Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02

by Day of the Cheetah (v1. 1)

  “I will not have athletics in this institution become a private battleground between students,” Roberts said. “Mr. Scorcelli?”

  Scorcelli hesitated, turned to face James and stuck out a hand.

  “Apology accepted, Mr. Scorcelli,” James said with his winning smile—a smile that infuriated Scorcelli.

  “I assume you have no intention of changing your playing habits,” Roberts said. “You will continue to take advantage of each opportunity to denigrate your compatriots, even in a baseball game?”

  Ken James looked puzzled. Scorcelli may have believed he was wrestling with a moral dilemma. Roberts knew better, but was surprised when James replied: “Sir, I will take advantage of every rule and every legal opportunity to win.”

  “No matter the consequences?”

  “No matter, sir.”

  Roberts expected and desired nothing less. “You are dismissed, Mr. Scorcelli. Mr. James will remain ... so, Mr. Scorcelli?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Vi balshoy sveynenah. ”

  Scorcelli did not look blank, as required. Only flustered.

  “Get out,” Roberts said, and Scorcelli hustled away, closing the door behind him so gently he might have been closing a door made of fine china.

  Ken James waited impassively. Roberts motioned him to a seat. Roberts watched him unbutton the top button of his sports coat and seat himself. “You even swear like one of them, Mr. James.”

  No reply.

  “Do you think you are ready for graduation?”

  “I do.”

  “Mr. James, whose side are you on? Sometimes it appears only your own.”

  “Isn’t that the American way? Knowledge is power, in baseball or business. I want all the knowledge I can accumulate. I’ve worked hard to accumulate it, even the things others think inconsequential. It would be a waste not to use it—”

  “Do not pretend you know everything about America or how to live in it. You have lived a sheltered life here in the Academy. The world is just waiting to swallow overconfident young people like you.” James made no reply but sat easily in the hard-backed upright wood chair. Roberts paused for a moment, then asked. “Tell me about your father, Kenneth.” “Not again, sir. All right, my father was a drunk, sir, a drunk and a scum who murdered my younger brother but was found incompetent to stand trial and was committed to a mental institution. They said he was suffering from delayed shock syndrome from his three tours as a Green Beret company commander in Vietnam. When he was released several years later he abandoned his family and went off to who knows where. Prison or another mental institution. His name was Kenneth also, but I refuse to use ‘Junior’ in my surname and I’ve even thought of changing my whole name.”

  Roberts looked surprised, which amused James. “Don’t worry, sir. I won’t. It’s not as glamorous a story as Scorcelli’s rich jet-setting parents, or Bell’s midwestern aunties. But it’s my story. I’ve learned, sir, to downplay it, push it out of my consciousness. I allow it to surface as a reminder of what I could become if I don’t work and study very hard.”

  “I am not particularly interested in your opinion of your father,” Roberts said, “and you would be well advised to keep such opinions to yourself.”

  James’ response was to smile back at him with that maddening half-grin. James, it seemed, had no intention of taking such advice.

  A problem. The Connecticut Academy, in operation for only thirty years, had acquired a reputation for excellence in its graduates. Only the best left the Academy, and they left only for the best colleges and universities. The rest were sent back to wherever they came from, without any ties or records of their time at the Academy. The Academy had a reputation to uphold. How would this Kenneth Francis James fit in?

  His grades were never in question—he had scored in the upper one percent of his Scholastic Aptitude Tests and had passed advanced placement exams in mathematics and biology, allowing him to take nine credits of college-level courses even before stepping onto a college campus. He had even taken several Law School Admissions Tests for practice and had scored high on all of them. He had requested only the best—Columbia, Harvard, Georgetown, Oxford. It was his intention to study under such as Kissinger, Kirkpatrick, Breze- zinski—and pursue a career in the Foreign Service or in politics.

  Mostly autonomy was what James craved, autonomy and control, but his extremism could destroy him and hurt the Academy. In the Foreign Service, in government, one had to be a team player. Which left out Kenneth James.

  But the Academy tried not to discard its students who did not fit. Especially the highly intelligent ones. The problem now was to find James a niche for his particular talents and personality and at the same time channel usefully his considerable energy and intelligence.

  Roberts began to stack the folders on his desk and buzzed his secretary. “You are dismissed, Mr. James.”

  The sudden announcement took James by surprise, but he tried not to show it. He stood and headed for the door.

  “Das svedanya, tovarishchniy Maraklov,” Roberts called out, glancing up at the retreating figure, waiting to catch his reaction.

  There was none. James turned, hand casually on the doorknob. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  Roberts remained stone-faced but inwardly was pleased. Good, Mr. James, he said to himself. No sign of recognition— and more importantly, no sign of trying to hide any recognition. You have learned your lessons well. I think you may be ready for graduation . . .

  “Dismissed, Mr. James.”

  * * *

  “My name is Janet.”

