Key to Midnight Read Online Free Page A

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 hairstyle. 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 doppelgänger, an unrelated twin. Even if Joanna was a dead ringer for Lisa, the resemblance might be pure chance.
    For a while he stared at the telephone on the desk, and finally he said aloud, “Yeah. Only thing is, I never did believe in chance.”
    He’d built one of the largest security and private-investigation firms in the United States, and experience had taught him that every apparent coincidence was likely to be the visible tip on an iceberg of truth, with much more below the waterline than above.
    He pulled the telephone closer and placed an overseas call through the hotel switchboard. By eight-thirty in the morning, Kyoto time (four-thirty in the afternoon, Chicago time), he got hold of Ted Blankenship, his top man in the home office. “Ted, I want you to go personally to the dead-file room and pull everything we’ve got on Lisa Chelgrin. I want that file in Kyoto as soon as possible. Don’t trust it to an air courier service. Keep it inside the company. Give it to one of our junior field ops who doesn’t have anything better to do, and put him on the first available flight.”
    Blankenship chose his words