by Jerry Ahern
Seven rounds left. Rourke advanced on the Mercedes. As in the Volvo, there was a man in the rear seat, and like that man from the Volvo this man was armed with an Uzi submachine gun. Unlike the man from the Volvo, the man in the back seat of the Mercedes already had the gun up and ready.
As he started to fire from the driver’s side rear door of the Mercedes, Rourke dodged left, behind the Saab. The glass in the Saab’s “station-wagon back” (as the rear hatch was called ever since the old days of the Saab 99s and, perhaps before) shattered.
Rourke edged along the driver’s-side left fender, keeping the engine block between him and the submachine gunner. The man was firing rapidly, long, ragged bursts, that would burn out the Uzi’s magazine in seconds if the fellow maintained the same pace between the bursts. The thing with an Uzi, however, was that magazines were available in various capacities. Rourke once knew a man who had banked on just that, firing exactly twenty rounds from a thirty-two round magazine, then pausing while his foe approached, thinking the gun was shot dry, that only a twenty-round magazine was utilized. The remaining twelve rounds in the thirty-two-round stick ended the fight.
Rourke had no intention of making the same mistake.
There was a long burst which seemed to choke off prematurely.
Rourke had no choice but to assume that the incompetent firing technique so far displayed was real, and that the man had emptied his gun. Rourke jumped up onto the hood of the Saab, took one long step and was onto the twisted hood of the Mercedes. He bounded up onto the roof of the Mercedes as the submachine gunner was ramming the fresh magazine up the butt of his weapon.
Rourke didn’t let him finish it.
The SIG in John Rourke’s right hand fired, six rounds into face and neck.
Still standing on the roof of the black Mercedes, John Rourke thumbed the magazine release catch and did a tactical magazine change, replacing the spent magazine with the spare, thirteen rounds loaded now plus one in the chamber.
He jumped from the roof of the Mercedes—careful lest he twist an ankle—and ran. At last, police sirens were wailing in the night. He ducked into an alley at the middle of the block, thumbing down the de-cocker, shoving the pistol into his belt. Holding the empty magazine in his left hand, he loaded fresh loose rounds from the side pocket of his jacket with his right, still keeping a decent pace until he reached the end of the alley.
John Rourke stood there, catching his breath for an instant, continuing to insert fresh rounds beneath the magazine’s feed lips. The sirens were louder now, despite the fact that he’d put some distance between himself and the two carloads of dead Nazis.
As he looked in both directions from the end of the alley, he spotted a fountain, and a cathedral spire.
“Plotkin,” Rourke whispered, then started walking, pocketing the magazine and straightening his tie. It would be a walk of several blocks, but on the plus side, the walk would afford him time to be certain that he wasn’t being followed again.
Two blocks past the cathedral, a magnificent old structure which looked almost too stereotypical to be genuine, he turned left down a wide street dotted with seen-better-days buildings of considerable age, all leaning against each other, it seemed, as if no one of them was able to stand alone. At the center of the block was the address he sought, but he didn’t turn in.
Five minutes later, after walking round the block and checking both entrances to the building, John Rourke at last entered through the front doorway of the rooming house. If there was trouble in store, he’d rather have it when there was a wide street behind him rather than a narrow alleyway which could easily be cut off.
There were no doorbells, mailboxes or any other means of identification, but he already knew what he needed. Plotkin’s room was on the third floor, overlooking the street, the second door from the stairwell.
John Rourke took the staircase slowly, but mounted the low treads two at a time, his eyes alternating from above and below him to the treads themselves, lest one were rigged with an alarm or a trip wire.
He found nothing out of the ordinary. When he reached the fourth-floor landing (as an American would reckon it), Rourke turned into the third-floor corridor. The hallway was long, running from side to side of the building, illuminated only by a bare bulb at the exact center. Plaster peeled within the gaps where paint—a kind of induction-center green—had once been. The runner of threadbare carpet was grey.
