Gemini Man--The Official Movie Novelization

by Titan Books

  Not today, however. The guy was gone and Henry knew he hadn’t just rolled off the roof. Talk about reflexes, Henry thought, ignoring the hole he’d put in his shirt. His stalker must have moved as soon as he’d seen him start to turn, without even knowing Henry had a gun.

  Better keep my head on a swivel, Henry thought uneasily.

  * * *

  Henry didn’t pick him up again until he reached a parking lot almost ten minutes later. As he walked briskly along a row of cars, some impulse made him stop at a bright yellow VW bug and use its side mirror to check behind him. He caught a glint of metal and ducked a heartbeat before the mirror exploded into fragments of glass, plastic, and rubber.

  Dropping to the ground, he crawled around the VW to the Jeep on the other side, dragging the burn bag with him. He waited a few moments and then used the barrel of the Glock to angle the Jeep’s side mirror so he could see the rooftops behind him.

  Nothing; his stalker had disappeared again. Being gone was a great idea; Henry decided to try it himself. He crawled under the Jeep to the other side and raised himself carefully, first to his knees and then to a half-crouch. The nearest street was about thirty yards away on his right. Henry hesitated, then made a break for it, forcing himself to stay low until he reached the street, where he straightened up and pushed himself into a sprint. Something whizzed past his head, close enough that he would have sworn he felt the breeze of it cutting through the air before it punched a hole in a brick wall on his right.

  Henry veered into a narrow alley, sprinting faster than he had in a long time. The shooter was stalking him openly now, no longer caring that Henry could see him leaping from one rooftop to another. Like he wanted to show he could go just as fast as Henry on the ground, but without as much effort.

  Time to turn and fight—gun time, not run time, Henry thought, hoping Danny and Baron were well out of harm’s way. He ducked behind a telephone pole, worked the sniper rifle out of the bag and got it assembled.

  Okay, Mr. I-go-so-fast-on-rooftops, let’s see who you are, Henry said silently. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and looked through the scope.

  Gone.

  Fuck. Henry fumed as he scanned roofs through the scope. It took a few seconds before he finally saw a skewed line and a glint of metal and glass that didn’t belong to the structure.

  He adjusted his grip on the rifle. Come on, buddy, he said silently, poke your head up so I can introduce myself properly. I’m Henry Brogan. And you are…?

  The guy’s head rose slowly from behind the line of the roof and Henry froze.

  The face he saw peering back at him through the scope was impossibly, unbelievably, and unmistakably his own.

  CHAPTER 10

  Henry had heard guys talk about this kind of shit, weird nightmares where they were tracking down a target, and when they looked through the scope, they saw their own faces looking back at them. It wasn’t that unusual among snipers. According to common wisdom, if you had it more than twice a week, it meant you’d been on the job for too long and it was your subconscious telling you to quit. Some guys dreamed it the other way round, like what was happening to Henry now—they were being hunted by someone who turned out to be their doppelgänger. That one seemed to occur less often but it still wasn’t unusual.

  Henry had never had either dream. He only had one nightmare and it was all about drowning. It came and went in frequency and the details varied—his subconscious would swap out his father for Verris and vice versa and often he was simultaneously five and twenty-five as he drowned. He couldn’t remember ever having the evil-twin dream. Therefore, as absurd as this was, he couldn’t be dreaming. The man with his face was real—quite a bit younger, he saw now. But it was his face.

  Except it couldn’t be real.

  Except it was.

  Caught between real and unreal, Henry lowered his rifle.

  The man on the roof responded to that with a burst of machine-gun fire.

  Okay, that was definitely real, Henry thought, squeezing himself into the space behind the telephone pole while real splinters flew and real chunks of concrete burst from the real wall behind him. Apparently the guy was no longer worried about attracting attention. If he ever had been.

  He fired another burst of real gunfire. Henry leaned out from behind the pole to answer with a burst of his own, just to make him duck, then scooped up his burn bag and ran like hell, although his legs were so shaky he stumbled and dipped from side to side like the ground under him was a rolling ocean. But those real bullets nipping at his heels straightened him out pretty quickly; again he pushed himself into a hard sprint, making for an abandoned building at the end of the alley.

