The Key to Midnight

where you came from, but Joanna lived in the dark.'
        She reached out and touched Alex's arm. 'The worst is past. You're here. It's okay now.'
        Peterson sighed. 'The idea was that all twelve of us would go to the States, get rich with the help of the KGB. Some of us needed that help, some didn't. We all made it to the top - except the two who died young, one in an accident, the other of cancer. Moscow figured that the perfect cover for an agent was wealth. Who'd ever suspect a self-made multimillionaire of plotting to overthrow the very system that made him a success?'
        'But you said you're on our team,' Alex reminded him.
        'I am. I've gone over to the other side. Did it a long time ago. I'm not the only one. It was a possibility that the fanatics behind Mirror didn't consider carefully enough. If you let a man make his mark in a capitalistic society, if you let him achieve all that he wants in that society, then after a while he feels grateful toward that system, toward his neighbours. Four of the others have switched. Dear Tom would have come over too, if he could have gotten past his fear of having his millions stripped from him.'
        'The other side,' Joanna said thoughtfully. 'So you're working for the United States?'
        'The CIA, yes,' Peterson said. 'Years and years ago, I told them all about Tom and the others. They hoped Tom would turn double like I did, of his own free will. But he didn't. And rather than try to turn him, they decided to use him without his knowledge. All these years, they fed subtly twisted information to dear old Tom, and he dutifully passed it on to Moscow. We've been quietly misleading first the communists, then the hash of ideologues who replaced them. In fact, we had a lot to do with the fall of the Soviet. Too bad it couldn't continue with Tom.'
        'Why couldn't it?'
        'Dear Tom was going too far in politics. Much, much too far. He had a better than even chance of becoming the next President of the United States. Think of that! With him in the Oval Office, we couldn't hope to continue to deceive any faction in the Russian government.'
        'Wouldn't it be even easier to deceive them?'
        'You see, when intelligence analysts in the Kremlin occasionally discovered a mistake in the information passed on to them by Senator Chelgrin, they figured it was because he wasn't in a sufficiently high position to acquire the entire unvarnished story. But they never lost faith in him. They continued to trust him. However, if he rose to the presidency, and if they discovered errors in the information passed to them by President Chelgrin, they would know something was rotten. They'd go back and painstakingly reexamine everything that he'd ever given them, and in time they'd realize that it was all doctored data, that they'd been played for fools.'
        Joanna shook her head, perplexed. 'But why does it matter any more whether they find out or not? The Soviet Union is gone. The new people in charge are all our friends.'
        'Some of them are friends. Some of the old thugs are still around, however, still riddling the bureaucracy, still in some key positions in the military - just waiting for an opportunity to come storming back.'
        'No one really believes they'll get into power again.'
        Peterson swirled the remaining cognac in his crystal snifter. 'You're perceptive, dear lady. Let's just say… we didn't merely feed them false information. For years, we engaged in a masterful charade that deceived them into a reckless expenditure of their national wealth on unnecessary military projects, leading to poverty and unrest in the civilian population. Furthermore, we played upon their systematic paranoia, giving them reason to believe they needed to make greater use of the Gulag, and the more people they dragged away to prison in the dead of the night, the more their fragile system cracked under the strain of the people's fear, resentment, and anger.'
        'You encouraged them to put more people in concentration camps?' she asked, disbelieving.
        'We didn't encourage it so much as provide them with information that led them to believe it was necessary for their survival.'
        'Are you saying you fingered people as enemies of the state who actually weren't spies or provocateurs? You provided phony evidence against them, condemned innocent Russians to suffering just to cause more internal