Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

“Mr. Brogan, you are the best at what you do,” Yuri said earnestly. “But you’re still a man. You get tired, you have doubts, fears—you feel pain, even remorse because you have a conscience. This makes you sub-optimal as a soldier. You’re less than perfect and so less profitable.” Yuri leaned toward him and lowered his voice. “Clayton Verris is playing God with DNA. He must be stopped.”

Henry sat in silence. A few days ago, he had understood the basic structure of the world. It was a messy, unhappy, dangerous place and he had chosen to spend his life working to alleviate those things, or at the very least, to keep them from worsening.

But then he had come home from Liège and retired and suddenly the world was upside down and inside out, and everything he knew was wrong. He’d killed a good man and his younger self was trying to kill him to cover it up—sent by the bastard who’d tricked him into killing a good guy in the first place. Henry wondered what Verris had told his clone. Dormov’s spiked file had said he was a bioterrorist. Verris had probably told the clone Henry ate young children alive. Hell, in his early twenties, he might have bought that himself.

Henry was quiet for a long moment, letting the other man’s words sink in. “If this is as dangerous as you say, why not just send a missile? Take out the whole lab?”

Yuri gave a single, humorless laugh. “That is what we are doing—except you are the missile! I wish you luck!”

The Russian stood up, stretched, and tightened the belt on his bathrobe. “And now, you’ll have to excuse me, I must go kill a Ukrainian oligarch.” He looked up and down the empty hallway. “Just kidding!” he added loudly, then winked at Henry as he drew his finger across his own throat, mouthing, No joke.

Yuri turned to leave, then stopped. “One last thing I meant to tell you. Your escape from your home two days ago? Amazing work! I was on the edge of my seat the whole time!”

Henry’s jaw dropped. “How do you even know about that?”

Yuri shrugged good-naturedly. “What can I say? I’m a super-fan.” He ambled up the hallway, his flip-flops smacking against the soles of his feet.

Damn, Henry thought, staring after him; the Ukrainians just couldn’t get a break, either.

Danny and Baron were waiting for him on the balcony. They listened intently as he told them what he’d found out from Yuri.

“Do you believe him?” Danny asked when he’d finished.

Henry nodded. “I’d trust him more than anyone at the agency right now.”

“Well that’s sobering,” Baron said. “You guys up for defecting?”

Danny elbowed him in the ribs. “We just have to find that kid.” Her eyes were large and serious. “You aren’t going to be safe until we do, Henry. None of us are.”

Who are you calling a kid? Henry barely managed not to say it aloud. “Okay, we find him. Then what?”

“You talk to him,” Danny replied, as if this should have been obvious. “He doesn’t know what he is; he doesn’t know who you are to him. Maybe you’ll get through.”

“Seriously?” Henry gave a short, hard laugh. “If a fifty-year-old version of you suddenly shows up saying you’re her clone, that would calm you down?”

“Fifty-one,” Baron put in.

Henry turned to give him a death-ray glare.

“Just sayin’.” Baron shrugged.

Danny touched Henry’s arm gently. “Maybe he’s the mirror you don’t want to look into, Henry. But he’s our best shot at getting to Verris.”

Henry couldn’t decide whether he wanted to hug her or shake her till her eyeballs rattled. Then he grinned as a better idea occurred to him.

“Let’s go get a cup of coffee,” he said.

“Where?” Baron asked.

Henry looked down at himself. He was still in the bathrobe and trunks. “Anywhere we don’t have to take off our clothes.”

“Janet Lassiter?”

Lassiter was sitting at her usual table in the Copper Ground coffee shop, staring out at Savannah’s early morning traffic while she waited for her usual order, which seemed to be taking more than the usual amount of time today. She turned to find a tall, dark-skinned man who looked vaguely familiar standing over her. He wore a narrow blue bike helmet, a tight, colorful shirt, dark shorts, and had a worn canvas bag slung across the front of his body.

Of course he looked familiar, Lassiter realized; he was a bike messenger, most likely the one who almost ran her down every other day.

“Who wants to know?” she asked, knowing full well she wasn’t going to like the answer. No one she had any use for would trust anything important to a bike messenger.

He pulled a cell phone out of his bag. “I’ve got a message for you, ma’am, from a man who transferred a thousand dollars into my Feathercoin account just to make sure you got it.”

“Does this person have a name?” Lassiter asked archly.

“His name is, ‘Thousand dollars into my Feathercoin account.’”

Lassiter considered asking what he called the guy for short but she didn’t feel like giving the smartass another straight line. Instead, she fixed him with a cold stare. Maybe she should shoot the messenger, she thought. A slug in the knee from the .38 in her purse wouldn’t kill him but it would hurt like hell, force him to find a less obnoxious line of work, and teach him not to get mouthy with short, older women. Then she motioned for him to go ahead.

The messenger cleared his throat and began reading from the cell phone screen. “‘Hello, Janet. Before you try to kill me again, consider this…’”

In her peripheral vision, Lassiter could see people turning to look at her with unabashed curiosity about the killer drinking coffee among them. It took an enormous amount of effort not to show any reaction herself. You couldn’t let the enemy see they’d had any effect on you or you’d be at their mercy. They were always trying to knock you off-balance, make you look crazy or stupid or even scary.

“‘Your home address is 1362 Carrol Grove. The security alarm code is 1776,’” the messenger continued. More people were staring, craning their necks, even standing up to get a look. Dammit, now she was going to have to move, Lassiter fumed. And she would have to change the security code while she packed.

“‘You awaken at 6:12 every morning and stop for your decaf soy latte with an extra shot by 6:42,’” declaimed the messenger, obviously enjoying himself. “‘Every night, you stand in front of your huge living room window sipping a Jose Cuervo margarita with Forensic Files on the TV.’”

Lassiter thought he had paused for breath but he tapped the screen and put the phone back in his bag. Apparently that was the message in its entirety. Lassiter felt let down in spite of herself; anticlimax wasn’t like Henry.

The people around her, however, seemed to think the show wasn’t over. Lassiter imagined kneecapping the messenger and maybe the wide-eyed couple at the table on her left, but then her own cell rang. She touched the Bluetooth clipped to her ear.

“This is Lassiter,” she said briskly.

“There are shooters at your ten and two,” Henry Brogan said. “Get up out of that chair and you will be AMF’ed.” He almost sounded polite, as if he were trying to be helpful.

Lassiter’s head snapped towards the window, scanning the buildings at ten o’clock and two o’clock. They were mostly high-rises with plenty of glass that reflected the bright morning sunlight, making it impossible for her to see anything. There might have been no one out there—or there might have been a whole platoon keeping her covered from multiple floors. She thought the former was more likely but she had known Henry Brogan for too long to risk calling his bluff. If she died today, it wasn’t going to be in a goddam coffee shop with a smartass bike messenger and a bunch of goddam over-caffeinated hipsters watching as she breathed her last.