  Now he would see if all abandoned buildings really were alike, Henry thought, feeling surreal. Maybe the ones in Cartagena’s Old Town were classier, dripping with history. The sign on the boarded-up entrance said something about how trespassers would be prosecuted. Next to it was a legal-looking notice he might have worried about if he hadn’t been under fire. Henry raised his rifle and, still sprinting, shot out the boards, obliterating both signs. Tiny fragments of the road pelted him from behind as he made it to shelter.

  This wouldn’t fool the shooter, of course; the guy knew where he was. But at least he wasn’t such an easy target. Or so he hoped, he thought as he scanned the place quickly. It had been an apartment building, its three floors built around an open-air courtyard. Definitely nicer than the usual abandoned building—for all the good that would do him, Henry thought, going up the nearest staircase two steps at a time.

  He found himself on a walkway with a broken railing on one side and several doors on the other—tenants could come out and see who was in the lobby. Through the street-facing window at the far end, Henry saw the shooter leaping from balcony to balcony of the neighboring apartment building as he parkoured his way down to street level.

  The guy’s head suddenly snapped up and around as if he’d actually felt Henry’s gaze. He raised the rifle and fired even as he was rebounding from the railing of one balcony to the next one lower down.

  Staying low, Henry moved toward the window, and returned fire, his bullets kicking up tiny puffs of powder at each spot where the shooter had been only half a second before. He got to the window just in time to see the guy hit the ground and run into the building.

  Okay, how about a little game of Hide’n’Kill? Henry thought at him, crouching close to the wall. There was another set of stairs leading down to the lobby at this end, this one with a landing to break up the climb. Henry heard broken glass crunching under the shooter’s feet as he approached it.

  Henry leaned forward to peer between the broken staves of the railing. An object slightly smaller than his fist suddenly flew up and over in a curved trajectory that would end in his face. He batted it away reflexively while throwing himself backwards and covering his head with both arms. The grenade exploded in midair, making the walkway shake and taking a bite out of the railing. It also deafened Henry but he knew it had done the same to the shooter. He raised his head, brushed off the splinters and other debris, and crept forward to peer over the edge of the walkway.

  The shooter was looking up at him from the lobby with a surprised expression on his face. On Henry’s face.

  Yeah, you’re the junior hitman here and it ain’t gonna be that easy. Henry felt a grim satisfaction although he could barely hear himself think over the ringing in his ears. The blast had been closer to the lobby so the kid probably wouldn’t be doing any better. He hoped.

  Doing his best to shake off the grenade’s effects, Henry slung the sniper rifle over his left shoulder and grabbed the Glock from his bag. As he made sure the gun was loaded, he heard the sound of sliding metal, albeit faintly; his hearing was coming back. Well, his mother had always said strong eardrums ran in the family. Thanks for the great genes, Ma. Now I’d just like to know how this bastard got my face—

  Abruptly, his gaze came to rest on a large mirror hanging over the stairc
ase landing. It had been placed very high up on the wall and although it was fly-specked and filthy, it was still intact. Henry was mystified as to how it was there at all—something like that should have been carried off long ago.

  Although now that he was really looking at it, he could see how high up it was—probably well out of reach for the casual scavenger, who preferred low-hanging fruit. Plus it was really big— as in heavy. Breaking a mirror like that might get you fourteen or even twenty-one years of bad luck.

  He realized it had been placed there so people going up and down the stairs could see anyone coming the other way. Because passing someone on the stairs was also bad luck, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember. Although he had a few little rituals—tapping his rifle stock before a hit, burning the target’s photo afterwards—he wasn’t superstitious so he’d never paid much attention to what was supposed to be good luck or bad luck. In Henry’s experience, chance favored the prepared mind, especially in a situation like this. The way Junior was coming at him had nothing to do with luck. A guy who could travel by rooftops to stalk a target on the ground had to know the area better than the back of his hand, had to have burned it so deeply into his brain that he could do it with his eyes closed.

