“It wasn’t your father’s fault. He was provoked.”
“What happened next?”
“He was sent to jail. There was quite an outcry about it. He had a lot of public sympathy. But the fact was, he had killed a man and he was found guilty of manslaughter. The judge had no choice.”
“And then?”
“They let him out after just a year. It was done very quietly. Your mother had stood by him; she never lost faith in him and he went back to live with her. Unfortunately his army career was over; he had received a dishonourable discharge. He was very much on his own.”
“Go on.” Alex’s voice was cold.
“He found it difficult to get a job. It wasn’t his fault; that’s just the way it is. But by this time, he had come to the attention of our personnel department.” Mrs Rothman paused. “Scorpia are always on the lookout for fresh talent,” she explained. “It seemed quite obvious to us that your father had been unfairly treated. We thought he would be perfect for us.”
“You approached him?”
“Yes. Your parents had very little money by this time. They were desperate. One of our people met your father, and two weeks later he came to us for evaluation.” She smiled. “We test every new recruit, Alex. If you decide to join us, and I still hope you will, we’ll take you to the same place we took your father.”
“Where is that?”
“I mentioned the name to you. Malagosto. It’s near Venice.” Mrs Rothman wouldn’t be any more precise than that. “We could see at once that your father was extremely tough and exceptionally talented,” she went on. “He passed every test we threw at him with flying colours. We knew, by the way, that he had a brother – Ian Rider – working for MI6. I was always a little surprised that Ian didn’t try to help him when he got into trouble, but I suppose there was nothing he could do. Anyway, it made no difference, the two of them being brothers. Your father was indeed perfect for us. And after what had happened to him, I have to say that we were certainly perfect for him.”
Alex was getting tired. It was almost eleven. But he knew there was no way he was leaving this room until the whole story had been told.
“So he joined Scorpia,” he said.
“Yes. Your father worked for us as an assassin. He spent four months in the field.”
“How many men did he kill?”
“Five or six. He was more interested in working as an instructor in the training school where he had been evaluated. You might like to know, Alex, that Yassen Gregorovich was one of the assassins he helped train. Your father actually saved Yassen’s life when they were on an assignment in the Amazon jungle.”
Alex knew that Mrs Rothman was telling the truth. Yassen had said as much himself in the final seconds before he died.
“I got to know your father very well,” Mrs Rothman went on. “We had dinner together many times, once even in this hotel.” She threw her head back, letting her black hair trail down her neck, and for a moment her eyes were far away. “I was very attracted to him. He was an extremely good-looking man. He was also intelligent and he made me laugh. It was just unfortunate that he was married to your mother.”
“Did she know what he was doing? Did she know about you?”
“I very much hope not.” Suddenly Mrs Rothman was businesslike. “I have to tell you now how your father died. I wish you hadn’t asked me to do this. Are you sure you want me to carry on?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” She took a deep breath. “MI6 wanted him. He was one of our best operatives and he was training others to become as effective as him. And so they set about hunting him down. I won’t go into the details, but they set a trap for him on the island of Malta. As it happened, Yassen Gregorovich was there too. He escaped – but your father was captured. We assumed that would be the last of him and that we would never see him again. You may think that the death penalty has been abolished in Britain, but – as they say – accidents happen. But then there was a development…
“Scorpia had kidnapped the eighteen-year-old son of a senior British civil servant, a man with considerable influence in the government – or so we thought. Again, it’s a complicated story and it’s late, so I won’t give you all the details. But the general idea was that if the father didn’t do what we wanted, we would kill the son.”
“That’s what you do, is it?” Alex asked.
“Corruption and assassination, Alex. It’s part of what we do. Anyway, as we quickly discovered, the civil servant was unable to do what we wanted. Unfortunately this meant we would have to kill the son. You can’t make a threat and then have second thoughts about it, because if you do, nobody will ever fear you again. And so we were about to kill the boy in as dramatic a way as possible. But then, out of the blue, MI6 got in touch with us and offered us a deal.
“It was a straight swap. They’d give us back John Rider in return for the son. The executive board of Scorpia met and, although it was only carried by a narrow vote, we decided to go ahead with the deal. Normally we would never have allowed an operation to become entangled in this way, but your father had been extremely valuable to us and, as I said, I was personally very close to him. So it was agreed. We would make the exchange at six o’clock in the morning – this was March. And it would take place on Albert Bridge.”
“March? What year was this?”
“It was fourteen years ago, Alex: 13th March. You were two months old.”
Mrs Rothman leant over the table and rested a hand on the television.
“Scorpia have always made a practice of recording everything that we do,” she explained. “There’s a good reason for this. We’re a criminal organization. It automatically follows that nobody trusts us – not even our clients. They assume we lie, cheat … whatever. We film what we do to prove that we are, in our own way, honest. We filmed the handover on Albert Bridge. If the civil servant’s son had been hurt in some way, we would have been able to prove that it wasn’t because of us.”
She pressed a button and the screen flickered into life, showing images that had been taken in another time, when Alex was just eight weeks old. The first shot showed Albert Bridge, stretching over a chilly River Thames with Battersea Park on one side and the lower reaches of Chelsea on the other. It was drizzling. Tiny specks of water hovered in the air.
