Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

“Yeah,” Henry said. “I noticed he was very good.”

“I meant his face ,” she said, applying the first butterfly bandage to his cheek. Stitches would have been better but she wasn’t skilled enough at facial sutures so butterflies would have to do. “The s imilarity ?”

Henry gave a resigned sigh. “Yeah, I noticed that, too.”

“So you never had a long-term relationship?” she asked, putting on the next bandage.

“Not unless we count you.”

Danny couldn’t help laughing at that one. “Is it possible you had a kid without knowing it?”

“ No ,” he said firmly. “Zero chance.”

“Then…?”

“ Danny .” He hadn’t raised his voice but she got the hint. Instead of pushing him, she tucked two bloody cotton balls into a small plastic bag and pushed it under her seat with the other item she was hanging onto.

“Thank you, by the way,” she said.

Henry’s eyebrows went up. “For what?”

“Leaving Baron’s apartment so he and I wouldn’t be targets,” she replied. “Also for coming to get me in Georgia when you could have just run for your life.”

Henry chuckled. “Just wanted to put you on a private plane and give you a free trip to Hungary.”

“Where I’m going to find…?”

“Hungarians,” Henry said. “When I saw him it was like I was seeing a ghost.”

“A ghost with a gun?” Danny said.

“It was like it was every trigger I ever pulled,” he said, surprising the hell out of her.

She was still trying to figure out what to say to that when he lay back and closed his eyes. The conversation, like the first aid, was over.

The mansion Clay Verris called home was one of many stately old houses that Savannah was famous for, although it wasn’t actually in the city itself but several miles away in the countryside, well off the beaten path followed by historic tours. It sat on several well-kept and heavily-surveilled acres of land and had its own lake just a few steps from the front door. The clear placid water reflected the place perfectly, so that from a certain distance, the house seemed to be sitting directly above its upside-down double. It was the kind of image many photographers found irresistible but the very few people allowed within Verris’s established perimeter knew better than to bring a camera.

In the twenty-three years Clay Verris had been in residence with his son, there had been very few intrusions. The security details stationed well away from the house had occasionally redirected hikers with broken compasses and, on one occasion, escorted someone claiming to be a herbalist off the property. But no one had ever come close to breaking into the house.

Nonetheless, Verris had put in an alarm system, just in case. The Gemini personnel he had tasked with the installation told him that it was a bit tricky to install something so high-tech without compromising the house’s historic character. Verris had told them this meant either the tech wasn’t high-tech enough or they didn’t know what they were doing; which was it?

The alarm system had gone in without a problem, and so had all the updates. Verris tested it from time to time and was satisfied that there was no way anyone could get into his home without being invited.

So when he woke just before dawn, he knew something was wrong. He was a man who slept soundly and well; thoroughly was the word he liked to use. His training and conditioning were also thorough, and as a result, he had an extremely heightened awareness, which was how he knew he had awakened because there was someone else in the house.

He lay very still, waiting for noises that might give some indication of how many hostiles he might have to deal with and where each of them was. Later he would determine how they had breached the perimeter and broken in without setting off the in-house alarm. The overnight security team would regret their negligence for the rest of their miserable lives, if not longer.

It seemed like an hour before he finally heard another sound, this time from his son’s bedroom. Verris tensed; was this some kind of drunken prank? There had been an incident before, but that had been in his office in the compound. At times, personnel got rowdy there but they wouldn’t dare break into his house, he was sure of that. If this was an outsider, though, a lot of heads were going to roll.

Without making a sound, Verris got up, put on his dressing gown and crept down the stairs. The light in Junior’s room was on and shouldn’t have been. His son was still out of the country; after his mission to take out Brogan had gone pear-shaped, Verris had told him to sit tight in a Colombian safe house and await new orders. He had issued that command personally and his son was nothing if not reliable and obedient.

Verris drew the pistol in the pocket of his dressing gown and, hugging the wall outside his son’s room, peeked around the open doorway.

The man sitting on the bed was the spitting image of Henry Brogan as he had been at the age of twenty-five, and he was alternating between tweezers and a pair of angled metal tongs to pick shrapnel out of his side, dropping the fragments on a monogrammed towel.

It was a tedious, awkward process, complicated by the attendant bleeding. Every time he removed one of the larger pieces, a little more blood would dribble down his side—not so much that he was in danger of losing consciousness, just enough to make a messy job that much messier.

Verris was rarely taken by surprise but he really hadn’t seen this coming. The only thing more surprising would have been finding Henry Brogan himself sitting on the bed with him. Now that would have been a sight and Verris almost wished he could see it. But it would never happen. The physical resemblance was only skin deep; past that, Junior was Verris’s son clear through to the bone.

He slipped the gun back into his pocket and stepped into the open doorway. The man on the bed looked up at him, then went back to what he was doing.

“I told you to stay in Colombia and await orders,” Verris said.

Junior looked up at him again. “I wanted to talk to you.”

His son’s voice was just a little too loud to be acceptable. The kid knew it, too, Verris thought, gazing at him sternly. Junior stared back, tongs in hand, refusing to admit he was in the wrong. All sons did this from time to time, even the best and most dutiful of them. It was how they tested the structure they’d been given. They needed to see if it held. A good father made sure his son knew that it would, that it was one of the few things in life he could count on never to fail him.

Junior could push pretty hard sometimes. It took almost half a minute before he finally dropped his gaze.

“Sorry,” he said.

When Verris didn’t respond, Junior looked up at him again, his expression turning wary.

Verris was staring through him now and Junior knew that meant he’d crossed a little too far over the line. He tried to go back to picking shrapnel out of his side but he couldn’t get a good hold on anything. The bleeding had increased.

Verris turned on his heel and went to his study. The retina scanner was a bit slow to unlock the door but he was in no hurry. He got his first-aid kit out of a cabinet behind his desk and gave it a full ten-count before going back to his son’s bedroom.

Junior’s expression was relieved if still a bit apprehensive when he reappeared. Verris shoved everything Junior had been using off the bed and had him lie down on his uninjured side while he finished removing the shrapnel for him. Boys will be boys, Verris thought as he soaked up the excess blood with cotton batting. No matter how old they got, they had to learn some lessons more than once. With any luck, this one would sink in hard enough to leave a mark as a permanent reminder. Verris loved his son but there were moments when Junior came uncomfortably close to genuine rebellion. That wasn’t supposed to happen… yet.