The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  While Lyshenko was enduring seven months of plastic surgery, Thomas Chelgrin was sweating out a seemingly endless series of brutal inquisitions at the camp outside Hanoi. He was in the hands of the Viet Cong’s best interrogators—who were being assisted by two Soviet advisers. They employed drugs, threats, promises, hypnosis, beatings, and torture to learn everything they needed to know about him. They compiled an immense dossier: the foods he liked least; the foods he liked most; his favorite brands of beer, cigarettes; his public and private religious beliefs; the names of his friends, descriptions of them, and lists of their likes, dislikes, quirks, foibles, habits, virtues, weaknesses; his political convictions; his favorite sports, movies; his racial prejudices; his fears; his hopes; his sexual preferences and techniques; and thousands upon thousands of other things. They squeezed him as though he were an orange, and they didn’t intend to leave one drop of juice in him.

  Once a week, lengthy transcripts of the sessions with Chelgrin were flown to Moscow, where they were edited down to lists of data. Ilya Lyshenko studied them while convalescing between surgeries. He was required to commit to memory literally tens of thousands of bits of information, and it was the most difficult job that he had ever undertaken.

  He was treated by two psychologists who specialized in memory research under the auspices of the KGB. They used both drugs and hypnosis to assist him in the retention of the information he needed to become Thomas Chelgrin, and while he slept, recordings of the lists played softly in his room, conveying the information directly to his subconscious.

  After fourteen years of English studies, which had begun when he was eight years old, Lyshenko had learned to speak the language without a Russian accent. In fact, he had the clear but colorless diction of local television newsmen in the Middle Atlantic States. Now he listened to recordings of Chelgrin’s voice and attempted to imprint a Midwest accent over the bland English that he already spoke. By the time the final surgeries had been performed, he sounded as though he had been born and raised on an Illinois farm.

  When Lyshenko was halfway through his metamorphosis, the men in charge of Mirror began to worry about Tom Chelgrin’s mother. They were confident that Lyshenko would be able to deceive Chelgrin’s friends and acquaintances, even most of his relatives, but they were worried that anyone especially close to him—such as his mother, father, or wife—would notice changes in him or lapses of memory. Fortunately Chelgrin had never been married or even terribly serious about any one girl. He was handsome and popular, and he played the field. Equally fortunate: His father had died when Tom was a child. As far as the KGB was concerned, that left Tom’s mother as the only serious threat to the success of the masquerade. That problem was easily remedied, for in those flush days when the Soviet economy had been largely militarized, the KGB had a long arm and deep pockets for operations on foreign soil. Orders were sent to an agent in New York, and ten days later, Tom’s mother died in an automobile accident on her way home from a bridge party. The night was dark and the narrow road was icy; it was a tragedy that could have befallen anyone.

  In late 1968, eight months after Tom Chelgrin had been captured, Ilya Lyshenko arrived by night at the labor camp outside Hanoi. He was in the company of Emil Gotrov, the KGB director who had conceived of the scheme, found funding for it, and overseen its implementation. He waited with Gotrov in the camp commandant’s private quarters while Chelgrin was brought from his isolation cell.

  When the American walked into the room and saw Lyshenko, he knew immediately that he was not destined to live. The fear in his haggard face and the despair in his eyes were, of course, a testimony to the work of the Soviet surgeons—but the doomed man’s anguished expression had haunted Ilya Lyshenko across three decades.

  “Mirror,” Gotrov had said, astounded. “A mirror image.”

  That night the real Thomas Chelgrin was taken out of the prison camp, shot in the back of the head, tumbled into a deep grave, soaked with gasoline, burned, and then buried.

  Within a week, the new Thomas Chelgrin “escaped” from the camp outside Hanoi and, against impossible odds and over the period of a few weeks, made his way back to friendly territory and eventually connected with his own division. He was sent home to Illinois, where he wrote a best-selling book about his amazing experiences—actually, it was ghost-written by a world-famous American writer who had long been sympathetic to the Soviet cause—and he became a war hero.

  Tom Chelgrin’s mother hadn’t been a wealthy woman, but she had managed to pay premiums on a life insurance policy that named her son—and only child—as the sole beneficiary. That money came into his hands when he returned from the war. He used it and the earnings from his book to purchase a Honda dealership just before Americans fell in love with Japanese cars. The business flourished beyond his wildest expectations, and he put the profits into other investments that also did well.

  His orders from the men behind Mirror had been simple. He was expected to become a business entrepreneur. He was expected to prosper, and if he could not turn a large buck on his own, KGB money would be funneled into his enterprises by various subtle means and an array of third parties. In his thirties, when his community knew him to be a respectable citizen and a successful businessman, he would run for a major public office, and the KGB would indirectly contribute substantial funds to his campaign.

  He followed the plan—but with one important change. By the time he was prepared to seek elective office, he had become hugely wealthy on his own, without KGB help. And by the time he sought a seat in the United States House of Representatives, he was able to obtain all the legitimate financial backing he needed to complement his own money, and the KGB didn’t have to open its purse.