“We had three cameras,” she said. “We had to conceal them carefully or MI6 would have removed them. But as you’ll see, they tell the whole tale.”
The first image. Three men in suits and overcoats. With them, a young man with his hands bound in front of him. This must be the son. He looked younger than eighteen. He was shivering.
“You are looking at the southern end of the bridge,” Mrs Rothman explained. “This was what had been agreed. Our agents would bring the son up from the park. MI6 and your father would be on the other bank. The two of them would walk across the bridge and the exchange would be made. As simple as that.”
“There’s no traffic,” Alex said.
“At six o’clock in the morning? There would have been little anyway, but I suspect MI6 had probably closed the roads.”
The image changed. Alex felt something twist in his stomach. The camera was concealed somewhere on the edge of the bridge, high up. It was showing him his father, the first moving image of John Rider he had ever seen. He was wearing a thick padded jacket. He was looking around him, taking everything in. Alex wished the camera would zoom in closer. He wanted to see more of his father’s face.
“This is the classic method of exchange,” Mrs Rothman told him. “A bridge is a neutral area. The two participants – in this case the boy and your father – are on their own. Nothing should go wrong.”
She reached out a finger and pressed the pause button.
“Alex,” she warned. “Your father died on Albert Bridge. I know you never knew him; you were just a baby when this happened. But I’m still not sure it’s something you should see.”
“Show me,” Alex ordered. His
voice sounded far away.
Mrs Rothman nodded. She pressed play.
The image unfroze. The pictures were now being taken by a hidden camera, hand-held, out of focus. Alex caught sight of the span of the bridge, hundreds of light bulbs curving through the air. There was the river again and, captured briefly in the distance, the great chimneys of Battersea Power Station. There was a cut. Now the picture was steady, a wide angle perhaps taken from a boat.
The three men with the civil servant’s son were at one end. His father was at the other. Alex could make out three figures behind him; presumably they worked for MI6. The image quality was poor. Dawn was only just breaking and there was little light. The water had no colour. A signal must have been given because the young man began to walk forward. At the same time, John Rider left the other group, also with his hands bound in front of him.
Alex wanted to reach out and touch the screen. He was watching his father walk towards the three Scorpia men. But the figure in the picture was only a centimetre high. Alex knew it was his father. The face matched the photographs he had seen. But he was too far away. He couldn’t see if John Rider was smiling or angry or nervous. Could he have had any idea of what was about to happen?
John Rider and the civil servant’s son met in the middle of the bridge. They paused and seemed to speak to each other – but the only sound on the film was the soft patter of the rain and the occasional rush of an unseen speeding car. Then they began to walk again. The son was on the north side of the bridge, the side controlled by MI6. John Rider was moving south, a little faster now, heading for the waiting men.
“This is when it happened,” Mrs Rothman said softly.
Alex’s father was almost running. He must have sensed that something was wrong. He moved awkwardly, his hands still clasped in front of him. On the north side of the bridge, one of the MI6 people took out a radio transmitter and spoke briefly. A second later, there was a single shot. John Rider seemed to stumble and Alex realized that he had been hit in the back. He took two more steps, twisted and collapsed.
“Do you want me to turn it off, Alex?”
“No.”
“There’s a closer shot…”
The camera angle was lower. Alex could see his father lying on his side. The three Scorpia men had produced guns. They were running, aiming at the civil servant’s son. Alex wondered why. The teenager hadn’t had anything to do with what had just taken place. But then he understood. MI6 had shot John Rider. They hadn’t kept their side of the bargain. So the son had to die too.
But he had reacted incredibly quickly. He was already running, his head down. He seemed to know exactly what was happening. One of the Scorpia men fired and missed. Then there was a sudden explosion, a machine gun opening fire. Alex saw bullets ricocheting off the iron girders of the bridge. Light bulbs smashed. The tarmac surface seemed to leap up. The men hesitated and fell back. Meanwhile the teenager had reached the far end of the bridge. A car surged forward out of nowhere. Alex saw the door open and the son was pulled inside.
Mrs Rothman froze the image.
“It seems that MI6 wanted the son back but they weren’t prepared to pay with your father’s freedom,” she said. “They double-crossed us and shot him in front of our eyes. You saw for yourself.”
Alex said nothing. The room seemed to have got darker, shadows chasing in from the corners. He felt cold from head to toe.
“There is one last part of the film,” Mrs Rothman went on. “I hate seeing you like this, Alex. I hate having to show you. But you’ve seen this much; you might as well see the rest.”
The last section of the film replayed the final moments of John Rider’s life. Once again he was on his feet, beginning to run while the civil servant’s son hurried the other way.
“Look at the MI6 agent who gave the order to fire,” Mrs Rothman said.
Alex gazed at the tiny figures on the bridge.
Mrs Rothman pointed. “We had the image computer enhanced.”
Sure enough, the camera leapt in closer, and now Alex could see that the MI6 agent with the transmitter was in fact a woman, wearing a black raincoat.
“We can get in closer.”
The camera jumped forward again.
“And closer.”
