“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. And if he was ever in danger of forgetting it, the green spade on his wrist would remind him.