Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

The train route from Liège, Belgium, to Budapest, Hungary, is a crooked line, passing through Germany and Austria, then skirting the southwestern border of Slovakia before it finally reaches its destination in north-central Hungary. Travel times can be as little as thirteen hours or an entire day, depending on how many stops there are and how many times you have to change trains. There is no way to get from Liège to Budapest without changing trains. Four or five transfers are most common, although on some itineraries there are seven or even ten changes.

All things considered, this made Valery Dormov’s itinerary a minor miracle. It required only two changes—the first in Frankfurt, the second in Vienna, and a total of eleven stops altogether, twelve if you counted Budapest—for an estimated travel time of not quite thirteen hours.

This extraordinary bit of scheduling had not been devised by Dormov himself but by some faceless rabotnik with a gift for seeing timetables in three dimensions rather than merely columns of numbers that most people would find almost impossible to coordinate. Dormov imagined that when the rabotnik came up from their basement office and presented this amazing bit of work to their superiors they’d had to withstand a chorus of bitching about the number of stops, rather than applause or even a pat on the back. But the stops couldn’t be helped—there weren’t any non-stop trains. On European railways there was no such thing as flyover cities.

Valery Dormov didn’t care about the number of stops but his bodyguards did. Every stop left them open to possible attack, or was at least an opportunity for an assassin to board the train, and transfers were even more dangerous. The bodyguards had gone over with him step by step how they were going to keep him alive in the Frankfurt and Vienna stations, emphasizing how important it was that he do exactly as he was told.

Dormov had been tempted to tell them that any putative assassin had probably boarded with them here in Liège but he knew they weren’t going to welcome him telling them how to do their job and instead simply nodded. He was a Russian in his sixties and he was just glad there were only two transfers, which meant he wouldn’t have to get up every few hours to run through train stations with three large, tense bodyguards. Not because he was disabled in any way—at his last check-up in the US, the forty-year-old doctor had actually said he envied Dormov’s blood pressure and muscle tone—but simply because he had been traveling nonstop for several days and he was tired. He could spend most of the next thirteen hours sitting down. Anything he could do sitting down wasn’t even an inconvenience.

It had been Dormov’s idea to go by train. Flying would have gotten him home more quickly but he had pointed out to his contacts that if the Americans were looking for him they would have already staked out the airports and even enlisted the security staff to help. No doubt they were watching the train stations, too, but it would be easier for him to blend in among the other travelers, even with bodyguards. In truth, Dormov had always hated air travel; on a train, you could get up and go to the bathroom any time you needed to, which at his age was an important consideration.

He suspected that if he had wanted to fly to Moscow, the bureaucrats would have turned him down. Not because airline passengers were easier to track but merely to put him in his place—Russia was happy he was coming home but that didn’t mean he could just snap his fingers and get whatever he wanted. Bureaucrats had to posture to compensate for their otherwise colorless jobs. Dormov didn’t mind. He could posture, too, and show them that after thirty-five years in the US, he wasn’t spoiled and demanding.

In fact, Dormov had mellowed about many things as he’d grown older. Even just twenty years ago, he’d have been highly annoyed at the little girl running up and down the aisle, chattering in softly accented Belgian French. These days, he was content to let children be children and do all the things children did, like being excited about going on a train ride. Too soon they would grow up and be browbeaten into the dullness and mediocrity that in too many places passed for good citizenship. Or they’d turn cynical and bad-tempered, finding fault with everyone and everything in the mistaken belief that this made them discriminating or insightful.

The train had yet to leave the station but the bodyguard sitting beside him asked for what seemed like the thousandth time if he wanted coffee or tea or something to eat. Dormov waved him off with one hand, shaking his head as he turned to look out the window. The other two bodyguards sitting on the other side of the small table were the usual kind of Russian muscle—stoic, stone-faced, and far more alert than they might appear to the other passengers.

His seat-mate, however, was somewhat younger and less experienced. Dormov wondered if this could be his very first field assignment because he didn’t seem to know he was supposed to just sit quietly and look intimidating, or at the very least unapproachable. He kept asking Dormov if he wanted something to eat or drink or read, was he comfortable, did he want a blanket.

Well, Yuri had said that quite a number of people were eagerly anticipating the return of the prodigal scientist to the bosom of Mother Russia. Typical Yuri—he’d never met a sentence he couldn’t embellish. Dormov thought it had something to do with the fact that the nature of Yuri’s work meant he had spent so many years oscillating between East and West. That sort of thing made operatives quirky.

East and West had many similarities but their differences weren’t complementary: Madonna’s bustier wasn’t a good fit for the bosom of Mother Russia. Dormov had always been secretly convinced that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the Soviet regime was directly attributable to three things: Madonna, MTV, and scented toilet paper. And the Internet had made sure no one looked back.

He had seen it coming back in the evocative year of 1984, when the Americans had first wooed him with the promise of a high-tech paradise without the threat of secret police watching him to make sure he toed the party line. Dormov had thought that sounded great. Over the next three and a half decades, however, he had learned that secret police came in many different forms, and just because you weren’t in a Siberian gulag didn’t mean you weren’t in a prison (albeit with softer toilet paper).

And then there was the matter of ethics. Bozhe moy!

He had always tried to be an ethical and moral man, a man of integrity. These were complex matters in an overcrowded world. He had been born the year Joseph Stalin had died and in those days there was less ambiguity about such matters. Stalin had outdone Hitler’s death toll, all of them Russians. Surviving under the Soviet regime was complex but ethics and morals were quite clear.

Dormov had gone to the US not for MTV or toilet paper but because he’d been certain that sooner or later, his scientific research would somehow come into conflict with the party. He didn’t want to wake up one morning and find himself in a gulag where the best thing he could hope for was a good tattoo of a cathedral on his back.