Scorpia Rising

Rover came to a halt and the driver got out. Gradually, more guards appeared, hurrying across the grass to peer over the edge, beside the broken fence. Below them and to one side, the city of Gibraltar lay spread out, the high-rises facing the sea. The Mediterranean itself was a brilliant blue, the sun throwing a million shimmering reflections across the surface.
    “Did you see that?” someone asked.
    “Poor bastard!”
    “You think he did it on purpose? He didn’t even try to get back on the road.”
    “He could still be alive.”
    “Forget it. Nobody could have survived that. He’ll have drowned . . . if he didn’t burn to death first.”
    “Poor sod. And he was only fifteen.”
    There would have to be an inquiry, of course. The most critical question would be—how had the gun been smuggled into the prison? One of the guards must have been bribed . . . but which one? And which organization had been behind the attempted escape? How had they even known about the existence of the prison in the first place? An ambulance was already on its way to take Dr. Flint to St. Bernard’s Hospital in the middle of Gibraltar city. As the last person to see Julius Grief alive, she might be able to fill in a few details. The warden would have to fly to London, to report at the highest level. There would be severe reprimands all around and an inevitable tightening of security.
    There were now six prisoners instead of seven. Julius Grief was dead and although frogmen would be sent to the seabed, there was very little chance that much or any of his remains would be discovered in the wreckage of the car. Well, he wouldn’t be missed. He was only a kid, but he was a mad kid. None of the other prisoners had liked him. Perhaps it was better this way.

    And nobody knew the truth.
    The trick had been played inside the old barn, during the few seconds when Julius Grief had been out of sight. As he had been instructed, he had driven into the building, smashing through a door that had been specially weakened for just this purpose. A whole team of Scorpia agents—six of them—had been waiting for him inside the barn, and as he skidded to a halt, a second, identical Suzuki Jimny had burst out the other side. But this one had no driver. It was radio controlled with a dummy Julius strapped to the wheel, almost invisible behind all the cracks. It didn’t have to travel very far. In fact, it had been a simple task to guide it across the open patch of land, through the fence, and over the edge.
    And while the guards were watching the fall and the explosion, the Scorpia team had got to work. The original Suzuki had been hastily covered with a tarpaulin and then with straw. Julius had been led to a pit constructed in the floor with a trapdoor sliding across. There was enough room for him and all the agents to bundle in together, and within seconds they had all disappeared. If anyone from the prison had thought to look inside the barn after the crash, they would have found it to be quite empty and abandoned with a few bits of old machinery, a haystack, and some moldy bags of animal feed.
    But nobody did. Everything had happened exactly as Scorpia had intended. As far as the world was concerned, Julius Grief was dead. And nobody was watching that night as a fishing boat with a single smiling passenger slipped out of Gibraltar harbor beneath a full moon and a starry sky and began its journey south.

6

    SECRETS AND LIES

    THE REPORT WAS MARKED TOP SECRET with the two words stamped on the cover in red ink, but in fact there was no need for them. Only three copies had been printed, one for Alan Blunt, the head of MI6 Special Operations, one for his deputy, Mrs. Jones, and one for the chief science officer, and since almost everything they did was secret in one way or another anyway, they hardly needed to be told. Sometimes Blunt wondered how many tens of thousands of documents had passed across the polished surface of his desk, here on the sixteenth floor of the building that called itself the Royal and General Bank on Liverpool Street in London. Each one of them had told its own dirty little story. Some of them had led nowhere, while others had demanded instant action. An operation might be set up on the other side of the world, an agent sent out to run it. How many people had died on the turn of a page?
    But there wouldn’t be many more files coming his way. Alan Blunt sat back in his chair and looked around him, his mind still sifting