Point Blanc (18 page)

"You
have put us to a great deal of inconvenience," he said.

Alex
straightened his head. He tried to move his hands, but they had been chained
together behind the chair.

"Your
name is not Alex Friend. You are not the son of Sir David Friend. Your name is
Alex Rider, and you are employed by the British secret service." Dr.
Grief was simply stating facts. There was no emotion in his voice.

"We
have microphones concealed in the cells," Mrs. Stellenbosch
explained. "Sometimes it is useful for us to hear the conversations
between our young guests. Everything you said was overheard by the guard who
summoned me."

"You
have wasted our time and our money," Dr. Grief continued. "For that
you will be punished. It is not a punishment you will survive."

The words
were cold and absolute, and Alex felt the fear that they triggered. It coursed
through his bloodstream, closing in on his heart. He took a deep breath,
forcing himself back under control. He had signaled MI6. They would be on their
way to Point Blanc. They might appear any minute now. He just had to play for
time.

"You
can't do anything to me," he said.

Mrs. Stellenbosch
lashed out, and he was almost thrown backward as the back of her hand sliced
into the side of his head. Only the chair kept him upright. "When you
speak to the director, you will refer to him as 'Dr. Grief,' "
she said.

Alex looked
around again, his eyes watering. "You can't do anything to me, Dr.
Grief," he said. "I know everything. I know about Project Gemini.
And I've already told London what I know. If you do anything to me,
they'll kill you. They're on their way here now."

Dr. Grief
smiled, and in that single moment Alex knew that nothing he said would change
what was about to happen to him. The man was too confident. He was like a poker
player who had not only managed to see all the cards but had also stolen the
four aces for himself.

"It may
well be that your friends are on their way," he said. "But I do not
think you have told them anything. We have been through your luggage and found
the transmitting device concealed in the Discman. I note also that it is an ingenious
electric saw. But as for the transmitter, it can send out a signal but not a
message. How you learned about the Gemini Project is of no interest to me. I
assume you overheard the name while eavesdropping at a door. We should have
been more careful--but for British intelligence to send in a child ...
that was something we could not expect.

"Let us
assume 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 that I very much fear you 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, it 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, discolored 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 the 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 president of South
Africa, appointed me minister of 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, but returned to her seat. 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
whites' toilets, restaurants, sports arenas, or bars. They had to carry
passes. They were treated like animals."

"It was
horrible," 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 had 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? Oh, yes--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 replicas of themselves for more than a
hundred years. The word itself is Greek."

"The
Greek word for twig," Mrs. Stellenbosch muttered.

"Think
how a twig starts as one branch but then splits into two," Grief
continued. "This is exactly what has been achieved with lizards, with sea
urchins, with tadpoles and frogs, with mice and--yes--on the fifth of
July, 1996, with a sheep. The theory is simple enough. Nuclear transplantation:
to take the nucleus out of an egg and to 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 earlier. She was
the 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. Well
... 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 a throne of his own imagination. "Twenty years ago I
began my work," he explained. "I told you--I was minister of
science. I had all the equipment and money 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
ambition. And my determination."

"Were
they all as mad as you too?" Alex asked, and he 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 who
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
been a mother to 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, who had also worked with me in
the South African government. She had worked in BOSS--our own secret
service. She was one of their principal interrogators."

"Happy
days!" Mrs. Stellenbosch muttered.

"Together
we set up the academy. Because, you see, that was the second part of my plan. I
had created 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 percent
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
original thing."