  But even that wouldn’t explain how he always seemed to know what Henry was going to do at the same moment he himself did, so well he could fire at him while he parkoured down the side of a building.

  Or why he had Henry’s face, which had to be completely impossible.

  Maybe it was some kind of mind game, psychological warfare, one-on-one. But how—plastic surgery? A high-tech Halloween mask?

  Henry shoved the questions aside; he could deal with impossible shit later. Right now, he had to press his advantage if he wanted to survive. Think, he ordered himself; there were more windows on the ground floor, which meant more light, making it easier for him to see what Junior Hitman was doing than vice versa.

  Suddenly the already broken staves in the railing exploded into splinters as the guy opened fire on him. Henry fired back, belly-crawling to the stairs where he shifted quickly to feet first before moving down a couple of steps. Junior Hitman paced him; the reflection in the mirror confirmed to Henry again that what he had seen in the scope hadn’t been a trick of the light. It was his own face, circa his early twenties. Henry remembered what that time had been like. He’d been all grown up but still a year or two away from being permanently set, like paint that hadn’t quite dried or clay not yet fired—barely not a kid, convinced he knew the good guys from the bad guys and the right things from the wrong ones, and utterly certain that when push came to shove, he could grab the world by the tail and swing it around over his head.

  “Stop right there,” Henry said sharply. “Who are you?”

  Junior Hitman looked up at the mirror and didn’t answer. Henry knew he could make out only a vague, man-shaped shadow among darker shadows. Despite having a better view of the kid, however, he didn’t have a clear shot—not a non-lethal one, anyway. He didn’t want to kill him before he got some answers.

  “I don’t want to shoot you,” Henry called down to him.

  “Fine,” said the kid. “Then don’t shoot me.”

  All the tiny hairs on the back of Henry’s neck stood up. Over the years, he had heard his own voice often enough on wiretaps and bugs to recognize it. What the fuck— the kid had his face and his voice?

  “Mind if I shoot you?” the kid asked, making Henry’s voice sound offhand, like this was no big deal.

  “Hey, I could have killed you on the roof,” Henry said.

  “Maybe you should have,” said the kid.

  Henry felt a surge of anger and exasperation. “Did they show you a picture of me?” he demanded.

  “Yeah.” Junior Hitman took another step up the stairs. “You’re old.”

  You’re gonna pay for that one, whether I shoot you or not, Henry promised him silently. “Kid, you take one step closer and you’re going to leave me no choice.”

  The kid’s reflection kept coming. Henry took a grenade from the burn bag and made a quick and dirty calculation by eye before pulling the pin and hurling it at the wall, intending to make the kid give ground in a hurry. The grenade bounced off a spot six inches away from the mirror and flew toward Junior Hitman. Eight ball in the side pocket—either he ran or it was game over.

  What happened next went too fast even for Henry’s eye to follow but he knew the move; he had done it himself once, in pure desperation:

  Junior Hitman took aim at the grenade and fired, batting it back at the mirror. Before Henry could get both arms up to shield his head, it exploded in a burst of shrapnel, plaster, wood, and glass.

  The shockwave slammed into him, flattened his lungs and midsection, punched his heart, drove his eyes against the back of their sockets, and made his brain ricochet around his skull. A split second later he registered the sting of countless fragments of mirror hitting his face and hands and larger debris pelting him like stones while clouds of dust billowed around him.

  Henry turned his face away, pulled a fistful of his t-shirt up over his nose and mouth, and tried to take a breath, just to see if he could. For a long moment, his mashed-flat lungs refused to inflate. Then mercifully his chest expanded. He knew his heart was still beating—he could feel his pulse in his eyes.

  As he raised his head, there was a sudden sharp pain in his cheek; something wet ran down his face. He felt around carefully with his fingertips, then removed a long shard of glass from a spot barely an inch below his eye. He reached for the burn bag and found it had disappeared along with a lot of the railing and part of the staircase. He was going to have to make do with the rifle, the Glock, and the two magazines of ammo he’d stuffed in his pockets. Once again, chance favored the prepared mind. He was just sorry he hadn’t stashed ammo for the rifle as well as the Glock, so maybe this really was only pure dumb luck. If so, it might be the last lucky break he’d get for a long time since he and Junior Hitman had broken that goddam mirror.

