Scorpia (20 page)

It was a Kahr P9, double-action semi-automatic, manufactured in America. It was six inches long and, with its stainless steel and polymer construction, it weighed just eighteen ounces, making it one of the smallest, lightest pistols in the world. The in-line magazine could have held seven bullets; to keep the weight down, Scorpia had provided just one. It was all Alex would need.

Carrying the canvas bag with the pizza, he went past the sleeping agent and over to Mrs Jones’s door. It had three locks, as he had been told. He lifted the pizza box lid and removed three of the black olives from the top, squeezing each one against a lock. The canvas bag had a false bottom. He opened it and trailed out three wires which he connected to the olives. A plastic box and a button were built into the bottom of the bag. Crouching down, Alex pressed it. The olives – which weren’t olives at all – exploded silently, each one a brilliant flare, burning into the locks. The sharp smell of molten metal rose in the air. The door swung open.

Holding the gun tightly, Alex walked into a large room with grey curtains draped along the far wall,
a dining table with four chairs, and a suite of leather sofas. It was lit by a soft yellow glow radiating from a single lamp. The room was modern and sparsely furnished; there was little in it that told him any more about Mrs Jones than he already knew. Even the pictures on the walls were abstracts, blobs of colour that gave nothing away. But there were clues. He saw a photograph on a shelf, a younger Mrs Jones – actually smiling – with two children, a boy and a girl aged about six and four. A nephew and a niece? They looked a lot like her.

Mrs Jones read books; she had an expensive television and a DVD player; and there was a chessboard. She was halfway through a game. But who with? Alex wondered. Nile had told him she lived alone. He heard a soft purring and noticed a Siamese cat stretched out on one of the sofas. That was a surprise. He hadn’t expected the deputy head of MI6 Special Operations to need companionship of any sort.

The purring grew louder. It was as if the cat were trying to warn its owner that he was there; and, sure enough, a door opened on the other side of the room.

“What is it, Q?”

Mrs Jones walked in. Approaching the cat, she suddenly saw Alex and stopped.

“Alex!”

“Mrs Jones.”

She was wearing a grey silk dressing gown. Alex suddenly saw a snapshot of her life and the emptiness at the heart of it. She came home from work, had a shower, ate dinner on her own. Then there was the chess game … maybe she was playing over the Internet.
News at Ten
on the television. And the cat.

She paused in the middle of the room. She didn’t seem alarmed. There was nothing she could do – certainly no panic button or alarm she could reach. Her hair was still wet from the shower; Alex noticed her bare feet. He raised his hand and she saw the gun.

“Did Scorpia send you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“To kill me.”

“Yes.”

She nodded as if she understood why this should be so. “They told you about your father,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Alex.”

“Sorry you killed him?”

“Sorry I didn’t tell you myself.”

She didn’t try to move; she simply stood there, facing him. Alex knew he didn’t have much time. Any moment now the lift might return to the ground floor. As soon as the agents saw he wasn’t in it, they would raise the alarm. They might already be on their way up.

“What happened to Winters?” she asked. Alex
didn’t know whom she meant. “He was outside the door,” she explained.

Winters was the third agent.

“I knocked him out.”

“So you got past the two downstairs. You came up here. And you broke in.” Mrs Jones shrugged. “Scorpia have trained you well.”

“It wasn’t Scorpia who trained me, Mrs Jones: it was you.”

“But now you’ve joined Scorpia.”

Alex nodded.

“I can’t quite picture you as an assassin, Alex. I realize you don’t like me – or Alan Blunt. I can understand that. But I know you. I don’t think you have any idea what you’ve got yourself into. I bet Scorpia were all smiles; I’m sure they were delighted to see you. But they’ve been lying to you—”

“Stop it!” Alex’s finger tightened on the trigger. He knew that she was trying to make it difficult for him. He had been warned that this was what she would do. By talking to him, by using his first name, she was reminding him that she wasn’t just a paper cut-out, a target. She was sowing doubts in his mind. And, of course, she was playing for time.

