Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

I talk too goddam much, Henry thought unhappily. “Me, personally, right now? Hell no,” he said. “But a younger, less mature version of me? Probably.”

She laughed and he laughed with her, as if they weren’t both scared shitless. He couldn’t let her do this, he thought, and opened his mouth to tell her it was off.

“Henry?” she said.

His name hung in the air between them and he could hear all the unspoken questions she wanted to ask:

Do I have a hope in hell of getting out of this alive? Do you ? If we don’t, is this something worth dying for? Is anything worth dying for? Is this really what our lives have been leading up to and is it right, is it good? Are we good? Will it even make a difference? Will anyone care what happens to us?

Even after twenty-five years, he still knew all those questions by heart. With any luck, she would get more answers than he had.

All of this ran through his mind in less time than it took for him to smooth an errant strand of dark hair back from her face. “When I came to get you in Georgia,” he said quietly, “I didn’t have to think about it. It was instinct, wanting to keep you safe. He’s got that, too—he’s not going to hurt you.”

He could sense her seizing on that and holding it close, willing it to be true.

“And hurting you doesn’t help him,” he added. “What he wants is me. In his sights.”

Danny took a deep steadying breath, got out of the car, and walked toward the entrance to Vajdahunyad Castle without looking back.

Henry stared after her, all his instincts still screaming for him to call it off.

Danny walked across the footbridge at an even pace, not slow, not fast, toward the Gatehouse Tower of Vajdahunyad Castle. The outside of the castle was surrounded by very bright, yellow-gold lights; although the illumination spilled over a bit on the inside, the place was still very dark and shadowy. The gate was up, its sharp points hanging over the entrance. She was pretty sure it was normally lowered after hours but Henry’s clone was clever enough to fix it so she wouldn’t have to scale the tower to get in. And the open gate absolutely did not in any way remind her of an animal’s gaping jaws, not even a little.

On the other side of the bridge, the paving went from smooth to brick. Danny still didn’t hurry, except as she passed under the raised gate; she did a quick little trot, so as not to be under those pointed metal bars for more than a second.

Which was silly—why would the clone agree to meet here only to impale her with a metal gate? Henry’s words came back to her: Hurting you doesn’t help him. What he wants is me. In his sights. She really hoped Henry was right, at least about the first part. And anyway, clone-Henry would have orders from Janet Lassiter to take her back to the States safe and sound. If he were going to disobey those orders and kill her, he could have done it when she was on the footbridge. Or he could shoot her right now.

Danny felt a rush of shame for being so scared. She wasn’t doing this alone. Henry and Baron had her back and she had theirs. The three of them were a team.

Her steps began to slow until she came to a stop, with a church on her left and on her right a statue sitting on a bench, mostly in shadow despite the spillover from the lights outside. Count Sándor Károlyi, according to the information she’d downloaded to her phone, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember the name of the church opposite. Then she discovered that she couldn’t get her feet to move, either.

“Forward march ,” she whispered between clenched teeth. “Yo left, right, left.”

Nothing; her feet might as well have been super-glued to the bricks.

“Yo left, right, left,” she whispered again—still nothing. Maybe she should try counting cadence. I had a dog, his name was Blue, Blue wanna be a seal too…

No, she was damned if she was going to make a fool of herself while clone-Henry watched. And he was watching her, she saw, from behind an iron gate off to the side of the church’s front door. Danny felt an intense surge of hostility and indignation. How long had he been there? Could he tell how spooked she was? Goddammit, it was after midnight in a castle that had been Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula’s crib. Anyone not creeped out would have to be made of stone.

Well, apparently he was. He didn’t look even mildly nervous as he opened the gate and beckoned to her. He was a clone made of stone. A stone clone. Danny had to bite her lips to keep from laughing. If she did she might not be able to stop, and hysteria was hardly the most constructive course of action.

She gave him a hard glare as she walked past him into a small courtyard. He was still watching her closely. Was he wondering how long she could keep it together without losing her shit? Let him, she thought; she would show him she wasn’t some poor little victim he could bully.

The moon was high in the sky. It was on the wane but still bright enough that, along with the flow-over from the lights outside the castle, Danny could see his face quite clearly, in more detail than the few glimpses she’d had back in Cartagena. This wasn’t simply a strong resemblance—it really was Henry’s face, his and none other, minus a few years and maybe some mileage. The way clone-Henry was staring at her so coldly, with no sign of recognition, was even more unsettling than Dracula’s castle at midnight. It was like she had taken a wrong turn and walked into a parallel universe where she and Henry had never met on the dock, and instead of teaming up with Baron they had become enemies.

“Lovely courtyard,” Danny said. It was a silly thing to say—the courtyard was lovely but only if you wanted to make a horror movie where everybody died horribly in the end. She had just wanted to see if she could speak without her voice shaking and was surprised at how calm and undaunted she sounded.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Henry’s clone said with Henry’s voice, “but before we go any further, I have to ask you to strip.”

Danny gaped at him. Her attention had snagged on the word ma’am. “I beg your pardon?”

“So I can check you for a wire,” he added, as if that made it reasonable.

“Wait a second,” she said. “Did you just call me ‘ ma’am ?’”

“ I was raised to respect my elders,” he told her in a slightly reproachful tone that suggested he thought her upbringing left a lot to be desired. “Your clothes, please.”

That ma’am was going to cost him dearly, Danny vowed as she took off her top. His death would be slow and merciless; it would last for weeks. No, months. She toed off her boots, pushed her jeans down and stepped out of them. Now she was standing in the middle of a horror movie set at midnight in her underwear. And her socks. She stepped back into her boots but she was pretty sure that wasn’t an improvement. At least she had put nice underwear in her burn bag—not that she had ever imagined this scenario. Although it was a good bet that someone somewhere did, frequently.

She tried to block the idea but it was too late. What had been thunk could not be unthunk, as her grandfather used to say. Meanwhile, Henry’s clone stood in front of her in his fatigues and his Kevlar vest and his combat boots. Was he enjoying this? Did he feel powerful because she was half-naked and vulnerable? That was the whole idea, of course, to make her feel weak and powerless. But why was he just standing there? What was he waiting for—another opportunity to call her ma’am ?