The Key to Midnight (39 page)

As Carrera threw another punch, Alex thrashed and bucked. The fist missed him, drove into the trail beside his head, and Carrera howled in pain.

Heaving harder than before, Alex threw Carrera off, crawled up the slope, clutched a tree for support, and pulled himself erect.

Carrera was also struggling to his feet.

Alex kicked him squarely in the stomach, which gave no more than a board fence.

Carrera skidded in the snow, windmilled his arms, and went down on his hands and knees again.

Cursing, Alex kicked him in the face.

Carrera sprawled on his back in the snow, arms extended like wings. He didn’t move. Didn’t move. Still didn’t move. Didn’t move.

Cautiously, as though he were Dr. Von Helsing approaching a coffin in which Dracula slept, Alex crept up on Carrera. He knelt at the bodybuilder’s side. Even in that dim and eerily phosphorescent light, he could see that the man’s eyes were open wide but blind to any sight in this world. He didn’t need to fetch a wooden stake or a crucifix or a necklace of garlic, because this time the monster was definitely dead.

He got up, turned away from Carrera, and ascended the trail, heading back toward the house.

Anson Peterson was waiting for him in the open field just beyond the forest. The fat man was holding a gun.

Rotenhausen was dead.

Joanna felt no remorse for having killed him, but she didn’t experience much in the way of triumph either. She was too worried about Alex to feel anything more than fear.

Stepping carefully to avoid the broken glass scattered across the floor, she found her ski clothes in a closet.

As she was hurriedly dressing, she heard the steel fingers—
click-click-click-click
—and she looked up in terror, frozen by the hateful sound. It must have been a reflex action, a postmortem nerve spasm sending a last meaningless instruction to the mechanical hand, because Rotenhausen was stone-cold dead.

Nevertheless, for a minute she stared at the hand. Her heart was knocking so loudly that she could hear nothing else, not even her own breathing or the wind beyond the windows. Gradually, as the hand made no new move, the fierce drumming in her chest subsided somewhat.

When she finished dressing, as she knelt on her left knee to lace up the boot on her right foot, she spotted the small bottle from which Ursula Zaitsev had filled the syringe. It was among the litter on the floor, but it had not broken.

She laced both boots, then picked up the bottle and pulled the seal from it. She shook a couple of drops of the drug onto the palm of her hand, sniffed, hesitated, then tasted it. She was pretty sure that it was nothing but water and that someone had switched bottles on Zaitsev.

But who? And why?

Puppets. They were all puppets—as Alex had said.

Cautiously she unlocked the door and peered into the hall. No one in sight. But for the background noise of the storm, muffled by the thick walls, the house was silent.

Room by room, she inspected the rest of that level but found no one. For almost a minute she stood on the second- floor landing, looking alternately up and down the steps, listening intently, and at last descended to the ground floor.

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.