Gemini Man: The Official Movie Novelization

CHAPTER 1

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.

The decision to leave the US had been much harder.

Again, the young, eager-to-please bodyguard on his left asked if he wanted a pillow and again Dormov shook his head. The two men sitting opposite didn’t change expression but Dormov caught them trading furtive glances. Maybe they were wondering why he put up with all the pestering. Dormov chuckled inwardly. The guy was just a kid; this was his version of running up and down the aisle, chattering. After thirty-five years in exile, Dormov enjoyed hearing his own language spoken by another Russian rather than an American with a pretty good accent.

The other two bodyguards had barely spoken to him at all, except to map out the plans for changing trains and to check him for bugs or GPS trackers. They made those devices so small these days, a person could hang one on you just by casually brushing past you in the street—or in a train station, or even while you were sitting in your seat on the train—and you’d be none the wiser.

Dormov knew all the tricks—the Americans had given him a thorough education in surveillance, though not always intentionally. From time to time, someone who was absolutely, positively not in any way a spy had tried to bug his laboratory, or even his home. He always knew because they came from vaguely named government departments he’d never heard of. When that happened, he would refuse to work until his lab was swept clean—the whole lab, including the bathrooms. Anyone curious about what he and his assistants were up to could watch the feeds from the bugs that were already in place.

Surveillance wasn’t the reason Dormov had decided to go home. He knew damned well he would be monitored even more closely in Moscow—the Soviet state was no more, but old habits died hard. Even so, the Russian government had never been as coy about surveillance as the Americans. In Russia, you had to assume somebody, somewhere, was watching. In the US, they made a lot of noise about privacy, how everyone was entitled to it and the government had no right to violate it, so they made the bugs smaller and hid them better.

Then 9/11 had happened and even the average US citizen was conflicted about the choice between personal privacy vs. public safety. Not that the American government hadn’t already been wiretapping and bugging and just generally poking its nose into the private affairs of people they considered threats to national security. ‘National security’ was one of those vague terms intelligence agencies found so very useful as a way to avoid having to explain their actions, or even admitting to them.

Still, government surveillance was one thing; this latest thing they had asked of him was something else, completely unacceptable. Dormov had never been a fan of Soviet-style communism but letting capitalism run riot was just as bad, maybe even worse. He had always suspected that someday he would reach his limit and then he would have to leave the West altogether. Finally he had understood that the Americans would never even allow him to retire, not with all that knowledge in his head—he was a risk to national security. He’d known then that he had to get the hell out and go home.

Russia was no utopia of enlightenment and he had no illusions about why they were so happy to take him back—getting all the knowledge in his head would be a real coup. Plus, it would upset the Americans. It was nothing personal, but at least he’d be able to get a decent bowl of solyanka. Which he could enjoy with a pint of kvass—the real thing, not the bottled sugar-water sold in US gourmet shops.

Dormov looked out the window at the swooping curved lines of the canopy roof. The Liège station was breathtaking. When he had first seen it, he’d thought it looked like an enormous white wave that had somehow been captured and frozen in transit, an enormous white wave with grooves. It was all steel, glass, and white cement, sans facade, or grand front door, just that swooping roof. The grooves were actually white concrete beams that threw geometric shadow patterns in the sunlight.

According to his helpful bodyguard, this was a trademark of the architect, Santiago Calatrava Valls. Dormov admired the design—he thought he would enjoy meeting a man who could see something like this in his head. At the same time, however, the station looked so utterly strange, like something from another planet. Except it wasn’t; the train station was right where it was supposed to be. He was out of place.

But that was just his homesickness, Dormov thought. As his journey eastward had progressed, he had come to realize he had been homesick for over thirty years, and the closer he got to the bosom of Mother Russia, the more intense the feeling became.

It would be a relief when they reached Budapest and made contact with Yuri. Hungary wasn’t home, but it wasn’t the West, either. If he couldn’t get solyanka and kvass yet, he’d happily settle for kettle-made goulash and vodka.

