Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

Henry tried to pull his hands away, fighting to breathe, but his air was already cut off. Dark patches appeared in his vision and the light from Danny’s flare above him began to fade out. Henry tugged on the clone’s wrists and forearms but it was like pulling at steel bars. Dammit, instead of drowning, he was going to suffocate out of water like a goddam fish. Henry was vaguely aware of a splash as something else fell into the water but he was too busy losing consciousness to wonder about it.

“Get your hands off him!” Danny yelled from somewhere off to Henry’s right. He felt Junior’s hands loosen but only for a moment before he started to squeeze again.

And then impossibly, there was a gunshot. Even more impossibly, Junior fell back from Henry.

Air rushed into Henry’s lungs in a noisy, torturous wheeze. He could hear the clone panting with shock and pain, as if he had never been shot before. Henry managed to prop himself up on one elbow and saw Danny treading water and aiming a Glock at the clone.

The woman could tread water and shoot a Glock, Henry marveled. If this was the DIA agent of the future, he was retiring just in time.

The clone was staring at her, too, astonished and indignant. Henry half-expected him to yell something like, No fair, that’s cheating! And then fling himself at her. Except he couldn’t. His nose wasn’t bleeding as much any more but now Henry saw a lot more blood on the front of his shirt.

Danny had maneuvered herself so that she was right beside Henry. With her free hand, she used the ledge to steady herself and took aim at the kid again. It was a tremendous physical effort but Henry reached over and somehow found the strength to push her gun hand down.

Danny stared at him wide-eyed and he knew she was wondering why he was stopping her after she had finally managed to shoot him.

Junior Hitman seemed even more astonished. “I’m not you !” he shouted suddenly, his face contorting with rage and pain. “You hear me, old man? I’m not you! ” He rolled off the ledge into the water.

Danny quickly boosted herself up out of the water next to Henry while he peered through the gloom, listening for the sound of the kid coming up for air. For a long time, he heard nothing and he wondered if the gunshot had weakened Junior so much that he had drowned. There was something terribly perverse about that.

Finally he heard the small splash of someone breaking the surface somewhere far away. He looked at Danny, who nodded; she’d heard it, too. This pool, or whatever it was, was a hell of a lot larger than he’d thought. And it wasn’t stagnant, which meant it had to let out somewhere.

“You think he’s gone?” Henry said after a bit. His chest was tight and every muscle in his neck felt sore; it hurt even just to swallow.

“I think so,” Danny replied.

“Where did you hit him?”

“In the shoulder.” Danny’s voice was calm and even.

“Then he’ll recover,” Henry said, staring at the water. He half-expected some new menace to suddenly surge up out of it. Just when you thought you were safe from your clone in the catacombs. Damn, he really was loopy from lack of oxygen.

Danny moved his hand to his neck. “Keep pressure on that and wait here,” she said as she got to her feet. “I’m going to see if we can get out of the cistern without having to climb back up to the catacombs.”

“This is a cistern ?” Henry said, horrified.

“Well, it ain’t an indoor swimming pool,” Danny said with a grim little chuckle. “Once I find a way out, I can call Baron to come get us.”

Henry was flabbergasted. “You’ve got a waterproof phone?”

“No. I’ve got a regular phone in a waterproof case,” she said over her shoulder as she disappeared into the shadows, leaving Henry to wonder how the hell she’d slipped that past Junior.

Baron had been waiting almost twenty minutes in a back alley outside a disused service entrance to the catacombs before Henry and Danny appeared. Henry had one arm slung across her shoulders, leaning on her like a wounded soldier. That was curious enough but what made it genuinely strange was the fact that they were both wet. He couldn’t wait to hear that story.

“It’s not often you see a guy get his ass kicked on two continents back to back. Hop in!” He opened the passenger-side doors. Henry sprawled across the back seat while Danny took shotgun. Baron closed the door for Henry, then hurried around the front of the car to hop into the driver’s seat. “Where to?”

For some reason, Danny found that funny; Henry didn’t. “Georgia,” he said wearily. “It’s where Verris is.”

This time, they were flying away from the oncoming day, chasing the night into the west while the clock ran backwards. Baron wasn’t singing, which Danny actually missed, while Henry resisted her attempts at first aid.

He didn’t have a whole lot of new injuries but she was concerned about the laceration on his neck. It wasn’t especially deep but it had been made with the jagged end of a very old, very dirty bone in a cistern and there was a high risk of infection. Henry had finally let her sterilize the wound and put a bandage on it. But every time she tried to check for inflammation, he waved her off.

“Advil?” she offered, showing him the bottle.

He shrugged. She gave him two; he held up four fingers so she gave him two more. The rule of thumb in the field was, doubling the dose of an over-the-counter medication made it prescription-strength. But another rule of thumb said this was only a stopgap and you were supposed to get out of the field ASAP. Danny didn’t know whose thumbs the rules were based on but she was pretty sure they weren’t Henry’s. He tossed back the four pills and chased them with whiskey. Well, at least alcohol was a disinfectant, she thought, and maybe its depressant properties would put him to sleep.

“Try to get some rest,” Danny said.

Henry didn’t answer. She hesitated, then decided to take her own advice in the seat behind him.

Clay Verris was in his office watching feeds from several different pre-dawn exercises when the guard on the ground floor called to inform him Junior was on his way up with blood in his eye. She also advised the commander that his son had sustained a GSW in his left shoulder, although it didn’t seem to be serious.

Verris thanked the guard and made a mental note to leave a plus sign on the performance sheet in her file. He didn’t like being disturbed while he was monitoring exercises unless it was important. A less perceptive guard would have figured there was no point in interrupting him to tell him he was going to be interrupted; fortunately, this one knew Junior always took priority.

Junior had been very much on his mind since this second debacle with Henry Brogan. Verris had known full well that Brogan wouldn’t be easy to eliminate. But he’d been surprised when the kid had called him from Cartagena to report the target had gotten away.

Then again, it had been a rushed assignment. Brogan had to be neutralized as soon as possible and there hadn’t been much time for the kid to study up on him, watch footage, get acquainted with his moves. Not that Verris had really wanted Junior to get a close enough look at Henry to recognize him at that point—not until he was ready to know the truth about who he was.

Originally, Verris had planned to lay it all out for him on his twenty-first birthday. But when it had arrived, he was still so damned young. It wasn’t education and training that he lacked, Verris realized, it was seasoning.