He went to the second door on the left, raising his left hand to rap on the door, his right hand behind him, holding the SIG.
After he rapped twice, the door opened a crack, a face peering through the crack. Rourke recognized the face from his briefing materials. “Plotkin, I’m Rourke, sent to work with you.” Then, Rourke began the obligatory recognition routine. “Munich is lovely this time of year; what a pity I’m here on business.”
“You would like the Alpine villages even more, I think.”
“But I’d be doubly sad that I had no time away from my work.”
“Life is a contradiction, isn’t it?”
Rourke exhaled. “I hate those things.”
“The ones in the KGB were worse, American. Wait a moment until I slip the chain.” The door shut, then opened, and Rourke started inside, expecting what he saw next: Plotkin was halfway across the room, the pistol in his hand trained on Rourke’s chest. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Why should I, Yuri? If I’m not your American contact, then I’d probably know more about John Rourke than you do, so what good would it do?” Rourke’s gun was still in his right fist, behind his back, and he would have guessed Plotkin knew it.
The pistol Plotkin held was a Ruger Standard Model .22, with the barrel replaced by one incorporating an integral silencer. Such weapons were made for the Special Forces and CIA during the Vietnam War. If this wasn’t one of them, it was a clone. “Tell me something so I will not feel stupid for believing you are who you say you are.”
“How about, I was followed by six men in two cars, one of the cars a lime green Volvo, the other one a black Mercedes.” Plotkin’s whole body tensed like a coiled spring. And then Rourke had a flash of inspiration. “None of the men looked particularly noteworthy except the man in the front passenger seat of the Volvo had a dull red birthmark—or something like it—at his left temple. I noticed it when I shot him.”
“Gorin!”
“ ‘Gorin’ doesn’t sound too terribly Germanic, Plotkin.”
“I do not know what he is, except that he is a devil!”
“Was,” John Rourke corrected.
“Then—”
“All six men are dead or dying, but I’d bet on dead. Does that make you feel better?”
Plotkin lowered the muzzle of his gun. “I learned in my youth never to feel better because of a man’s death. What is it the poet said?”
“Something about how each man’s death diminishes me, you mean? John Donne. And, lest we forget and waste too much time, the passage goes on with, ‘Send not to know for whom the bell tolls—’ ”
“ ‘—It tolls for thee,’ ” Plotkin supplied.
“Yes. So, you have a list and I have an escape route. I have a feeling I’ll be using it, too. I should be hot with the police and the Nazis by now.”
“Do you have a notebook?”
Rourke, the pistol still in his right hand, looked at Plotkin’s gun, then into Plotkin’s eyes. “I pride myself on a good deal of ambidexterity, but it will take longer for me to copy down the names you’re about to give me if I have to keep a gun in my hand.”
Plotkin set down his pistol, then opened his hands, palms outward, toward John Rourke. “I learned to believe in God, too, over the years. May He help me if you are not who you say.”
“And may He help us both to get out of Germany alive, hm?” Rourke belted his pistol, took out his notebook and his pen and relit the cigar that was in the corner of his mouth. “Don’t mind, do you?”
Plotkin lit a cigarette, sat down on the edge
of the bed and began to recite the list of names. . .
There was nothing to do but wait, sleeping in shifts for an hour at a time, thinking. To light a fire would have been madness. So, they waited in the cold, their stolen staff car more than a mile back and well below them, nearer to the battlefield than Rourke himself wanted to be. Deitrich Zimmer’s Nazi forces had attacked the Nazi-like forces of a government which predicated its existence on warfare which did not exist. And, here was the first test. There might be the tendency for the defenders of the mountain city to congratulate themselves for having driven back the attack, but only if they were truly fools. Deitrich Zimmer’s forces had probed the enemy, confirming whatever data Zimmer already might have possessed, making certain that Zimmer’s superior technology and superior forces would prevail against the claustrophobic government here.
And, such would be the case.
