Scorpia

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