by Titan Books
If that was true, Junior pitied the Yemeni. He wondered what uniforms they would be wearing—certainly not Libyan. Unless his father had done another of those convoluted deals he was so famous for. In which case, Junior pitied everyone involved. Except his father, of course.
“Do these guys know the rules of engagement?” he asked Verris. “Or are they more ‘if it moves, shoot it?’”
“They’re elite,” his father replied, even prouder. “Disciplined. And if they have a clean shot at their target—say, through an apartment window—they’ll take it. Why don’t you think about that on your way to Budapest?”
Junior turned to look at him in surprise.
“Henry’s just landed,” his father added. “Pack your bags, you’ve got a flight to catch.”
CHAPTER 14
Danny had been to Europe a number of times for the DIA. She had noticed that in winter, you could tell when you’d passed from Western Europe to Eastern Europe when the fur coats appeared. People wore a lot more fur in Eastern Europe, particularly in the northern regions where, if someone said they were freezing, it wasn’t hyperbole.
Until now, however, she had never been to Hungary and she was feeling slightly awestruck, almost as if she were a kid seeing the Old World for the first time. Of all the cities she had been to, she had never felt the presence of history as much as she did in Budapest, where it seemed to be in the very air she breathed.
In Rome and Moscow, the present and the ever-oncoming future had an immediacy that overrode the past even when you were looking at a relic as enormous as the Coliseum or standing in a cathedral commissioned by Ivan the Terrible.
But in Budapest, the past seemed to have grown stronger with time, holding its own no matter how demanding or urgent the concerns of the day might be, giving the city no choice but to co-exist with it as best it could. And nowhere was this more evident than at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The old friend Danny had phoned told her it was Hungary’s answer to MIT, which made it MTI—Magyar Technologia Intezet.
Clever, Danny had said, but how was their biology department? Specifically, human biology.
Her friend, an old submarine crewmate who now worked as an interpreter at the UN, had assured her the whole place was full of whip-smart students who were already shaping the future of their various chosen fields. The name she had given Danny was of a doctoral candidate who was so bright she’d been invited to participate in some highly advanced gene-sequencing projects while she was still an undergrad. Danny hoped she lived up to the hype.
The library where Anikó suggested they meet looked more like a cathedral to Danny. It was also enormous but she had no trouble finding her. Among all the students sitting at the long polished tables, some with notebook computers, some with pads of paper, and some with both, she was the only one reading a comic book.
“Anikó?” Danny asked her in a hushed tone.
She looked up and smiled. It was hard to believe she was working on her doctorate. With her shiny black curls, pink cheeks, and large dark eyes, she looked about twelve. Or that might have been because of the comic book.
Sitting down across from her, Danny put two plastic bags on the table. One held a few bloody cotton balls; the other contained a dirty black baseball cap. “Thank you for your time. Here are your samples.”
Anikó took one in either hand, studied them for a moment, then nodded. “This I can do for you in… two days.”
Danny was already pulling crumpled bills out of her various pockets and piling them on the table between them. She always kept several different currencies in her burn bag, mostly Euros; she had changed some of it into forints but the exchange rate the teller had given her was terrible. Anikó would probably get a better deal. She certainly didn’t look unhappy to see all those Euros.
“No, this you can do for me in two hours,” Danny said. Anikó’s wide dark eyes went from the small crumpled fortune on the table to her. Danny shifted position in the chair, getting more comfortable. “I’ll wait.”
* * *
A little over two hours later, Danny was sitting on a bench in the garden outside the library, waiting for Henry and Baron while she tried to get her mind around the new reality contained in the envelope Anikó had given her. She actually found herself hoping Henry and Baron would be late. Then she could worry about them. Worry was a normal thing, part of the normal world. Only the normal world didn’t exist any more. Thanks to the thing in the envelope that Anikó had given her, nothing would ever be normal again.
But of course they weren’t late.
