After six months, the CIA had finally approached Alex regarding future training and work. His current happiness and refuge in San Francisco with the Pleasures' came with a price. The Bank may have let him go but the CIA had paid for his therapy here. He had received both residential and weekly sessions of intensive group and individual therapy to get over his fifteen months of intensive fieldwork, his PTSD, guilt, grief and depression.
It was the beginning of December and Alex should be looking forward to his first family Christmas in America but all he felt was the cold dread and the certainty that he had endangered his foster family. The CIA had allowed him space to heal and become attached to his family and life in the US. Then they had but the knife in. Like Blunt before, he knew he could not escape, they owned him. He was too valuable an asset for them to let slip back into normal life. The CIA would treat him better; he would finish his education, maybe even to post graduate level but it would be on their terms.
He sat watching shoppers from Starbucks at the mall. Sabina had dragged him out and then disappeared with her friends. Alex had become semi popular in school. A jock as he had made the baseball and soccer teams at school with little effort. He had already purchased the gifts he would give in two weeks and posted letters and presents to Fox Smithers and Tom in England. In his gut Alex wanted to run but he did not have the means to do so. He needed money and false documents and the ability to pass as 18. He was tall enough but still looked like a lanky sixteen year old teenager. Even with false ID no one would take him for an adult.
Alex knew he was being followed. His movements noted and any threat from his enemies would be neutralised. The CIA Liaison, Clare Matheson, had explained that Scorpia had been reduced to a few isolated cells run by low level operatives. Nothing more than thugs for hire now. Zeljan Kurst had been eliminated by a Mossad Search and Destroy Team. It seemed that Levi Kroll had been a deep cover agent and his assassination had given the Israeli's the impetus to finish what Alex had started. Clare Matheson had detailed that Alex would need to learn Farsi, Arabic and Urdu as their operations were currently concentrated taking down Al-Qaeda. He would need to train at Langley the next summer to qualify for full agent status and then slowly build up his field experience in case he had any problems with flashbacks or any recurrence of his PTSD.
It all seemed so cut and dried. No escape, no future, no hope.