Snakehead

said.
    “And then he turned and ran.
    “To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me. Maybe his gun had jammed. Or maybe it was simpler than that. He’d killed Caxero, Travis, and three more of my men. Maybe he’d run out of ammunition. I watched him disappear down the next alleyway, and that was when I realized that he’d had a knife as well as a gun. The hilt was sticking out of my stomach. I didn’t feel anything. But looking down…there was so much blood. It was pouring out of me. It was everywhere.”
    Ash stopped. The soft scream of the plane’s engines rose in pitch for a moment. Alex wondered if they were coming into Jakarta.
    “The pain came later,” Ash said. “You have no idea how bad it was. I should have died that night. Maybe I would have. Only your dad had come after me. He’d feared the worst—and he’d put his own life at risk because if Yassen had seen him, he would have known that the whole thing was a setup. By then I was on the ground. I was slipping away fast. And I was cold. I’ve never felt so cold.
    “Your father didn’t take the knife out. He knew that would kill me right away. He put pressure on the wound and kept it there until the ambulance came. I was airlifted to Valetta, where I was in critical condition for a week. I’d lost five pints of blood. In the end, I came through, but…you’ve seen the scar. I’m missing about half my stomach. There wasn’t anything they could do about that. There are about a hundred things I’m not allowed to eat because there’s nowhere for them to go. And I have to take pills…a lot of pills. But I’m alive. I suppose I should be grateful for that.”
    There was a long silence.
    “Scorpia got my dad in the end,” Alex said.
    “Yeah. A couple of months later. After you were born. I was there at the christening, Alex. It was almost the last time I saw your dad—and if it makes you feel any better, I never saw him happier than when he was holding you. He and your mother. It was like you made them real people again. You took them out of the shadows.”
    “You went with them to the airport. They were on their way to France. You said they were going to Marseille.”
    “They were looking for a new house. More than that. A new life.”
    “You were there when the bomb went off on their plane.”
    Ash looked away. “I said I wouldn’t talk about that and I meant it. Somehow Scorpia found out they’d been tricked and they took revenge. That’s all I know.”
    “What happened to you, Ash? Why did you leave MI6?”
    “I’ll tell you that, Alex, but that’s the end of it. I think I’ve lived up to my side of the bargain.”
    Ash crumpled his plastic glass and shoved the broken pieces into the compartment in front of him.
    “I didn’t come out of it too well, if you want the truth,” he said. “I was on sick leave for six weeks, and the day I got back to Liverpool Street, Alan Blunt called me into his office. He then chewed me out for everything that had gone wrong.
    “First of all, there was the thing with the time. The wrong clock. But it turned out that the most stupid mistake I’d made was to stand up after Yassen had shot me. You see, that had told him we were all wearing body armor and that was the reason he’d shot Travis and the others in the head. It was all my fault…at least, according to Blunt.”
    “That wasn’t fair,” Alex muttered.
    “You know what, mate? I thought more or less the same thing. And finally, chasing after Yassen when the whole point was to let him get away. That was the final nail in my coffin. Blunt didn’t fire me. But I was demoted. He made it clear that I wouldn’t be heading up any more operations for some time to come. It didn’t matter that I’d almost been killed. In a way, that just made it worse.”
    Ash shook his head.
    “It was a little while later that your parents died together on that plane, and after that my heart sort of went out of it. I told you when we were in Bangkok. It was your dad who was the patriot, serving his country. For me it was always just a job. And I’d had enough of it. I did a few more months’ desk duty, but then I handed in my resignation and headed down under. ASIS were keen to have me. And I wanted to start again.
    “I saw you a few times, Alex. I looked in on you to see that you were okay. After all, I was your godfather. But by then Ian Rider had started adoption proceedings. I had a drink with him the night before I left England,