Anthony Horowitz - Point Blank

‚I don’t know anything,' Alex said. ‚But as you said, I’m an English schoolboy. Lazy and ignorant.'

‚There is another word for it. Have you heard of cloning?'

Alex almost burst out laughing. ‚You mean, like Dolly the sheep?'

‚To you it may be a joke, Alex. Something out of science fiction. But scientists have been searching for a way to create replicas of themselves for more than a hundred years. The word itself is Greek.'

‚The Greek word for twig,' Mrs. Stellenbosch muttered.

‚Think how a twig starts as one branch but then splits into two,' Grief continued. ‚This is exactly what has been achieved with lizards, with sea urchins, with tadpoles and frogs, with mice and—yes—on the fifth of July, 1996, with a sheep. The theory is simple enough. Nuclear transplantation: to take the nucleus out of an egg and to replace it with a cell taken from an adult. I won’t tire you with the details, Alex. But it is not a joke. Dolly was the perfect copy of a sheep that had died six years earlier. She was the result of no less than one hundred years of experimentation. And in all that time, the scientists shared a single dream: to clone an adult human. Well … I have achieved that dream!'

He paused.

‚If you want a round of applause, you’ll have to take off the handcuffs,' Alex said.

‚I don’t want applause,' Grief snarled. ‚Not from you. What I want from you is your life, and that I will take.'

‚So who did you clone?' Alex asked. ‚Not Mrs. Stellenbosch, I hope. I’d have thought one of her was more than enough.'

‚Who do you think? I cloned myself!' Dr. Grief grabbed hold of the arms of his chair, a king on a throne of his own imagination. ‚Twenty years ago I began my work,' he explained. ‚I told you—I was minister of science. I had all the equipment and money I needed. Also, this was South Africa! The rules that hampered other scientists around the world did not apply to me. I was able to use human beings—political prisoners—for my experiments. Everything was done in secret. I worked without stopping for twenty years. And then, when I was ready, I stole a very large amount of money from the South African government and moved here.

‚This was in 1981. And six years later, almost a whole decade before an English scientist astonished the world by cloning a sheep, I did something far, far more extraordinary … here, at Point Blanc. I cloned myself. Not just once! Sixteen times. Sixteen exact copies of me. With my looks. My brains. My ambition. And my determination.'

‚Were they all as mad as you too?' Alex asked, and he flinched as Mrs. Stellenbosch hit him again, this time in the stomach. But he wanted to make them angry. If they were angry, they might make mistakes.

‚To begin with, they were babies,' Dr. Grief said. ‚Sixteen babies who would grow up to become replicas of myself. I have had to wait fourteen years for the babies to become boys and the boys to become teenagers. Eva here has been a mother to all of them. You have met them …

some of them.'

‚Tom, Cassian, Nicolas, Hugo, Joe. And James…' Now Alex understood why they had somehow all looked the same.

‚Do you see, Alex? Do you have any idea what I have done? I will never die because even when this body is finished with, I will live on in them. I am them and they are me. We are one and the same.'

He smiled again. ‚I was helped in all this by Eva, who had also worked with me in the South African government. She had worked in BOSS—our own secret service. She was one of their principal interrogators.'

‚Happy days!' Mrs. Stellenbosch muttered.

‚Together we set up the academy. Because, you see, that was the second part of my plan. I had created sixteen copies of myself. But that wasn’t enough. You remember what I said about the strands of the tapestry? I had to bring them here, to draw them together.'

‚To replace them with copies of yourself!' Suddenly Alex saw it all. It was totally insane.

But it was the only way to make sense of everything he had seen.

Dr. Grief nodded. ‚It was my observation that families with wealth and power frequently had children who were troubled. Parents with no time for their sons. Sons with no love for their parents. These children became my targets, Alex. Because, you see, I wanted what these children had.

‚Take a boy like Hugo Vries. One day his father will leave him with a fifty percent stake in the world’s diamond market. Or Tom McMorin. His mother has newspapers all over the world.

Or Joe Canterbury. His father at the Pentagon, his mother a senator. What better start for a life in politics? What better start for a future president of the United States, even? Fifteen of the most promising children who have been sent here to Point Blanc, I have replaced with copies of myself. Surgically altered, of course, to look exactly like the original thing.'

‚Baxter … the man you shot …'

‚You have been busy, Alex.' For the first time, Dr. Grief looked surprised. ‚The late Mr. Baxter was a plastic surgeon. I found him working in Harley Street, in London. He had gambling debts. It was easy to bring him under my control, and it was his job to operate on my family, to change their faces, their skin color, and where necessary their bodies so that they would exactly resemble the teenagers they replaced. From the moment the real teenagers arrived here at Point Blanc, they were kept under observation.'

‚With identical rooms on the third and fourth floors.'

‚Yes. My doubles were able to watch their targets on television monitors. To copy their every movement. To learn their mannerisms. To eat like them. To speak like them. In short, to become them.'

‚It would never have worked!' Alex twisted in his chair, trying to find some leverage in the handcuffs. But the metal was too tight. He couldn’t move. ‚Parents would know that the children you sent back were fakes!' he insisted. ‚Any mother would know it wasn’t her son, even if he looked the same.'

Mrs. Stellenbosch giggled. She had finished her cigar. Now she lit another.

‚You’re quite wrong, Alex,' Dr. Grief said. ‚In the first place, you are talking about busy, hardworking parents who had little or no time for their children in the first place. And you forget that the very reason these people sent their sons here was because they wanted them to change. It is the reason all parents send their sons to private schools. Oh, yes, they think the schools will make their children better, more clever, more confident. They would actually be disappointed if those children came back the same.

‚And nature, too, is on our side. A boy of fourteen leaves home for six or seven months. By the time he gets back, nature will have made its mark. The boy will be taller. He will be fatter or thinner. Even his voice will have changed. It’s all part of puberty, and the parents when they see him will say, ‘Oh, Tom, you’ve gotten so big, and you’re so grown-up!’ And they will suspect nothing. In fact, they would be worried if the boy hadn’t changed.'

‚But Roscoe guessed, didn’t he?' Alex knew that he had arrived at the truth, the reason he had been sent here in the first place. He knew why Roscoe and Ivanov had died.

‚There have been two occasions when the parents did not believe what they saw,' Dr. Grief admitted. ‚Michael J. Roscoe in New York. And General Major Viktor Ivanov in Moscow.

Neither man completely guessed what had happened. But they were unhappy. They argued with their sons. They asked too many questions.'

‚And the sons told you what had happened.'

‚You might say that I told myself. The sons, after all, are me. But yes. Michael Roscoe knew something was wrong and called MI6 in London. I presume that is how you were unlucky enough to be involved. I had to pay to have Roscoe killed just as I paid for the death of Ivanov.