Nile had told him to do it quickly, the instant they met. Alex realized that this was already going wrong; she had already gained the upper hand – even though he was the one with the gun. He
reminded himself of what Mrs Rothman had shown him in Positano. Albert Bridge. The death of his father. He was facing the woman who had given the order to shoot.

“Why did you do it?” he demanded. His voice had become a whisper. He was trying to channel the hatred through him, to give him the strength to do what he had been sent here for.

“Why did I do what, Alex?”

“You killed my father.”

Mrs Jones looked at him for a long moment and it was impossible to tell what was going on in those black eyes. But he could see that she was making some sort of calculation. Of course, her entire life was a series of calculations – and once she’d worked out the figures, someone would usually die. The only difference here was that the death would be her own.

She seemed to come to a decision.

“Do you want me to apologize to you, Alex?” she asked, suddenly hard. “We’re talking about John Rider, a man you never knew. You never spoke to him; you have no memory of him. You know nothing about him.”

“He was still my dad!”

“He was a killer. He worked for Scorpia. Do you know how many people he murdered?”

Five or six
. That was what Mrs Rothman had told him.

“There was a businessman working in Peru; he
was married with a son your age. There was a priest in Rio de Janeiro; he was trying to help the street children, but unfortunately he’d made too many enemies so had to be taken out. There was a British policeman. An American agent. Then there was a woman; she was about to blow the whistle on a big corporation in Sydney. She was only twenty-six, Alex, and he shot her as she was getting out of her car—”

“That’s enough!” Now Alex was holding the gun with both hands. “I don’t want to hear any of this.”

“Yes, you do, Alex. You asked me. You wanted to know why he had to be stopped. And that’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? Follow in your father’s footsteps. I’m sure they’ll send you all over the world, making you kill people you know nothing about. And I’m sure you’ll be very good at it. Your father was one of the best.”

“You cheated him. He was your prisoner and you said you were letting him go. You were going to swap him for someone else. But you shot him in the back. I saw…”

“I always wondered if they filmed it,” Mrs Jones murmured. She gestured and Alex stiffened, wondering if she was trying to misdirect him. But they were still alone. The cat had gone to sleep. Nobody was approaching the room. “I’ll give you some advice,” she said. “You’ll need it if you’re going to work with Scorpia. Once you join the other side,
there are no rules. They don’t believe in fair play. Nor do we.

“They had kidnapped an eighteen-year-old.” Alex remembered the figure on the bridge. “He was the son of a British civil servant. They were going to kill him; but they were going to torture him first. We had to get him back – so, yes, I arranged the exchange. But there was no way I was ever going to release your father. He was too dangerous. Too many more people would have died. And so I arranged a double-cross. Two men on a bridge. A sniper. It worked perfectly and I’m glad. You can shoot me if it really makes you feel any better, Alex. But I’m telling you: you didn’t know your father. And if I had to do it all again, I’d do it exactly the same.”

“If you’re saying my father was so evil, what do you think that makes me?” Alex was trying to will himself to shoot. He had thought anger would give him strength, but he was more tired than angry. So now he searched for another way to persuade himself to pull the trigger. He was his father’s son. It was in his blood.

Mrs Jones took a step towards him.

“Stay where you are!” The gun was less than a metre from her, aiming straight at her head.

“I don’t think you’re a killer, Alex. You never knew your father. Why do you have to be like him? Do you think every child is ‘made’ the moment they’re born? I think you have a choice …”

“I never chose to work for you.”

“Didn’t you? After Stormbreaker you could have walked away. We never needed to meet again. But if you remember, you
chose
to get tangled up with drug dealers and we had to bail you out. And then there was Wimbledon. We didn’t make you go undercover. You agreed to go – and if you hadn’t locked a Chinese gangster in a deep freeze, we wouldn’t have had to send you to America.”

“You’re twisting everything!”

“And finally Damian Cray. You went after him on your own and we’re very grateful to you, Alex. But you ask me – what do I think you are? I think you’re too smart to pull that trigger. You’re not going to shoot me. Now or ever.”

“You’re wrong,” Alex said. She was lying to him, he knew that. She had always lied to him. He could do this. He had to do it.

He held the gun steady.

