Disclaimer: I don't own any characters blah blah blah owned by Anthony Horowitz blah blah blah don't sue me.
Summary: Some rules are meant to be followed. Others were made to be broken. John decided the rule of not writing about his ordeals was one of the latter. Years later, Alex finds a notebook in the attic and decides he needs to know what it means. His decision changes a lot.
Slight AU (Alternative Universe), characters acting slightly OOC (Out Of Character).
'Cause you're a Natural
Chapter 8
Alex had spent the week deep in thought. Should he? Shouldn't he?
Alex had used his time in computer class to look up people on the FBI's most wanted list (1) whose first name began with Y (turns out, there weren't too many people with names starting with Y that the FBI wanted). Out of the five options, two were Chinese, one was an Irish woman, one was a French teenage hacker who worked for a hacking group, and the final one was Russian. (2)
Guessing that this was the person he was looking for, he read the information on the profile. The man (Yassen) seemed to have done almost every crime in the book, apart from rape or any crime of a similar nature. With a jolt, he realised that Yassen was the man who'd helped Alex figure out that the diary was written in Russian. Knowing that Yassen was from Russia, his knowledge was expected (it would be slightly unusual if a person couldn't speak one of the main languages in their country of origin.
He'd also managed to discover that "S" was a criminal organisation called SCORPIA, "M" was the island of Malagosto, and "J" was Julia Rothman, who was on the board of SCORPIA.
Having Russia as a vague starting point, he'd also found out from a newspaper article that "V" had died, along with his son, in his dacha in the Silver Forest when someone broke in and shot them. The perpetrator had never been found.
Then, there was the wake-up call by the police to tell him that Ian had died in a car crash. While not wearing a seat belt. Even during his grief, he remembered thinking that the policeman was wrong. Ian wouldn't even drive to the corner if Alex wasn't wearing a seatbelt, yet he'd apparently decided to break the habit of a lifetime on a long drive from Cornwall to London. Pull the other one; it's got bells on.
Alex had reread the diary entries repeatedly, trying to decide whether he should ring the number or not. Yassen was an assassin, a member of the most wanted terrorist organisation in the world (though most countries didn't seem to mind ignoring that if they decided they wanted to hire SCORPIA to solve a problem). Yassen was a serial killer, yet so was his father.
The day before his uncle's funeral, those thoughts and others whirled around his head repeatedly, joined by the idea that Ian might have also been a member of SCORPIA - or even a member of whatever government agency his father had been part of. If nothing else, Alex decided, Yassen might be able to tell him something about his parents (hopefully, the man wouldn't tell him stories that were too gruesome - he liked a horror story as much as the next teenage boy, but not if the perpetrator was his father, mother or uncle). He sighed and reached for the phone.
(A.N:
(1) I learned about this website from a podcast. If you have the time, search through it to see how many people on the list were born in the same country as you, are the same gender or even the same age as you.
(2) No offence meant to people from these countries. Apart from Russia (Yassen) and Ireland (me), the other countries were chosen by asking two friends to name the first country that came to mind.)