The Key to Midnight

were fragments of memory.
        Although she had no recollection of ever having been seriously ill or injured, she half believed that once she must have been in a hospital room that had reeked with an abnormally powerful odor of antiseptics. A hospital… in which something terrible had happened to her, something that was the cause of the repeating nightmare about the man with steel fingers.
        Silly. But the dream always left her rattled and irrational.
        She went into the bathroom and drew a glass of water from the tap. She returned to the bed, sat on the edge of it, drank the water, and then slipped under the covers once more. After a brief hesitation, she switched off the lamp.
        Outside, in the predawn stillness, a bird cried. A large bird, a piercing cry. The flutter of wings. Past the window. Feathers brushing the glass. Then the bird sailed off into the night, its thin screams growing thinner, fainter.

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    6
        
        Suddenly, as he sat in bed reading, Alex recalled where and when he'd previously seen the woman. Joanna Rand wasn't her real name.
        He had awakened at six-thirty Wednesday morning in his suite at the Kyoto Hotel. Whether vacationing or working, he was always up early and to bed late, requiring never more than five hours of rest to feel alert and refreshed.
        He was grateful for his uncommon metabolism, because he knew that by spending fewer hours in bed, he was at an advantage in any dealings with people who were greater slaves to the mattress than he was. To Alex, who was an overachiever by choice as well as by nature, sleep was a detestable form of slavery, insidious. Each night was a temporary death to be endured but never enjoyed. Time spent in sleep was time wasted, surrendered, stolen. By saving three hours a night, he was gaining eleven hundred hours of waking life each year, eleven hundred hours in which to read books and watch films and make love, more than forty-five 'found' days in which to study, observe, learn - and make money.
        It was a cliché but also true that time was money. And in Alex Hunter's philosophy, money was the only sure way to obtain the two most important things in life: independence and dignity, either of which meant immeasurably more to him than did love, sex, friendship, praise, or anything else.
        He had been born poor, raised by a pair of hopeless alcoholics to whom the word 'dignity' was as empty of meaning as the word 'responsibility.' As a child, he had resolved to discover the secret of obtaining wealth, and he'd found it before he had turned twenty: time. The secret of wealth was time. Having learned that lesson, he applied it with fervor. In more than twenty years of judiciously managed time, his net worth had increased from a thousand dollars to more than twelve million. His habit of being late to bed and early to rise, while half at odds with Ben Franklin's immortal advice, was a major factor in his phenomenal success.
        Ordinarily he would begin the day by showering, shaving, and dressing precisely within twenty minutes of waking, but this morning he allowed himself the routine-shattering luxury of reading in bed. He was on vacation, after all.
        Now, as he sat propped up by pillows, with a book in his lap, he realized who Joanna Rand really was. While he read, his subconscious mind, loath to squander time, apparently remained occupied with the mystery of Joanna, for although he hadn't been consciously thinking of her, he suddenly made the connection between her and an important face out of his past.
        'Lisa,' he whispered.
        He put the book aside.
        Lisa. She was twelve years older. A different hair style. All the baby fat of a twenty-year-old girl was gone from her face, and she was a mature woman now. But she was still Lisa.
        Agitated, he got up, showered, and shaved.
        Staring into his own eyes in the bathroom mirror, he said, 'Slow down. Maybe the resemblance isn't as remarkable as you think.'
        He hadn't seen a photograph of Lisa Chelgrin in at least ten years. When he got his hands on a picture, he might discover that Joanna looked like Lisa only to the extent that a robin resembled a bluejay.
        He dressed, sat at the writing desk in the suite's sparsely furnished living room, and tried to convince himself that everyone in the world had a Doppelganger, an unrelated twin. Even if Joanna was a dead ringer for Lisa, the