  Ken James moved closer to the woman and stared into her bright green eyes. Janet Larson was thirty years old, five feet tall, with long, bouncy brown hair. She was wearing stone- washed jeans and a red flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the top three buttons unbuttoned against the warming late spring weather. Sitting in her apartment, Ken let his eyes travel from her shining eyes to her white throat and down her open neckline to the deepening crest between her breasts. When his eyes moved back to her face he found her looking directly at him.

  “Eye contact,” he said, moving closer. “When strangers meet, eye contact is frequently broken. We’ve been taught here to look everyone in the eye, that eye contact is important. Actually a woman’s direct look makes many men uneasy.”

  She nodded, then slowly stepped even closer until her breasts pushed against his cotton Rugby shirt. He let the Academy’s administrative secretary linger there for a moment, then reached out, grasped her shoulders and pushed her away a few inches.

  “Remember the social bubble, too,” he said with a smile. “Americans need their space. Encroachment on a person’s bubble, even by a beautiful woman, turns even the most desirable woman into an intruder.”

  “Do you find me desirable, Kenneth?”

  He pretended to be exasperated. “Try it again,” he prompted.

  She nodded, looked up, smiled and said, “Hi, my name is Janet.”

  “Pretty good. But try contracting ‘name’ and ‘is.’ Americans love contractions. They slur everything together. ‘Hi, my name’s Janet.’ ”

  She nodded, took a deep breath. “Hi, my name’s Janet,” and punctuated it by invading his bubble again.

  “Perfect,” he said, and let his eyes deliberately roam her body once again. She raised her lips, and their little lesson was abruptly postponed.

  She was very well trained. She started slowly, agonizingly so. Undressing was part of the foreplay. She was controlling him, moving slowly when she felt him hurry, speeding up when she felt him grow impatient. She knew when and where to touch him, what to say or do to build their sexual energy in perfect synchronization.

  Soon it became too much to control and they released their pent-up energy. She climaxed first, the way she had been taught, giving him one last volt to heighten his own climax. She used her muscles to draw every drop from him, then released him moments later—she had been taught that most American men wou
ld not remain inside a woman after sex, sometimes refusing even to lie beside them. But this student, however well trained, was not that American . . . He stayed inside her for several minutes, then let her lie on top of him so he could nuzzle her neck and breasts and feel her warmth all around him. She gently rolled beside him, propped up her head so she could look into his eyes as he traced his fingers around her body.

  She too had once been a student at the Connecticut Academy, but her training was in a far different field than his. She had readily accepted her courtesan training and had been selected for “graduation,” but instead opted to stay at the Academy as an administrator. Seducing the young students was her chief source of excitement now, her satisfaction coming less from the erotic than from pleasure in displaying her exceptional skills.

  She especially enjoyed displaying her skills with this young student—control name “Ken James,” born Andrei Ivanschi- chin Maraklov of Leningrad, the son of a Party bureaucrat and a hospital administrator, the top student at the top-secret Connecticut Academy in the mountainside city of Novorossijsk on the Black Sea, where young Soviet men and women were trained to be KGB deep-cover agents.

  The Connecticut Academy was a most unusual high school, and it attracted the USSR’s most unusual men and women. Most of the students were trained at a very early age for the intelligence field, learning foreign languages and customs of dozens of nations. Both male and female students, like “Janet Larson,” were trained as courtesans and used for sexual espionage activities. Others were trained in demolition or assassination or other forms of terrorism. And still others, like “Kenneth James,” born Maraklov, were part of a whole new area of espionage.

  Selected individuals in various countries were targeted by the KGB because of their socio-economic status and opportunity for growth and importance. These individuals—sons and daughters of politicians, businessmen, corporate presidents— would be carefully studied at an early age, once identified as being groomed for a particular position or put into the pipeline for a given career or special responsibility. Their habits, social life and personality were examined. Were they responsible, stable individuals, or did they squander time and money on, say, drugs and partying? If they were especially promising individuals, apparently destined for greatness, phase two of the project was invoked.

  A young Russian closely matching the target’s general physical and mental attributes would be trained in the same fields as the subject individual. Along with being taught the target’s native language, the student would also learn everything possible to help him blend himself into the social fabric as well as the personality of the target. After years of study and training, the student would be a virtual clone of the target.

  Next, at an opportune time, the clone would be inserted to replace the target. He would assume all of the target’s activities, history, future. Of course it was not possible precisely to duplicate the subject’s every mood or segment of his personality, so the clones were trained to fit in, to adapt, to take control of their situations. If they did not perfectly match, they were to change the environment around themselves. The clone would, it was hoped, create the new norm and thereby achieve a more viable match-up.

  After a suitable waiting period to allow the new mole to acclimate himself with his new surroundings, he would be directed by Moscow headquarters to begin collecting information, to maneuver closer to the seat of power in government or industry, to influence events in favor of the Soviet Union or its allies. In an emergency the mole could be used to assist other agents, collect or borrow funds, even carry out search- and-destroy missions or assassinations. Unlike informers, traitors, bribery victims or embassy employees, these “native citizens” were always to be immune to suspicion. They could pass the most exhaustive background investigation—fingerprints, if necessary, even surgically matched.

