The Key to Midnight

probably been followed since he'd arrived in Kyoto.
        Gingerly he moved his arm, held it away from his chest. Although the wounds continued to bleed freely, they weren't serious enough to require a doctor's attention. He hadn't any desire to explain the injury to anyone other than Joanna.
        The burning-stinging had grown worse, intolerable. He plunged his arm under the cold water that foamed out of the faucet. Relief was instantaneous, and he sat for a couple of minutes, just thinking.
        The first time he'd seen Joanna Rand at the Moonglow, when he'd first suspected that she might be Lisa Chelgrin, he'd figured that she must have engineered her own kidnapping in Jamaica, twelve years ago. He couldn't imagine why she would have done such a thing, but his years as a detective had taught him that people committed drastic acts for the thinnest and strangest reasons. Sometimes they hurtled off the rails in a simple quest for freedom or new thrills or self-destruction. They sought change for the sake of change, for better or worse.
        After talking to Joanna, however, he'd known she wasn't one of those reckless types. Besides, it was ludicrous to suppose that she could have planned her own abduction and confused Bonner-Hunter's best investigators, especially when, at that time, she had been an inexperienced college girl.
        He considered amnesia again, but that was as unsatisfying as the other explanations. As an amnesiac, she might have forgotten every detail of her previous life, but she would not have fabricated and come to believe a completely false set of memories in order to fill the gap, which was precisely what Joanna seemed to have done.
        Okay, she was not consciously deceiving anyone, and she was not an amnesiac, at least not in the classic sense. What possibilities were left?
        He withdrew his arm from the cold water. The flow of blood had been reduced. He wrapped the arm tightly in a towel. Eventually blood would seep through, but as a temporary bandage, the towel was adequate.
        He returned to the drawing room and telephoned the bell captain in the hotel lobby. He asked for a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a bottle of Mercurochrome, a box of gauze pads, a roll of gauze, and adhesive tape. 'If the man who brings it is fast, there'll be an especially generous tip for him.'
        The bell captain said, 'If there's been an accident, we have a house doctor who-'
        'Only a minor accident. No need for a doctor, thank you. Just those items I requested.'
        While he waited for the bandages and antiseptics, Alex made himself presentable. In the bathroom, he stripped out of his blood-drenched undershirt, scrubbed his chest with the washcloth, and combed his hair.
        The worst of the stinging pain in the wounds had subsided to a pounding but tolerable ache. The arm was stiff, as if undergoing a Medusan metamorphosis: flesh into stone.
        In the drawing room, he picked up most of the shattered vase and dropped the pieces in the wastebasket. He took the straight-backed chair from under the doorknob and returned it to the desk.
        Blood was beginning to work through the layers of the towel that was wrapped around his arm.
        He sat at the desk to wait for the bellhop, and the room seemed to move slowly around him.
        If he ruled out deception and classic amnesia, he was left with only one credible explanation for Joanna's condition: brainwashing.
        'Crazy,' he said aloud.
        With drugs, hypnosis, and subliminal reeducation, they could have wiped her mind clean. Absolutely spotless. Actually, he was not a hundred percent certain that such a thing was possible, but he thought it was a good bet. The modern menu of psychological-conditioning and brainwashing techniques was far more extensive than it had been in the Korean or Vietnam wars. In the past ten years there had been truly amazing advances in those areas of research - psychopharmacology, biochemistry, psychosurgery, clinical psychology - that directly and indirectly contributed to the less reputable but nonetheless hotly pursued science of mind control.
        He hoped that something far less severe had been done to Lisa. If the complete eradication of a life-set of memories still eluded modern science, then the girl's kidnappers might have been able to do no more than repress her original personality. In which case, Lisa might still be buried deep beneath the