The Key to Midnight

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.

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    81
        
        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 dropped 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 Doppelganger.
        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