Snakehead (12 page)

“I was quite surprised when John asked me to be his best man,” Ash went on. “I mean, he was such a hotshot and nobody had even noticed I existed. But he didn't really have much choice. His brother, Ian, was away on an assignment…and there's something else you might as well know. Spies are pretty solitary. It goes with the territory, and I was the closest thing he had to a best friend. John was still seeing one or two people from the university—he'd told them he was working for an insurance company—but friendship doesn't really work when you have to lie all the time.”

Alex knew that was true. It was the same for him at school. Everyone at Brookland believed he had been struck down by a series of illnesses in the past ten months. He'd been back at school a bit, and he'd even joined a school trip to Venice. But he'd felt like an outsider. Somehow his friends knew that something wasn't adding up and the knowledge made them less good friends than they had once been.

“Did he have any other family?” he asked.

“Apart from his brother?” Ash shook his head. “There was no family that I knew of. The wedding was at a registry office in London. There were only half a dozen people there.”

Alex felt a twinge of sadness. He would have liked his mother to have had a white wedding in a country church with a big party in a tent and speeches and dancing and too much to drink. After all, he already knew, her happiness wasn't going to last long. But he understood that he was getting a glimpse of a secret agent's life. Friendless, secretive, and a little empty. The plane trembled briefly in the air, and farther down the aisle, one of the call lights blinked on. Outside the window, the sky was very black.

“Tell me more about my mother,” Alex said.

“I can't, Alex,” Ash replied. He twisted in his seat, and Alex noticed a flicker of pain in his eyes. The pills hadn't kicked in yet. “I mean, she liked to read. She went to the movies a lot—she preferred foreign films if she had a choice. She never bought expensive clothes, but she still looked good.” Ash sighed. “I didn't know her that well. And she didn't really trust me, if you want the truth. Maybe she blamed me. I was part of the world that put John in danger. She loved your dad. She hated what he did. And she was smart enough to know that she couldn't talk him out of it.”

Ash opened the second miniature and poured the contents into his plastic glass.

“Helen found out she was expecting you at around the same time that John was sent out on his toughest assignment,” Ash continued. “The two things couldn't have happened at a worse time. But a new organization had come to the attention of MI6. I don't need to tell you its name. I guess you know more about Scorpia than I do. Anyway, there it was: an international network of ex-spies and intelligence officers. People who'd gone into business for themselves.

“At first, they were useful. You have to remember that MI6 actually welcomed them when they first arrived. If you wanted information about what the CIA was up to or how the Iranians were getting on with their nuclear program, Scorpia would sell it to you. If you wanted to do something outside the law with no way of having it traced back to you, there they were. That was the whole point about them. They were loyal to no one. They were only interested in money. And they were very good at their job. Until you came along, Alex, they had never really failed.

“But MI6 got worried about them. They could see that Scorpia was getting out of control…particularly when a couple of their own agents got murdered in Madrid. All around the world, intelligence agencies were regulated, which is to say they played by the rules…at least, to a certain extent. But not Scorpia. They were growing bigger and more powerful, and at the same time they were becoming more ruthless. They didn't care how many people they killed so long as they got their check.

“So Alan Blunt—who'd just become the director of MI6 Special Operations—decided to put your father into Scorpia. The idea was to put him inside the organization…to get them to recruit him. Once he was there, he'd find out everything he could about them. Who was on the executive board? Who was paying them? Who were their connections within the intelligence agencies? That sort of thing. But to do that, MI6 had to put your dad into deep cover. That meant faking everything about him.”

“I know about this,” Alex interrupted. “They pretended he'd been in jail.”

“They actually sent him to jail for a time. They had to be thorough. There were newspaper stories about him. Everyone turned against him. It looked like he lost all his money and he had to sell the apartment. He and Helen moved to some dump in Bermondsey. By then she was three months pregnant. It was very hard on her.”

“But she must have known the truth.”

“I can't tell you that. Maybe your dad told her. Maybe he didn't.”

Alex couldn't believe that. Somehow he was sure his mother must have known.