Several miles southeast of the city, on a desolate hilltop overlooking a valley untouched by development, a man named Henry Brogan sat in an SUV. One dark brown, well-muscled arm was stretched out, his hand resting on the steering wheel as he gazed into the distance. A casual observer might have thought he had come to that deserted place for some solitary introspection, maybe to take stock of his life and consider the circumstances that had led up to this moment, with an eye to deciding what he might do next.

A more careful observer, however, would have noticed how straight he sat in the driver’s seat and attributed his posture to military service. Henry had been a Marine but those days were long behind him. The only thing he’d taken with him from that time besides a skill set he had since enhanced and improved to an incredible degree was a small tattoo on his right wrist, a green spade. He might have jettisoned that along with his uniforms and the rest of the military trappings except it meant more to him than all the commendations and medals he’d received put together. It was an icon; when he looked at it he saw the deepest and most significant part of himself, what other people might call the soul, a concept he had never felt comfortable talking about. Fortunately, he didn’t have to; it was all contained in that little green spade, nice and neat, the way he liked things to be in his life.

Right now, his attention was focused on a set of tracks 800 yards away waiting for the train from Liège on the first leg of its long journey to Budapest. Occasionally, he glanced at the photo taped to the rearview mirror; it was slightly fuzzy, copied from a passport or a driver’s license or maybe an employee ID badge, but clear enough to be recognizable. The name Valery Dormov was printed across the bottom in clear block letters.

Monroe Reed enjoyed taking the train anywhere on the Continent. The Europeans really knew how to travel at ground level. This was something he had learned to appreciate as travel by plane had become more complicated and less comfortable. It was bad enough that you had to wait in line for a godawful amount of time to walk through a metal detector and then maybe get felt up by some bored worker bee in a uniform. But to add insult to injury, airlines now had two or even three levels of coach and they all sucked.

Usually he didn’t have to suffer commercial air travel when he was working with Henry. But on occasion the DIA would give him an extra assignment or they would tell him to stay behind and do some clean-up. The agency didn’t send out jets for anyone as low as he was on the totem pole. Then he would be stuck listening to the screaming baby chorus while the kid in the row behind him kicked his seat for six hours—a kid he thought was probably very much like the one who kept running up and down the aisle right now, mouth going a mile a minute. Monroe wasn’t sure how old she was—six, maybe seven? Too young to travel alone but he was damned if he could tell which of the other adults in the car she belonged to. None of them seemed inclined to rein her in. His own parents hadn’t been big on corporal punishment but if he’d behaved like this at the same age, he wouldn’t have been able to sit down for a week.

He should probably just lighten up, Monroe thought; nobody else seemed to find her annoying, not even Dormov, and he’d have expected the old man to be a prize grouch. Not that it would have occurred to Monroe to think any defector could be good-natured or likeable. On the other hand, Dormov was originally from Russia, so maybe the old man didn’t feel like he was defecting so much as he was simply going home to retire. Maybe he still missed the place even after thirty-five years in the US. Now that the old Soviet regime was no more, he didn’t have to worry about the KGB taking him away in the middle of the night and sending him to a gulag in Siberia.

Still, Monroe doubted Dormov would find retirement in Russia to be as cushy as it would have been in the US. And if he wasn’t retiring, if he was going to carry on with his so-called ‘work’, he would discover that despite all the classified information he had brought with him from the US, the Russians would never be able to give him a lab as good as the state-of-the-art facilities and tech he’d taken for granted in America. Hell, he’d be lucky to get a chair with good lumbar support. Old guys were always complaining their chairs didn’t have good lumbar support, or at least all the old guys Monroe knew.

Well, Dormov wouldn’t have to worry about that, nor would he be spilling his guts. And Monroe would only have to tolerate the hyperactive kid until the next stop, where he’d be getting off if everything went according to plan. He was certain it would. He was working with Henry Brogan and Henry never failed to come through. When Henry was on a job, he was like a machine. Nothing rattled him or distracted him; he had focus like a laser and a sense of timing that was practically supernatural. The jumpiness Monroe always felt at the start of a mission was, in fact, sheer anticipation.

Today, however, that kid running up and down the aisle chattering away with her little-girl curls bouncing around her face was driving him crazy. Was she six? He wasn’t good at guessing kids’ ages.

