Scorpia

instructor in the training school where he had been evaluated. You might like to know, Alex, that Yassen Gregorovich was one of the assassins he helped train. Your father actually saved Yassen’s life when they were on an assignment in the Amazon jungle.”
    Alex knew that Mrs Rothman was telling the truth. Yassen had said as much himself in the final seconds before he died.
    “I got to know your father very well,” Mrs Rothman went on. “We had dinner together many times, once even in this hotel.” She threw her head back, letting her black hair trail down her neck, and for a moment her eyes were far away. “I was very attracted to him. He was an extremely good-looking man. He was also intelligent and he made me laugh. It was just unfortunate that he was married to your mother.”
    “Did she know what he was doing? Did she know about you?”
    “I very much hope not.” Suddenly Mrs Rothman was businesslike. “I have to tell you now how yourfather died. 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 killthe 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 flickeredinto 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