Skeleton Key

wasn‟t sure what was more surprising. To be still alive, or to find himself back in the London headquarters of the Special Operations division of MI6.
    The fact that he was still breathing was, he knew, entirely down to Sabina. She had been sitting on the beach, watching in awe as he rode the Cribber towards her. She had seen the jet ski coming up behind him even before he did and had known instinctively that something was wrong. She had started running the moment Alex had leapt into the air and was already in the water by the time he crashed down next to the jet ski and then disappeared below the surface.
    Later on, she would say that there had been a collision … a terrible accident. From that distance it was impossible to see what had really taken place.
    Sabina was a strong swimmer and luck was on her side. Although the water was murky and the waves still huge, she knew where Alex had gone down and she was there in less than a minute.
    She found him on her third dive, dragged his unconscious body to the surface and then pulled him ashore. She had learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at school and she used that knowledge now, pressing her lips against his, forcing the air into his lungs. Even then, she was sure that Alex was dead. He wasn‟t breathing. His eyes were closed. Sabina pounded on his chest—once, twice—and was finally rewarded with a sudden spasm and a fit of coughing as Alex came to. By then, some of the other surfers had arrived. One of them had a mobile phone and called for an ambulance. There was no sign of the man on the jet ski.
    Alex had been lucky too. As it turned out, he had ridden the Cribber just far enough to be near the end of its journey, when the wave had been at its weakest. A ton of water had fallen onto him, but five seconds earlier and it might have been ten tons. Also, he hadn‟t been too far from the shore when Sabina found him. Any further out and she might never have found him at all.
    Five days had passed since then.
    It was Monday morning, the start of a new week. Alex was sitting in room 1605, on the sixteenth floor of the anonymous building in Liverpool Street. He had sworn that he would never return here. The man and the woman with him in the room were the last two people he wanted to see.
    And yet here he was. He had been drawn in as easily as a fish in a net.
    As usual, Alan Blunt didn‟t seem particularly pleased to see him, preferring to study the file on the desk in front of him rather than the boy himself. It was the fifth or sixth time Alex had met the man in overall command of this section of MI6 and he still knew almost nothing about him.
    Blunt was about fifty, a man in a suit in an office. He didn‟t seem to smoke and Alex couldn‟t imagine him drinking either. Was he married? Did he have children? Did he spend his weekends walking in the park or fishing or watching football matches? Somehow Alex doubted it. He wondered if Blunt had any existence at all outside these four walls. He was a man defined by his work. His whole life was devoted to secrets, and in the end his own life had become a secret itself. He looked up from the neatly printed report.
    “Crawley had no right to involve you in this business,” he said. Alex said nothing. For once, he wasn‟t sure that he disagreed.
    “The Wimbledon tennis championships. You nearly got yourself killed.” He glanced quizzically at Alex. “And this business in Cornwall. I don‟t like my agents getting involved in dangerous sports.”
    “I‟m not one of your agents,” Alex said.
    “There‟s enough danger in the job without adding to it,” Blunt went on, ignoring him. “What happened to the man on the jet ski?” he asked.
    “We‟re interrogating him now,” Mrs Jones replied.
    The deputy head of Special Operations was wearing a grey trouser suit, with a black leather handbag that matched her eyes. There was a silver brooch on her lapel, shaped like a miniature dagger. It seemed appropriate.
    She had been the first to visit Alex as he‟d recovered in hospital in Newquay and she at least had been concerned about what had happened. Of course, she had shown little or no emotion. If anyone had asked, she would have said that she didn‟t want to lose someone who had been useful to her and who might be useful again. But Alex suspected this was only half the story. She was a woman and he was fourteen years old. If Mrs Jones had a son, he could well be the same age as Alex. That made a