The Key to Midnight

by Dean Koontz

  Peterson smiled. “Don’t get moralistic, dear lady. It was a war, even if cold, and the Soviets were a formidable enemy. In a war, some sacrifices must be made.”

  “Sacrifices of innocent people.”

  He shrugged his big round shoulders. “Sometimes.”

  “Dear God.”

  “But you can see why we wouldn’t want to have light thrown on the whole operation. Some pretty nasty stuff happened here. Let’s just say... it would taint the victory we so well deserved and won. So when Tom began to seem not merely like a credible candidate for the presidency but like an inevitable successor to the current bumbler, he had to be removed.”

  “Why not just kill him in a staged accident?” Joanna asked.

  “For one thing, the other side would have been alarmed and highly suspicious. In this line of work, we tend not to believe that there are ever any genuine accidents.”

  “But why did I have to do the removing?” Alex asked.

  Peterson finished his cognac and, incredibly, took a roll of butter-rum Life Savers from his pocket. He offered them to Alex and Joanna, then popped one into his mouth. “The CIA determined that maximum propaganda value should be gotten from the senator’s death. They decided that his status as a former Soviet—and now Russian—intelligence operative should be revealed to the world—but in such a way that the Russians would think the Mirror network of deep-cover agents had not been uncovered, just Tom. The Cold War is over, yes, and we’re all chums with the Russians now, skipping hand in hand toward the carefree and glorious dawn of the millennium, but we still spy on them and they still spy on us, and thus will it always be among powerful nations with big nuclear arsenals. We don’t want to damage my position or that of the other turncoat Mirror agents in the States. If the CIA itself tore the mask off Tom Chelgrin, the Russians would be convinced that he had been made to tell everything about Mirror. But if a civilian—such as you, Alex—stumbled across Chelgrin’s double identity through a chance encounter with his long-lost daughter, and if Chelgrin were killed before the CIA could have a chance to interrogate him, the Russians might think that Mirror was still safe.”

  “But the senator told me all about it,” Joanna said, “and now it isn’t a secret any more.”

  “You’ll merely pretend that he didn’t tell you a thing,” the fat man advised. “In a few minutes, I’ll leave. What we would like you to do is wait half an hour, giving me time to make myself scarce, and then call the Swiss police.”

  “We’ll be arrested for murder,” Alex objected, “in case you’ve forgotten the carnage downstairs.”

  “No, you won’t be arrested when the whole story comes out. You see... you’ll tell them how you tracked backward through Joanna’s life to London and then to here, how you discovered that Lisa was made into Joanna because of what she heard in Jamaica all those years ago, and how you shot these people in self-defense.” He smiled at Joanna. “You’ll tell the press that your father was a Soviet agent, that he told you his pathetic story as he lay dying. But you’ll make no mention of Mirror or of the other doppelgängers like him. You must pretend to believe that he was Tom Chelgrin, the real Tom Chelgrin, who just fell into a secret love of Marxism after Vietnam.”

  “And what if I do mention Mirror and the other doubles?” she asked.

  Peterson looked distressed. “Most unwise. You’d destroy the most spectacular counterintelligence operation in history. There are people who wouldn’t take that lightly.”

  “The CIA,” Alex said.

  “Among others,” Peterson said.

  “You’re saying they’d kill me if I told it all?” Joanna asked.

  “Dear lady, they would certainly regret having to do it.”

  Alex said, “Don’t threaten her.”

  “I didn’t make a threat,” Peterson said placatingly. “I merely stated an incontrovertible truth.”

  Putting down his empty brandy snifter, tenderly blotting his hand against his bloody lips, Alex said, “What happened to me in Rio?”

  “We stole a week of your vacation. Like the KGB, the Agency has long sponsored a few behavioral psychologists and biochemists who have been expanding upon Rotenhausen’s research. We used some of Franz’s tech- niques to implant a program in you.”

  “That’s why I went to Japan on vacation.”

