The Key to Midnight

stomped the accelerator. Building walls flashed past in a stony blur, two feet away on either side. The small car bounced and shimmied on the rough cobblestones, severely testing Alex's grip on the steering wheel. If anyone entered the alleyway ahead of them, a head-on crash couldn't be averted; but luck was with them, and they exploded out of the cramped street onto a main thoroughfare, fishtailing across the wet pavement in front of oncoming traffic and into a cacophony of squealing brakes and blaring horns. Alex turned right and sped through a red traffic light as it changed from yellow.
        The Jaguar was no longer in sight.
        'Terrific!' Joanna said.
        'Not so terrific.' He kept glancing worriedly at the rear-view mirror. 'We shouldn't have lost them. Not that easily.'
        'Easily? You think that was easy? We nearly wrecked half a dozen times!'
        'They kill like professionals, so they ought to be able to run a tail like professionals. Should've kept on top of us every minute. They had a better car than this one. And they must be a lot more familiar with the streets than we are. It's just like this morning with the other Jaguar. It's as if they wanted to let us get away - so we'd feel safe.'
        'But why would they be playing a game like that?'
        He scowled. 'I don't know. I feel like we're being manipulated, and I sure don't like the feeling. It scares me.'
        'Maybe they don't have to take exceptional risks to keep us in view,' she said, 'because they've got this car bugged. A concealed transmitter. Or am I being paranoid?'
        'These days,' Alex said, 'only the paranoid survive.'
        

    * * *
        
        Somewhere in the suburban sprawl, as the storm diluted the last light of dusk and washed it into a deep ocean of night, they stopped in the loneliest end of a shopping-center parking lot. Joanna stayed in the car and kept watch while Alex removed the license plates from their rental car and put them on a nearby Toyota. He didn't put the Toyota plates on the rental but kept them for later use.
        A few miles farther on, they stopped at a busy roadside supper club. Over rolling thunder and the incessant roar of the rain, big-band music and laughter drifted through the drenched night.
        Alex checked parked cars for unlocked doors, then looked inside each accessible vehicle in hope of finding keys in the ignition. In a silver-gray Ford, he discovered what he was looking for under the driver's seat.
        Alex drove away in the stolen vehicle. Joanna stayed close behind him in the rental car. As far as he could tell, no one followed them.
        In an apartment-complex parking lot, they quickly transferred their bags to the Ford. They abandoned the rental, sans license plates, and went in search of a quiet residential neighborhood.
        Ten minutes later, they parked on a street lined with relatively new, identical, single-family brick houses with shallow front lawns and bare-limbed trees, where Alex removed the Ford's license plates and replaced them with the set he had taken from the Toyota in the shopping center. He dropped the Ford's tags into a drainage grate at the curb, and they splashed into the dark water below.
        The owner of the Toyota was unlikely to notice immediately that his plates had been replaced with those from the rental car. And when the Ford was reported stolen back at the supper club, police would be looking for a car with the plates that were now lost in the storm drain.
        By the time they were on the move again, Alex and Joanna were soaked and shivering, but they felt safer. He turned up the heater to its maximum setting. It was going to take a while to chase away the chill, because he was cold all the way into his bones.

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    54
        
        Joanna fiddled with the car radio until she located a station playing Beethoven. The beautiful music relieved her tension.
        Using complimentary road maps provided by the car-rental agency, they got lost only three times before they were headed south on the correct highway. They were going to Brighton, on the coast, where Alex intended to spend the night.
        For years Joanna had thought that the highway they now traveled was the same on which Robert and Elizabeth Rand had lost their lives. But both London and this outlying landscape were new and strange to her. Hard as it was to accept, she now knew that she had never spent her