“Either way, the setup worked,” Ash continued. “He was recruited into Scorpia. They sent him to their training facility on the island of Malagosto, just a couple of miles from Venice.”

The name made Alex shiver. He had been sent there himself when Scorpia had tried to recruit him.

“As far as Scorpia was concerned, John Rider was a gift,” Ash said. “He was a brilliant operator. He had a track record inside British intelligence. And he was desperate. He was also a very good-looking man, by the way. One of the senior executives at Scorpia took a fancy to him.”

“Julia Rothman.” Alex had met her too. She had talked about his father over dinner in Positano.

“The very same. She quickly saw John's potential, and soon he was a senior training officer with special responsibility for some of Scorpia's younger recruits. And she gave him a code name. He was called Hunter.”

“How do you know all this?” Alex asked.

“That's a good question.” Ash smiled. “Because, finally, someone had noticed I existed. Alan Blunt sent me out to shadow John in the field. I was his backup. My job was to stay close but not too close…to be there if he needed to make contact. And that's how I came to be there when it all ended.”

“In Malta.”

“Yeah. In Malta.”

“What happened?”

“Your dad was coming in. He'd had enough of Scorpia
and
MI6. You were on your way into the world. John just wanted a normal life—and anyway, he'd achieved what he'd set out to do. Thanks to him, we knew the entire structure of command within Scorpia. We had the names of most of their agents. We knew who was paying them and how much.

“The job now was to bring him home without arousing suspicion. Julia Rothman would kill him if she found out he was a spy. The plan was to get him back to England and then let him disappear. A new home. A new identity. The whole works…he'd start a new life in France with your mom. I should have mentioned that he spoke fluent French, by the way. If things had gone the way they'd planned, you'd be speaking French now. You'd be in a lycée in Marseilles or somewhere and you wouldn't know anything about all this.

“Well, it was right at this time that Scorpia provided the opportunity to get John out. There was a man called Caxero. He was a petty criminal. A drug dealer, a money launderer…that sort of thing. But he must have rubbed someone the wrong way because someone had paid Scorpia to hit him. Your dad was sent to do the job.

“Caxero lived in Mdina in the middle of Malta. It's an old citadel, completely surrounded by walls. In fact
madina
is an Arabic word meaning exactly that…‘walled city.' Caxero's hometown had another name too. It was so quiet and full of shadows, even in the winter, that the locals called it the silent city. And MI6 realized it was the perfect place for the ambush that would bring John home.

“Your dad wasn't sent there alone. He was accompanied by a young assassin, one of the best who ever came out of Malagosto. I understand you met him. His name was Yassen Gregorovich.”

Alex shivered again. He couldn't help himself. They were certainly digging deep into his past tonight.

He had met Yassen on his first mission and remembered the slim, fair-haired Russian with the ice-cold eyes. Yassen could have killed Alex then but had chosen not to. And then they had met a second time in the south of France. It had been Yassen who had led him into the nightmare world of Damian Cray. Alex thought back to the last moments they had been together. Once again Yassen had refused to kill him, and this time it had cost him his own life.

“What can you tell me about Yassen?” he asked.

“An interesting young man,” Ash replied—but there was a sudden coldness in his voice. “He was born in a place called Estrov. You won't have heard of it but it was certainly of interest to us. The Russians had a secret facility there…bio-chemical warfare, but one day the whole place blew up. Hundreds of people were killed—and Yassen's father was one of them. His mother died six months later.

“The Russians tried to hush the whole thing up. They didn't want to admit anything had happened, and even now, we don't know the whole truth. But one thing was certain. By the end of the year, Yassen was totally alone. He was just fourteen years old, Alex. The same age as you are now.”

“How did Scorpia find him?”

