Scorpia

he said. “But my dad wanted me to tell you how very grateful we are to you. He asked me to pass that on to you. Your father saved my life. There’s no doubt about it. I’m married now; I have two children. Funnily enough, I named the eldest John after him. There would be no children if it hadn’t been for him. My father would have no son and no grandsons. Whatever you may think of him, whatever you’ve been told about him, John Rider was a very brave man.”
    James Adair nodded at Mrs Jones and left the room. The door closed. There was a second, long silence.
    “I don’t understand,” Alex said.
    “Your father wasn’t an assassin,” Mrs Jones said. “He wasn’t working for Scorpia. He was working for us.”
    “He was a spy?”
    “A very brilliant spy,” Alan Blunt muttered. “We recruited the two brothers—Ian and John—in the same year.
    Ian was a good agent. But John was the better man by far.”
    “He worked for you?”
    “Yes.”
    “But he killed people. Mrs Rothman showed me. He was in prison…”
    “Everything Julia Rothman thought she knew about your father was a lie.” Mrs Jones sighed. “It’s true that he had been in the army, that he had a distinguished career with the Parachute Regiment and that he was decorated for his part in the Falklands War. But the rest of it—the fight with the taxi driver, the prison sentence and all that—we made up. It’s called deep cover, Alex. We wanted John Rider to be recruited by Scorpia. He was the bait and they took him.”
    “Why?”

    “Because Scorpia was expanding all over the world. We needed to know what it was doing, the names of the people it was employing, the size and structure of its organization. John Rider was a weapons expert; he was a brilliant fighter. And Scorpia thought he was washed up. He was welcomed with open arms.”
    “And all the time he was reporting to you?”
    “His information saved more lives than you can imagine.”
    “But that’s not true!” Alex’s head swam. “Mrs Rothman told me that he killed five or six people. And Yassen Gregorovich worshipped him! He showed me the scar. He said my dad saved his life.”
    “Your father was pretending to be a dangerous killer,” Mrs Jones said. “And so—yes, Alex—he had to kill. One of his victims was a drug dealer in the Amazon jungle. That was when he saved Yassen’s life. Another was an American double agent; a third was a corrupt policeman. I’m not saying that these people deserved to die. But certainly the world was able to get along very well without them and I’m afraid your father had no choice.”
    “What about the others you told me about?” Alex had to know.
    “There were two more,” Blunt cut in. “One was a priest, working on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The other was a woman in Sydney. They were more difficult. We couldn’t let them die. And so we faked their deaths … in much the same way that we faked your father’s.”
    “Albert Bridge…”
    “It was faked.” Mrs Jones took up the narrative again. “Your father had told us as much as we needed to know about Scorpia and we had to get him out. There were two reasons for this. The first was that your mother had just given birth to a baby boy. That was you, Alex. Your father wanted to come home; he wanted to be with you and your mother. But also it was becoming too dangerous. You see, Mrs Rothman had fallen in love with him.”
    It was almost too much to take on board at once. But Alex remembered Julia Rothman talking to him in the hotel in Positano.

    I was very attracted to him. He was an extremely good-looking man.
    Alex tried to grasp at the truth through the swirling quicksand of lies and counter-lies. “She told me he was captured. In Malta…”
    “That was faked too,” Mrs Jones revealed. “John Rider couldn’t just walk out of Scorpia; they’d never have let him. So we had to arrange things for him. And that’s what we did. He had been sent to Malta, supposedly to kill his sixth victim. He tipped us off and we were waiting for him. We staged a ferocious gun battle. You know what we’re capable of, Alex. We did more or less the same thing for you with that multiple pile-up on the Westway. Yassen was there, in Malta, but we let him escape. We needed him to tell Julia Rothman what had happened. Then we ‘captured’ John Rider. As far as Scorpia were concerned, he would be interrogated and then either thrown back into prison or executed. They would never see