Snakehead

in the field. I was his backup. My job was to stay close but not too close…to be there if he needed to make contact. And that’s how I came to be there when it all ended.”
    “In Malta.”
    “Yeah. In Malta.”
    “What happened?”
    “Your dad was coming in. He’d had enough of Scorpia and MI6. You were on your way into the world. John just wanted a normal life—and anyway, he’d achieved what he’d set out to do. Thanks to him, we knew the entire structure of command within Scorpia. We had the names of most of their agents. We knew who was paying them and how much.
    “The job now was to bring him home without arousing suspicion. Julia Rothman would kill him if she found out he was a spy. The plan was to get him back to England and then let him disappear. A new home. A new identity. The whole works…he’d start a new life in France with your mom. I should have mentioned that he spoke fluent French, by the way. If things had gone the way they’d planned, you’d be speaking French now. You’d be in a lycée in Marseilles or somewhere and you wouldn’t know anything about all this.
    “Well, it was right at this time that Scorpia provided the opportunity to get John out. There was a man called Caxero. He was a petty criminal. A drug dealer, a money launderer…that sort of thing. But he must have rubbed someone the wrong way because someone had paid Scorpia to hit him. Your dad was sent to do the job.
    “Caxero lived in Mdina in the middle of Malta. It’s an old citadel, completely surrounded by walls. In fact madina is an Arabic word meaning exactly that…‘walled city.’ Caxero’s hometown had another name too. It was so quiet and full of shadows, even in the winter, that the locals called it the silent city. And MI6 realized it was the perfect place for the ambush that would bring John home.
    “Your dad wasn’t sent there alone. He was accompanied by a young assassin, one of the best who ever came out of Malagosto. I understand you met him. His name was Yassen Gregorovich.”
    Alex shivered again. He couldn’t help himself. They were certainly digging deep into his past tonight.
    He had met Yassen on his first mission and remembered the slim, fair-haired Russian with the ice-cold eyes. Yassen could have killed Alex then but had chosen not to. And then they had met a second time in the south of France. It had been Yassen who had led him into the nightmare world of Damian Cray. Alex thought back to the last moments they had been together. Once again Yassen had refused to kill him, and this time it had cost him his own life.
    “What can you tell me about Yassen?” he asked.
    “An interesting young man,” Ash replied—but there was a sudden coldness in his voice. “He was born in a place called Estrov. You won’t have heard of it but it was certainly of interest to us. The Russians had a secret facility there…bio-chemical warfare, but one day the whole place blew up. Hundreds of people were killed—and Yassen’s father was one of them. His mother died six months later.
    “The Russians tried to hush the whole thing up. They didn’t want to admit anything had happened, and even now, we don’t know the whole truth. But one thing was certain. By the end of the year, Yassen was totally alone. He was just fourteen years old, Alex. The same age as you are now.”
    “How did Scorpia find him?”
    “He found them. He crossed the whole of Russia on his own, with no money and no food. He worked in Moscow for a while, living on the street and running errands for the local Mafiya. We still don’t know how he managed to find his way to Scorpia, but the next thing we know, he turns up in Malagosto. Curiously, your dad was in charge of his training for a time. He told me the boy was a natural. It’s funny, isn’t it. In a way, you and Yassen had a lot in common.” Ash turned to Alex, and he seemed suddenly ghostlike in the artificial light of the plane. A strange look came into his eyes. “John had a soft spot for Yassen,” he said. “He really liked him. What do you make of that? The spy and the assassin. A bit of an odd couple, I’d say…”
    And more than ten years later, Yassen had sacrificed himself for Alex, repaying the debt of an old friendship. But Alex didn’t tell Ash that. For some reason, he wanted to keep it to himself.
    “This was the deal,” Ash said. Suddenly he sounded tired, like he wanted to get this over with. “Caxero was a man of habit—and that’s