval table that could have accommodated a dozen, and a fourth man stood at the tall windows with his back to the others.

  The nearest man was extremely obese. He was opening the end of a roll of Life Savers.

  Anson Peterson.

  Alex heard the name as if someone had whispered it to him, but he was still alone in the hall. He had never seen the fat man before, yet he knew his name. He was intrigued and still frightened by the sense of being caught up in events as preordained as the course of a bobsled in a luge chute, but he was not surprised. He didn’t think anything could surprise him after he’d found his gun in the library desk where he’d somehow known that it would be.

  The next man at the table was unusually large but not obese. Even sitting down he appeared to be tall. Bull neck. Massive shoulders. His face was broad and flat beneath a low brow.

  Again, an inner voice spoke the name: Antonio Paz.

  The third man at the table had coarse black hair, a prominent nose, and deeply set dark eyes. He was shorter than Paz but even more powerfully built.

  Ignacio Carrera.

  The fourth man turned away from the windows and the cascading snow beyond them.

  Alex was capable of surprise after all. The fourth man was Senator Thomas Chelgrin.

  68

  With his mechanical hand, Rotenhausen grasped the sheet, pulled it off Joanna, and tossed it to the floor.

  She was wearing only a thin hospital gown tied in back, but she was so cold inside that the cool air didn’t chill her.

  Faking the effects of the drug as she imagined they would have been, she let her eyes swim out of focus and murmured wordlessly to herself.

  “Pretty,” he said, looming.

  She required all the courage that she could summon to continue to feign a drugged indifference.

  The steel fingers gripped the neckline of her gown and tore the garment from her.

  She almost gasped, but kept a grip on herself because she knew that he was watching her closely.

  The steel hand touched her breasts.

  69

  Peterson popped a butter-rum Life Saver into his mouth, savored it, and then said to Carrera, “So it’s decided. You’ll kill Hunter tonight, strip him, and dump his body into the lake, under the ice.”

  “I’ll cut off the tips of his fingers so the police won’t be able to print the body, smash out his teeth to prevent dental-record identification.”

  “Isn’t that excessive? By the time the lake thaws and they find him next summer, perhaps even the summer after next—if they ever do find him—the fish will have left nothing but bare bones.”

  “Can’t be too careful,” Carrera disagreed. “I’ll also disfigure his face so he can’t be identified from a photograph.”

  And you’ll enjoy every minute of it, Peterson thought.

  Chelgrin hadn’t said much during the past half hour, but now he walked to the table and faced Peterson. “You told me I’d be allowed to see my daughter as soon as they brought her here.”

  “Yes, Tom. But Rotenhausen must examine her first.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But he felt it was necessary, and he’s the boss in this place.”

  “Not when you’re around,” Chelgrin said sourly. “Wherever you are, you’re the boss. It’s in your genes. You’ll be in charge of Hell an hour after you get there.”

  “How very kind of you to say so,” Peterson replied.

  “Damn it, I want to see Lisa. I want—”

  Carrera interrupted: “And there you have another problem. The girl. What do we do about the girl if she comes through the second treatment with a lot of mental damage?”

  “That won’t happen,” Chelgrin said firmly, as though he could determine her fate by fiat.

  “Fifty-fifty chance,” Carrera said.

  Refusing to confront that dreadful possibility, Chelgrin turned from Carrera, started toward the hallway door, but then halted and backed up a step. “Someone’s there, listening.”

  70

  The instant that he knew he had been seen, Alex pushed the door all the way open and stepped into the room, thrusting the pistol in front of him.

  “Ah, hello,” said the fat man with curious aplomb. “How’re you feeling?”

  Ignoring him, Alex stared at Chelgrin. “You’re dead.”

  The senator didn’t respond.

  Sickened and infuriated by a profound and growing sense of violation, by having been so totally manipulated, Alex said, “Why aren’t you dead?”

  “Faked,” Chelgrin said, nervously focusing on the muzzle of the gun. “We just wanted you to find the clipping about Rotenhausen.”

  “And the unfinished letter to Lisa—?”

