The Key to Midnight

dreaming, but the full horror of her situation quickly became apparent. Her hammering heart pounded a cold sweat out of her.
        Broad leather straps with Velcro fasteners restrained her wrists and ankles. She wrenched at them, but she was well secured.
        'Ah,' a woman said behind Joanna, 'the patient's awake at last.'
        She had thought that the head of the bed was against the wall and that she was alone; but she was in the center of the room. She twisted her neck, trying to see the person who had spoken, but the straps and the inclined mattress foiled her.
        After a taunting moment, a woman in a white smock walked around to the side of the bed where she could be seen. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Sharp features. Unsmiling. Rotenhausen's assistant. Joanna remembered the pinched face and hard eyes from one of the regression-therapy sessions in Omi Inamura's office.
        'Where's Alex?' Joanna asked.
        Without answering, the woman picked up a sphygmo-manometer from a tray of medical instruments and wrapped the pressure pad around Joanna's arm.
        She tried to struggle, but the straps rendered her helpless. 'Where's Alex?' she repeated.
        The physician took her blood pressure. 'Excellent.' She unwound the pad and put it aside.
        'Unbuckle these straps,' Joanna demanded, trying to quell her terror by focusing on her rage.
        'It's over,' the woman said, tying a rubber tube around Joanna's arm, forcing a vein to bulge. She swabbed the skin with alcohol.
        'I'll fight you,' Joanna promised.
        'If it makes you happy.'
        The woman had an accent, as Joanna had recalled in regression therapy. It wasn't German or Scandinavian. A Slavic accent of some kind. Russian? The senator had said something about Russians when he'd telephoned Alex in London.
        The woman tore open a plastic packet that contained a hypodermic syringe.
        Joanna's heart was already slamming. The sight of the syringe made it throb painfully harder than before.
        The physician thrust the needle through the sterile seal on the end of a small bottle that contained a colorless drug. She drew some of the fluid into the syringe.
        When the woman took hold of her arm, Joanna twisted and jerked in the restraining straps just enough to make the vein a difficult target. 'No. No way. Get away from me.'
        The doctor backhanded her across the face, and in the instant that Joanna needed to recover from the shock and pain, the needle slipped into her.
        With tears running down her face, she said, 'Bitch.'
        'You'll feel better in a minute.'
        'You rotten, stinking bitch,' Joanna said bitterly.
        'I'll give you a name to hate,' the physician said with a small smile. 'Ursula Zaitsev.'
        'That's you? I'll remember. I'll remember your name, and I'll destroy you.'
        Ursula Zaitsev's economical smile grew broader by a millimeter or two. 'No, you're quite wrong. You won't remember it - or anything else.'

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    63
        
        Alex slowly pushed open the swinging door from the kitchen. The dimly lighted hallway was deserted, and he eased into it.
        Five other doors opened off the corridor before it reached the head of the stairs. Three were closed. Past the two open doors were dark rooms.
        He stepped to the closed door across the hall, hesitated, opened it, and peered into a bedroom with exquisite contemporary furnishings in lacewood and bird's-eye maple, which somehow didn't seem at odds with the considerable age of the house. The lamp on the nightstand cast warm light on a deeply sculpted, predominantly green carpet. He checked the adjacent master bath but found no one.
        Beside the bed were half a dozen books. Five dealt with new discoveries in the behavioral sciences. The sixth was a heavily illustrated, privately printed collection of pornography: The subject was sadism; the beautiful, vulnerable-looking women in the pictures appeared to be suffering in earnest. The blood appeared to be real. It turned Alex's stomach.
        In one of the bureau drawers were two pairs of fine leather gloves. No. Not pairs. When he looked closer, he saw that the four gloves were all for the same hand.
        Unquestionably, this was Franz Rotenhausen's house.
        In the corridor again, Alex went to one of the open doors. He found the light switch, flipped it on, and immediately snapped it off again when