Or any ages, he thought, remembering how he’d assumed Henry was in his late thirties. When Henry told him he was fifty-one, his jaw had dropped. How could anyone look that good in their fifties?

Dammit, where were that kid’s parents? The train would be pulling out any minute, why hadn’t they corralled her already? Oh, right—everything was different in Europe, including methods of parenting. Monroe had heard somewhere the French started giving their kids wine with dinner when they were three years old. The practice probably extended to every country where they spoke French, like here in the Liège province. He looked at his watch as the girl pattered past him for the millionth time, her mouth running like a motor. Too bad dinnertime was still hours away—a little wine would calm her down. She might even sleep all the way to wherever. Which, now that he was thinking of it, might have been why the French gave their kids wine in the first place.

Across the aisle and three rows down from him, one of Valery Dormov’s bodyguards was fussing over him, had been ever since they’d boarded the train. Maybe he’d been a nursemaid in a previous incarnation. He wouldn’t let up even though Dormov kept waving him off and telling him he was fine.

The bodyguard’s unrelenting solicitude was getting on Monroe’s nerves as much as the girl was. It was torment just having to listen to him asking him over and over if Dormov wanted something to eat or drink or read, did he need a pillow, was his seat okay. Nyet, nyet, nyet, the old man said, waving one hand. If it had been anyone else, Monroe might have actually gotten up and told them to leave the poor guy in peace. Dormov was hardly a poor guy, and he would rest in peace soon. The thought put a smile on Monroe’s face.

The little girl ran past Monroe again going the other way. If the train didn’t get underway soon, he thought, he’d have to start running up and down the aisle himself just to blow off steam. Still, it didn’t really matter if they ran late, just as long as Henry was on time. And he would be.

As if in response to his thoughts, the train gave a jerk and began to move forward. At the same moment, a female voice came over the PA system, making an announcement about travel times, destinations, and passenger safety and, since it was all in French, it sounded enchanting and a bit seductive. Monroe had been told that Belgians had a softer accent than they did in France. His ear wasn’t good enough to tell the difference. Henry’s probably was, though; he was that kind of precise.

He looked out the window. “Car number six,” he said, his voice quiet and clear. “We’re moving. Four alpha. Repeat: four alpha. Window seat, his team on all sides.”

Some miles to the south and east, Henry replied, “Copy that.”

His eyes were still on the tracks in the distance, specifically on the spot where they disappeared into a tunnel cut into a hill. The entrance to the tunnel was somewhat lower than his vantage point. Moving quickly but without hurrying, Henry got out of the driver’s seat and went around to the rear to raise the hatch before pausing a moment to check the time on his wristwatch. He’d bought it on base when he was still in boot camp because it looked right to him, like the kind of watch a Marine would wear. It was still working and he still liked seeing it on his wrist. Then he opened the hard case in the back of the SUV.

The Remington 700 sniper rifle was old and sturdy, like his watch, like himself, and they were all still going. The moment he began assembling the Remington, a sensation of calm control bloomed inside him and flowed outward from his core into his head and his hands, into the air around him so that he breathed the same imperturbable, perfect balance that made up his mind and body. And the Remington.

Henry calibrated the Remington’s telescopic sight, attached it to the bipod on the barrel, then lay down on his stomach enjoying the way his body warmed to the position. It felt like coming home; it always did.

“Speed?” he asked.

“238 kilometers per hour and holding steady,” said Monroe’s voice in his ear. Henry smiled.

Monroe shifted in his seat. It was as if his skin were on too tight. He transferred the book he’d been pretending to read—or trying to pretend to read—from one hand to the other and back again.

“You sound excited,” Henry said, as calm and matter-of-fact as ever.

“I do love capping bad guys,” Monroe said, shifting again. If Henry had seen him, he might have knocked him out with the butt of the Remington. Had to, for your own good, he’d say later when Monroe came to. You were going to give the whole thing away.

Monroe forced himself to stare down at the book instead of stealing another look at Dormov and his bodyguards. This wasn’t his first rodeo; he knew damned well you had to be careful not to look at the target too much. They would notice and get the idea something was up. Then he looked anyway.

