Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

When they got to the communion rail in front of the altar, the clone yanked her into an alcove on the right and pushed her toward a set of stone steps going down.

“Basement?” she said, forcing a light tone. “You must really know your way around Budapest churches.”

“I watch a lot of Nat Geo.” He motioned at the stairs. “ Down. ”

The steps were narrow and uneven and she was afraid of losing her balance and falling because he kept prodding her with the Glock. That would be another two weeks added to his agonizing death, she thought poisonously.

When they reached the bottom he gave her a nudge into a passageway lined with shelves and lit by bare bulbs strung overhead, spaced about fifteen feet apart. Were they five watts? Less? She could barely see, and if clone-boy poked her with that Glock one more time, she was going to shove it up his nose sideways—

Her toe hit something and she stumbled, nearly falling on her face before she caught hold of a steel rod sunk solidly into the floor. Which, she saw now, wasn’t hard-packed dirt as she had originally thought but concrete covered with ages of dust and grime. She looked up and suddenly found herself staring into the dark, empty eye sockets of a very, very old skull. It was one of many on the shelf in front of her. No, actually one of thousands on a multitude of shelves on either side of the passageway, all stacked one on top of another, from the gritty cement floor up past the string of bare light bulbs and disappearing into the shadows above.

“Wow,” Danny breathed, staring upward. The clone gave her another push. “I wonder how many people are buried down here.” He didn’t answer and she resisted asking him if he had missed Catacombs Week on Nat Geo.

There was a rusted iron gate ahead; as they got closer, Danny saw part of a broken padlock hanging from the hasp. Signs in four different languages, including English, declared, This Area Strictly Off Limits.

The clone gave her another poke with the Glock, motioning her forward. Whoever had raised him to respect his elders had obviously failed to mention it was rude to poke them with a handgun. Instead of giving in to the urge to stick the Glock up his nose, however, she pushed the gate open. “But it says off limits.”

“That’s very funny,” he said, his voice flat.

The passageway ahead was even narrower and more dimly lit. He caught her arm. “Stand over there,” he said, pushing her up against another steel support rod. “Don’t move.”

Danny watched as he wedged a grenade into the mouth of a skull on a shelf one up from floor level, then attached a tripwire, which he connected to another skull on the shelf opposite. It was about six inches off the ground and, in this light, invisible.

Messing with the dead like this had to be some kind of serious desecration, Danny thought, the kind of thing even a hard-headed non-believer would want to avoid. But clone-Henry wasn’t fazed in the least. Maybe he really was a stone clone. Or maybe he’d just never seen a horror movie.

He reached up with the Glock and shattered the bulb above them. As they continued along the passageway, he broke the rest of them so that the only illumination came from his flashlight.

“If you knock out all the lights,” Danny said, “how are you going to see your own tripwire on your way out? A grenade is no joke. I mean, I get what you’re doing—darkness neutralizes his biggest strength. And close-quarters favors you, right? He can’t throw a grenade without killing me, too. But what if he uses tear gas? Or a sleep agent?”

He shoved her through another doorway into a large round area with a few dim naked bulbs dangling well out of reach. This must be the Quartz Chamber, Danny thought. It, too, was lined with shelves of skulls and bones bolstered every few feet by metal support rods. As far as she could tell, there was no other way in or out. The clone dropped his backpack on the cement floor and pulled out what seemed to be a compact gas mask equipped with night vision. He put it on but left it sitting up on top of his head.

“Okay, I see you’re way ahead of me,” she said. “Gas mask and night vision together, very smart. But can I ask you something?”

“Would you actually stop talking long enough for me to answer?” clone-Henry said with a fed-up edge in his voice.

Danny smiled inwardly. She was getting to him. “How much do you know about Henry?” she demanded. “What have you been told?” He dragged her over to one of the steel support rods. “Did anybody tell you why they want him dead? Did you even ask ?”

The clone gave a heavy, put-upon sigh. “The guy cracked,” he said, pulling some zip-ties out of his backpack. He bound her wrists with the rod between her forearms, positioning them so she couldn’t try chewing herself free and so tightly she couldn’t slide her arms up or down. That was a real problem; pretty soon she was going to lose feeling in her hands, and if she complained he’d make them tighter. “He killed eight ops in a single night. And his spotter.”

“ That’s what they told you?” Danny said incredulously.

“ That’s what he did ,” the clone corrected her.

“Not exactly!” Danny fumed, forgetting she was trying to make him lose it. All at once, she was close to tears and didn’t care if it showed. “I was with him the night all those operatives got hit. They’d been sent to kill him. And me —by Gemini . Think about that: Henry saved my life even though I was surveilling him!” She was shouting at him now, full of rage at the way everything she said just bounced off him while he rummaged around in his backpack.

“And not that it matters,” she went on at high volume, “but his spotter was shot in Virginia , the rest of those men went down in Savannah . Henry can shoot long distance but not that long. I—”

Clone-Henry suddenly stood up again. “You know what?” Without waiting for an answer, he mashed a thick piece of duct tape over her mouth, pressing hard for a couple of seconds. “That’s better,” he said.

“Fuh yuh ,” she replied, enunciating as clearly as she could.

He screwed a silencer onto the end of the Glock and started shooting out the light bulbs in the chamber, spraying glass and fragments of bone into the air. Danny wanted to kick him for violating a place where the dead from ages past had been laid to rest with the idea that they would rest undisturbed for all eternity, but she couldn’t reach him.

He was about to shoot out the last light when the grenade went off.

Yanking the mask down over his face, Junior ran into the passageway, his heart pounding with a mix of anticipation, excitement, and confidence. The explosion that had blown his target to pieces had also blown the world back into its proper orbit. Everything was now in order again. As soon as he finished mopping up, his next mission would be waiting—

He stopped short. The goggles were very high resolution, letting him see, in various shades of luminous green, the iron gate now hanging crookedly from one hinge, and the crater that had been blown out of the cement, with countless bone fragments and shards spread all over the blast zone. But there were no splatters of blood and tissue, no body parts, no dead or dying old guy. Had the son of a bitch somehow set off the mine from a safe distance? No, impossible. Even with night-vision goggles, Brogan couldn’t have spotted the wire unless he’d known where to look for it and there was no way he could have known that. He couldn’t even have guessed.