The Key to Midnight (39 page)

A corpse lay in the hallway. Even in the poor light and from a distance, Joanna could see that it was Ursula Zaitsev.

Several doors led off the hall. She didn’t want to open any of them, but she would have to search the place if she had any hope of finding Alex.

The nearest door was ajar. She eased it open, hesitated, crossed the threshold—and her father stepped in front of her.

Tom Chelgrin was ashen. His hair was streaked with blood, and his face was spotted with it. His left hand was pressed over what must have been a bullet wound in his chest, for his shirt was soaked with blood as dark as burgundy. He swayed, almost fell, took one step toward her, and put his bloody hand on her shoulder.

On the snow-swept slope, less than a hundred yards from the house, above the storm-dimmed lights of Saint Moritz, Alex and Peterson stared at each other for a long, uncertain moment.

Alex couldn’t speak clearly or without pain, because his mouth was swollen and sore from the punch he’d taken, but he had questions and he wanted answers. “Why didn’t I kill you when I killed Paz and Chelgrin?”

“You weren’t supposed to,” said the fat man. “Where’s Carrera?”

“Dead.”

“But you didn’t have a gun,” Peterson said incredulously.

“No gun,” Alex agreed. He was weary. His eyes watered from the stinging cold. The fat man shimmered like a mirage in the night.

“It’s hard to believe you could kill that mean bastard without a gun.”

Alex spat blood onto the snow. “I didn’t say it was easy.”

Peterson let out a short bray of laughter.

“All right,” Alex said, “all right, get it over with. I killed him, now you kill me.”

“Oh, heavens, no! No, no,” Peterson said. “You’ve got it all wrong, all backward, dear boy. You and I—we’re on the same team.”

Chelgrin had been dead in London. Dead on a hotel-room floor. Now he was here in Switzerland, dying again.

The sight of the blood-smeared specter immobilized Joanna. She stood in shock, every muscle locked, while the senator clung to her shoulder.

“I’m weak,” he said shakily. “Can’t stand up any more. Don’t let me ... fall. Please. Help me ... down easy. Let’s go down easy.”

Joanna put one hand on the doorjamb to brace herself. She dropped slowly to her knees, and the senator used her for support. At last he was sitting with his back against the wall, pressing his left hand against the chest wound, and she was kneeling at his side.

“Daughter,” he said, gazing at her wonderingly. “My baby.”

She couldn’t accept him as her father. She thought of the long years of programmed loneliness, the attacks of claustrophobia when she’d dared to consider building a life with someone, the nightmares, the fear that might have been defeated if it could have been defined. She thought of how Rotenhausen had repeatedly raped her during her first stay in this place—and how he had tried to use her again this very night. Worse: If Alex was dead, Tom Chelgrin had directly or indirectly pulled the trigger. She had no room in her heart for this man. Maybe it was unfair of her to freeze him out before she knew his reasons for doing what he’d done; perhaps her inability to forgive her own father was itself unforgivable. Nevertheless, she felt no guilt whatsoever and knew that she never would. She despised him.

“My little girl,” he said, but his voice seemed colored more by self-pitying sentimentality than by genuine love or remorse.

“No,” she said, denying him.

“You are. You’re my daughter.”

“No.”

“Lisa.”

“Joanna. My name’s Joanna Rand.”

He wheezed and cleared his throat. His speech was slurred. “You hate me ... don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t understand.”

“I understand enough.”

“No. No, you don’t. You’ve got to listen to me.”

“Nothing you have to say could make me want to be your daughter. Lisa Chelgrin is dead. Forever.”

The senator closed his eyes. A fierce wave of pain swept through him. He grimaced and bent forward.

She made no move to comfort him.

When the attack passed, he sat up straight again and opened his eyes. “I’ve got to tell you about it. You’ve got to give me a chance to explain. You have to listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” she assured him, “but not because I have to.”

His breath rattled in his throat. “Everyone thinks I was a war hero. They think I escaped from that Viet Cong prison camp and made my way back to friendly lines. I built my entire political career on that story, but it’s all a lie. I didn’t spend weeks in the jungle, inching my way out of enemy territory. I never escaped from a prison camp because ... I was never in one to begin with. Tom Chelgrin was a prisoner of war, all right, but not me.”

“Not you? But
you’re
Tom Chelgrin,” she said, wondering if his pain and the loss of blood had clouded his mind.

“No. My real name is Ilya Lyshenko. I’m a Russian.”

Haltingly, pausing often to wheeze or to spit dark blood, he told her how Ilya Lyshenko had become the Honorable United States Senator from the great state of Illinois, the well-known and widely respected potential candidate for the presidency, Thomas Chelgrin. He was convincing—although Joanna supposed that every dying man’s confession was convincing.

She listened, amazed and fascinated.

At the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, in every Viet Cong labor camp, commandants were looking for certain special American prisoners of war: soldiers who shared a list of physical characteristics with a dozen young Russian intelligence officers who had volunteered for a project code-named “Mirror.” None of the Vietnamese assisting in the search knew the name of the project or what the Russians hoped to achieve with it, but they did not allow themselves to be in the least curious because they understood that curiosity killed more than cats.

When Tom Chelgrin was brought in chains to a camp outside Hanoi, the commandant saw at once that he somewhat resembled a member of the Russian Mirror group. Chelgrin and the Russian were the same height and build, had the same color hair and eyes. Their basic facial-bone structures were similar. Upon his arrival at the camp, Chelgrin was segregated from the other prisoners, and for the rest of his life he spent mornings and afternoons with interrogators, evenings and nights in solitary confinement. A Vietnamese photographer took more than two hundred shots of Chelgrin’s entire body, but mostly of his face from every possible angle, in every light: close-ups, medium shots, long shots to show how he stood and how he held his shoulders.

The undeveloped negatives were sent to Moscow by special courier, where KGB directors in charge of the Mirror group anxiously awaited them.

Military physicians in Moscow studied the photographs of Thomas Chelgrin for three days before reporting that he appeared to be a reasonably good match for Ilya Lyshenko, a Mirror volunteer. One week later, Ilya underwent the first of many surgeries to transform him into Chelgrin’s double. His hairline was too low, so cosmetic surgeons destroyed some hair follicles and moved the line back three quarters of an inch. His eyelids drooped slightly, thanks to the genetic heritage of a Mongolian great-great-grandfather; they lifted the lids to make them look more Western. His nose was pared down, and a bump was removed from the bridge. His earlobes were too large, so they were reduced as well. His mouth was shaped quite like Tom Chelgrin’s mouth, but his teeth required major dental work to match Chelgrin’s. Lyshenko’s chin was round, which was no good for this masquerade, so it was made square. Finally, the surgeons circumcised Lyshenko and pronounced him a fit doppelgänger.

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.