“Let us assume then that your friends do come calling. They will find nothing wrong. You yourself will have disappeared. I shall tell them that you ran away. I will say that my men are looking for you even now, but I very much fear you will have died a cold and lingering death on the mountainside. Nobody will guess what I have done here. The Gemini Project will succeed. It has already succeeded. And even if your friends do take it upon themselves to kill me, that will make no difference. I cannot be killed, Alex. The world is already mine.”
“You mean it belongs to the kids you’ve hired to act as doubles,” Alex said.
“Hired?” Dr Grief muttered a few words to Mrs Stellenbosch in a harsh, guttural language. Alex assumed it must be Afrikaans. Her thick lips parted and she laughed, showing heavy, discoloured teeth. “Is that what you think?” Dr Grief asked. “Is that what you believe?”
“I’ve seen them.”
“You don’t know what you’ve seen. You have no understanding of my genius! Your little mind couldn’t begin to encompass what I have achieved.” Dr Grief was breathing heavily. He seemed to come to a decision. “It is rare enough for me to come face to face with the enemy,” he said. “It has always been my frustration that I will never be able to communicate to the world the brilliance of what I have done. Well, since I have you here – a captive audience, so to speak – I shall allow myself the luxury of describing the Gemini Project. And when you go, screaming, to your death, you will understand that there was never any hope for you. That you could not hope to come up against a man like me and win. Perhaps that will make it easier for you.”
“I will smoke, if you don’t mind, Doctor,” Mrs Stellenbosch said. She took out her cigars and lit one. Smoke danced in front of her eyes.
“I am, as I am sure you are aware, South African,” Dr Grief began. “The animals in the hall and in this room are all souvenirs of my time there; shot on safari. I still miss my country. It is the most beautiful place on this planet.
“What you may not know, however, is that for many years I was one of South Africa’s foremost biochemists. I was head of the biology department at the University of Johannesburg. I later ran the Cyclops Institute for Genetic Research in Pretoria. But the height of my career came in the 1960s when, although I was still in my twenties, John Vorster, the prime minister of South Africa, appointed me Minister for Science—”
“You’ve already said you’re going to kill me,” Alex said, “but I didn’t think that meant you were going to bore me to death.”
Mrs Stellenbosch coughed on her cigar and advanced on Alex, her fist clenched. But Dr Grief stopped her. “Let the boy have his little joke,” he said. “There will be pain enough for him later.”
The assistant director glowered at Alex.
Dr Grief went on. “I am telling you this, Alex, only because it will help you understand. You perhaps know nothing about South Africa. English schoolchildren are, I have found, the laziest and most ignorant in the world. All that will soon change! But let me tell you a little bit about my country, as it was when I was young.
“The white people of South Africa ruled everything. Under the laws that came to be known to the world as apartheid, black people were not allowed to live near white people. They could not marry white people. They could not share white toilets, restaurants, sports halls or bars. They had to carry passes. They were treated like animals.”
“It was disgusting,” Alex said.
“It was wonderful!” Mrs Stellenbosch murmured.
“It was indeed perfect,” Dr Grief agreed. “But as the years passed, I became aware that it would also be short-lived. The uprising at Soweto, the growing resistance and the way the entire world – including your own, stinking country – ganged up on us, I knew that white South Africa was doomed and I even foresaw the day when power would be handed over to a man like Nelson Mandela.”
“A criminal!” Mrs Stellenbosch added. Smoke was dribbling out of her nostrils.
Alex said nothing. It was clear enough that both Dr Grief and his assistant were mad. Just how mad they were was becoming clearer with every word they spoke.
“I looked at the world,” Dr Grief said, “and I began to see just how weak and pathetic it was becoming. How could it happen that a country like mine could be given away to people who would have no idea how to run it? And why was the rest of the world so determined for it to be so? I looked around me and I saw that the people of America and Europe had become stupid and weak. The fall of the Berlin Wall only made things worse. I had always admired the Russians, but they quickly became infected with the same disease. And I thought to myself, if I ruled the world, how much stronger it would be. How much better—”
“For you, perhaps, Dr Grief,” Alex said. “But not for anyone else.”
Grief ignored him. His eyes, behind the red glasses, were brilliant. “It has been the dream of very few men to rule the entire world,” he said. “Hitler was one. Napoleon another. Stalin, perhaps, a third. Great men! Remarkable men! But to rule the world in the twenty-first century requires something more than military strength. The world is a more complicated place now. Where does real power lie? In politics. Prime ministers and presidents. But you will also find power in industry, in science, in the media, in oil, in the Internet… Modern life is a great tapestry and if you wish to take control of it all, you must seize hold of every strand.
“This is what I decided to do, Alex. And it was because of my unique position in the unique place that was South Africa that I was able to attempt it.” Grief took a deep breath. “What do you know about nuclear transplantation?” he asked.
