The Key to Midnight

turmoil?'
        Peterson smiled. 'Don't get moralistic, dear lady. It was a war, even if cold, and the Soviets were a formidable enemy. In a war, some sacrifices must be made.'
        'Sacrifices of innocent people?'
        He shrugged his big round shoulders. 'Sometimes.'
        'Dear God.'
        'But you can see why we wouldn't want to have light thrown on the whole operation. Some pretty nasty stuff happened here. Let's just say… it would taint the victory we so well deserved and won. So when Tom began to seem not merely like a credible candidate for the presidency but like an inevitable successor to the current bumbler, he had to be removed.'
        'Why not just kill him in a staged accident?' Joanna asked.
        'For one thing, the other side would have been alarmed and highly suspicious. In this line of work, we tend not to believe that there are ever any genuine accidents.'
        'But why did I have to do the removing?' Alex asked.
        Peterson finished his cognac and, incredibly, took a roll of butter-rum Lifesavers from his pocket. He offered them to Alex and Joanna, then popped one into his mouth. 'The CIA determined that maximum propaganda value should be gotten from the senator's death. They decided that his status as a former Soviet - and now Russian - intelligence operative should be revealed to the world - but in such a way that the Russians would think the Mirror network of deep-cover agents had not been uncovered, just Tom. The Cold War is over, yes, and we're all chums with the Russians now, skipping hand in hand toward the carefree and glorious dawn of the millennium, but we still spy on them and they still spy on us, and thus will it always be among powerful nations with big nuclear arsenals. We don't want to damage my position or that of the other turncoat Mirror agents in the States. If the CIA itself tore the mask off Tom Chelgrin, the Russians would be convinced that he had been made to tell everything about Mirror. But if a civilian - such as you, Alex - stumbled across Chelgrin's double identity through a chance encounter with his long-lost daughter, and if Chelgrin were killed before the CIA could have a chance to interrogate him, the Russians might think that Mirror was still safe.'
        'But the senator told me all about it,' Joanna said, 'and now it isn't a secret any more.'
        'You'll merely pretend that he didn't tell you a thing,' the fat man advised. 'In a few minutes, I'll leave. What we would like you to do is wait half an hour, giving me time to make myself scarce, and then call the Swiss police.'
        'We'll be arrested for murder,' Alex objected, 'in case you've forgotten the carnage downstairs.'
        'No, you won't be arrested when the whole story comes out. You see… you'll tell them how you tracked backward through Joanna's life to London and then to here, how you discovered that Lisa was made into Joanna because of what she heard in Jamaica all those years ago, and how you shot these people in self-defense.' He smiled at Joanna. 'You'll tell the press that your father was a Soviet agent, that he told you his pathetic story as he lay dying. But you'll make no mention of Mirror or of the other Doppelgangers like him. You must pretend to believe that he was Tom Chelgrin, the real Tom Chelgrin, who just fell into a secret love of Marxism after Vietnam.'
        'And what if I do mention Mirror and the other doubles?' she asked.
        Peterson looked distressed. 'Most unwise. You'd destroy the most spectacular counterintelligence operation in history. There are people who wouldn't take that lightly.'
        'The CIA,' Alex said.
        'Among others,' Peterson said.
        'You're saying they'd kill me if I told it all?' Joanna asked.
        'Dear lady, they would certainly regret having to do it.'
        Alex said, 'Don't threaten her.'
        'I didn't make a threat,' Peterson said placatingly. 'I merely stated an incontrovertible truth.'
        Putting down his empty brandy snifter, tenderly blotting his hand against his bloody lips, Alex said, 'What happened to me in Rio?'
        'We stole a week of your vacation. Like the KGB, the Agency has long sponsored a few behavioral psychologists and biochemists who have been expanding upon Rotenhausen's research. We used some of Franz's techniques to implant a program in you.'
        'That's why I went to Japan on vacation.'
        'Yes. You were programmed to