  Then he reminded himself he wasn’t superstitious; the kid had to handle all the bad luck by himself. So maybe that was his last lucky break.

  All he knew for certain right now was pain. Everything hurt, like he’d been tuned up for days by a team of experts. He could barely keep from crying out as he forced himself to get up and run down the closed hall just off the walkway. You can go faster, he told himself, keeping his eyes fixed on the staircase at the end of the hall. The stairs went up; he could do that. He could make himself climb the stairs because if he didn’t move his ass, good ol’ Junior Hitman was going to put him out of his misery.

  The stairs led up to another dark hallway with a closed door at the end. Lines of light showed all around it; Henry ran with everything he had and hurled himself at it. The door broke into pieces when he hit and he stumbled forward onto yet another staircase, shorter than the others and made of iron. He didn’t so much climb as he fell up the steps, then tumbled through an open doorway that spat him out onto the roof.

  Sound was still so muffled that he wasn’t sure whether he was hearing birds or traffic or the high-pitched tone that meant part of his hearing was dying off for good. He staggered across the roof to peer over the waist-high barrier that ran along all four sides. A graffito informed him that someone named Monte had been there.

  Good for you, Monte.

  It was about a thirty-foot drop to the ground, he estimated; a fall he could survive but not walk away from. Fortunately there was a fire escape that ran from the roof to the ground. It was pretty old but it didn’t look like it was falling apart and Henry couldn’t see any places where it had come loose. Still, there was a fair amount of rust; it was a gamble as to whether it would hold his weight.

  Or he could just keep dithering until Junior Hitman caught up with him.

  “Oh, hell no,” Henry muttered. He stuck his sidearm into his waistband, slung the rifle, clambered over the barrier, and climbed down the first length of the fire-escape
ladder. It felt solidly attached to the stone and so did the first platform but he didn’t linger. The second platform, however, swayed as soon as he stepped onto it and he all but flung himself at the next section of ladder.

  He reached the lowest platform to find that part of it had pulled out of the wall, along with the upper part of the last section of ladder, something he hadn’t been able to see from his vantage point on the roof. He was still too high up to jump without breaking something. He’d just have to move so fast the goddam thing wouldn’t have time to come apart under his weight.

  The platform groaned but he made it to the ladder. Large flakes of rust on its rungs stuck to his palms, rubbed off on his shirt, fell into his hair. The ladder itself was a little shaky but it didn’t start pulling away from the building until he was halfway down.

  He froze, clinging to the rusty metal while he scanned the wall in the vain hope of finding some kind of protrusion he might grab onto and pull the ladder back toward the building.

  And thankfully, he found it—a bolt slightly thicker than his thumb, sticking a few centimeters out of the stone at the level of his waist. As he reached for it, the rifle slid off his shoulder and down his arm to his wrist, but he managed to grab the bolt. It didn’t give under his touch so he wedged his fingertips under the head and pulled.

  The ladder tilted back against the building. Henry breathed a sigh of relief, then looked up, half-expecting to see Junior Hitman taking aim at him.

  But he wasn’t there—yet.

  Still holding onto the bolt and attempting to keep his weight forward on the ladder, Henry tried going down a rung. Immediately, the ladder started to lean away from the wall; at the same time, the rifle slipped from his wrist onto his hand. Henry tried to counter the movement of the ladder by pushing forward with his body. The rifle slipped farther, from the back of his hand past his knuckles to the first joints of his fingers.

  Henry groaned. He could let go of the bolt, flip the rifle strap toward his wrist and then grab the bolt again, although he would have to do it fast, before the ladder could tilt backwards. But the moment he let go, the rifle slid over his fingers and dropped to the ground while the ladder leaned even farther back than before. He braced himself, thinking the ladder would yank itself free and fall to the ground as well. Then there was a dull clang and the ladder stopped short; Henry had all of a second to see that it had caught on the platform above him before he lost his grip and fell the last several feet to the ground.