The Key to Midnight (37 page)

He rose from the desk chair, pointed the silencer-equipped pistol at a row of books on the far side of the room, and squeezed the trigger.

One of the books jumped on the shelf, and the spine cracked with a sound louder than the noise made by the gun itself.

The pistol wasn’t loaded with blanks.

He left the library and went to the head of the stairs.

The Hand.

He looked much the same as he had in her nightmares: tall and thin, clothes hanging loosely on him, balder than he had been twelve years ago but still without gray in his hair. His eyes were pale brown, almost yellow, and in them shone a controlled madness as cold as Arctic sun flicker ing on strange configurations of ice. The shiny, chitinous, gear-jointed fingers of his steel hand reminded her of the grasping legs of certain carnivorous insects.

Mariko had assured her that she’d find this man less frightening in reality than he was in her nightmares, but the opposite was true: She was weak with terror.

As he approached the bed, he said, “Sleepy, little lady?”

Though it was clear that he expected her to be in a stupor or on the edge of one, her mind wasn’t in the least clouded. She wondered if Zaitsev had made a mistake and given her the wrong drug.

“Hmmm?” he said. “Sleepy?”

Fate—or someone in its employ—had given her a last, desperate chance, though it was as thin as an atheist’s hope.

“Let me go,” she said, slurring her voice as though sinking under the influence of the medication. Through her half-closed eyes, she thought that he was suddenly suspicious, and she said, “Wake up. Gotta... wake up.”

“You think you’re already asleep?” he asked, amusement replacing any suspicion that he might have had. “You think getting rid of me will be as easy as waking up? Not this time.”

She closed her eyes and didn’t answer him at once, pretending to slip away for a moment. Then she opened her eyes but squinted as if having difficulty focusing on him. “I ... hate you ... hate ... you,” she said with no edge of true anger, but in a dreamy voice, as though the drug had disconnected her mind from her emotions.

“Good,” he said. “I like it when there’s hatred.”

The steel fingers clicked as he reached for her.

The house was solidly built. Not one step creaked.

Alex paused at the second-floor landing. The deserted hallway was hung with shadows, illumined only by a weak amber mist of light that drifted into it from the stairwell. The air was redolent of disinfectants and medicinal odors, indicating that Joanna might have been imprisoned twelve years ago in one of these second-floor rooms.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

Hit once in the chest, Chelgrin 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.

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.

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.