Already, as Rourke watched through his binoculars, he could see Zimmer’s land forces massing into a complex attack formation. And, soon the attack—perhaps a final attack—would begin.
After escaping the first battle, John Rourke and Paul Rubenstein had driven their captured vehicle as far as they dared, then abandoned it, moving on foot deeper into the mountains in search of a secure hiding place where they could wait.
And, while they waited, Rourke watched and remembered. The affair in Munich had been John Rourke’s first encounter with Nazis, but certainly not the first encounter for the Rourke family. Rourke’s father, in the United States Office of Strategic Services during World War II, had worked behind the lines in Europe and, for a period of three years, fought Nazis on an almost daily basis.
John Rourke’s father spoke little of his experiences in those days, but those few of his friends who had survived, whom John Rourke had met while he was growing up, often did.
Time was of the essence now, but there was no way of telling when the forces of the Trans-Global Alliance would be able successfully to insert an aircraft and get them out of here. So, there was nothing to do but wait, rest—wait some more.
When the pickup came, they would be off to Deitrich Zimmer’s headquarters at sixty-two degrees north longitude, one hundred and eighteen degrees west latitude. Sarah Rourke and Wolfgang Mann waited there. So did many nightmares.
Chapter One
Was this consciousness, or a dream? Was this death? Her last memory was holding her newborn son clutched in her arms as a tall, evilly beautiful man aimed a gun at her head. And then there were swirling blurs, fragments of awareness, then dreams from which she never seemed to awaken. Now this. It was as if she were looking in a mirror and the mirror image was somehow able to move independently of her, while she herself could not move, could not even speak. She could open her eyelids and close them, the rest of her body numb and dead-seeming to her. Except for the dull throbbiing of her head.
She ached there.
“You are watching me, aren’t you? I don’t blame you. It’s not every day you see yourself, is it? And, that’s who I am. I’m you, but a little different. You make Penelope—wife of Ulysses—look like she was playing around, for goodness’ sake. What kind of a woman are you? A glutton for punishment, I’d say. But, if you ever harbored any thoughts of getting even, hey, don’t worry. I’ll do it for you.”
She wanted to ask the woman in the mirror who she was, even though she knew the woman was her. But she couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything except blink.
“I’ll bet you’re confused, Sarah. Well, don’t be! Because I’m Sarah, now. And I’m part of you, am you, really, except for a few differences. So, don’t worry. I’m the latest model.” And the woman who was her but wasn’t, looked away, smiled, reached out her hand. A man’s hand grasped her hand. “Wanna meet somebody?”
A man’s face appeared in the mirror, the face instantly recognizable, yet not. It was John’s face, or maybe Michael’s face, but it wasn’t either of them. “This is your son, in a way, but not really.”
Sarah’s head ached all the more and she wanted to close her eyes, drift back into the other nightmares, any one of them, because they were better than this.
But the Sarah in the mirror said, “Hey, now! You want to see your little boy, huh? This is Martin. I mean, it really isn’t Martin, but he is. Just like I’m Sarah, do you see?”
Sarah Rourke finally could not stand it, closed her eyes, kept them closed. But there was only the pain, no fresh nightmare, and she kept seeing the mirror image, her own, and that of someone named Martin who looked just like her husband and her son but wasn’t either of them . . .
His face was identical to that of Martin, which one time, early in her conscious life, a few days ago, she had seen with three different expressions all at once. One of them, Dr. Zimmer told her, was really Martin, but the others almost were. John was falling right into Dr. Zimmer’s trap, following Dr. Zimmer’s plan as slavishly as if he were one of the clones.
She asked him that. “Excuse me, Dr. Zimmer, but why don’t you clone my husband and then you could use him, too?”
“I like it, Sarah, that you think of him as your husband. I truly do. And, as a matter of fact, I have considered your proposal. How would it be, for example, if John Thomas Rourke denounced the Trans-Global Alliance? Or, if he shot to death his Jew friend, Rubenstein? Hm? The possibilities are endless, not to mention that some of them are quite potentially beneficial and amusing. Let us just say for now that I have a number of options open to me, just as I did when I learned that ‘your husband’ was on the loose again. Leave it at that, my dear.”
