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
