Snakehead

the window, the sky was very black.
    “Tell me more about my mother,” Alex said.
    “I can’t, Alex,” Ash replied. He twisted in his seat, and Alex noticed a flicker of pain in his eyes. The pills hadn’t kicked in yet. “I mean, she liked to read. She went to the movies a lot—she preferred foreign films if she had a choice. She never bought expensive clothes, but she still looked good.” Ash sighed. “I didn’t know her that well. And she didn’t really trust me, if you want the truth. Maybe she blamed me. I was part of the world that put John in danger. She loved your dad. She hated what he did. And she was smart enough to know that she couldn’t talk him out of it.”
    Ash opened the second miniature and poured the contents into his plastic glass.
    “Helen found out she was expecting you at around the same time that John was sent out on his toughest assignment,” Ash continued. “The two things couldn’t have happened at a worse time. But a new organization had come to the attention of MI6. I don’t need to tell you its name. I guess you know more about Scorpia than I do. Anyway, there it was: an international network of ex-spies and intelligence officers. People who’d gone into business for themselves.
    “At first, they were useful. You have to remember that MI6 actually welcomed them when they first arrived. If you wanted information about what the CIA was up to or how the Iranians were getting on with their nuclear program, Scorpia would sell it to you. If you wanted to do something outside the law with no way of having it traced back to you, there they were. That was the whole point about them. They were loyal to no one. They were only interested in money. And they were very good at their job. Until you came along, Alex, they had never really failed.
    “But MI6 got worried about them. They could see that Scorpia was getting out of control…particularly when a couple of their own agents got murdered in Madrid. All around the world, intelligence agencies were regulated, which is to say they played by the rules…at least, to a certain extent. But not Scorpia. They were growing bigger and more powerful, and at the same time they were becoming more ruthless. They didn’t care how many people they killed so long as they got their check.
    “So Alan Blunt—who’d just become the director of MI6 Special Operations—decided to put your father into Scorpia. The idea was to put him inside the organization…to get them to recruit him. Once he was there, he’d find out everything he could about them. Who was on the executive board? Who was paying them? Who were their connections within the intelligence agencies? That sort of thing. But to do that, MI6 had to put your dad into deep cover. That meant faking everything about him.”
    “I know about this,” Alex interrupted. “They pretended he’d been in jail.”
    “They actually sent him to jail for a time. They had to be thorough. There were newspaper stories about him. Everyone turned against him. It looked like he lost all his money and he had to sell the apartment. He and Helen moved to some dump in Bermondsey. By then she was three months pregnant. It was very hard on her.”
    “But she must have known the truth.”
    “I can’t tell you that. Maybe your dad told her. Maybe he didn’t.”
    Alex couldn’t believe that. Somehow he was sure his mother must have known.
    “Either way, the setup worked,” Ash continued. “He was recruited into Scorpia. They sent him to their training facility on the island of Malagosto, just a couple of miles from Venice.”
    The name made Alex shiver. He had been sent there himself when Scorpia had tried to recruit him.
    “As far as Scorpia was concerned, John Rider was a gift,” Ash said. “He was a brilliant operator. He had a track record inside British intelligence. And he was desperate. He was also a very good-looking man, by the way. One of the senior executives at Scorpia took a fancy to him.”
    “Julia Rothman.” Alex had met her too. She had talked about his father over dinner in Positano.
    “The very same. She quickly saw John’s potential, and soon he was a senior training officer with special responsibility for some of Scorpia’s younger recruits. And she gave him a code name. He was called Hunter.”
    “How do you know all this?” Alex asked.
    “That’s a good question.” Ash smiled. “Because, finally, someone had noticed I existed. Alan Blunt sent me out to shadow John