had been worried by Alex’s long absence at the start of spring term. The fact that Alex had also missed the last two weeks of the same term had worried him more. So he had called a meeting.
‚Do you want lunch?' Jack asked.
‚No, thanks.' Alex knew that he would have to pretend he had been ill again. Doubtless MI6 would produce another doctor’s note in due course. But the thought of lying to his principal had spoiled his appetite.
He set off an hour later, taking his bicycle, which had been returned to the house by the Putney police. He cycled slowly. It was good to be back in London, to be surrounded by normal life. He turned off the King’s Road and pedaled down the side road where—it felt like a month ago—he had followed the man in the white Skoda. The school loomed up ahead of him. It was empty now and would remain so until the summer term.
But as Alex arrived, he saw a figure walking across the yard to the school gates and recognized Mr. Lee, the elderly school caretaker.
‚You again!'
‚Hello, Bernie,' Alex said. That was what everyone called him.
‚On your way to see Mr. Bray?'
‚Yeah.'
The caretaker shook his head. ‚He never told me he was going to be here today. But he never tells me anything! I’m just going down to the shops. I’ll be back at five to lock up, so make sure you’re out by then.'
‚Right, Bernie.'
There was nobody in the school yard. It felt strange, walking across the tarmac on his own.
The school seemed bigger with nobody there, the yard stretching out too far between the redbrick buildings with the sun beating down, reflecting off the windows. Alex was dazzled.
He had never seen the place so empty and so quiet. The grass on the playing fields looked almost too green. Any school without schoolchildren has its own peculiar atmosphere, and Brookland was no exception.
Mr. Bray had an office in D block, which was next to the science building. Alex reached the swinging doors and opened them. The walls here would normally be covered in posters, but they had all been taken down at the end of the term. Everything was blank, off-white. There was another door open to one side. Bernie had been cleaning the main laboratory. He had rested his mop and bucket to one side when he had gone to the shops—to pick up cigarettes, Alex presumed. The man had been a chain smoker all his life, and Alex knew he’d die with a cigarette between his lips.
Alex climbed up the stairs, his heels rapping against the stone surface. He reached a corridor—left for biology, right for physics—and continued straight ahead. A second corridor, with full-length windows on both sides, led into D block. Bray’s study was directly ahead of him. He stopped at the door, vaguely wondering if he should have dressed up for the meeting.
Bray was always snapping at boys with their shirts hanging out or crooked ties. Alex was wearing a Gortex jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and Nike sneakers—the same clothes he had worn that morning at MI6. His hair was still too short for his liking, although it had begun to grow back.
All in all, he still looked like a juvenile delinquent—but it was too late now. And anyway, Bray didn’t want to see him to discuss his appearance. His nonappearance at school was more to the point.
He knocked on the door.
‚Come in!' a voice called.
Alex opened the door and walked into the principal’s study, a cluttered room with views over the school yard. There was a desk, piled high with papers, and a black leather chair with its back toward the door. A cabinet full of trophies stood against one wall. The others were mainly lined with books.
‚You wanted to see me,' Alex said.
The chair turned slowly around.
Alex froze.
It wasn’t Henry Bray sitting behind the desk.
It was himself.
He was looking at a fourteen-year-old boy with fair hair cut very short, brown eyes, and a slim, pale face. The boy was even dressed identically to him. It took Alex what felt like an eternity to accept what he was seeing. He was standing in a room looking at himself sitting in a chair. The boy was him.
With just one difference. The boy was holding a gun.
‚Come in,' he said.
Alex didn’t move. He knew what he was facing and he was angry with himself for not having expected it. When he had been handcuffed at the academy, Dr. Grief had boasted to him that he had cloned himself sixteen times. But that morning Mrs. Jones had traced ‚all fifteen of them.' That left one spare—one boy waiting to take his place in the family of Sir David Friend.
Alex had glimpsed him while he was at the academy. Now he remembered the figure with the white mask, watching him from a window as he walked over to the ski jump. The white mask had been bandages. The new Alex had been spying on him as he recovered from the plastic surgery that had made the two of them identical.
And even today there had been clues. Perhaps it had been the heat of the sun, or the fallout from his visit to MI6. But he had been too wrapped up in his own thoughts to see them.
Jack, when he got home. ‚
Bernie, at the gate. ‚
They had both thought they’d seen him. And in a sense, they had. They had seen the boy sitting opposite him. The boy who was now aiming a gun at his heart.
‚I’ve been looking forward to this,' the other boy said, and despite the hatred in his voice, Alex couldn’t help marveling. The voice wasn’t the same as his. The boy hadn’t had enough time to get it right. But otherwise he was a dead ringer.
‚What are you doing here?' Alex said. ‚It’s all over. The Gemini Project is finished. You might as well turn yourself in. You need help.'
‚I need just one thing,' the second Alex sneered. ‚I need to see you dead. I’m going to shoot you. I’m going to do it now. You killed my father!'
‚Your father was a test tube,' Alex said. ‚You never had a mother or a father. You’re a freak. Handmade in the French Alps, like a cuckoo clock. What are you going to do when you’ve killed me? Take my place? You wouldn’t last a week. You may look like me, but too many people know what Grief was trying to do. And I’m sorry, but you’ve got ‘fake’ written all over you.'
‚We would have had everything! We would have had the whole world!' The replica Alex almost screamed the words, and for a moment Alex thought he heard Dr. Grief somewhere in there, blaming him from beyond the grave. But then the creature in front of him
or part of him. ‚I don’t care what happens to me,' he went on, ‚just so long as you’re dead.'
The hand with the gun stretched out. The barrel was pointing at him. Alex looked the boy straight in the eyes.
And he saw the hesitation.
The fake Alex couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. They were too similar. The same clothes, the same bodies, the same faces. For the other boy, it would be like shooting himself. Alex still hadn’t closed the door. He threw himself backward, out into the corridor. At the same time, the gun went off, the bullet exploding inches above his head and crashing into the far wall. Alex hit the ground on his back and rolled out of the doorway as a second bullet slammed into the floor.
And then he was running, putting as much space between himself and his double as he could.
There was a third shot as he sprinted down the corridor, and the window next to him shattered, glass showering down. Alex reached the stairs and took them three at a time, afraid that he would trip and break an ankle. But then he was at the bottom, heading for the main door, swerving only when he realized that he would make too easy a target as he crossed the school yard. Instead he dived into the laboratory, almost falling headfirst over Bernie’s bucket and mop.
The laboratory was long and rectangular, divided into workstations with Bunsen burners, flasks, and dozens of bottles of chemicals spread out on shelves that stretched the full length of the room. There was another door at
