Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

He turned his attention back to the exercise, where the elite team members were now engaging the insurgents and showing them what they thought of fighters who killed unarmed civilians. The uniformed team was going full-on, like it really was fighting insurgents and this wasn’t a training exercise where both sides were armed only with tasers.

Training had to be tough and a good part of that was so soldiers gained a level of conditioning to be able to withstand punishment—a punch, a beating, a cattle prod, even a stab wound or a gunshot—and not be too traumatized to get up again. But Junior thought these guys had bypassed tough and gone to unadorned brutality. There had to be a limit to how many times you could tase even the hardest hard-ass before doing serious damage. At the very least, it wasted juice.

The guys playing the insurgents gave as good as they got, all for the sake of keeping everyone’s training at peak. But this didn’t look like training. The so-called good guys seemed to be enjoying themselves too much. So were the guys playing the insurgents—some of them had apparently discovered their inner bad guys and were gleefully letting them out to play. One rather protracted fight gave Junior the definite impression a score was being settled and that was nothing short of unprofessional. Conduct unbecoming, for sure.

Junior looked around at the other personnel who weren’t part of the exercise. Generally, anyone not tapped for an exercise gave the field of action a wide berth. But more than a few soldiers had paused in the observation area to check things out, although they hadn’t stayed long, and if they’d thought the exercise was getting out of hand, they hadn’t said anything to him about it. But they probably wouldn’t have anyway. Everyone was polite to him but even those who were friendly kept their distance, never going out of their way to get to know him, like they didn’t know what to make of him. Like he was a freak.

In any case, Junior knew what his father would say if he shared his misgivings about what was going on in the current exercise. Verris would tell him to remember these guys were still learning. None of them came from his privileged background—they hadn’t grown up learning how to conduct themselves, how to channel their thoughts and emotions, how to conquer fear by first embracing it, how to focus their minds properly, how to achieve complete dedication to a mission without letting it become personal. And of course, none of them could manage physical pain as well as he could.

His father had told him many times he was especially proud of him for that. Physical pain was the biggest problem for a soldier. Compartmentalizing was a skill and most people could learn how to do it if they were dedicated enough. But physical pain was something else altogether. Even the strongest soldiers could be worn down and defeated by pain.

That includes you, Junior, his father had said. You have a remarkable ability to keep pain from taking over your state of mind and affecting your judgment. But even you can’t do that indefinitely. Pain weakens the body, interferes with the mind, and eventually soldiers succumb. They can’t help it. They’re captured or killed, because they either make mistakes, or they simply don’t have the physical strength to defend themselves.

Can’t the lab just make better painkillers? he’d asked Verris. Stuff that won’t get you stoned, then wear off after four measly hours and make you an addict?

Easier said than done, his father had replied. I’ve spent a good part of my career trying to find ways to pain-proof the men and women under my command. Drugs don’t work the same for everyone and a lot of them create more problems than they solve, like addiction. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only real solution is endogenous—something within the soldier’s body, part of the physical organism.

Junior hadn’t been sure what that was supposed to mean but it had sounded weird and creepy and possibly dangerous. Maybe it was just because his father had referred to the human body as an organism. His father always talked like that but sometimes he sounded scary even to him.

Behind him, he heard the sound of soldiers suddenly snapping to attention; his father had arrived. Only people with Gemini training could salute audibly. Those who managed not to be completely intimidated spoke to him: Hello, sir. Good afternoon, sir. Good to see you, sir . His father let the pleasantries bounce off his impenetrable shell as he joined Junior in the observation area.

“Some new faces out there,” Junior said, nodding at the soldiers.

“Yep. They’ll be the first boots on the ground in Yemen.” His father spoke with undisguised pride.

If that was true, Junior pitied the Yemeni. He wondered what uniforms they would be wearing—certainly not Libyan. Unless his father had done another of those convoluted deals he was so famous for. In which case, Junior pitied everyone involved. Except his father, of course.

“Do these guys know the rules of engagement?” he asked Verris. “Or are they more ‘if it moves, shoot it?’”

“They’re elite ,” his father replied, even prouder. “ Disciplined . And if they have a clean shot at their target—say, through an apartment window—they’ll take it. Why don’t you think about that on your way to Budapest?”

Junior turned to look at him in surprise.

“Henry’s just landed,” his father added. “Pack your bags, you’ve got a flight to catch.”

Danny had been to Europe a number of times for the DIA. She had noticed that in winter, you could tell when you’d passed from Western Europe to Eastern Europe when the fur coats appeared. People wore a lot more fur in Eastern Europe, particularly in the northern regions where, if someone said they were freezing, it wasn’t hyperbole.

Until now, however, she had never been to Hungary and she was feeling slightly awestruck, almost as if she were a kid seeing the Old World for the first time. Of all the cities she had been to, she had never felt the presence of history as much as she did in Budapest, where it seemed to be in the very air she breathed.

In Rome and Moscow, the present and the ever-oncoming future had an immediacy that overrode the past even when you were looking at a relic as enormous as the Coliseum or standing in a cathedral commissioned by Ivan the Terrible.

But in Budapest, the past seemed to have grown stronger with time, holding its own no matter how demanding or urgent the concerns of the day might be, giving the city no choice but to co-exist with it as best it could. And nowhere was this more evident than at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The old friend Danny had phoned told her it was Hungary’s answer to MIT, which made it MTI—Magyar Technologia Intezet.

Clever, Danny had said, but how was their biology department? Specifically, human biology.

Her friend, an old submarine crewmate who now worked as an interpreter at the UN, had assured her the whole place was full of whip-smart students who were already shaping the future of their various chosen fields. The name she had given Danny was of a doctoral candidate who was so bright she’d been invited to participate in some highly advanced gene-sequencing projects while she was still an undergrad. Danny hoped she lived up to the hype.

The library where Anikó suggested they meet looked more like a cathedral to Danny. It was also enormous but she had no trouble finding her. Among all the students sitting at the long polished tables, some with notebook computers, some with pads of paper, and some with both, she was the only one reading a comic book.