Dormov was finally starting to show a little impatience with the helpful bodyguard, waving him off without bothering to turn away from the window. It wouldn’t be much longer now. Knowing that made Monroe even jumpier.

The train appeared on the track eight hundred yards from the hilltop where Henry lay on his belly.

He loaded a single bullet into the Remington. One shot was all he’d get. If he couldn’t do it in one shot… but he always had.

He tapped the stock twice and took aim.

“Wait. Wait.”

Henry could practically hear Monroe’s knuckles whiten. He was about to tell him to unbunch his panties when Monroe said the magic words:

“Civilian in play.”

Henry froze and the universe froze with him. Except for the goddam train speeding toward the tunnel as if it were desperate to reach safe haven.

The good news was the little girl had finally stopped running up and down the aisle. The bad news was she was now standing in the aisle right beside Dormov and his party, staring at them as if transfixed. Dormov stared back at her, apparently disconcerted by her unabashed curiosity.

She’s going to stand there and save his life, Monroe thought, horrified. The little shit’s going to save this bastard’s life. She’s going to blow our only chance to prevent a foreign power from getting hold of classified material, and she’s going to do it just by being a goddam little kid.

Monroe was about to get up and find some pretense to make her move even if he had to knock her down, when her mother finally materialized to take charge of her. There was a strong resemblance between the little girl and the pretty young woman dressed in a white blouse and blue skirt but somehow her mother had managed to remain invisible until now. She took her daughter by the shoulders and ushered her away, admonishing her gently in French that sounded musical to Monroe.

Monroe’s sigh of relief cut off sharply when the two of them took seats in the next row, the girl sitting directly behind Dormov. She was far too close for Monroe’s comfort but it didn’t matter as long as she was outside the kill box.

“Clear,” Monroe said under his breath.

Looking through the scope, Henry felt himself dare to resume breathing. “Confirm that,” he said as the first car entered the tunnel. And do it fucking now, he added silently.

“Confirmed. Clear. Go to green,” Monroe said, his voice tight and urgent.

“Copy.” Henry’s finger curled around the trigger and squeezed.

The moment of the shot was always the moment, The One True Moment when the universe was finally in order, when it finally made sense. All cause was aligned with effect, everything was in the right place, and every place was in the right position in relation to his own. He knew when the bullet left the barrel and visualized the path it took through the softly sunlit air all the way to the train, where, like everything else in the universe, it would be exactly where it was supposed to be.

Except it wasn’t.

Henry took his eye from the scope. The immutable calm, clarity, and conviction that always enveloped him on a job had vanished. Everything in the perfectly ordered universe had slipped out of alignment; The One True Moment had not come together. There was no calm around him. He was only a guy holding a rifle, lying on his belly in the dirt below an uncaring sky somewhere in northwestern Europe.

He’d missed the shot.

He didn’t know how he knew, he just did.

Monroe was unaware of Henry’s frame of mind. The entire carriage was in an uproar. The little girl’s mother was screaming as she held her daughter in her arms, one hand over her eyes even though the child couldn’t see anything, not even the hole in the window beside Dormov. Dormov himself sat with his head cocked at a rather inelegant angle while blood dribbled down onto his shirt from the gunshot wound in his throat.

The bodyguards sat frozen in place as if the shot had turned them all into statues, even the one who had been so attentive, and they were still frozen when the train emerged from the tunnel. There was going to be hell to pay when they reported to their superiors. They’d had one job and they’d failed spectacularly.

Tant pis—for them. A bad guy had been capped. Now Dormov would never spill his guts about everything he’d gained from thirty-five years of government-funded research in America. Everything Dormov knew about chemical-biological warfare had died with him. Disaster averted, everything was as it should be. All was right with the world.

“Alpha, mike, foxtrot,” Monroe said cheerfully.

Henry removed the tiny earpiece without responding. Normally Monroe’s sign-off was the cherry on top but he wasn’t feeling it today. He was on automatic pilot as he disassembled the rifle, without the satisfaction he should have felt after eliminating a terrorist—and a bioterrorist at that, thus making the world a safer place. Something had gone wrong, and for now, he and Monroe had nothing more to talk about.