  “Yes. You were programmed to go.”

  “That’s why I stopped in Kyoto.”

  “Yes.”

  “And went to the Moonglow Lounge.”

  “We implanted that and a lot of other things, and I must say you performed perfectly.”

  Joanna slid forward on her chair, filled with a new fear. “How detailed was the program?”

  “How detailed?” the fat man asked.

  “I mean... was Alex... ?” She bit her lip and then took a deep breath. “Was he programmed to fall in love with me?”

  Peterson smiled. “No, I assure you that he wasn’t. But by God, I wish I’d thought of it! That would’ve been a surefire guarantee that he’d follow the rest of the program.”

  Alex got up from his chair, went to the bar, and poured more of the Rémy Martin into his glass. “Moscow will wonder why you weren’t killed too.”

  “You’ll tell the press and police there was a fat man who got away. That’s the only description you’ll be able to give. You’ll say I shot at you, and you returned my fire. When I ran out of ammunition, you chased me, but I had quite a lead, and I got away in the darkness.”

  “How do I explain Ursula Zaitsev?” Alex asked bitterly. “She wasn’t armed, was she? Don’t the Swiss frown on killing unarmed women?”

  “We’ll put the 9mm pistol in her hand. Believe me, Alex, you won’t wind up in jail. The CIA has friends here. It’ll use them on your behalf if necessary. But that won’t even be called for. All of this killing was strictly in self-defense.”

  They spent the next fifteen minutes constructing and memorizing a story that would explain everything that had transpired without mentioning Mirror or the fat man’s true role in Chelgrin’s downfall.

  Finally Peterson stood up and stretched. “I’d better get out of here. Just remember ... give me half an hour before you call the police.”

  84

  They stood at the open door of Rotenhausen’s house and watched the fat man drive out of sight in his gray Mercedes, down toward the lights of Saint Moritz.

  When Alex closed the door, he looked at Joanna and said, “Well?”

  “I guess we have to do what he wants. If we talk about Mirror, if we spoil their fun and games, they’ll kill us. I don’t doubt that. You know they will.”

  “They’ll kill us anyway,” Alex said. “They’ll kill us even if we do exactly what they want. We’ll call the Swiss police, tell them our story. They won’t believe us at first, but in a day or two or three, they’ll match your fingerprints to Lisa’s. And other things will fall into place, so then they’ll accept what we’ve told them. They’ll let us go. We’ll tell the same story to the press, just the way Peterson wants it told, with no mention of Mirror or Lyshenko. Newspapers all over the world will front-page it. War hero, Senator Tom Chelgrin, was a Russian agent through the two decades of the Cold War. Big news. The former members of the KGB will gloat and preen about how clever they were, and the current government of Russia will pretend to be embarrassed and distressed that such a thing could have been done by their predecessors. In time everything will quiet down. We’ll start to lead normal lives again. Then someone in the CIA will begin to worry about us, about a couple of civilians walking around with this big secret. They’ll send someone after us, sure as hell.”

  “But what can we do?”

  He had been considering their options while Peterson had been helping them create a slightly altered version of the truth for the police. “It’s a cliché, but it’ll work. It’s the only thing we can do. We won’t call the cops. We’re going to walk out of here, go to Zurich tonight or in the morning, hole up in a hotel, and write a
complete account of this, all of it, including Mirror and everything Peterson just told us. We’ll make a hundred copies of it and spread them among a hundred attorneys and bank trust departments in ten or twenty countries. With each sealed copy, we’ll leave instructions that it be sent to a major newspaper, each copy to a different major newspaper in the event that we’re killed—or in the event that we simply disappear. Then we’ll send a copy to Peterson at his real-estate office in Maryland and another to the Director of the CIA, along with notes explaining what we’ve done.”

  “Will it work?”

  “It better.”

  For twenty minutes they moved rapidly through the house, wiping everything that they might have touched.