“Hey,” Henry said, quickening his pace as he came toward her with Baron. “We got a time with Yuri. Meeting him at the—” The look on her face finally registered and he broke off. “You okay?”
Danny held up the envelope Anikó had given her with the lab results. How could something as normal as an envelope contain something so unbelievable? “I think I know why this guy is as good as you, Henry.”
Henry’s eyes widened; Baron looked like he was waiting for a punchline.
She took a deep breath and plunged on. “He is you.”
Henry and Baron looked from her to each other and back again.
“Huh?” Henry said finally.
“There’s a lab in there,” she continued, tilting her head at the building behind her. “I gave them samples, yours and the baseball cap he was wearing.”
The expression on Henry’s face told her he didn’t like that one bit. If it had been her, she wouldn’t have, either, but she’d have wanted to know.
“He looked so much like you, I thought he had to be your son,” she went on. “So I—well, they did the test three times. Your DNA and his. All three came back ‘Identical’. Not ‘Close’. Identical. As in ‘same person’… He’s your clone.”
* * *
He’s your clone.
He’s your clone.
Your clone.
Your clone.
Clone.
Henry plumped down on the bench beside Danny. She looked pretty freaked out. So did Baron. Which was almost funny—if they thought this was crazy-town, they should have seen the view from his side of the looking glass.
“They thought I’d made the mistake,” Danny was saying. “That maybe I’d given them samples from just one person. But I didn’t. He’s you.”
“It’s impossible,” Henry said after a bit. He turned to Baron to see if he thought so, too.
Baron looked as stunned as Henry felt. “You know what Verris always used to say about you—‘I wish I had a whole corps of Henrys.’ I thought he was just blowing smoke.”
“My clo—” Henry looked pained. “Hell, I can’t even say the goddam word.” He shook his head. “The way he was coming at me, it was like he was… bred for it.” Suddenly he was back on that street in Cartagena, the guy swatting him with the back wheel of a motorcycle, trying to smash him with the front wheel. And when all of that failed, pulling his combat knife. If the police hadn’t shown up then, Henry knew the guy would have gutted him, and the last thing he would have seen as the knife went in was his own face.
Talk about being your own worst enemy—literally. Henry winced; that should have been funny but it wasn’t. The whole world was out of kilter, and so was he. And there was no going back.
“I don’t—” Danny started and then had to take a steadying breath. “Henry, who the hell have we been working for?”
And that was why he had to keep it together, Henry thought, sitting up straighter. His reaction would have to wait. His whole life had been about serving his country, protecting the good people from bad guys, foreign or domestic. Good people like Danny and Baron, not to mention all the people who were just doing the best they could to get by, unaware of what bad guys like Clay Verris were up to in secret laboratories. Henry couldn’t quit on them even if he quit the agency. When he had joined the Marines, he had taken an oath to bear true faith; that oath didn’t come off with the uniform, it was for life. A
nd if he was ever in danger of forgetting it, the green spade on his wrist would remind him.
Semper fi.
* * *
“There were always rumors about the agency lab and their experiments,” Henry said as the three of them walked through a Budapest park together, on their way to meet Yuri. In the aftermath of the bomb Danny had dropped on him, he had all but forgotten why they’d actually come to Budapest in the first place.
“How is it even possible?” Baron said.
“It’s complicated,” Danny told him, “but doable. They take the nucleus of a somatic cell from a donor—in this case, Henry. Then they take an egg cell, pull the genetic material out of it, transplant the donor cell into it. That’s the science.”
Baron looked openly impressed. “You get that from your lab friend?”
Danny shook her head. “Google.”
Henry blinked at her, incredulous. The world had spun so wildly out of control that anyone could find instructions on cloning on the goddam Web. “I always thought if they could do that they’d make more doctors or scientists, not more of me,” he said. “They could have cloned Nelson Mandela.”
“Nelson Mandela couldn’t kill a man on a moving train from two kilometers,” Danny pointed out.
