before. He wrote them on the back of his hand. The numbers would soon fade, but by then he would have memorized them.
“What now?” he asked.
“We rest. Then we get a taxi to the airport. It’s going to be a long night.”
Alex realized the moment had come. They might not be able to speak to each other in Jakarta or on the way to Australia—certainly not in English—and very soon after that, the whole business would be over. Once they had arrived on the northern coast, Alex wouldn’t be needed anymore.
“All right, Ash,” he said. “You promised you’d tell me about my mom and dad. You were the best man at their wedding, and they made you my godfather. And you were there when they died. I want to know all about them because for me, it’s like they didn’t exist. I want to know where I came from . . . that’s all . . . and what they thought about me.” He paused. “And I want to know what happened on Malta. You said that Yassen Gregorovich was there. Was he the one who gave you that scar on your stomach? How did that happen? Was my dad to blame?”
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There was a long silence. Then Ash nodded slowly.
He stubbed out his cigarette.
“All right,” he said. “On the plane.” They were thirty thousand feet above the Gulf of Thailand, heading south on the short flight to Jakarta. The plane was only half full. Alex and Ash had a whole row to themselves, right at the back. Ash had smartened himself up a little with a white shirt and a cheap tie. He was, after all, meant to be a sales manager. But Alex hadn’t changed.
He was grubby and a little ragged, still wearing the clothes he had been given in Bangkok. Perhaps that was why the two of them had been seated on their own. In front of them, the other passengers were dozing in the strange half-light of the cabin. Outside, the sun had set. The plane hung in the darkness.
Ash hadn’t spoken while they took off and climbed into the sky. He had accepted two miniature whisky bottles from the stewardess, but he was still sitting in silence, his dark eyes blacker than ever, fixed on the ice in his glass as it slowly melted. He looked even more bummed out than usual. Alex had noticed him swallow two pills with his drink. It had taken him a while to realize that Ash was in constant pain. He was beginning to wonder if his godfather really was going to tell him what he wanted to know.
And then, without warning, Ash began to speak.
“I met your dad on my first assignment for Special
Operations. He’d only joined a year before me, but he was completely different. Everyone knew John Rider. Top of his class. Golden boy. On the fast track to the top.” There was no rancor in Ash’s voice. There was no emotion at all. “He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four. Recruited out of the parachute force. Before that he’d been at Oxford University. A first class degree in politics and economics. And—oh yes—did I mention that he was also a brilliant athlete? Rowed for Oxford—and won. A good tennis player too. And now he was in Prague, in charge of his first operation, and I was a nobody sent along to learn the ropes.
“Well, as it turned out, the whole thing was a sham-bles. It wasn’t John’s fault. Sometimes it just happens that way. But afterward, at the debriefing, I met him properly for the first time and you know what I liked most about him? It was how calm he was. Three agents had died . . .
not ours, thank God. The Czech police were going crazy.
And the Museum of East European Folk Art and Antiquities had burned down. Actually, it wasn’t really a museum, but that’s another story. And as I say, your dad was more or less the same age as me and he wasn’t even worried. He didn’t shout at anyone. He never lost his temper. He just got on with it.
“After that, we became friends. I’m not sure how it happened. We lived near each other—he had an apartment in an old warehouse in Blackfriars, set back from the river. We started playing squash together. In the end we
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must have played about a hundred games, and you know what? I won at least a couple of them. Sometimes we met for a drink. He liked Black Velvet. Champagne and Guin-ness. He was away a lot, of course, and he wasn’t allowed to tell me what he’d been doing. Even though we were in the same service, I didn’t have clearance. But you heard things . . . and I looked in on him a couple of times when he was in the hospital. That was how I met your mother.”
“She was a nurse.”
“That’s right. Helen Beckett. That was her maiden name. She was very attractive. Same color hair as you.
And maybe the same eyes. I actually asked her out, if you want to know. She turned me down very sweetly. It turned out that she actually knew your dad from Oxford.
They’d met a couple of times when she was studying medicine.”
“Did she know what my dad did?”
“I don’t know what he told her, but she probably had a pretty good idea. When you’re treating someone with two broken ribs and a bullet wound, you don’t imagine they fell over playing golf. But it didn’t bother her. She looked after him. They started seeing each other. The next thing I knew, she had moved in with him and we weren’t playing squash quite so often.”
“Did you ever get married, Ash?” Alex asked.
Ash shook his head. “Never met the right girl . . . although I had fun with quite a few of the wrong ones. I’m actually quite glad, Alex. I’ll tell you why.
“You can’t afford to get scared in our business. Fear’s the one thing that will kill you faster than anything, and although it’s true to say that all agents are fearless, generally what that means is that they’re not afraid for themselves. All that changes when you get married, and it’s even worse when you have kids. Alan Blunt didn’t want your dad to marry. He knew that in the end, he’d be losing his best man.”
