The Key to Midnight

he saw that it was a deserted dining room.
        The second open door led to a living room with more low modern furniture and what might have been two Picasso originals. The big casement windows framed a dramatic view of Saint Moritz at night, aswirl with snow, revealing that the house was slightly above the town and at the edge of the forest.
        The fourth door led to a large guest bedroom with its own bath. It had not been used in a long time and had an unpleasant musty odor.
        The house remained unnaturally quiet. The walls were so thick and the bronze windows so well made that even the howling of the storm wind was a distant threnody.
        Alex was impressed with the size of the building. Evidently, Rotenhausen lived in this sprawling top-floor apartment, which left an enormous amount of space below for unknown purposes.
        The final door opened on a library furnished in a traditional style more in keeping with the house itself: mahogany paneling and bookshelves, a magnificent antique desk with an intricate marquetry top, a few wing-backed chairs upholstered in well-aged red leather. A Tiffany desk lamp with twelve trumpet-flower shades cast a light so golden that it seemed palpable.
        Alex stopped just over the threshold, overwhelmed by deja vu, frightened almost to the point of immobility. Although he had never been in the house on any prior occasion, he had seen this library before. Even the smaller objects were eerily familiar: a carousel-style pipe rack on the desk, a huge globe softly lighted from within, a sterling-silver magnifying glass with a long ornate handle, a two-bottle brandy chest…
        He had broken his paralysis and walked around the desk before he even realized that he was moving - as if half in a trance.
        He opened a desk drawer and then another. In the second drawer he found the 9mm pistol that he had taken off the man in the alleyway in Kyoto several days ago.
        The instant he saw the pistol, he realized that he had known it would be there.

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    64
        
        After she administered the injection, Ursula Zaitsev left Joanna alone in the white-walled room.
        The winter storm huffed at the high window that Joanna had recalled in one of her regression-therapy sessions with Dr. Inamura, but it also whined and whispered at another window behind her, which she could not see.
        She strained against the straps once more, but she was so well secured that any attempt to pull free was useless. She finally fell back against the mattress, gasping for breath.
        A minute passed. Two. Three. Five.
        Joanna expected the drug to take hold of her, because Ursula Zaitsev had implied that it was a sedative or a depressant. She ought to be getting drowsy - but, instead, she was thinking faster and more clearly by the minute.
        She figured she was on an adrenaline rush. It would fade in a minute or two, and the drug would begin to affect her.
        But she was still clearheaded when Rotenhausen entered the room. He closed the door after himself. Locked it.

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    65
        
        Sitting at the library desk, Alex thoroughly examined the gun. He was suspicious. They could have disabled the weapon.
        The pistol appeared to be in perfect working order. Unless the ammunition had been replaced with blanks.
        He assumed that he was being set up somehow. Suckered into a trap. But the nature of that trap seemed more incomprehensible the longer that he tried to puzzle out what it might be.
        Though he was reluctant to be manipulated any further, he could not simply sit there all night. He had to find Joanna and get her out of the house.
        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.
         Whump!
        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.

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    66
        
        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 flickering on strange configurations of