  In the garage they found the van in which they’d been brought unconscious from the hotel. Their luggage was still in the back.

  Exactly half an hour after Peterson left, they drove away from Rotenhausen’s clinic. The windshield wipers thumped metronomically, as if counting cadence for the dead; snow caked on the blades and turned to ice.

  “We can’t drive through these mountains tonight,” Joanna said. “The roads won’t be passable. Where will we go?”

  “To the depot,” he said. “Maybe there’s another train out.”

  “To where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Whose life will we live?”

  “Our own,” he said without hesitation. “No disguises. No running. In our own ways, we’ve been running for a long, long time. Neither of us can do that any more.”

  “I know. I just meant—your life in Chicago or mine in Kyoto?”

  “Kyoto,” he said. “You can’t be asked to start over yet again. And there’s nothing for me in Chicago if you’re not there. Besides, I really do like big-band music. It’s not a taste they programmed into me. And on a winter night, I like the way that snow falls like powdered starlight on the Gion. I like the pure notes of temple bells and oiled-paper lanterns that make shadows dance in a breeze.”

  Within the hour, they were sitting in a nearly empty passenger car, holding hands, as the last train out clattered toward midnight and then, finally, beyond.

  Afterword

  The Key to Midnight was the first novel that I wrote under the pen name Leigh Nichols, which I now no longer use. The other Nichols novels included Shadowfires, The Servants of Twilight, and The House of Thunder, which have previously been put under my real name, and one other that will be reissued in paperback in 1996.

  Like all my pen names, Leigh met a tragic end. (Please see the Afterword to The Funhouse for the story of the death of “Owen West,” who also wrote The Mask.) I used to tell people that while taking a tour for research purposes, Leigh had been killed in an explosion at a jalapeño-processing plant. Later, I insisted that Leigh died in a catastrophic rickshaw pile-up in Hong Kong. The truth, of course, is uglier. After drinking too much champagne one evening on a Caribbean cruise ship, Leigh Nichols was decapitated in a freak limbo accident.

  This first Nichols book was meant to be my stab at an action-suspense-romance novel with a background of international intrigue, because I like to read stories of that kind when they are well done. Before giving Berkley Books the go-ahead to reprint Key, I reread it. Although many readers who discovered this novel through the years wrote to say that they enjoyed it, I decided that I hadn’t succeeded with the original version as well as I’d thought at the time. Furthermore, it needed to be updated to reflect world events since its initial publication.

  I am my own worst critic and a full-blown obsessive-compulsive, which is a bad combination in a line of work that requires me to meet deadlines. I swore that I would only lightly revise Key, but as is often the case, I was lying to myself. After all these years, one might think that I would no longer trust myself, but I continue to be a sucker for my own lies. I have this wide-eyed, puppy-dog look that I give myself in the mirror, when I’m lying, and I’m always fooled by it. I could sell myself the Brooklyn Bridge. In fact, I have. And I’ve no idea what I did with the money that I swindled from myself. I hope I had fun with it. Anyway, by the time I’d finished revising The Key to Midnight, I’d cut 30,000 words from it, added about 5,000 new words, and reworked it nearly line by line.

  Nevertheless, I resisted the demonic urge to write an entirely new version of the story—even though the satanically induced desire to do so was so strong that at one point my head was spinning around 360 degrees on my shoulders. In spite of all these changes, Key is still largely the novel that it was on first publication. The plot and the characters have not been changed materially, and I have not altered the style in which it was written, but I believe and hope that the story is much more smoothly told and more fun to read than it was in its previous incarnation.

  None of my other books is in the genre or the style of The Key to Midnight, but lurking in these pages is the Dean Koontz you know. I can’t repress a love of twist-and-turn storytelling, and a certain characteristic eeriness creeps in, as with the scenes involving Omi Inamura, in spite of the intentionally spare (essentially Japanese) tone. I hope you enjoyed this change of pace. And remember, when you drink, don’t limbo.