Ian was a good agent. But John was the better man by far.”
“He worked for you?”
“Yes.”
“But he killed people. Mrs Rothman showed me. He was in prison…”
“Everything Julia Rothman thought she knew about your father was a lie.” Mrs Jones sighed. “It’s true that he had been in the army, that he had a distinguished career with the Parachute Regiment and that he was decorated for his part in the Falklands War. But the rest of it—the fight with the taxi driver, the prison sentence and all that —we made up. It’s called deep cover, Alex. We wanted John Rider to be recruited by Scorpia. He was the bait and they took him.”
“Why?”
“Because Scorpia was expanding all over the world. We needed to know what it was doing, the names of the people it was employing, the size and structure of its organization. John Rider was a weapons expert; he was a brilliant fighter. And Scorpia thought he was washed up. He was welcomed with open arms.”
“And all the time he was reporting to you?”
“His information saved more lives than you can imagine.”
“But that’s not true!” Alex’s head swam. “Mrs Rothman told me that he killed five or six people. And Yassen Gregorovich worshipped him! He showed me the scar. He said my dad saved his life.”
“Your father was pretending to be a dangerous killer,” Mrs Jones said. “And so—yes, Alex—he had to kill. One of his victims was a drug dealer in the Amazon jungle. That was when he saved Yassen’s life. Another was an American double agent; a third was a corrupt policeman. I’m not saying that these people deserved to die. But certainly the world was able to get along very well without them and I’m afraid your father had no choice.”
“What about the others you told me about?” Alex had to know.
“There were two more,” Blunt cut in. “One was a priest, working on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The other was a woman in Sydney. They were more difficult. We couldn’t let them die. And so we faked their deaths … in much the same way that we faked your father’s.”
“Albert Bridge…”
“It was faked.” Mrs Jones took up the narrative again. “Your father had told us as much as we needed to know about Scorpia and we had to get him out. There were two reasons for this. The first was that your mother had just given birth to a baby boy. That was you, Alex. Your father wanted to come home; he wanted to be with you and your mother. But also it was becoming too dangerous. You see, Mrs Rothman had fallen in love with him.” It was almost too much to take on board at once. But Alex remembered Julia Rothman talking to him in the hotel in Positano.
I was very attracted to him. He was an extremely good-looking man.
Alex tried to grasp at the truth through the swirling quicksand of lies and counter-lies. “She told me he was captured. In Malta…”
“That was faked too,” Mrs Jones revealed. “John Rider couldn’t just walk out of Scorpia; they’d never have let him. So we had to arrange things for him. And that’s what we did. He had been sent to Malta, supposedly to kill his sixth victim. He tipped us off and we were waiting for him. We staged a ferocious gun battle. You know what we’re capable of, Alex. We did more or less the same thing for you with that multiple pile-up on the Westway. Yassen was there, in Malta, but we let him escape. We needed him to tell Julia Rothman what had happened. Then we ‘captured’ John Rider. As far as Scorpia were concerned, he would be interrogated and then either thrown back into prison or executed. They would never see him again.”
“So why…?” Alex still couldn’t make complete sense of it. “Why Albert Bridge?”
“Albert Bridge was a bloody mess,” Alan Blunt said. It was the first time Alex had ever heard him swear.
“You’ve met Sir Graham Adair. He’s a very powerful man. He also happens to be an old friend of mine. And when Scorpia took his son, I didn’t think there would be anything I could do.”
“It was your father’s idea,” Mrs Jones went on. “He also knew Sir Graham. He wanted to help. You have to understand, Alex, that’s the sort of man he was. One day I want to tell you all about him—not just this. He believed passionately in what he was doing. Serving his country. I know that sounds naive and old-fashioned.
But he was a soldier through and through. And he believed in good and evil. I don’t know how else to put it. He wanted to make the world a better place.”
She took a deep breath.
“Your father suggested that we send him back to Scorpia as an exchange. He knew how Mrs Rothman felt about him; he knew she would agree to anything to get him back. But at the same time, he planned to double-cross her. There was a gunman in place, but the gun was loaded with blanks. John had a squib in the back of his jacket —a little firework—and a phial of blood. When the shot was fired, he activated it himself. It blew a little hole in the back of his jacket. He went sprawling and pretended to be dead. It looked as if MI6 had killed him in cold blood. But we never hurt him, Alex. That’s why I wanted you to meet James Adair. The idea was that now he would be safe again and he could simply disappear.”
Alex buried his head in his hands. There were a hundred questions he wanted to ask. His mother, his father, Julia Rothman, the bridge… He was shaking and he had to force himself back under control. At last he was ready.
“I have just two questions,” he said.
“Go on, Alex. We’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“What was my mother’s part in all this? Did she know what he was?”
“Of course she knew he was a spy. He would never have lied to her. They were very close, Alex. I never met her, I’m afraid. We don’t tend to socialize much in this business. She was a nurse before she married him. Did you know that?”
Ian Rider had told Alex that his mother had been a nurse, but he didn’t want to talk about that now. He was simply building himself up, finding the strength to ask the worst question of all.
