Snakehead

letting people in on the ninth and seventh floors. Alex stood silently in the corner. He was suddenly nervous, although he wasn’t quite sure why. Finally, they arrived. The elevator doors opened.
    Ash was standing in the reception area, dressed in a blue linen jacket, a white shirt, and jeans. There were plenty of other people around, but Alex recognized him instantly, and somehow he wasn’t even surprised.
    They had met before. Ash was the soldier in Swanbourne, the man who had told him he was standing on a grenade.

    “It was all a setup, wasn’t it?” Alex said. “The training exercise. The minefield. All of it.”
    “Yeah.” Ash nodded. “I expect that must make you pretty annoyed.”
    “You could say that,” Alex growled.
    There was an eating area just outside the hotel, softly lit, with the river in front of them and a long, narrow swimming pool to one side. The two of them were sitting at a table, facing each other. Ash had a Singha beer. He had ordered Alex a fruit cocktail: orange, pineapple, and guava blended with crushed ice. It was almost dark now, but Alex could still feel the heat of the evening pressing down on him. He realized it was going to take time to get used to the climate in Bangkok. The air was like syrup.
    He looked again at his godfather, the man who had played such a major part in his early life. Ash was leaning back with his legs stretched out, untroubled by the trick that had been played at the beach near Swanbourne. Out of uniform, with his shirt open and a silver chain glinting around his neck, he looked nothing at all like a soldier or a spy. He was more like a movie star with his long, black hair, rough beard, and suntanned skin. Physically, he was slim —wiry was the word that sprang to Alex’s mind. Fast-moving rather than particularly strong. He had brown eyes that were very dark, and Alex guessed he could easily play the part of an Afghan. He certainly didn’t look European.
    There was something else about him that Alex found harder to place. A certain guarded quality in the eyes, a sense of tension. He might look relaxed, but he never would be. He had been touched by something at some time, and it would never let him go.
    “So why did you do it?” Alex asked.
    “It was a test, Alex. Why do you think?” Ash had a soft, lilting voice. The eight years he had spent in Australia had given him an accent, but Alex could hear the English there too. “ASIS wasn’t going to use a fourteen-year-old boy—not even you. Not unless they were damn sure that you weren’t going to panic at the first sign of danger.”
    “I didn’t panic with Drevin. Or with Scorpia…”
    “The snakeheads are different. You have no idea what sort of people we’re up against. Didn’t they tell you? They’ve already killed two agents. The first one came back minus his head. They sent the second one back in an envelope. They’d had him cremated to save us the trouble.” Ash drank his beer and signaled to the waiter for another. “I had to see for myself that you were up to the job,” he went on. “We set up a situation that would have terrorized any normal kid. Then we watched how you dealt with it.”
    “I could have been killed.” Alex remembered how the first bomb had blown him off his feet.
    “You weren’t in any real danger. All the missiles were launched with pinpoint accuracy. We knew exactly where you were all the time.”
    “How?”
    Ash smiled. “There was a beacon inside the heel of one of your sneakers. Colonel Abbott arranged that while you were asleep. It sent out a signal to the nearest inch.”
    “What about the mine?”
    “It had less explosive in it than you probably thought. And it was activated by remote control. I set it off a couple of seconds after you made that dive. You did pretty well, by the way.”
    “You were watching me all the time.”
    “Just put it behind you, Alex. It was a test. You passed. That’s all that matters.”
    The waiter arrived with the second beer. Ash lit a cigarette—Alex was surprised to see that he smoked—and blew smoke out into the warm evening air.
    “I can’t believe we’re finally meeting,” he said. He examined Alex closely. “You look a hell of a lot like your dad.”
    “You were close to him.”
    “Yeah. We were close.”
    “And my mother.”
    “I don’t want to talk about them, Alex.” Ash shifted uncomfortably, then reached out and drank some of his beer. “Do you mind? It was all a long time ago.