“Fine,” the clone said. “Doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“That’s good.” She rinsed her coffee mug and left it in the sink. “I’ve got to go. I’m late.”
The clone poured the last of his coffee into the sink and followed her to the door leading to the garage. Louie took a tentative step after him, but then seemed to think better of it and walked back to his dog bed in the corner of the kitchen and lay down.
“I think Louie might be sick,” the clone said. In the lab, Jeremiah cringed, hoping Brent wouldn’t pick up on all the talk about the dog.
Diana stopped and turned toward Louie with a hint of confusion on her face.
“Really?” she asked. “He seems fine to me. He ate his breakfast. Was he okay on his walk this morning?”
“He wouldn’t come on the walk with me,” the clone told her. “That’s what I mean. He just didn’t want to go. Dug his heels in. I just let him out in the yard on his own. He was acting strange last night, too.”
Diana’s brow wrinkled. “I’ll make an appointment for him later this week,” she said, and walked into the garage.
The clone followed and closed the door behind him. Another camera, situated somewhere above the garage bay doors, immediately picked him up from another angle in an almost seamless cut.
Diana got into her red Subaru and waved at the clone as she closed the door. Jeremiah saw with some unease that she hardly looked at him as she did so. He’d never noticed while he was actually there with her, but she hardly looked at him at all anymore. There’s guilt in her, he thought. The clone waved back, and Jeremiah noticed that his gaze lingered for just a moment longer than it should have. The realization that he knew exactly what was going through its mind in that moment was slightly disturbing to him. It was definitely someone at her office she was having an affair with. He had never met anyone from the law firm, knew them only from her sporadic mentions of them: four lawyers, three of them men, two other legal secretaries, one of them a much younger man, and two receptionists, both female. He should have done something. He should have confronted her. He didn’t know why he never had. It wasn’t as though he needed any more proof. He had been sure of it for a while, several months at least. And, he realized now, the clone shared that certainty. He found himself wondering if his double would somehow muster the resolve to do something other than wait and pretend. He wondered if he even could.
“I’m going to make coffee,” Brent said, startling Jeremiah out of his contemplations.
On the monitor, Jeremiah watched as the clone got into the rental car, started the engine and backed into the driveway. He drove to work listening to news radio and sighing occasionally at the traffic on the highway. How the hell had they gotten a camera into the rental car?
Brenda, the bubbly, flame-haired receptionist for ViMed’s Communications department, greeted him at the office in typical exuberance. She wore an equally brash outfit, featuring a pair of oversize kelly-green hoop earrings that were specifically distracting.
“Good morning, Mr. Adams,” she said, handing him a single slip of pink paper. “Walt Thompson from the New York Times.”
“Thanks,” he said, looking her directly in the ears. “Anything else?”
“You have that editorial meeting at 11:15 and the printer will be here at noon to go over the proofs of the newsletter. Other than that, pretty quiet so far.”
The clone nodded and headed into his office. He closed the door and the camera angle shifted. This one, if Jeremiah had to guess, was located in one of the paintings on the wall directly in front of him and afforded a clear view of the desk and a head-on view of the clone.
Walt Thompson was a science editor for the Times and Jeremiah’s former classmate and one-time colleague on a Boston paper. There was a chance the call could have been a social one, but Jeremiah suspected it more likely had to do with Meld. Even without a current storm over the drug, Walt had been keenly preoccupied with it, writing no fewer than four stories on the drug in the past two months. He was probably still chasing it. The clone sighed and picked up the phone to dial.
Jeremiah could hear only the clone’s side of the conversation, but it was relatively easy to figure out that his suspicions had been correct.
“Give it a rest, would you, Walt?” he said. “If you want another angle, why don’t you talk to that doctor in Delaware again? I hear he’s using Meld more and more. There’s your story...
“What am I hedging about? I don’t have anything new. There’ve been no more suicides, no incidents at all since New Jersey. Maybe the kinks have been worked out. Maybe the cops are doing their jobs...”
Maybe, Jeremiah thought in the lab, it was just a stroke of dumb luck.
“You’re being ridiculous. You’re starting to sound like one of those conspiracy theorists. I think you need a vacation...
“Look, I can put you in touch with someone else from the science end, but I think you’re barking up a dead tree here, Walt. There’s nothing new to report...
“I’m not defending anyone. This is my job...
“Yeah, yeah, the award thing. No, I haven’t forgotten,” the clone said, his tone shifting from the defensive for the moment. Walt had been after him to attend an award dinner in New York City at the end of the month. Jeremiah had no inclination of going.
“Diana is checking her schedule. I’ll get back to you on it.” He hadn’t even mentioned it to Diana.
The last thing Jeremiah wanted was to drive four hours and schmooze with a roomful of journalists, most of whom he could have reported circles around in his day. He had no desire to banter about who got which promotion and listen to all the righteous First Amendment‒Fourth Estate pontificating. And he certainly wasn’t itching to see Walt get a second Hearst Award for Excellence in as many years. Jeremiah had been nominated himself three times but missed out on each one. If he had to hear one more person say to him what an honor it was “just to be nominated” he’d likely start throwing punches. Besides, with the Meld scandal, he’d be a goldfish in a piranha pool, and that wasn’t something he was about to walk into casually.
“Yeah, I will,” the clone said into the phone. “I’ll call you later this week.”
For the remainder of the viewing, Jeremiah and Brent watched the clone work silently in his office, lead an uneventful editorial meeting and decline an offer for lunch with two of his younger coworkers, saying he had a lot of busywork to catch up on. When the monitor switched off, he was eating a soggy tuna sandwich alone at his desk and staring, unknowingly, directly into the camera.
Chapter 6
Day 30
It was a novelty to live in the lap of high-tech luxury without the responsibilities of work and family. Jeremiah wasn’t used to so much free time, and in those first weeks he wallowed in it. He stayed up late, well after midnight, watching old movies and reruns of TV shows he hadn’t seen since he was a kid. He ate unconventional meals at odd hours and burned them off on the treadmill in virtual locales as exotic as he could think of. He read newspapers—the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, even his hometown weekly—from cover to cover. They delivered the actual hard copies, like he’d asked. He started reading the books they’d supplied him with and toyed again with the idea of writing his own novel. A year of this could go far, he figured, toward finally setting that idea in motion. But what would he write about? Titles took shape in his mind: Clone Alone; Cloney Island; The Year of the Clone. He doubted Charles Scott would approve. Still, he thought, it could make for a good read.