The Key to Midnight (34 page)

As the windshield wipers thumped like a heartbeat, she thought of her real father, Thomas Chelgrin, lying dead on that hotel-room floor, and she wished that the image of the bloodied senator could reduce her to tears. Feeling grief would be better than feeling nothing at all. But her heart was closed to him.

She put one hand on Alex’s shoulder, just to reassure herself that he was real and that she was not alone.

He glanced at her, evidently sensed her mood, and winked.

The storm continued without surcease. On the black highway, the headlights shimmered like the lambent glow of the moon reflecting off the glassy surface of a swift-flowing river.

“Just west of Brighton,” Alex said, “on the way to Worthing, there’s a quaint little inn called The Bell and The Dragon. It’s a couple hundred years old but beautifully kept, and the food’s quite good.”

“Won’t we need a reservation?”

“Not this late in the year. The tourist season is long past. They ought to have a few nice rooms available.”

When they arrived at The Bell and The Dragon a short while later, the only sign announcing it was a large wooden billboard hung from a crossbar between two posts near the highway—no neon, no well-lighted announcement panel advertising an early-bird dinner special or a piano bar. The inn was tucked in a stand of ancient oaks, and the parking lot was nearly as dark as it must have been in the days when the guests arrived in horse-drawn coaches. It was a rambling structure, pleasing to the eye, half brick and half plaster with a crosswork of rugged, exposed beams. The front doors were fashioned from oak timbers and featured hand-carved plaques indicating that beds, food, and drink were offered inside. In the lobby and public rooms, soft electric lights hidden in converted gas lamps imparted a marvelous luster to the polished, richly inlaid paneling.

Alex and Joanna were given spacious quarters on the second floor. White plaster walls. Darkly stained beams. A pegged oak floor protected by plush area carpets.

Joanna examined the griffin-head water spouts in the bathroom, was pleased to find that the stone fireplace in the bedroom would actually work if they chose to use it, and finally threw herself on the four-poster bed. “It’s absolutely delightful.”

“It belongs to another age—one more hospitable than ours.”

“It’s charming. I love it. How often have you stayed here?”

The question appeared to surprise him. He stared at her but didn’t speak.

She sat up on the bed. “What’s wrong?”

He turned slowly in a full circle, studying the room. At last he said, “I’ve never stayed here before.”

“Who told you about it?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. I’ve never been to Brighton before, can’t remember ever talking to anyone about it—except to you, of course. This is the third time today.”

“The third time what?” Joanna asked.

He went to the nearest window and gazed into the rainy darkness beyond. “It’s the third time I’ve known about something I shouldn’t know about. Have no way of knowing about. Creepy. Before I opened that note this morning, I knew it was from the senator.”

“That was just a good guess,” Joanna said.

“And before we ever got to his hotel room, before I saw that his door was ajar, I knew Tom Chelgrin was dead.”

“Intuition.”

Alex turned away from the window, shaking his head. “No. This place is more than a hunch. I knew the name—The Bell and The Dragon. I knew exactly how it would look, as if I’d seen it before.”

“Maybe someone told you about it, but you just don’t recall. Or you read about it in a travel article—one with photographs.”

“No. I’d remember,” he insisted.

“Not if it was a few years ago. Not if it was casual reading. Maybe a magazine in a doctor’s office. Something you skimmed and pretty much forgot, except this place stuck in your subconscious.”

“Maybe,” he said, though he was obviously unconvinced.

He turned to the window again, put his face close to the glass, and stared into the night, as if certain that people were out there staring back at him.

With the descent of night in London, the temperature had dropped ten degrees. It now hovered at the freezing point. The wind had grown stronger, and the rain had become sleet.

On his way home from the Fielding Athison offices in Soho, Marlowe—previously in charge of all Soviet operations that had used the importing company as a front, now working for post-Soviet forces that still dreamed of a Russian Marxist Utopia—drove slowly and cursed the weather. He kept his head tucked down and his shoulders drawn up in anticipation of a collision. Everywhere he looked, cars slid on the icy pavement, and as far as he could tell, he was the only motorist in all of Greater London who wasn’t driving like a suicidal maniac.

In a line of work that demanded caution, Marlowe was one of the most cautious men he knew. He had committed himself to a life of treason, which was, thank you very much, more than enough risk for any man. Having made that one dangerous decision, he tried thereafter to ensure that espionage would be as thoroughly safe and serene an occupation as floral arrangement or managing a tobacco shop. He abhorred taking any action without first thinking through all the ramifications, and he was always markedly slower to act than any of his associates. He kept four stashes of false passports and getaway cash at various places in England, as well as secret bank accounts in Switzerland
and
Grand Cayman.

His aversion to risk extended beyond his working world into his private life. He participated in no leisure sports that were likely to result in broken bones or torn ligaments. He didn’t hunt, because occasionally one saw stories in the press about hunting accidents, chaps shooting themselves or one another, either out of carelessness or because they’d mistaken one another for game. He had acquaintances who enjoyed hot-air ballooning, which he considered no safer than bungee jumping off high bridges, so he refused to join them on their mad weekend flights. He faithfully followed a low-fat, low-salt diet. He never drank alcoholic beverages or any beverage containing caffeine. He ate only trace amounts of refined sugar, always bundled up well and wore a hat in cold weather, underwent a complete physical examination twice a year, never had sex without a condom, and drove as sedately as an octogenarian vicar.

On the roadway ahead, another driver stood on the brakes, and the car fishtailed wildly on the ice-sheathed pavement.

Marlowe tamped his brakes judiciously and congratulated himself on having left enough room to stop short of a collision.

Behind him, the brakes of another vehicle squealed horribly.

Marlowe winced, gritted his teeth, and counted the seconds until impact.

Miraculously, no crash ensued.

“Morons,” Marlowe said.

He cherished life. He intended to die no sooner than his one hundredth birthday—and then in bed with a young woman. A very young woman. Two very young women.

At the moment his anxiety was exacerbated by his inability to concentrate on his driving to the degree he would have liked. In spite of the constant fear that some lunatic would plow into him, he couldn’t prevent his mind from wandering. The past few days had been filled with signs and portents, bad omens—and he couldn’t stop mulling them over, trying to decide what they meant.

First, he had come out of the confrontation with Ignacio Carrera less well than expected. When he’d tried to learn Joanna Rand’s real name, he had been operating on his long-held conviction that he and Carrera were equals in the eyes of the masters whom they served. Instead, he’d been slapped down. Hard. Then word had come from Moscow that Marlowe was to back off the Rand situation, obey Carrera, and leave the mysterious woman unharmed even if she blundered into the offices of Fielding Athison and threatened to disrupt the entire operation.

Marlowe was still smarting from that loss of face when the grotesque Anson Peterson swept in from America and began issuing commands with royal arrogance. Marlowe wasn’t permitted to see the Rand woman, not even a photograph of her. He was told not to speak to her if she should call British-Continental again. He was not even supposed to think about her any more. Peterson was in charge of the operation, and Marlowe was instructed to go about his other work as if he knew nothing whatsoever about the crisis.

But Marlowe was reluctant to surrender even a single minor prerogative of his position. He jealously guarded his authority and privileges; it was dangerous to relinquish even a small amount of hard-won power. One backward step on the ladder could turn into a long, bone-crunching fall to the bottom, because everywhere there were schemers who envied their betters and were willing to give them a killing push over the brink at the first sign of weakness.

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.

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.