  Perhaps only a handful of these super-moles could be turned loose in a year. The training was exhaustive and exhausting; many Soviet students, even though they learned English well and knew a good deal of “American,” could not sufficiently adapt themselves to the very strange American culture and be a reliable espionage agent as well. And even with the apparently perfect student, there was no way of knowing what would happen to the intended target. Targets were selected for their accessibility as well as their potential value, but over the years there was no way to guarantee a useful match. Goals changed, opportunities came and went, minds changed, paths crossed. An individual who was perceived as the next President of the United States could turn out to be a corrupt congressman; a candidate-target discarded from consideration could turn out to be a future Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The target Ken James—the American Ken James—would never have been considered only a few short years earlier: He was the son of a psychotic Vietnam veteran; he grew up in a fragmented childhood punctuated by a devastating family disaster; the family was split apart. The boy himself was a loner, unpopular and remote, anti-social.

  But things changed. The loner turned out to be a boy genius. The father disappeared from sight and was presumed dead. The mother married a wealthy multinational corporate president, and both the stepfather and mother were candidates for political office by election or appointment. The obscure boy was suddenly a prime candidate for “cloning.” Still a loner, virtually ignored by his jet-setting parents, he was nonetheless being educated and groomed for a public life in government- service. A perfect target.

  And they found a boy in the Soviet Union equal to the challenge of a match-up . . . and ultimate substitution. Andrei Ivanschichin Maraklov had a unique combination of writer’s imagination and a savant’s intelligence—the stuff to qualify him as Ken James’ intellectual and emotional twin . . .

  Janet Larson smiled as she noted the faraway expression in his eyes and propped herself up again on one elbow so she could watch him. “Where are you now, Kenneth?”

  He smiled at the question. It was a game they played when they were together. As an administrative assistant to the headmaster, Janet Larson knew all about Ken James—why he was there, what was expected of him after “graduation.” But some students, the special ones like Maraklov/James, gave the nuts and bolts of their alter egos a considerable amount of spice and feeling. It was forbidden for the students to talk of their “lives” with any other student, but not so with her, and especially not so with her and student Kenneth James . . .

  “I’m on my way to Hawaii,” he said. “One last fling before college. My mom and stepdad are in Europe on business. They gave me a Hawaiian vacation as a graduation present. I graduated last week, remember?”

  “How were your grades?”

  “Straight A’s, but it was an easy semester. I planned it that way. I could have graduated and gone on to college after my junior year—doubled up on a few classes in the summer—but I was told by my stepdad that a guy shouldn’t miss out on his senior year in high school, that it has too many memories. That’s a crock. Anyway, I cruised through the year.”

  “And what about your senior-year memories? Were they worth delaying college?”

  “I guess so,” he said as he ran his hand up and down her back and she saw that smile slowly spread across his face. It was as if he was actually reliving those experiences . . .

  “I was quite an athlete the whole year,” he went on. “Soccer in the fall, basketball, baseball in the spring—I already had all my credits for graduation and I had two gym periods every day so I could devote full time to all of them. It was fantastic.” Janet had trouble following—“gym” and “soccer” were foreign words to her. Not, of course, baseball. The way he told his story was eerie, as if he was relating some sort of mystical out-of-body experience.

  “That was all you did? Sports?”

  “No, I had lots of dates. I went out every Friday and Saturday night. My mom and Frank—that’s my stepdad—were home only one week out of five, so I had the run of the place. Except for the maid, of course.”


  “Tell me about your dates, Kenneth.”

  Again, that smile. “I saw Cathy Sawyer the most. We’ve been going out almost all year. Nothing special ... a movie, dinner once in a while. I helped her with her homework, she can’t seem to pick up calculus no matter how hard I try to explain it to her.”

  Listening to him, watching him, it was like hearing someone not just talk about but actually live another life in front of you. They had done a complete job, it seemed, on Andrei Maraklov. Now he was Kenneth James. “Were you ever passionate with her, Kenneth?”

  Suddenly his eyes grew dark. “Ken?”

  “She doesn’t want me that way.” His voice had been deep, harsh. She touched his shoulder—his body seemed to have turned to ice.

  . . She doesn’t want me,” he repeated in a dead-sounding voice. “No one does. My dad’s an alcoholic schizoid. People think some genetic germ is going to rub off from me onto them if I get too close. Everyone thinks I’ll whack out on them just like my dad whacked out on his family.”

  Whack out? More mumbo-jumbo. “Ken . . .”

  “All they want is my brains and my money.” His body was now as hard, as tense as his voice, his eyes were hot. “ ‘Help me with my homework, Ken’... ‘Help us with the fund-raiser, James’. . . ‘Come out for the team, Ken’ . . . Ask, ask, ask. But when I want something, they all run away.”

  “It’s only because you are better than they are, Kenneth—”

  “Who cares about that?” It was like a cry. She gasped at the anger in his face. “When am I going to get what I want? When am I ever going to feel accepted by them . . . ?” He took hold of her right hand and squeezed hard. “Huh? When?”

  He tossed her hand aside and rolled up out of bed. She gathered a sheet around her and slid out on the other side.