  In Moscow the highest hope was that he would become a member of the lower house of Congress and win reelection for three or four terms. During those eight or ten years, he would be able to pass along incredible quantities of vital military information.

  He lost his first election by a narrow margin, primarily because he had never remarried after the loss of his first wife, who had died in childbirth. At that time, the American public had a prejudice against bachelors in politics. Two years later, when he tried again, he used his adorable young daughter, Lisa Jean, to win the hearts of voters. Thereafter, he swiftly rose from the lower house of Congress to the upper—until he developed into a prime presidential candidate.

  His success had been a thousandfold greater than Moscow had ever hoped, and even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the surviving Marxist element in the new government of Russia held a tight rein on Tom Chelgrin. He was more valuable than diamond mines. Where once he had labored to obtain and pass along highly sensitive military information, he now worked somewhat more openly to transfer billions of U.S. dollars in loans and foreign aid into the grasping hands of his masters, who had lost the Cold War but still prospered.

  Eventually his success became the central problem of his life. Even while the Cold War had still been under way, Thomas Chelgrin—who had once been Ilya Lyshenko— had lost all faith in the principles of communism. As a United States Congressman and then as a Senator, with his soul secretly in hock to the KGB, he was called upon to betray the country that he had learned to love. By then he didn’t want to pass along the information they sought, but he could find no way to refuse. The KGB owned him. He was trapped.

  82

  “But why was my past taken from me?” Joanna demanded. “Stolen from me. Why did you send me to Rotenhausen?”

  “Had to.” The senator bent forward, racked by a vicious twist of pain. His breath bubbled wetly, hideously in his throat. When he found the strength to sit up straight again, he said, “Jamaica. You and I were ... going to spend a whole week down there ... at the vacation house in Jamaica.”

  “You and Lisa,” she corrected.

  “I was going to fly down from Washington on a Thursday night. You were at school in New York. Columbia. A senior. Summer term. There was a project you had
to finish. You couldn’t ... get away until Friday.”

  He closed his eyes and didn’t speak for so long that she thought he had lost consciousness, even though his breathing was still ragged and labored. Finally he continued:

  “You changed plans without telling me. You flew to Jamaica ... on Thursday morning ... got there hours ahead of me. When I arrived that evening, I thought the house was deserted ... but you were in your bed upstairs ... napping.”

  His voice grew fainter. He was striving mightily to stay alive long enough to explain himself in hope of gaining her absolution.

  “I had arranged to meet some men ... Soviet agents ... in the last years of the Soviet Union, though none of us realized it then. I was handing over a suitcase of reports ... important stuff related to the strategic defense initiative. You woke up ... heard us downstairs ... came down ... overheard just enough to know I was a ... a traitor. You barged into the middle of it ... shocked and indignant ... angry as hell. You tried to leave. You were so naive, thinking you could just leave. Of course they couldn’t let you go. The KGB gave me a simple choice. Either you ... had to be killed ... or sent off to Rotenhausen ... for the treatments.”

  His account of the events in Jamaica did not stir even the shadow of a memory in her, although she knew he must be telling the truth. “But why did Lisa’s entire life have to be eradicated? Why couldn’t Rotenhausen just remove all memories about what she ... about what I overheard ... and leave the rest untouched?”

  Chelgrin spat blood again, more and darker than previously. “It’s comparatively easy ... for Rotenhausen to scour away ... large blocks of memory. Far more difficult ... to reach into a mind ... and pinch off just a few ... selected pieces. He refused to guarantee the results ... unless he was permitted to erase all of Lisa ... and create an entirely new person. You were put in Japan ... because you knew the language ... and because they felt it was unlikely ... that anyone there would spot you and realize you were Lisa.”

  “Dear God,” Joanna said shakily.

  “I had no choice.”

  “You could have refused. You could have broken with them.”

  “They would’ve killed you.”

  “Would you have worked for them after they killed me?”

  “No!”

  “Then they would never have touched me,” she said. “They wouldn’t have had anything to gain.”

  “But I couldn’t ... couldn’t go up against them,” Chelgrin said weakly, miserably. “The only way I could’ve gotten free ... was go to the FBI ... expose myself. I’d have been jailed ... treated like a spy. I would’ve lost everything ... my businesses, investments, all the houses ... the cars ... everything ... everything.”

  “Not everything,” Joanna said.

  He blinked at her, uncomprehending.

  “You wouldn’t have lost your daughter,” she said.

  “You’re not... not even ... trying to understand.” He sighed as if in frustration, and the sigh ended in a wet rattle.

  “I understand too well,” she said. “You went from one extreme to the other. There wasn’t room for humanity in either position.”

  He didn’t reply.

  He was dead. For real this time.

  She stared at him, thinking about what might have been. Perhaps there never could have been anything between them. Perhaps the only Tom Chelgrin who could have been a decent father was the one who had never left Vietnam, the one whose charred bones were still buried in a deep, unmarked grave.

  At last she got up from beside the dead senator and returned to the ground-floor hallway.

  Alex was there, coming toward her. He called her name, and she ran to him.