Henry grimaced. If she was trying to cheer him up, she was doing a lousy job.
“Hey, I’m not happy about this, either. I risked my life for them,” Danny said. “So they could do this?”
“You risked your life for your country,” Henry corrected her. “Like your father did.”
“My country.” She gave a harsh, bitter laugh. “I don’t think I like the way that’s working out.”
“The DIA is an agency—it’s not your country,” Henry said. “Be glad you didn’t have to wait, say, twenty-five years to find that out.”
Baron patted her shoulder. “Listen, if you ever want to junk it all and come be VP of Baron Air, I’ll make a position available.”
Danny gave him a sad smile. “If my father were here, he’d find out who was responsible for all this and beat the crap out of them.” She sighed. “But he’s not here.”
“Then I guess it’s up to us,” Henry told her.
* * *
The Széchenyi Baths were not a single building but a whole complex of magnificent old structures built around thermal springs. Yuri had waxed rhapsodic to Henry about the beautiful architecture and how relaxing and therapeutic the baths were, and yes, the buildings were gorgeous, great architecture, yeah, yeah, yeah. But standing with Danny and Baron on a balcony overlooking the multitude of happy bathers enjoying themselves in the sunshine, Henry had a hard time appreciating Yuri’s choice of meeting place.
When Yuri had said baths, Henry had imagined Turkish baths with steam rooms, popular among spies and mobsters because you couldn’t wear a wire or hide a weapon when you were dressed only in a towel. He had been fully prepared to strip down and sit in a steam room for the sake of getting some answers.
Instead, he was meeting Yuri at what was essentially a gigantic municipal swimming pool.
Although in hindsight, Henry supposed he should have known—the mention of thermal springs should have given him a clue that there was more to the place than steam and whirlpool baths. He could see the pools weren’t very deep; the average adult didn’t have to tread water to not drown. There weren’t any children, either—apparently thermal springs weren’t advisable for little kids—so there wasn’t a lot of laughing and splashing.
No, Henry realized, he was wrong—there wasn’t any. The people here were practically sedate. He spotted a couple of older guys who had set up a chess board on a marble surface near a set of stone stairs; Henry watched them in astonishment. He’d seen people playing chess in parks—retirees making a game last all day, or young show-offs playing speed chess with ten people simultaneously and beating all of them for ten bucks per checkmate. But who the hell would go to a swimming pool to play chess?
Well, these guys, obviously—and now that he was looking, he saw they weren’t the only ones. But even seeing it with his own eyes, he was having trouble getting his mind around the idea that anyone woke up in the morning and decided to go to a swimming pool for a game of chess.
Of course, when he’d woken up this morning, he hadn’t thought clones were possible, let alone that someone would clone him. He couldn’t get his mind around that, either, and he wasn’t sure he ever would. God only knew what he’d find out when he woke up tomorrow.
If he woke up tomorrow—the younger version of himself was trying very hard to keep that from happening.
Where the hell was Yuri, he wondered, listening to happy Hungarian conversation over the musical sound of rippling, bubbling water. “Everything okay with you?” he asked Baron, who was now keeping watch by the stairs to his left.
“All good, no worries,” Baron replied.
“Copy that.” Henry glanced at his watch, feeling on edge, and not just because Yuri had made him come to a giant swimming pool and was now about to be late. As of today, he would probably feel on edge for the rest of his life. The world had become a very unfamiliar place in the brief period of time since Monroe and Jack had died and Verris had sent a hit squad to kill him and the exemplary agent standing next to him, an agent who had never gotten a single demerit. Congratulations, here’s your reward: a bullet in the head.
“Henry,” Baron said.
Henry turned to see a man standing in the doorway behind him. He was dressed in the standard outfit for anyone not actually in the water—a bathrobe and flip-flops—but unlike the other baths patrons, he didn’t look at all innocuous. He was shorter than Henry but built like a brick wall.
“Mr. Brogan!” The man smiled brightly and beckoned for Henry to join him.
