Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

“Anikó?” Danny asked her in a hushed tone.

She looked up and smiled. It was hard to believe she was working on her doctorate. With her shiny black curls, pink cheeks, and large dark eyes, she looked about twelve. Or that might have been because of the comic book.

Sitting down across from her, Danny put two plastic bags on the table. One held a few bloody cotton balls; the other contained a dirty black baseball cap. “Thank you for your time. Here are your samples.”

Anikó took one in either hand, studied them for a moment, then nodded. “This I can do for you in… two days.”

Danny was already pulling crumpled bills out of her various pockets and piling them on the table between them. She always kept several different currencies in her burn bag, mostly Euros; she had changed some of it into forints but the exchange rate the teller had given her was terrible. Anikó would probably get a better deal. She certainly didn’t look unhappy to see all those Euros.

“No, this you can do for me in two hours ,” Danny said. Anikó’s wide dark eyes went from the small crumpled fortune on the table to her. Danny shifted position in the chair, getting more comfortable. “I’ll wait.”

A little over two hours later, Danny was sitting on a bench in the garden outside the library, waiting for Henry and Baron while she tried to get her mind around the new reality contained in the envelope Anikó had given her. She actually found herself hoping Henry and Baron would be late. Then she could worry about them. Worry was a normal thing, part of the normal world. Only the normal world didn’t exist any more. Thanks to the thing in the envelope that Anikó had given her, nothing would ever be normal again.

But of course they weren’t late.

“Hey,” Henry said, quickening his pace as he came toward her with Baron. “We got a time with Yuri. Meeting him at the—” The look on her face finally registered and he broke off. “You okay?”

Danny held up the envelope Anikó had given her with the lab results. How could something as normal as an envelope contain something so unbelievable? “I think I know why this guy is as good as you, Henry.”

Henry’s eyes widened; Baron looked like he was waiting for a punchline.

She took a deep breath and plunged on. “He is you.”

Henry and Baron looked from her to each other and back again.

“Huh?” Henry said finally.

“There’s a lab in there,” she continued, tilting her head at the building behind her. “I gave them samples, yours and the baseball cap he was wearing.”

The expression on Henry’s face told her he didn’t like that one bit. If it had been her, she wouldn’t have, either, but she’d have wanted to know.

“He looked so much like you, I thought he had to be your son,” she went on. “So I—well, they did the test three times. Your DNA and his. All three came back ‘Identical’. Not ‘Close’. Identical . As in ‘same person’… He’s your clone.”

He’s your clone.

He’s your clone.

Your clone.

Your clone.

Clone.

Henry plumped down on the bench beside Danny. She looked pretty freaked out. So did Baron. Which was almost funny—if they thought this was crazy-town, they should have seen the view from his side of the looking glass.

“They thought I’d made the mistake,” Danny was saying. “That maybe I’d given them samples from just one person. But I didn’t. He’s you. ”

“It’s impossible,” Henry said after a bit. He turned to Baron to see if he thought so, too.

Baron looked as stunned as Henry felt. “You know what Verris always used to say about you—‘I wish I had a whole corps of Henrys.’ I thought he was just blowing smoke.”

“My clo—” Henry looked pained. “Hell, I can’t even say the goddam word.” He shook his head. “The way he was coming at me, it was like he was… bred for it.” Suddenly he was back on that street in Cartagena, the guy swatting him with the back wheel of a motorcycle, trying to smash him with the front wheel. And when all of that failed, pulling his combat knife. If the police hadn’t shown up then, Henry knew the guy would have gutted him, and the last thing he would have seen as the knife went in was his own face.

Talk about being your own worst enemy— literally. Henry winced; that should have been funny but it wasn’t. The whole world was out of kilter, and so was he. And there was no going back.

“I don’t—” Danny started and then had to take a steadying breath. “Henry, who the hell have we been working for?”

And that was why he had to keep it together, Henry thought, sitting up straighter. His reaction would have to wait. His whole life had been about serving his country, protecting the good people from bad guys, foreign or domestic. Good people like Danny and Baron, not to mention all the people who were just doing the best they could to get by, unaware of what bad guys like Clay Verris were up to in secret laboratories. Henry couldn’t quit on them even if he quit the agency. When he had joined the Marines, he had taken an oath to bear true faith; that oath didn’t come off with the uniform, it was for life. And if he was ever in danger of forgetting it, the green spade on his wrist would remind him.

Semper fi.

“There were always rumors about the agency lab and their experiments,” Henry said as the three of them walked through a Budapest park together, on their way to meet Yuri. In the aftermath of the bomb Danny had dropped on him, he had all but forgotten why they’d actually come to Budapest in the first place.

“How is it even possible ?” Baron said.

“It’s complicated,” Danny told him, “but doable. They take the nucleus of a somatic cell from a donor—in this case, Henry. Then they take an egg cell, pull the genetic material out of it, transplant the donor cell into it. That’s the science.”

Baron looked openly impressed. “You get that from your lab friend?”

Danny shook her head. “Google.”

Henry blinked at her, incredulous. The world had spun so wildly out of control that anyone could find instructions on cloning on the goddam Web . “I always thought if they could do that they’d make more doctors or scientists, not more of me ,” he said. “They could have cloned Nelson Mandela. ”

“Nelson Mandela couldn’t kill a man on a moving train from two kilometers,” Danny pointed out.

Henry grimaced. If she was trying to cheer him up, she was doing a lousy job.

“Hey, I’m not happy about this, either. I risked my life for them,” Danny said. “So they could do this ?”

“You risked your life for your country ,” Henry corrected her. “Like your father did.”

“My country . ” She gave a harsh, bitter laugh. “I don’t think I like the way that’s working out.”

“The DIA is an agency—it’s not your country,” Henry said. “Be glad you didn’t have to wait, say, twenty-five years to find that out.”

Baron patted her shoulder. “Listen, if you ever want to junk it all and come be VP of Baron Air, I’ll make a position available.”

Danny gave him a sad smile. “If my father were here, he’d find out who was responsible for all this and beat the crap out of them.” She sighed. “But he’s not here.”

“Then I guess it’s up to us,” Henry told her.

The Széchenyi Baths were not a single building but a whole complex of magnificent old structures built around thermal springs. Yuri had waxed rhapsodic to Henry about the beautiful architecture and how relaxing and therapeutic the baths were, and yes, the buildings were gorgeous, great architecture, yeah, yeah, yeah. But standing with Danny and Baron on a balcony overlooking the multitude of happy bathers enjoying themselves in the sunshine, Henry had a hard time appreciating Yuri’s choice of meeting place.