Agent Matt: Academy of Shadows

Chapter 15: Ruling the world 101

"Open your eyes, matt. Dr. Sorrow wishes to speak to you." The words came from across an ocean. Matt groaned and tried to lift his head. He was sitting down, his arms pinned behind his back. The whole side of his face felt bruised and swollen, and the taste of blood was in his mouth. He opened his eyes and waited for the room to come into focus. Mrs. Stenavich was standing in front of him; her fist curled loosely in her other hand. Matt remembered the force of the blow that had knocked him out. His whole head was throbbing, and he ran his tongue over his teeth to see if any were missing. It was fortunate he had rolled with the punch. Otherwise she might have broken his neck. Dr. Sorrow was sitting in his golden chair, watching Matt with what might have been curiosity or distaste. Or perhaps a little of both There was nobody else in the room. It was still snowing outside, and a small fire burned in the hearth. The flames weren't as red as Dr. Sorrow's eyes.

"You have put us to a great deal of inconvenience," he said. Matt straightened his head. He tried to move his hands, but they had been chained together behind the chair. "Your name is not Matt Hiroku. You are not the son of George Hiroku. Your name is Matt Ishida, and you are employed by the Japanese secret service." Dr. Sorrow was simply stating facts. There was no emotion in his voice.

"We have microphones concealed in the cells," Mrs. Stenavich 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. Sorrow continued. "For that you will be punished. It is not a punishment you will survive." The words were cold and absolute, and Matt 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 signalled JIN 7. They would be on their way to Ombre Académie. They might appear any minute now. He just had to play for time.

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

Mrs. Stenavich lashed out, and he was almost thrown backwards 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. Sorrow,'" she said.

Matt looked around again, his eyes watering. "You can't do anything to me, Dr. Sorrow," he said. "I know everything. I know about Project Shadow. And I've already told Tomoeda what I know. If you do anything to me, they'll kill you. They're on their way here now." Dr. Sorrow smiled, and in that single moment Matt 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 Shadow 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 Japanese 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 Shadow 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, Matt. The world is already mine."

"You mean, it belongs to the kids you've hired to act as doubles, Matt said.

"Hired?" Dr. Sorrow muttered a few words to Mrs. Stenavich in a harsh, guttural language. Matt assumed it must be Afrikaans. Her thick lips parted and she laughed, showing heavy, discoloured teeth. "Is that what you think?" Dr. Sorrow 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. Sorrow 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 Shadow 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. Stenavich 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. Sorrow 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, mostly in genetics 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," Matt said, "but I didn't think that meant you were going to bore me to death." Mrs. Stenavich coughed on her cigar and advanced on Matt, her fist clenched. But Dr. Sorrow stopped her.

"Let the boy have his little joke," he said. "There will be pain enough for him later."

The assistant director glowered at Matt, but returned to her seat. Dr. Sorrow went on. "I am telling you this, Matt, only because it will help you understand. You perhaps know nothing about South Africa. Japanese 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," Matt said.

"It was wonderful!" Mrs. Stenavich murmured.

"It was indeed perfect," Dr. Sorrow 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. Stenavich added. Smoke was dribbling out of her nostrils. Matt said nothing. It was clear enough that both Dr. Sorrow and his assistant were mad. Just how mad they were was becoming clearer with every word they spoke.

"I looked at the world," Dr. Sorrow 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. Sorrow," Matt said. "But not for anyone else." Sorrow 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, Matt. And it was because of my unique position in the unique place that was South Africa that I was able to attempt it." Sorrow took a deep breath. "What do you know about nuclear transplantation?" he asked.

"I don't know anything," Matt said. "But as you said, I'm a Japanese schoolboy. Lazy and ignorant."

"There is another word for it. Have you heard of cloning?" Matt almost burst out laughing.

"You mean, like Dolly the sheep?"

"To you it may be a joke, Matt. 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. Stenavich muttered.

"Think how a twig starts as one branch but then splits into two," Sorrow 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, Matt. 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," Matt said.

"I don't want applause," Sorrow snarled. "Not from you. What I want from you is your life, and that I will take."

