The Key to Midnight

knowledge of martial arts, but no doubt Carrera was even better trained.
        He stumbled backward through the door, pulled it shut after him, and ran along the ground-floor hallway. The last room on the right was dark. He plunged across the threshold, slammed the door, fumbled frantically for a latch. He found a privacy-lock button in the center of the knob.
        An instant later Carrera reached the other side, tried to get in, discovered that he had been locked out, and immediately threw himself against the door, determined to break it down.
        Alex located the light switch. The overhead bulb revealed an empty storeroom that offered nothing he could use as a weapon.
        He was loath to leave the house with Joanna held somewhere in it, but he would be no good to her if he got himself killed.
        As Carrera battered the door, Alex crossed to the storeroom window and put up the blind. A fierce gust of wind fired a barrage of fine white granules against the glass.
        Carrera hit the door again, again, and wood splintered.
        With trembling hands, Alex unlatched the casement window and pushed the halves outward. Arctic wind exploded into the room.
        Carrera rammed into the door. In the lock, tortured metal shrieked against metal.
        Even wounded, the man was a bull.
        Alex clambered over the window ledge and stepped into a foot of fresh snow. Wind howled along the valley wall, clocking at least seventy or eighty kilometers an hour; it bit his face, wrung tears from his eyes, and flash-numbed his hands. He was thankful for the insulated ski clothes that they had bought in Klosters.
        In the room he'd just left, the door went down with a thunderous boom.
        Alex hurried away into the bitter darkness, kicking up clouds of snow as he went.

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    73
        
        By the time Peterson reached the storeroom, Carrera was climbing through the window in pursuit of Hunter. Peterson started after him, but then he changed his mind and crossed the hall to Ursula Zaitsev's private quarters.
        She refused to answer when he knocked.
        'Ursula, it's me. Anson. Hurry.'
        The door cracked open on a security chain, and she peered at him fearfully. 'What's all the noise? What's gone wrong?'
        'Everything. We have to get out of here right now, right away, before the police arrive.'
        'Go?' She was a strange, self-involved woman even in the best of times, but in her bewilderment she had the wild-eyed look of an asylum inmate. 'Go where?'
        'Damn it, Ursula, hurry! Do you want to go home - or spend the rest of your life in a Swiss jail?'
        She had left Russia twenty years ago and had been Rotenhausen's assistant - and watchdog - for fifteen, from the day that his funding had been provided exclusively by Moscow. Since she'd been away from home, the old order had fallen, and judging by her expression, the home to which she would be going was one that she either found unappealing or could not quite comprehend.
         'Ursula' Peterson hissed with red-faced urgency. 'The police - do you hear me? - the police!'
        In a panic, she undid the security chain and opened her door.
        Peterson drew the silencer-equipped pistol from the shoulder holster under his jacket, and he shot her three times.
        For such a severe-looking, even mannish woman, Ursula died gracefully, almost prettily. The bullets spun her around as if she were twirling to show a new skirt to a boyfriend. There wasn't much mess, perhaps because she was too thin and dry to contain any substantial quantity of blood. She sagged against the wall, gazed at Peterson without seeing him, allowed a delicate thread of blood to escape one corner of her mouth, let go of her icy expression for the first time since he had known her, and slid down into death.
        Four of the six people on Anson Peterson's hit list had been eliminated. Marlowe. Paz. Chelgrin. Ursula Zaitsev. Only two others awaited disposal.
        He sprinted across the hall and into the storeroom with that peculiar grace that certain very fat men could summon on occasion. He climbed through the open casement window and groaned when the bitter night air slapped his face. The only thing he disliked more than exertion and an unsatisfied appetite was physical discomfort.
        He was having a very bad evening.
        The wind was busily scouring the footprints from the newly fallen