Now the words hit Maraklov like a baseball bat against his skull. He had forgotten the name the minute he left the Soviet Union for Hawaii all those years ago. The delirium caused by the ANTARES interface somehow had unearthed it — unfortunately, in the presence of another Connecticut Academy graduate who knew her.
“Yes, I knew Janet. Janet Larson. What has she got to do with my orders?”
“Perhaps nothing — perhaps everything,” Zaykov said. “Janet Larson — Katrina Litkovka — was found dead in a car crash. They say she had been drinking, that her car went off the road. But Katrina was fond of having affairs with many of the students at the Academy. You were one of them.” She paused, then said, “I was one of them too.”
“You and Larson were lovers?”
“Those of us in courtesan training at the Academy were taught to … to please women as well as men,” she said. “It was all part of the game at the Academy. But mostly we were friends, damn it, friends … She apparently had been drinking an expensive Scotch whiskey. Even though she didn’t have much alcohol in her blood, drunk driving was blamed for the accident. But the whiskey was very suspicious. Under questioning, a truck driver that delivered supplies to the Academy admitted that he sold or traded bottles of contraband foreign liquor to students and employees. One of the students he sold the whiskey to was you.”
Zaykov took a tighter grip on the weapon. “All of Katrina’s lovers were suspects in the investigation. All of us were officially cleared — all but you. No investigation was started on you because you had just been inserted into the United States Air Force Academy training program. After a time interest in the case disappeared. Katrina Litkovka’s murderer was never found.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with anything,” Maraklov said. “Are you accusing me of her murder? Now, after all these years, you’re on a manhunt for a murder that happened over a decade ago and ten thousand miles away?”
“There is no statute of limitations on murder.” She held up the paper. “I did some more checking, Mr. Kenneth James. A report done by a KGB agent that assisted you in killing the real Kenneth James in Hawaii during the substitution. He reported that the dying American admitted to two murders in his presence — the murder of his infant brother, and the murder of his high school girlfriend.”
Maraklov took a step forward. The gun did not waver. “Musi, I still don’t understand. What does this have to do with what’s going on here? Yes, the real Kenneth James killed his brother — he admitted that. He was seconds away from death when he said he killed his girlfriend. He was delirious—”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. My friend Katrina Litkovka used to tell me about you, about the stories you supposedly made up, about how realistic they were. She told me about how you told her about how James killed his girlfriend before he went to Hawaii. Katrina said you were close to killing her then. Strange, isn’t it — the real Kenneth James confessed to the very crime that you described to Katrina.”
That made Maraklov stop in hopeless confusion. The parallels between the real Ken James and what he thought was James’ life were indeed startling, but he had never thought of it as his thoughts versus James’ real life. At the very instant that he realized he had been left alone in that hotel room in Honolulu, he became the ultimate extreme of his training … he became Kenneth Francis James. He evaded the security checks, the encounters with James’ friends and lovers, even related intimate details about James’ childhood because he had ceased to be Andrei Ivanschichin Maraklov and had become Ken James. Which was more than they wanted at the Academy.
Zaykov let the report fall to the floor and took out still another piece of paper from her jacket. “I am detaining you so we can speak with General Tret’yak, but I am also reopening the investigation of Katrina Litkovka’s murder.
“Motive: She told me you threatened to kill her if she exposed your behavior to Headmaster Roberts. That would have destroyed your chances to go to America, something you had spent half your life and every part of your peculiar mind training for. I recall the talk that your mission was to be canceled because you were unprepared emotionally for the role. Opportunity: The whiskey you bought two days before the accident. The security guards testified that Litkovka was not drunk before leaving the Academy. You arranged the accident, made it look like Katrina had been drinking, then killed her, Kenneth James …”
“I am not Kenneth James,” Maraklov said. “I am Colonel Andrei Maraklov, an officer in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, a trained deep-cover agent just like yourself. And I am not a murderer …”
Zaykov held up the last piece of paper in her hand. It was a photograph. She tossed it across to him. Maraklov stepped forward to pick it up; she moved backward to stay out of his reach. “Look at it.”
Sweat popped off his forehead as he studied the picture. It was an old photocopy of a picture of Kenneth James, the real Kenneth James, taken in Hawaii, obviously by a KGB hidden camera. It appeared to have been taken not long before he had arrived in Hawaii to make the switch — possibly it was the photo used by the plastic surgeons to give him his new face before replacing James.
Even though the photo was much enlarged and grainy, Maraklov could still make out the drawn features, the thinning hair, the sickly appearance. The guy had been tearing himself apart from the inside out for ten years over the murder of his infant brother. He had destroyed not only his own life but the life of his natural father as well. No wonder he had expressed such relief when he realized he was dying and had confessed the truth to Maraklov that evening.
“What about this, Musi? We’re wasting time … “
She motioned to a mirror on the living room wall. “Take a look.”
Maraklov dropped the photograph and moved over to the mirror. He stared at the face in the mirror. It was Kenneth Francis James — at least the face of James in the photograph. The plastic surgery Maraklov had undergone before coming to America kept most of his face looking like it was still seventeen years old, but it couldn’t hide the thinning hair, the hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes, the thin neck and protruding Adam’s apple … in his case, the strain of the ANTARES interface and the other attrition in the theft of DreamStar had chewed away at Maraklov’s body, much as the murders of his brother and girlfriend had eaten away at James.
“I’m arresting you for the murder of Katrina Litkovka,” Musi Zaykov said. “You come with—”
Ignoring the weapon pointed at his chest, he reared back and hurled the Scotch bottle at the mirror. The bottle hit the glass and exploded. Instinctively Zaykov turned at the sound, the gun still pointed at Maraklov, but her head turned toward the shattered mirror. It was the opening Maraklov needed. Forgetting the pistol she still held, he covered the few steps between him and Zaykov, and with the skill and precision developed from years of training, turned the pistol away from his left hand and delivered a solid roundhouse kick with his right foot. Zaykov collapsed to the floor, but Maraklov could not take control of the gun. As she doubled over and fell, she swung the gun back up and squeezed the trigger.
The gun exploded, he felt his left shoulder yanked backward, there was a loud buzzing in his ears, and the blood drained from his head. His knees buckled, and he dropped backward, clutching his shoulder. There was no pain — yet — only a steady rivulet of blood leaking from between his fingers, and the disorienting reeling of confusion mixed with fear. The room began to spin. He felt lightheaded, almost intoxicated.