  “Nice touch, wasn’t it?” Peterson asked.

  Confused, Alex said, “Now that I think about it... at the time, I should’ve checked you for a pulse. Why didn’t I check you?”

  “The bullet wounds, the rabbit blood,” Chelgrin said, “the hair over my eyes so you wouldn’t notice any involuntary eye-muscle spasms—it was all very convincing. And I wore only the robe and left my wallet on the dresser so you wouldn’t have any reason to search me.”

  Alex glanced at each of the men, then at Chelgrin again. “No. Doesn’t wash. I made Joanna stay away from you too. As if I’d been programmed to keep us at a distance from you. Programmed not to shatter the illusion. Isn’t that right?”

  Chelgrin blinked. “Programmed?”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Alex said, raising the gun a few inches until the muzzle was lined up with the senator’s heart.

  Chelgrin seemed genuinely baffled. “What’re you talking about?”

  Turning to the fat man, Alex said, “It’s true, isn’t it? I’ve been running around like a damn robot, programmed like a machine.”

  Peterson smiled. He knew the truth, even if Chelgrin didn’t.

  Alex thrust the pistol at him. “Last spring, when I went to Rio for a vacation—what in the name of God happened to me there?”

  Before Peterson could answer, Antonio Paz reached under his jacket for a gun. Alex caught the movement from the corner of his eye, swung away from Peterson, and fired twice. Both shots ripped into Paz’s face. Like perfume from an atomizer, a mist of blood puffed into the air. Paz and his chair crashed over backward.

  Even as Paz went down, Carrera sprang to his feet.

  That mysterious inner voice whispered to Alex again, Kill him. Before he could think about what he was doing, he obeyed, squeezing the trigger twice more.

  One of the rounds hit Carrera, and he fell.

  Shocked, wide-eyed, terrified, the senator backed away. He held his hands out in front of him, palms toward Alex, fingers spread, as if he thought he might be able to ward off the bullets meant for him.

  Kill him.

  Alex heard the interior voice again, icy and insistent, but he hesitated. Bewildered. Shaking.

  He tried to think through to another, less violent solution: Paz and Carrera had been dangerous men, but they were dead, no longer any threat, and the senator wasn’t a threat either, just a broken man, a pitiful specimen, begging for his life, so there was no need to waste him, no justification for it.

  Kill him, kill him, kill him, killhim, killhim.

  Alex couldn’t resist that inner voice, and again he squeezed the trigger twice.

  Hit once in the chest, C
helgrin fell backward into the window. His head struck the glass, and one of the thick panes cracked. He dropped to the floor and was as still as stone.

  “Oh, God,” Alex said, and stared at the hand in which he held the gun, as if he couldn’t quite believe that it was his own hand. He was out of control, acting before thinking. “What am I doing? What am I doing?”

  The fat man was still in his chair on the far side of the table. “The terrible angel of vengeance,” he said with a smile. He appeared to be delighted.

  Bloody but not mortally wounded after all, Carrera launched up from the floor, seized a chair, and threw it.

  Alex fired, missed.

  The chair struck him as he tried to dodge it. Pain speared through his right arm. The pistol flew out of his hand and across the room, clattered off the wall. He staggered backward, collided with the door, and Carrera charged him.

  71

  Gleaming, cold, humming, clicking, the steel hand caressed her. Squeezed her. Patted, stroked, pinched her. Click, click, click.

  She was impressed by her own courage. She didn’t flinch. She endured Rotenhausen’s obscene explorations and pretended to be doped. She mumbled, murmured, sometimes feigned a dreamy pleasure at his touch, occasionally warned him off as if she had briefly surfaced from her delirium, but then drifted away again.

  She’d just about decided that he was never going to stop petting her with that monstrous hand, when he finally reached across her and disengaged the strap on her right wrist. He freed her left hand as well, and then he moved to the foot of the bed to release her ankles. She was unbound.

  He returned to the head of the bed.

  She still did not make a break for freedom.

  Taking off his white smock and draping it across the cart that held the syringes and other instruments, he said, “I remember you so well. I remember ... how you felt.” He took off his shirt.

