The Key to Midnight

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 1966, 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