Henry shook hands with him and then turned to Danny and Baron. It was obvious that Yuri’s warm greeting didn’t extend to them. They both nodded to indicate they didn’t mind waiting for him on the balcony. In a situation like this, only one on one was acceptable; two plus one was asking for trouble and three to one would result in casualties all round.
In any case, Henry was sure that Yuri wasn’t going to try anything tricky in a place like this, not in a bathrobe and flip-flops. But he did insist that Henry trade his street clothes for the same outfit—Yuri had even brought bathing trunks for him, which he said Henry was welcome to keep. He had to insist, he added when Henry hesitated, looking dubious. They needed to blend in. People didn’t come to the baths to hang around fully dressed. Henry’s friends should do the same, Yuri said with an appreciative look at Danny, but it wasn’t as important. They could remain on the balcony and the locals would assume they were American tourists with body image issues.
Henry put on the bathing trunks and bathrobe, leaving his clothes in a changing room, and was greatly relieved when Yuri led him to a nearby bench and invited him to sit. He had been prepared to bite the bullet and go into one of the pools if Yuri had insisted, but apparently the bathrobes were camouflage enough.
Henry could see why Jack Willis had liked the guy. Aside from the fact that his slightly florid complexion indicated a fondness for vodka, Yuri exuded an air of cheerful corruption and casual treachery, qualities that were absolutely necessary for survival under a corrupt, treacherous regime. He was a spy’s spy—he probably had dirt on Putin and Putin probably knew it. Putin probably also knew that as long as he left Yuri untouched and happy, the dirt would stay under the rug.
“Before we begin,” Yuri said with that same delighted smile, “I must confess—I have admired your work for many years!”
Henry blinked at him, surprised. “So you know who I am?”
Yuri laughed. “‘Long-time listener, first-time caller,’ as they say in your country. I would congratulate you on your retirement but your last job has some loose ends, yes?”
“Well…” Henry tried not to squirm. “My government lied to me and tried to kill me, if that’s what you mean.”
Yuri laughe
d again. “In Russia, we call this ‘Tuesday.’ But you Americans—it hurts your feelings. So…?” He raised his eyebrows.
“So why was Dormov going back to Russia?” Henry asked.
“Yes, down to business! Very American—you are a very busy man!” Yuri’s delighted smile faded and his expression became thoughtful as he looked up and down the hallway. It was empty except for the two of them. “We were both friends with Jack Willis,” he went on after a moment. “He was a good man, and like you, I mourn his death. The reason you are here and I have not killed you—yet—” there was a brief hint of a smile on Yuri’s face, “—is, we share a common enemy.”
“Clay Verris?” Henry guessed.
Yuri nodded, his face solemn. “He lured Dormov to the West. Funded his lab. And now you’ve met the fruits of their labor. Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996. And in ’97…”
“I was the sheep,” Henry said. It still seemed unbelievable but now he was starting to feel less astonished and more like he’d had something stolen from him, something both enormously significant and priceless that he would never get back.
“Perhaps you should take it as a compliment. Verris took your DNA and raised the boy as his own son, trained him to be the perfect assassin.”
“So why did Dormov leave?” Henry asked, even though he was pretty sure he knew the answer, at least in part.
“We tried for years to lure him back home,” Yuri said. “Nothing worked. Then last year, Dormov and Verris had a falling-out. Dormov became frightened; he reached out to me. We had indications that Dormov had made a breakthrough with modified human DNA that could lead to mass production. But Dormov wanted soldiers who were both stronger and smarter. Verris wanted—” Yuri paused, looking troubled. “Something else,” he said finally.
“Something else,” Henry echoed. He had no idea what that meant but he was sure it was nothing good.
Yuri looked into his face and now the cheerfully corrupt, pragmatically treacherous spy was gone, replaced by a man who had encountered something he could not bring himself to justify or accept. If it was true that everyone had a price, it was also true that everyone had a line they wouldn’t cross for any price.