  83

  As if the bodies littering the house were of little concern, Peterson insisted on a cognac. He led Alex and Joanna to the third floor, into the library where Alex had found the pistol. They sat in the red leather chairs while the fat man poured double measures of Rémy Martin from a crystal decanter. He sat in a chair opposite them, nearly overflowing it, and clasped the brandy snifter in both thick hands, warming the Rémy with his body heat.

  “A little toast,” Peterson said. He lifted his glass. “Here’s to living.”

  Alex and Joanna didn’t bother to raise their glasses. They just drank the cognac—fast. Alex hissed in pain as the Rémy stung his cut lips, but he still took a second swallow.

  Peterson savored the Rémy and smiled contentedly.

  “Who are you?” Joanna asked.

  “I’m from Maryland, dear. I’m in real estate there.”

  “If you’re trying to be funny—”

  “It’s true,” said Peterson. “But of course I’m more than just a Realtor.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m also a Russian.”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “My name was once Anton Broskov. Oh, you should have seen me in those days of my youth. Very dashing. I was so thin and fit, my dear. Positively svelte. I started getting fat the day that I was sent to the States from Vietnam, the day I began impersonating Anson Peterson in front of his friends and relatives. Eating became my way of coping with the terrible pressures.”

  Joanna finished her cognac. “The senator told me about the Mirror group before he died. You’re one of them?”

  “There were twelve of us,” Peterson said. “They made us into mirror images of American prisoners of war, Alex. Sent us home in their place. They transformed us—not unlike the way in which this dear lady was transformed.”

  “Bullshit,” Alex said angrily. “You didn’t endure pain like she endured. You weren’t raped. You always knew who you really were and where you came from, but Joanna lived in the dark.”

  She reached out and touched Alex’s arm. “The worst is past. You’re here. It’s okay now.”

  Peterson sighed. “The idea was that all twelve of us would go to the States, get rich with the help of the KGB. Some of us needed that help, some didn’t. We all made it to the top—except the two who died young, one in an accident, the other of cancer. Moscow figured that the perfect cover for an agent was wealth. Who’d ever suspect a self-made multimillionaire of plotting to overthrow the very system that made him a success?”

  “But you said you’re on our team,” Alex reminded him.

  “I am. I’ve gone over to the other side. Did it a long time ago. I’m not the only one. It was a possibility that the fanatics behind Mirror didn’t consider carefully enough. If you let a man make his mark in a capitalistic society, if you let him achieve all that he wants in that society, then after a while he feels grateful toward that system, toward his neighbors. Four of the others have switched. Dear Tom would have come over too, if he could have gotten past his fear of having his millions stripped from him.”

  “The other side,” Joanna said thoughtfully. “So you’re working for the United States?”

  “The CIA, yes,” Peterson said. “Years and years ago, I told them all about Tom and the others. They hoped Tom would turn double like I did, of his own free will. But he didn’t. And rather than try to turn him, they decided to use him without his knowledge. All these years, they fed subtly twisted information to dear old Tom, and he dutifully passed it on to Moscow. We’ve been quietly misleading first the communists, then the hash of ideologues who replaced them. In fact, we had a lot to do with the fall of the Soviet. Too bad it couldn’t continue with Tom.”

  “Why couldn’t it?”

  “Dear Tom was going too far in politics. Much, much too far. He had a better than even chance of becoming the next President of the United States. Think of that! With him in the Oval Office, we couldn’t hope to continue to deceive any faction in the Russian government.”

  “Wouldn’t it be even easier to deceive them?”

  “You see, when intelligence analysts in the Kremlin occasionally discovered a mistake in the information passed on to them by Senator Chelgrin, they figured it was because he wasn’t in a sufficiently high position to acquire the entire unv
arnished story. But they never lost faith in him. They continued to trust him. However, if he rose to the presidency, and if they discovered errors in the information passed to them by President Chelgrin, they would know something was rotten. They’d go back and painstakingly reexamine everything that he’d ever given them, and in time they’d realize that it was all doctored data, that they’d been played for fools.”

  Joanna shook her head, perplexed. “But why does it matter any more whether they find out or not? The Soviet Union is gone. The new people in charge are all our friends.”

  “Some of them are friends. Some of the old thugs are still around, however, still riddling the bureaucracy, still in some key positions in the military—just waiting for an opportunity to come storming back.”

  “No one really believes they’ll get into power again.”

  Peterson swirled the remaining cognac in his crystal snifter. “You’re perceptive, dear lady. Let’s just say... we didn’t merely feed them false information. For years, we engaged in a masterful charade that deceived them into a reckless expenditure of their national wealth on unnecessary military projects, leading to poverty and unrest in the civilian population. Furthermore, we played upon their systemic paranoia, giving them reason to believe they needed to make greater use of the Gulag, and the more people they dragged away to prison in the dead of night, the more their fragile system cracked under the strain of the people’s fear, resentment, and anger.”

  “You encouraged them to put more people in concentration camps?” she asked, disbelieving.

  “We didn’t encourage it so much as provide them with information that led them to believe it was necessary for their survival.”

  “Are you saying you fingered people as enemies of the state who actually weren’t spies or provocateurs? You provided phony evidence against them, condemned innocent Russians to suffering just to cause more internal turmoil?”