  Through half-closed eyes, Joanna studied the mechanical hand. A flexible steel-ring cable trailed up from the metal wrist and terminated in a pair of male jacks that were plugged into a battery pack. The pack was strapped to his biceps.

  “This will be better even than before,” he said. “With your father just downstairs.”

  Joanna seized the cable and tore the jacks out of the battery pack. The steel fingers froze. She rolled away from Rotenhausen. Naked, she dropped off the other side of the bed and ran for the door.

  He caught her with his real hand as she touched the dead-bolt lock. Clenching a handful of her hair, he spun her around to face him, and his pale eyes were full of inhuman menace.

  Screaming in pain and fear, she flailed at him, and her fists landed with satisfyingly hard, flat sounds.

  Rotenhausen cursed her, dragged her from the door, and shoved her away.

  She collided with the bed. Unbalanced, she grabbed the footrail to avoid falling.

  Standing between her and the door, he plugged the jacks into the battery again. The hand purred. The steel fingers moved. Click, click, click.

  72

  Carrera came low and fast, like a human locomotive. Without the pistol, Alex had no chance to get the best of the powerful bodybuilder. He had some knowledge of martial arts, but no doubt Carrera was even better trained.

  He stumbled backward through the door, pulled it shut after him, and ran along the ground-floor hallway. The last room on the right was dark. He plunged across the threshold, slammed the door, fumbled frantically for a latch. He found a privacy-lock button in the center of the knob.

  An instant later Carrera reached the other side, tried to get in, discovered that he had been locked out, and immediately threw himself against the door, determined to break it down.

  Alex located the light switch. The overhead bulb revealed an empty storeroom that offered nothing he could use as a weapon.

  He was loath to leave the house with Joanna held some- where in it, but he would be no good to her if he got himself killed.

  As Carrera battered the door, Alex crossed to the storeroom window and put up the blind. A fierce gust of wind fired a barrage of fine white granules against the glass.

  Carrera hit the door again, again, and wood splintered.

  With trembling hands, Alex unlatched the casement window and pushed the halves outward. Arctic wind exploded into the room.

  Carrera rammed into the door. In the lock, tortured metal shrieked against metal.

  Even wounded, the man was a bull.

  Alex clambered over the window ledge and stepped into a foot of fresh snow. Wind howled along the valley wall, clocking at least seventy or eighty kilometers an hour; it bit his face, wrung tears from his eyes, and flash-numbed his hands. He was thankful for the insulated ski clothes that they had bought in Klosters.

  In the room that he’d just left, the door went down with a thunderous boom.

  Alex hurried away into the bitter darkness, kicking up clouds of snow as he went.

  73

  By the time Peterson reached the storeroom, Carrera was climbing through the window in pursuit of Hunter. Peterson started after him, but then he changed his mind and crossed the hall to Ursula Zaitsev’s private quarters.

  She refused to answer when he knocked.

  “Ursula, it’s me. Anson. Hurry.”

  The door cracked open on a security chain, and she peered at him fearfully. “What’s all the noise? What’s gone wrong?”

  “Everything. We have to get out of here now, right away, before the police arrive.”

  “Go?” She was a strange, self-involved woman even in the best of times, but in her bewilderment she had the wild-eyed look of an asylum inmate. “Go where?”

  “Damn it, Ursula, hurry! Do you want to go home—or spend the rest of your life in a Swiss jail?”

  She had left Russia twenty years ago and had been Rotenhausen’s assistant—and watchdog—for fifteen, from the day that his funding had been provided exclusively by Moscow. Since she’d been away from home, the old order had fallen, and judging by her expression, the home to which she would be going was one that she either found unappealing or could not quite comprehend.

  “Ursula, Peterson hissed with red-faced urgency. ”The police—do you hear me?—the police!“

  In a panic, she undid the security chain and opened her door.

  Peterson drew the silencer-equipped pistol from the shoulder holster under his jacket, and he shot her three times.

  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.

  74

  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 b
ody, 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.

  75

  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.