The Key to Midnight

didn't work for him.'
        'It'll work for us. It has to.'
        'But even if it does - what'll we do after we get to Saint Moritz?'
        He sipped his tea and thought about her question. Finally he said. 'I'll find Rotenhausen's place, look it over. If it isn't too heavily guarded, I'll get in, find his file room. If he's the careful, methodical man of science he seems to be, maybe he'll have a record of what he did to you, how he did it, and why.'
        'What about British-Continental Insurance?'
        'What about it?'
        'If we follow up on that lead, maybe we won't have to go to Saint Moritz.'
        'Now that we know where they put you through this "treatment," we don't have to pry into British-Continental. Besides, that would be just as dangerous as going to Switzerland, but we wouldn't be likely to find as much there as at Rotenhausen's place.'
        She slumped back in her chair, resigned to the trip. 'When do we leave London?'
        'As soon as possible. Within the hour, if we can manage it.'

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    53
        
        When Alex and Joanna returned to the hotel for their passports and luggage, they didn't go to their suite alone. They stopped at the front desk, ordered a rental car, told the desk clerk that they were checking out sooner than originally anticipated, and took two bellmen upstairs with them.
        Although the bellmen served as unwitting guards, and though the senator's killers were not likely to strike in front of witnesses, Alex paced nervously in the drawing room and watched the door, alert for the silent turning of the knob, while Joanna got their bags ready to go. Fortunately, when they had arrived the previous night from Tokyo, they had been too tired to unpack more than essentials; and this morning, awakened by Tom Chelgrin's noisy messenger, they'd had no time to hang up their clothes and transfer their things from the suitcases to the dresser drawers, so repacking only required a couple of minutes.
        On the way downstairs, the elevator stopped to take aboard more people at the tenth floor. As the doors slid open, Alex unhooked one button on his overcoat, reached inside, and put his hand on the butt of the pistol tucked under the waistband of his trousers. He was half convinced that the people waiting in the corridor were not merely other hotel guests, that they would have submachine guns and would spray the elevator with bullets. The doors rolled open. An elderly couple entered the cab, conducting an animated discussion in rapid-fire Spanish, hardly aware of their fellow passengers.
        Joanna smiled grimly at Alex. She knew what he'd been thinking.
        He took his hand off the 9mm automatic and buttoned his coat.
        They had to wait in the lobby fifteen minutes for the rental car to arrive, but by a quarter past three, they drove away into rain so silver that it appeared to be sleet. Gray mist as thick as smoke settled lower with the waning of the day, engulfing the tops of the tallest buildings, and in the strange pewter light, London seemed medieval even where the buildings were all of glass and steel and modern angles.
        For a while they weaved through a Byzantine complexity of rain-lashed streets that branched off from one another with no discernible logic. They were lost but didn't care, because until they identified their tail and lost it, they had no specific destination.
        Turned in her seat, staring out the back window, Joanna said at last, 'Another Jaguar. A yellow one this time.'
        'All these bastards seem to travel in style.'
        'Well, they knew the senator,' Joanna said sarcastically, facing forward and engaging her seatbelt, 'and the senator always moved in the very best circles, didn't he?'
        Alex swerved right, in front of a bus and into thinner traffic. The tires squealed, the car shot forward, and he whipped from lane to lane, as if trying to make a car do what an Olympic skier could accomplish in a giant slalom. Motorists braked in surprise as the rental car swerved around and flashed past them, a truck driver blew his horn angrily, and pedestrians stopped and pointed. But the clog of London traffic didn't permit a protracted car chase like those in the movies, and the lanes ahead quickly began to jam up. Alex hung a hard left at the first corner and darted in front of a taxi with only centimeters to spare. At mid-block he swung the wrong way into a one-way backstreet and