The same action, repeated a third and fourth time. The woman taking out her radio transmitter. But now her face filled the screen. Alex could see her fingers holding the device in front of her mouth. There was no sound, but he saw her lips move, giving the order, and he understood perfectly what she said.
Shoot him.
“There was a sniper in an office block on the north bank of the Thames,” Mrs Rothman told him. “It was really just a matter of timing. The woman you’re looking at masterminded the operation. It was one of her early successes in the field, one of the reasons why she was promoted. You know who she is.”
Alex had known at once. She was fourteen years younger on the screen but she hadn’t changed all that much. And there could be no mistaking the black hair – cut short – the pale, businesslike face, the black eyes that could have belonged to a crow.
Mrs Jones, the deputy head of Special Operations at MI6.
Mrs Jones, who had been there when Alex was first recruited and who had pretended that she was his friend. When he had returned to London, hurt and exhausted after his ordeal with Damian Cray, she had come looking for him and tried to help him. She had said she was worried about him. And all the time she had been lying. She had sat next to him and smiled at him, knowing that she had taken his father from him just weeks after he was born.
Mrs Rothman turned off the screen.
There was a long silence.
“They told me he died in a plane crash,” Alex said in a voice that wasn’t his own.
“Of course. They didn’t want you to know.”
“So what happened to my mother?” He felt a sudden rush of hope. If they had been lying about his father, then maybe she wasn’t dead. Could it be at all possible? Was his mother somewhere in England, still alive?
“I’m so sorry, Alex. There was a plane crash. It happened a few months later. It was a private plane, and she was on her own, travelling to France.” Mrs Rothman rested a hand on his arm. “Nothing can make up for what’s been done to you, for all the lies you’ve been told. If you want to go back to England, back to school, I’ll understand. I’m sure you just want to forget the whole lot of us. But if it’s any consolation, I adored your father. I still miss him. This was the last thing he sent me, just before he was taken prisoner in Malta.”
She had opened a second file and taken out a postcard. It showed a strip of coastline, a setting sun. There were just a few lines, handwritten.
My dearest Julia,
A dreary time without you. Can’t wait to be at the Widow’s Palace with you again.
John R.
Alex recognized the handwriting although he had never seen it before, and in that instant any last, lingering doubt was swept away.
The writing was his father’s.
But it was identical to his own.
“It’s very late,” Mrs Rothman said. “You really ought to get to bed. We can talk again tomorrow.”
Alex looked at the screen as if expecting to see Mrs Jones mocking him across fourteen years, destroying his life before it had even really begun. For a long while he didn’t speak. Then he stood up.
“I want to join Scorpia,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Go to Venice. Find Scorpia. Find your destiny, Yassen had told him. And that was what had happened. He had made up his mind. There could be no going back.
HOW TO KILL
The island was only a few miles from Venice but it had been forgotten for a hundred years. Its name was Malagosto and it was shaped roughly like a crescent moon, just half a mile long. There were six buildings on the island, surrounded by wild grasses and poplars, and they all looked condemned. The largest of them was a monastery, bu
ilt around a courtyard, with a red-brick bell tower, slanting very slightly, next to it. There was a crumbling hospital and then a row of what looked like apartment blocks with shattered windows and gaping holes in the roofs. A few boats went past Malagosto but never docked there. It was forbidden. And the place had a bad reputation.
There had once been a small, thriving community on the island. But that had been long ago, in the Middle Ages. It had been ransacked in 1380, during the war with Genoa, and after that it had been used for plague victims. Sneeze in Venice, it was said, and you would end up in Malagosto. When the plague died out it became a quarantine centre, and then, in the eighteenth century, a sanctuary for the insane. Finally it had been abandoned and left to rot. But there were fishermen who claimed that, on a cold winter’s night, you could still hear the screams and demented laughter of the lunatics who had been the island’s last residents.
Malagosto was the perfect base for Scorpia’s Training and Assessment Centre. They had bought the island on a lease from the Italian government in the mid-eighties and they had been there ever since. If anyone asked what was happening there, they were told that it was now a business centre where lawyers, bankers and office managers could come for motivation and bonding sessions. This was, of course, a lie. Scorpia sent new recruits to the school that they ran on Malagosto. It was here that they learnt how to kill.
Alex Rider sat at the front of the motor launch, watching as the island drew nearer. It was the same motor launch that had led him to the Widow’s Palace and the silver scorpion on the bow glistened in the sun. Nile was sitting opposite him, totally relaxed, dressed in white trousers and a blazer.
“I spent three months in training here,” he shouted over the noise of the engine. “But that was a long time after your dad.”
Alex nodded but said nothing. He could see the bell tower looming up, rising crookedly over the tops of the trees. The wind chased through his hair and the spray danced in his eyes.
Julia Rothman had left Positano before them that morning, returning to Venice, where she was involved in something that required her presence. They had met briefly after breakfast and this time she had been more serious and businesslike. Alex would spend the next few days on Malagosto, she said – not for full training, but for an initial assessment that would include a medical examination, psychological testing and a general overview of his fitness and aptitude. It would also give Alex time to reflect on his decision.