"So who did you clone?" Matt asked. "Not Mrs. Stenavich, I hope. I'd have thought one of her was more than enough." Mrs. Stenavich swiftly punched matt in the stomach. Matt groaned in pain as he felt the full force of it.

"Who do you think? I cloned myself!" Dr. Sorrow 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 seven 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, I made Ombre Académie. 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?" Matt asked, and he flinched as Mrs. Stenavich hit him again. But he wanted to make them angry. If they were angry, they might make mistakes.

"To begin with, they were babies' " Dr. Sorrow said. "Sixteen babies who would grow up to become replicas of myself. I have had to wait fifteen 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."

"Jacco, Aidan, Kevin, James, John. And Jamie..." Now Matt understood why they had somehow all looked the same. "Do you see, Matt? 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. They are like my shadow." 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. Stenavich 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 Matt saw it all. It was totally insane. But it was the only way to make sense of everything he had seen. Dr. Sorrow 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, Matt. Because, you see, I wanted what these children had.

"Take a boy like Jacco van dijk. One day his father will leave him with a fifty percent stake in the world's diamond market. Or Aidan Bouchard. His mother has newspapers all over the world. Or John Kent. 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 Ombre Académie, I have replaced with copies of myself. Surgically altered, of course, to look exactly like the original thing."

"Baxter ... the man you shot . . how does he fit into all this?"

"You have been busy, Matt." For the first time, Dr. Sorrow looked surprised. "The late Mr. Baxter was a plastic surgeon. I found him working in Harley Street, in 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 Ombre Académie, they were kept under observation."

"With identical rooms on the third and fourth 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 just like them, their own shadows, hence the name…Project Shadow.

" It would never have worked!" Matt 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. Stenavich giggled. She had finished her cigar. Now she lit another.

"You're quite wrong, Matt," Dr. Sorrow 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 these people sent their sons here was because they wanted them to change. It is the reason 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 fifteen leaves home for six or seven months. 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,

John, you've gotten so big, and you're so grown-up!' And they will suspect nothing. In fact, they would be worried if the boy hadn't changed."

"But Jones guessed, didn't he?" Matt knew that he had arrived at the truth, the reason he had been sent here in the first place. He knew why Jones and Vanko had died.

"There have been two occasions when the parents did not believe what they saw," Dr. Sorrow admitted. "Paul A. jones in New York. And General Major Anton Vanko 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. Paul Jones knew something was wrong and called JIN 7 in Tomoeda. I presume that is how you were unlucky enough to be involved. I had to pay to have Jones killed just as I paid for the death of Vanko. 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. Paul A. Jones left his entire fortune to his son. And I understand that the Russian president is taking a personal interest in Dimitry Vanko, following the loss of his father. "In short, the Shadow Project has been an outstanding success. In a few days' time, the last of the children will leave Ombre Académie to take their places in the heart of their family. 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, Matt Ishida. You have caused me a great deal of annoyance. I propose, therefore, to make an example of you " Dr Sorrow reached into his pocket and took out a device that looked like a pager. It contained a single button, which he pressed. "What is the first lesson tomorrow morning, Eva?" he asked.

"Biology," Mrs. Stenavich replied.

"As I thought. You have perhaps been to biology classes where a frog or a rat has been dissected, Matt?" he asked. "For some time now, my children have been asking to see a human dissection. This is no surprise to me. I myself first attended a human dissection at the age of fifteen. Tomorrow morning, at half past nine, their wish will be granted. You will be brought into the laboratory and we shall open you up and have a look at you. We will not use aesthetic, 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!" Matt 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. Sorrow spat the words. "And that is why I am giving you a scientific death. At least in your last minutes you will have been of some use to me." He looked past Matt. "Take him away and search him thoroughly. Then lock him up for the night. I'll see him again first thing tomorrow morning." Matt had seen Dr. Sorrow summon the guards, but he hadn't heard them come in. He was seized from behind, the handcuffs were unlocked, and he was jerked backward out of the room. His last sight of Dr. Sorrow was of the man stretching out his hands to warm them in the fire, the twisting flames reflected in his glasses. Mrs. Stenavich smiled and blew out smoke. Then the door slammed shut and Matt was dragged down the corridor knowing that Ooishi and the secret service had to be on their way, but wondering whether they would arrive before it was too late.