“He knew my mother?”
“He had her investigated.” Alex looked shocked, and Ash smiled. “It was standard procedure. He had to be sure she wasn’t a security risk.”
So somewhere inside MI6 Special Operations there was a file on his mother. Alex made a mental note of it.
Maybe one day it would be something he would dig up.
“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
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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
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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.”