One of the Martins—no one would tell her which was which—added, “My father has some marvelous surprises in store, Mother dear.” Was it Martin or an “Almost-Martin” who called her his mother?
“Almost-Sarah” brushed her hair, staring at herself in the mirror. The real Sarah could have been strikingly beautiful, and Almost-Sarah wanted to be. But Sarah—the original—was always too busy being Sarah to bother.
Almost-Sarah knew every detail of the life Sarah Rourke had lived. Although Almost-Sarah had no experiences by which she could actually compare (she was actually a virgin, although surgically refined so she would not appear so, and possessed of the real Sarah’s memories), John Rourke, when he was around, was magnificent. It was hard for Almost-Sarah to imagine that anyone could be better sexually than he. He was so much a man, so perfect. And, of course, as Dr. Zimmer had explained, his perfection was his flaw, his weakness.
Almost-Sarah had memories of John Rourke naked beside her in bed, his organ brushing against her as he would roll over in the night. And these memories stirred her now as she examined her body in the mirror. But they were not her memories, really, because he had never made love to her, only to the real Sarah. And the real Sarah had never been with another man. So, perhaps any comparison was impossible.
Almost-Sarah’s only real memory of “her husband” was a peek she sneaked when he came to sit at her bedside and wept that she lay comatose. She longed for him to touch her, not just hold her hand, and although she would do as Deitrich Zimmer had programmed her to do, trained her how to do, she would not be denied what she had so suddenly come to crave. There were living creatures—some of these in the insect world—who killed after intercourse. And, she doubted that this would be a first among humankind.
After all, no one deserved death so richly, and with such magnificent irony.
She began to dress, still pondering whether or not Dr. Zimmer had cloned John Rourke. After all, his people had gotten into the secret hiding place for the cryogenic chambers all by prearranged plan, opened the real Sarah’s chamber, just as they had Wolfgang Mann’s, and taken cell samples, then resealed the chambers. What was to say that Rourke himself wasn’t sampled, then cloned?
The process, she knew from the real Sarah’s memories, was begun in the mid-twentieth century, with simple creatures, such as frogs. Almost-Sarah had never seen a frog through her own eyes, but recalled them vividly in memory when Michael, j
ust a tot then, had raised tree frogs and she—the real Sarah—and John had gone all over creation it seemed in order to find live crickets for the frogs to eat. Almost-Sarah found herself smiling, remembering the time that the container of crickets tipped over and the little creatures were everywhere and all of them—except Annie who was too little then—had crawled around the floor on hands and knees, finding the crickets, picking them up and replacing them in the bait container.
John took Michael onto one knee and her onto the other, holding them both. Then she heard Annie crying from the bedroom and went to change her and—Almost-Sarah shook her head, reminding herself consciously who she was, and who she wasn’t.
As she zipped the coveralls closed, she refocused on the cloning process, still trying to understand Dr. Zimmer’s overall plan. For example, as she well knew, the Wolfgang Mann clone Dr. Zimmer sent along on the expedition was expected to be discovered, his programming left imperfect.
The programming was, of course, the key to cloning’s utility. Complex organisms were harder to clone than simple ones, but what had really prevented twentieth-century scientists and those in the intervening centuries from pressing onward were moral questions. The clone, albeit that it was made from the cells of the original organism, was a living, sentient being. As such, it could not be dismissed.
Dr. Zimmer had no such moral obligations. And Almost-Sarah felt a chill along her spine when she considered the real Sarah’s set of memories and values—perhaps what the concept of “conscience” really meant. But her programming allowed her to resolve the moral conflict.
Almost-Sarah looked at herself once more in the mirror, then started from her room and down the corridor. She was about to check into a cell.
