Point Blank

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.‛
    ‚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, 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 color, 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 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 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’re 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 these people sent their sons here was because they wanted