Snakehead

pocket. His gloved hands were crossed in front of him.
    “How are you feeling?” Yu asked.
    “My head hurts,” Alex replied.
    “Yes. I’m afraid I must apologize. I really don’t know what came over me, hitting you like that. But the truth is, I was angry. You did a lot of damage on the Liberian Star and made it necessary for me to murder Captain De Wynter, which I didn’t really want to do.”
    Alex filed the information away. So De Wynter was dead. He had paid the price for failing a second time.
    “Even so, it was unforgivable of me. My mother used to say that you can lose money, you can lose at cards, but you should never lose your temper. Can I offer you some apple juice? It comes from High House Farm in Suffolk, and it’s quite delicious.”
    “Thank you,” Alex said. He didn’t know what was going on here but had decided he might as well play along with this madman. He held out his glass, and Yu poured. At the same time, the Indonesian maid came in with the lunch: cold roast beef and salad. Alex helped himself. He noticed that Yu ate very little and held his knife and fork as if they were surgical implements.
    “I’m very glad to have had this opportunity to meet you,” Major Yu began. “Ever since you destroyed our operation Invisible Sword and caused the death of poor Mrs. Rothman, I’ve been wondering what sort of boy you were…”
    So Mrs. Jones had been right. Major Yu was indeed part of Scorpia. Alex filed the information away, knowing with a sense of dread that it gave Yu another reason to want to kill him…to settle an old score.
    “It’s just a shame that we have so little time together,” Yu went on.
    Alex didn’t like the sound of that. “I have a question,” he said.
    “Please go ahead.”
    “Where is Ash? What have you done with him?”
    “Let’s not talk about Ash.” Yu gave him a thin smile. “You don’t have to worry about him. You’ll never see him again. How is the beef, by the way?”
    “A little bloody for my taste.”
    Yu sighed. “It’s organic. From Yorkshire.”
    “Where else?” Alex was getting a bit fed up with all this. He toyed with his knife, wondering if he had the speed and the determination to stick it into the man’s heart. It might be five or ten minutes before the maid came back. Enough time to find a way out of here…
    Yu must have seen the idea forming in Alex’s eyes. “Please don’t think of anything foolish,” he remarked. “There is a pistol in my right-hand jacket pocket, and, as the Americans would say, I am very quick on the draw. I think I could shoot you dead before you had even left your chair—and that would spoil a perfectly pleasant lunch. So come now, Alex. I want to know all about you. Where were you born?”
    Alex shrugged. “West London.”
    “Your parents were both English?”
    “I don’t want to talk about them.” Alex looked around. Suddenly the paintings, the furniture, the clothes, even the food made sense. “You seem to like England, Major Yu,” he remarked.
    “I admire it greatly. If I may say so, Alex, I have enjoyed having you as my adversary because you are English. It is also one of the reasons I have invited you to eat with me now.”
    “But what about Invisible Sword? You tried to kill every child in London.”
    “That was business, and I really was very unhappy about it. You might also like to know, by the way, that I voted against sending a sniper to kill you. It seemed so crude. Some more apple juice?”
    “No, thank you.”
    “So where do you go to school?”
    Alex shook his head. He’d had enough of this game. “I don’t want to talk about myself,” he said. “And certainly not to you. I want to see Ash. And I want to go home.”
    “Neither of which is possible.” Yu was drinking wine. Alex noticed that even that was English. He remembered Ian Rider once describing English wine as the sort of liquid that might have been extracted from a cat. But Yu sipped it with obvious enthusiasm.
    “I love England, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Since you won’t talk about yourself, perhaps you will permit me to tell you a little about me. My life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me…”
    “I’ve never much cared for horror stories,” Alex said.
    Yu smiled again—but his eyes were cold. “I like to think of myself as a genius,” he began. “Of course, you might remark that I have never invented anything or written a novel or painted a