Spy Games
Alex Rider, Alex, Ian played the double agent instead of John and Alex finds out about his father's career in a different way
"This boy survived the Gentleman?" John Crawley asked of Smithers, his tone a bit stifling. The flowers for the funeral of John and Alex Rider had already arrived to the desk of Alan Blunt, MI6 being the only family that Rider's seemed to have in common. It was a bit of a family curse, Crawley had thought.
Alex, however, was not dead. Proof of this lay on the white sheets of a chemically cleaned dark room, burnt bare skin under bandages, the boy looked like a mummy. He was alive, but the scar on his back would leave the imprint of flames, in mimicry of wings.
"Do not sound so upset, he is a boy, yes, but he is a brilliant one. At only ten he had wanted to find out more about Ian, in fact, so set his mind was, so determined – he nearly succeeded in hacking his way into MI6 systems, if I hadn't….distracted him, I fully believe he would have succeeded." Smithers sounded almost as if he'd wished to change things, to have let Alex have the victory, if only so he would have had a hint then to what was coming. Now, he was an orphan, John dead with the house having been blown up, his only uncle long buried, and his mother having died in a plane bomb –targeted at the only brother of Ian who had a family to loose, that would have taken Alex and his father if not for Alex having had an ear infection and John being unwilling to leave Alex, so staying behind and surviving.
John had not been the same with Ian dying, and his wife's death had all but killed him, living a half life for his son's sake, Yassen had walked into the Riders lives. He was a boy assassin who said that he owed it to Ian to take care of the babe that Ian had considered like his own son; for all that Alex was John's. John had not turned such an offer aside, and had allowed the teenager to stay – to say Alex had a bond was to understate things. As it was, Yassen thought Alex dead, and was even now chasing after the heels of the Gentleman for his vengeance.
He might even succeed, MI6 was unsure if the boy was crazy or as skilled as he played at being. Ian had certainly taught him things, and the then fourteen year old had kept in practice, dragging Alex about the world while John worked and paid for their keep – and John himself had certainly raised the two with skills they may not even realized they even now possessed. If Alex's skills mirrored Yassen's, then they might get a double deal for the fourteen year old Alex, and his twenty eight year old guardian. If Yassen came back alive – and he surely would come back if he lived, if only to see Alex's grave, which was being dug and filled, the marker between of the graves of John and Helen, and Ian and Ash. Perhaps now Alex might understand the engraved imagery, the hunters telescope, the medical cross, the reaper, and the ring of thorns – Alex's would be a mimic of his scars, angel wings.
"Anyone who has a claim on him is dead, they can't protect him from the grave – Yassen, even if he is the boy's legal guardian now, thinks he is dead - what do you think that Alan Blunt will do?" Smithers asks, though the answer to the question goes between them unspoken, they are both fond of this Rider, having decided to give him the best odds they can. Loyalty to new ties does not yet feel like a break from the old ones.