“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 exact replicas of themselves for more than a hundred years. The word itself is Greek for ‘twig’. Think how a twig starts as one branch but then splits into two. This is exactly what has been achieved with lizards, with sea urchins, with tadpoles and frogs, with mice and, yes, on 5 July 1996, with a sheep. The theory is simple enough. Nuclear transplantation. To take the nucleus out of an egg and 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 before Dolly was born. She was the end 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. 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 the throne of his own imagination. “Twenty years ago I began my work,” he explained. “I told you – I was Minister for Science. I had all the equipment and money that 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 amb
ition. And my determination.”
“Were they all as mad as you too?” Alex asked, and 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 from sixteen mothers – who were themselves biologically irrelevant. They 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 looked after 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 Stellenbosch, who had also worked with me in the South African government. She had worked in the SASS – our own secret service. She was one of their principal interrogators.”
“Happy days!” Mrs Stellenbosch smiled.
“Together we set up the academy. Because, you see, that was the second part of my plan. I was creating 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 per cent 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 originals.”
“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, 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 colour – 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 second and third 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 are 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 why these people sent their sons here was because they wanted them to change. It is the reason why 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 weeks. 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 got so big – and you’re so grown up!’ And they will suspect nothing. In fact, they would be worried if the boy had not changed.”
“But Roscoe guessed, didn’t he?” Alex knew he had arrived at the truth, the reason why 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 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 become involved. I had to pay to have Roscoe killed just as I paid for the death of Ivanov. But it was to be expected that there would be problems. Two out of sixteen is not so catastrophic, and of course it makes no difference to my plans. In many ways, it even helps me. Michael J. Roscoe left his entire fortune to his son. And I understand that the Russian president is taking a personal interest in Dimitry Ivanov following the loss of his father.
“In short, the Gemini Project has been an outstanding success. In a few days’ time, the last of the children will leave Point Blanc to take their places in the heart of their families. Once I am satisfied that they have all been accepted, I will, I fear, have to dispose of the originals. They will die painlessly.
“The same cannot be said for you, Alex Rider. You have caused me a great deal of annoyance. I propose, therefore, to make an example of you.” Dr Grief reached into his pocket and took out a device that looked like a pager. It had a single button, which he pressed. “What is the first lesson tomorrow morning, Eva?” he asked.
“Double biology,” Mrs Stellenbosch replied.
“As I thought. You have perhaps been to biology lessons where a frog or a rat has been dissected, Alex,” he said. “For some time now, my children have been asking to see a human dissection. This is no surprise to me. At the age of fourteen, I first attended a human dissection myself. Tomorrow morning, at nine-thirty, their wish will be granted. You will be brought into the laboratory and we will open you up and have a look at you. We will not be using anaesthetic and it will be interesting to see how long you survive before your heart gives out. And then, of course, we shall dissect your heart.”
“You’re sick!” Alex yelled. Now he was thrashing about in the chair, trying to break the wood, trying to get the handcuffs to come apart. But it was hopeless. The metal cut into him. The chair rocked but stayed in one piece. “You’re a madman!”
“I am a scientist!” Dr Grief spat the words. “And that is why I am giving you a scientific death. At least in your last minutes you will have been some use to me.” He looked past Alex. “Take him away and search him thoroughly. Then lock him up for the night. I’ll see him again first thing tomorrow morning.”
Alex had seen Dr Grief summon the guards but he hadn’t heard them come in. He was seized from behind, the handcuffs were unlocked and he was jerked backwards out of the room. His last sight of Dr Grief was of the man stretching out his hands to warm them at the fire, the twisting flames reflected in his glasses. Mrs Stellenbosch smiled and blew out smoke.
Then the door slammed shut and Alex was dragged down the corridor knowing that Blunt and the secret service had to be on their way – but wondering if they would arrive before it was too late.
BLACK RUN
The cell measured two metres by four metres and contained a bunk bed with no
mattress and a chair. The door was solid steel. Alex had heard a key turn in the lock after it was closed. He had not been given anything to eat or drink. The cell was cold but there were no blankets on the bed.
At least the guards had left the handcuffs off. They had searched Alex expertly, removing everything they had found in his pockets. They had also removed his belt and the laces of his shoes. Perhaps Dr Grief had thought he would hang himself. He needed Alex fresh and alive for the biology lesson.
It was about two o’clock in the morning but Alex hadn’t slept. He had tried to put out of his mind everything Grief had told him. That wasn’t important now. He knew that he had to escape before nine-thirty because – like it or not – it seemed he was on his own. More than thirty-six hours had passed since he had pressed the panic button that Smithers had given him – and nothing had happened. Either the machine hadn’t worked or for some reason MI6 had decided not to come. Of course it was possible that something might happen before breakfast the next day. But Alex wasn’t prepared to risk it. He had to get out. Tonight.
For the twentieth time he went over to the door and knelt down, listening carefully. The guards had dragged him back down to the basement. He was in a corridor separate from the other prisoners. Although everything had happened very quickly, Alex had tried to remember where he was being taken. Out of the lift and turn left. Round the corner and then down a second passageway to a door at the end. He was on his own. And listening through the door, he was fairly sure that they hadn’t posted a guard outside.