Scorpia

him, unloading and adjusting their weapons. Alex knew all of them by now. There was Klaus, a German mercenary who had trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Walker, who had spent five years with the CIA in Washington before deciding he could earn more working for the other side. One of the two women there had become quite close to Alex,and he wondered if she had been specially chosen to look after him. Her name was Amanda and she had been a soldier with the Israeli army in the occupied Gaza Strip. Seeing him, she raised a hand in greeting. She seemed genuinely pleased to see him.
    But then they all did. That was the strange thing. He had been accepted into the day-to-day life of Malagosto without any problem. That in itself was remarkable. Alex remembered the time MI6 had sent him for training with the SAS in Wales. He had been an outsider from the day he arrived, unwanted and unwelcome, a child in an adult world. He was by far the youngest person here too, but that didn’t seem to matter. Quite the opposite. He was accepted and even admired by the other students. He was John Rider’s son. Everyone knew what that meant.
    “You’re just in time to show us what you can do before lunch,” Gordon Ross announced. His Scottish accent made almost everything sound like a challenge. “You got a high score the day before yesterday. In fact, you were second in the class. Let’s see if you can do even better today. But this time I may have built in a little surprise!”
    He handed Alex a gun, a Belgian-made FN semiautomatic pistol. Alex weighed it in his hand, trying to find the balance between himself and his weapon. Ross had explained that this was essential to the technique he called instinctive firing.
    “Remember – you have to shoot instantly. You can’t stop to take aim. If you do, you’re dead. In a real combat situation you don’t have time to mess around. You and the gun are one. And if you believe that you can hit the target, you will hit the target. That’s what instinctive firing is all about.”
    Now Alex stepped forward, the gun at his side, watching the mocked-up doors and windows in front of him. He knew there would be no warning. At any time, a target could appear. He would be expected to turn and fire.
    He waited. He was aware of the other students watching him. Out of the corner of his eye he could just make out the shape of Gordon Ross. Was the teacher smiling?
    A sudden movement.
    A target had appeared in an upper window and immediately Alex saw that the bull’s-eye targets with their impersonal rings had been replaced. A photograph had appeared instead. It was a life-sized colour picture of a young man. Alex didn’t know who he was – but that didn’t matter. He was a target.
    There was no time to hesitate.
    Alex raised the gun and fired.
    Later that day, Oliver d’Arc, the principal of Scorpia’s Training and Assessment Centre, sat in his office on Malagosto, talking to Julia Rothman. Herimage filled the screen of the laptop computer on his desk. There was a webcam perched on a shelf and his own image would be appearing simultaneously somewhere in the Widow’s Palace just across the water, in Venice. Mrs Rothman never came to the island. She knew it was under surveillance by both the American and British intelligence services, and one day they might be tempted to target the island with a non-nuclear ballistic missile. It was too dangerous.
    It was only the second occasion they had spoken since Alex had arrived. The time was exactly seven o’clock in the evening. Outside, the sun had begun to set.
    “How is he progressing?” Mrs Rothman asked. Her own webcam didn’t flatter her; her face on the screen looked cold and a little colourless.
    D’Arc considered. He ran a thumb and a single finger down the sides of his chin, stroking his beard. “The boy is certainly exceptional,” he murmured. “Of course, his uncle, Ian Rider, trained him all his life, almost from the moment he could walk. I have to say, he did a good job.”
    “And?”
    “He is very intelligent. Quick-witted. Everyone here genuinely likes him. Unfortunately, though, I have my doubts about his usefulness to us.”
    “I am very sorry to hear that, Professor d’Arc. Please explain.”
    “I will give you two examples, Mrs Rothman.Today Alex returned to the shooting range. We’ve been putting him through a course of instinctive firing. It’s something he’s never done before and, I have to say, it takes many