“He found them. He crossed the whole of Russia on his own, with no money and no food. He worked in Moscow for a while, living on the street and running errands for the local Mafiya. We still don't know how he managed to find his way to Scorpia, but the next thing we know, he turns up in Malagosto. Curiously, your dad was in charge of his training for a time. He told me the boy was a natural. It's funny, isn't it. In a way, you and Yassen had a lot in common.” Ash turned to Alex, and he seemed suddenly ghostlike in the artificial light of the plane. A strange look came into his eyes. “John had a soft spot for Yassen,” he said. “He really liked him. What do you make of that? The spy and the assassin. A bit of an odd couple, I'd say…”

And more than ten years later, Yassen had sacrificed himself for Alex, repaying the debt of an old friendship. But Alex didn't tell Ash that. For some reason, he wanted to keep it to himself.

“This was the deal,” Ash said. Suddenly he sounded tired, like he wanted to get this over with. “Caxero was a man of habit—and that's dangerous if you're in crime. He liked to have a black coffee and a cognac every night at a little café in the square opposite St. Paul's Cathedral in Mdina. That was where they were going to kill him. John let me know when the hit was arranged. It was going to be at eleven o'clock at night on November 11. All the elevens. We'd be there waiting. We'd let them take Caxero—he was a nasty piece of work and we might as well let Scorpia get him out of the way—and then we'd move in and grab John. But we'd let Yassen escape. He'd report back to Scorpia. He'd tell them that their man had been captured.

“It had to look good. I was in charge of the operation. This was the first time I was given command. I had nine men, and even though John was our target, we were all carrying real ammunition—not blanks. Yassen might have been able to tell the difference. He was that smart. We were all wearing concealed body armor. John wouldn't be aiming at us when we moved in, but Yassen would. And we already knew he was a crack shot.

“I'd put a couple of my people in place that morning. The cathedral had these two towers—one on either side—and I put one in each. I remember it also had two clocks. One of them was five minutes slow. I thought it was strange, the two faces showing different times. Anyway, the men in the towers had night vision glasses and radios. They could see the whole town from up there. They'd make sure that nothing went wrong.”

Ash paused.

“Everything went wrong, Alex. Everything.”

“Tell me.”

Ash sipped his whisky. All the ice had melted.

“We arrived at Mdina just after ten thirty. It was a beautiful night. This was November, and all the tourists had gone. There was a sliver of a crescent moon and a sky full of stars. As we came in through the south gate, it was like stepping back a thousand years in time. The roads in Mdina are narrow and the walls are high. And all the bricks are different shapes and sizes. You can almost imagine them being put in place one by one.

“The whole place felt deserted. The shutters were closed on the houses, and the only light seemed to come from the wrought-iron lamps hanging over the corners. As we made our way up the Triq Villgaignon—that was the name of the main street—a horse-drawn carriage crossed in front of us. They use them to ferry tourists, but this one was on its way home. I can still hear the echo of the horse's hooves and the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles.

“I got a whisper in my earpiece from the lookout in the tower. Caxero was in his usual place, drinking his coffee and smoking a cigar. No sign of anyone else. It was a quarter to eleven.

“We crept forward…past an old chapel on one side of the road, a crumbling palazzo on the other. All the shops and restaurants were closed—some for the whole winter. I had seven men with me. We were all dressed in black. We'd spent half the day studying the map of Mdina, and I signaled them to spread out. We were going to surround the square, ready to move in.

“Ten to eleven. I could see the time on the cathedral clock. And there was Caxero. He was a short, round man in a suit. He had a fancy mustache, and he was holding his coffee cup with his little finger pointing into the air. There were a couple of cars parked in the square next to some cannons and a waiter standing in the door of the café. Otherwise, nothing.

“But then, suddenly, they were there…John Rider and Yassen Gregorovich—or Hunter and Cossack. Those were the names they used. They were five minutes early…that was what I thought. That was my first mistake.”

“The clocks…”

“The cathedral clocks. Yes. One was right and one was wrong and in all the tension I'd been looking at the one that was five minutes slow. As for Yassen, it was like some trick in a movie. One minute he wasn't there, the next he was, with John next to him. It was a ninja technique—how to move and to stay invisible—and the irony was it was probably your dad who'd taught him.