He let the hatred take him.

And fired.

The air in front of him seemed to explode into fragments.

Mrs Jones had tricked him. She had been tricking him all along, and he hadn’t seen it. The room was divided into two parts. A huge pane of transparent, bulletproof glass ran from one corner to the other, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. She had been on one side; he had been on the other. In the half-light it had been invisible, but now the
glass frosted, a thousand cracks spiralling outwards from the dent made by the bullet. Mrs Jones had almost disappeared from sight, her face broken up as if she had become a smashed picture of herself. At the same time, an alarm rang, the door flew open and Alex was grabbed and thrown sideways onto the sofa. The gun went flying. Somebody shouted something in his ear but he couldn’t understand the words. The cat snarled and leapt past him. His arms were wrenched behind him. A knee pressed into his back. A bag was pulled over his head and he felt cold steel against his wrists. There was a click. He could no longer move his hands.

Now he could make out several voices in the room.

“Are you all right, Mrs Jones?”

“We’re sorry, ma’am…”

“We’ve got the car waiting outside…”

“Don’t hurt him!”

Alex was jerked off the sofa with his hands cuffed behind him. He felt wretched and sick. He had failed Scorpia. He had failed his father. He had failed himself.

He didn’t cry out. He didn’t resist. Limp and unmoving, he allowed himself to be dragged out of the room, back down the corridor and into the night.

T
he room was a bare white box, designed to intimidate. Alex had measured out the space: ten paces one way, four across. There was a narrow bunk with no sheets or blankets, and, behind a partition, a toilet. But that was all. The door had no handle and fitted so flush to the wall that it was almost invisible. There was no window. Light came from behind a square panel in the ceiling and was controlled from outside.

Alex had no idea how long he had been here. His watch had been removed.

After he had been taken from Mrs Jones’s flat, he had been bundled into a car. The black cloth bag was still over his head. He had no idea where he was going. They drove at speed for what seemed like half an hour, then slowed down. Alex felt his stomach sink and knew they were heading down some sort of ramp. Had they taken him to the
basement of the Liverpool Street HQ? He had been here once before but this time he was to be given no chance to take his bearings. The car stopped. The door opened and he was grabbed and dragged out. Nobody spoke to him. He was marched along – pinned between two men – and down a flight of stairs. Then his hands were unlocked, and the bag was pulled off. He just had time to glimpse Lloyd and Ramirez – the two agents from the reception desk – as they walked out. Then the door closed and he was on his own.

He lay on his back, remembering the final moments in the flat. He was amazed that he hadn’t seen the glass barrier until it was too late. Had Mrs Jones’s voice been amplified in some way? It didn’t matter. He had tried to kill her. He had finally found the strength to pull the trigger, proving that Scorpia had been right about him all along.

He was a killer. Do you know how many people he murdered?

Alex remembered what Mrs Jones had said about his father. She was the one who had given the order for John Rider’s death; she had arranged it. She deserved to die.

Or so he tried to persuade himself. But the worst thing was, he half understood what she meant. Suppose his father hadn’t been killed on Albert Bridge. Suppose Alex had grown up with him and somehow found out what his father did. How would he have felt about it? Would he have
been able to forgive him?

Sitting on his own in this cruel white room, Alex thought back to the moment when he had fired the gun. He felt again the shudder in his hand. Saw the invisible glass screen crack but not break. Good old Smithers! It was almost certainly the MI6 gadget master who had fixed it up. And, despite everything, Alex was glad. He was glad he hadn’t killed Mrs Jones.

He wondered what would happen to him now. Would MI6 prosecute? More likely, they would interrogate him. They would want to know about Malagosto, about Mrs Rothman and Nile. But maybe after that, at last, they would leave him alone. After what had happened, they would never trust him again.

He fell asleep – not just exhausted but drained. It was a black and empty sleep, without dreams, without any feeling of comfort or warmth.

The sound of the door opening woke him up. He opened his eyes and blinked. It was disconcerting having no idea of the time. He could have slept for a few hours or all night. He wasn’t feeling rested; there was a crick in his neck. But without a window it was impossible to say.