The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  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.

  76

  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.

  77

  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.

  The bastard doesn’t quit.

  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 nee
d 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.

  78

  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.

  A corpse lay in the hallway. Even in the poor light and from a distance, Joanna could see that it was Ursula Zaitsev.

  Several doors led off the hall. She didn’t want to open any of them, but she would have to search the place if she had any hope of finding Alex.

  The nearest door was ajar. She eased it open, hesitated, crossed the threshold—and her father stepped in front of her.

  Tom Chelgrin was ashen. His hair was streaked with blood, and his face was spotted with it. His left hand was pressed over what must have been a bullet wound in his chest, for his shirt was soaked with blood as dark as burgundy. He swayed, almost fell, took one step toward her, and put his bloody hand on her shoulder.

  79

  On the snow-swept slope, less than a hundred yards from the house, above the storm-dimmed lights of Saint Moritz, Alex and Peterson stared at each other for a long, uncertain moment.

  Alex couldn’t speak clearly or without pain, because his mouth was swollen and sore from the punch he’d taken, but he had questions and he wanted answers. “Why didn’t I kill you when I killed Paz and Chelgrin?”

  “You weren’t supposed to,” said the fat man. “Where’s Carrera?”

  “Dead.”

  “But you didn’t have a gun,” Peterson said incredulously.

  “No gun,” Alex agreed. He was weary. His eyes watered from the stinging cold. The fat man shimmered like a mirage in the night.

  “It’s hard to believe you could kill that mean bastard without a gun.”

  Alex spat blood onto the snow. “I didn’t say it was easy.”

  Peterson let out a short bray of laughter.

  “All right,” Alex said, “all right, get it over with. I killed him, now you kill me.”

  “Oh, heavens, no! No, no,” Peterson said. “You’ve got it all wrong, all backward, dear boy. You and I—we’re on the same team.”

  80

  Chelgrin had been dead in London. Dead on a hotel-room floor. Now he was here in Switzerland, dying again.

  The sight of the blood-smeared specter immobilized Joanna. She stood in shock, every muscle locked, while the senator clung to her shoulder.

  “I’m weak,” he said shakily. “Can’t stand up any more. Don’t let me ... fall. Please. Help me ... down easy. Let’s go down easy.”

  Joanna put one hand on the doorjamb to brace herself. She dropped slowly to her knees, and the senator used her for support. At last he was sitting with his back against the wall, pressing his left hand against the chest wound, and she was kneeling at his side.

  “Daughter,” he said, gazing at her wonderingly. “My baby.”

  She couldn’t accept him as her father. She thought of the long years of programmed loneliness, the attacks of claustrophobia when she’d dared to consider building a life with someone, the nightmares, the fear that might have been defeated if it could have been defined. She thought of how Rotenhausen had repeatedly raped her during her first stay in this place—and how he had tried to use her again this very night. Worse: If Alex was dead, Tom Chelgrin had directly or indirectly pulled the trigger. She had no room in her heart for this man. Maybe it was unfair of her to freeze him out before she knew his reasons for doing what he’d done; perhaps her inability to forgive her own father was itself unforgivable. Nevertheless, she felt no guilt whatsoever and knew that she never would. She despised him.

  “My little girl,” he said, but his voice seemed colored more by self-pitying sentimentality than by genuine love or remorse.

  “No,” she said, denying him.

  “You are. You’re my daughter.”

  “No.”

  “Lisa.”

  “Joanna. My name’s Joanna Rand.”

  He wheezed and cleared his throat. His speech was slurred. “You hate me ... don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t understand.”

  “I understand enough.”

  “No. No, you don’t. You’ve got to listen to me.”

  “Nothing you have to say could make me want to be your daughter. Lisa Chelgrin is dead. Forever.”

  The senator closed his eyes. A fierce wave of pain swept through him. He grimaced and bent forward.

  She made no move to comfort him.

  When the attack passed, he sat up straight again and opened his eyes. “I’ve got to tell you about it. You’ve got to give me a chance to explain. You have to listen to me.”

  “I’m listening,” she assured him, “but not because I have to.”

  His breath rattled in his throat. “Everyone thinks I was a war hero. They think I escaped from that Viet Cong prison camp and made my way back to friendly lines. I built my entire political career on that story, but it’s all a lie. I didn’t spend weeks in the jungle, inching my way out of enemy territory. I never escaped from a prison camp because ... I was never in one to begin with. Tom Chelgrin was a prisoner of war, all right, but not me.”

  “Not you? But you’re Tom Chelgrin,” she said, wondering if his pain and the loss of blood had clouded his mind.

  “No. My real name is Ilya Lyshenko. I’m a Russian.”

  Haltingly, pausing often to wheeze or to spit dark blood, he told her how Ilya Lyshenko had become the Honorable United States Senator from the great state of Illinois, the well-known and widely respected potential candidate for the presidency, Thomas Chelgrin. He was convincing—although Joanna supposed that every dying man’s confession was convincing.

  She listened, amazed and fascinated.

  81

  At the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, in every Viet Cong labor camp, commandants were looking for certain special American prisoners of war: soldiers who shared a list of physical characteristics with a dozen young Russian intelligence officers who had volunteered for a project code-named
“Mirror.” None of the Vietnamese assisting in the search knew the name of the project or what the Russians hoped to achieve with it, but they did not allow themselves to be in the least curious because they understood that curiosity killed more than cats.

  When Tom Chelgrin was brought in chains to a camp outside Hanoi, the commandant saw at once that he somewhat resembled a member of the Russian Mirror group. Chelgrin and the Russian were the same height and build, had the same color hair and eyes. Their basic facial-bone structures were similar. Upon his arrival at the camp, Chelgrin was segregated from the other prisoners, and for the rest of his life he spent mornings and afternoons with interrogators, evenings and nights in solitary confinement. A Vietnamese photographer took more than two hundred shots of Chelgrin’s entire body, but mostly of his face from every possible angle, in every light: close-ups, medium shots, long shots to show how he stood and how he held his shoulders.

  The undeveloped negatives were sent to Moscow by special courier, where KGB directors in charge of the Mirror group anxiously awaited them.

  Military physicians in Moscow studied the photographs of Thomas Chelgrin for three days before reporting that he appeared to be a reasonably good match for Ilya Lyshenko, a Mirror volunteer. One week later, Ilya underwent the first of many surgeries to transform him into Chelgrin’s double. His hairline was too low, so cosmetic surgeons destroyed some hair follicles and moved the line back three quarters of an inch. His eyelids drooped slightly, thanks to the genetic heritage of a Mongolian great-great-grandfather; they lifted the lids to make them look more Western. His nose was pared down, and a bump was removed from the bridge. His earlobes were too large, so they were reduced as well. His mouth was shaped quite like Tom Chelgrin’s mouth, but his teeth required major dental work to match Chelgrin’s. Lyshenko’s chin was round, which was no good for this masquerade, so it was made square. Finally, the surgeons circumcised Lyshenko and pronounced him a fit doppelgänger.