6.12 pm, Tuesday, 5th July
Brompton Road, London
Ian spent another week in Morocco, just to solidify the idea of him being on holiday in Blunt's mind, should he be watching - and knowing him, he always was.
He didn't see Gregorovich again, not that he'd expected to, and instead, had spent his time aimlessly wandering around the Kasbah Museum and Villa Perdicaris, making plans for what he was going to do next, and firmly, studiously, almost religiously, blocking out any and all chatter he heard about a Sahrawi Arab politician who had been assassinated only a few days before.
His MI6 tails latched onto him again as soon as he left Stansted airport.
Upon arriving home - quiet, lonely, empty home - he wondered if Blunt had taken the opportunity to bug his house while he'd been away, and after calling in yet another favour from Lee, he'd tracked down and happily destroyed three micro cameras and a handful of listening devices.
He'd put up with the agents following him - keep your friends close and all that - but he firmly drew the line at that odious reptilian prick being given access to what he did in his own damn house.
Carefully placing the crushed and shattered bugs in a well-padded cardboard box, he sent it directly to Mr Alan Blunt, Royal and General Bank, Liverpool Street, with a lovely little note too - just to make sure that the man understood his displeasure.
But after that, it was back to business as usual.
Namely, tracking down his wayward kid.
He remembered Mrs Jones's words distinctly.
"If you get caught talking to more unsavoury figures, then it will be well within his rights to have you arrested".
Knowing Alan Blunt, however, he would likely be killed in a tragic accident rather than being placed in a cell. The bastard couldn't risk Ian giving away all his secrets, after all. He didn't think Blunt knew he'd met Yassen, or else he wouldn't still be standing here, but Ian couldn't guarantee that he wouldn't meet the assassin again in the future - or any other "unsavoury" characters for that matter.
It was because of this, that the first thing he did upon securing his home was open the hidden safe he kept in his office, put on a shoulder holster for the first time in fourteen years, and load his SIG Sauer with brand new ten millimetre bullets.
It felt… weird, carrying a weapon again, but he figured it'd be better to be safe than sorry - especially since this was as close as he was likely to ever get to being back in the field.
And so, life went on.
He got a call about once a week from the SAS, a text every few days from Ben Daniels or Lee, and never any messages from Yassen. Ian spent his days researching everything he could, scouring international news sites for any incidents that might have MI6's fingerprints on them, and doing his damn best not to collapse on a pile on the floor with a bottle of whiskey and one of Alex's blankets.
He went out for dinner more often than not. He had the money for it, after all, and it got him out of the house, too. And besides, there was just something incredibly depressing about cooking dinner for one. He kept misjudging the portion sizes and making far too much - enough for two - but he couldn't stomach the leftovers the following day and he hated throwing out perfectly good food.
Oh, how far he'd come from his once single bachelor life…
"-tellin' you mate, the kid was insane! Kicked that guy's arse, let me tell you! Course then, all the security guys showed up and hauled him away but still! He couldn't have been, what? Fourteen? Fifteen? It was mad!"
Halfway to the bar, Ian… paused.
"Was the boy arrested for it? I mean, kid or not, beating up a guy like that-"
"No, no, no! That's the thing! The cops weren't called at all! Instead, all of these business suits suddenly appeared and half of the Millennium Building was locked down! And then, the next day, the kid just- shows up for work, like nothin' ever happened! I mean, strawberry delivery is usually pretty borin' work, ya know? But not this year".
Sitting at a table in the corner, two men were hunched over room-temperature pints. Nevertheless, the man talking was gesturing wildly enough to make Ian wonder if this wasn't, perhaps, his first drink of the night. His companion, however, was far more sober and also far more annoyed - like he'd heard this story already, and more than once too.
"He couldn't have just gotten away with it, Dave. I mean, he was a ballboy, right? That area's off-limits to them! What the hell was he doing beneath the courts in the first place?!"
Millennium Building, ballboy, courts… Were they talking about Wimbledon?
Ian hadn't paid any attention to it this year - not that he usually paid attention to it any other year either, but recently, his mind had rather understandably been occupied by other things. Now that he was thinking about it, however, he vaguely remembered reading an article only a few days ago about some guy being caught spiking the players' water fountains.
It was a story that sounded far too… dull for Alex to have been involved.
And yet…
"I don't know! Maybe he followed the guy!" Dave was saying, throwing his hands in the air and almost toppling over his drink in the process, "Look, I'm just tellin' you what I saw, mate. This half-pint kid went up against some Asian guy twice his size and three times as mean, and he won! It was insane! He even knocked him out cold, too, with some fancy karate moves or whatever! Man, you should've seen it! He even made a joke - somethin' about the guy being 'out cold' cause he was in a freezer!"
That, on the other hand, sounded exactly like Alex.
Plastering a screen-worthy smile on his face, Ian made a detour to the right and pulled a small notebook out of his pocket, flipping it open like it was his job.
"Alright fellas?" he greeted, putting on a Liverpudlian accent, "Sorry to bother youse. I couldn't help but overhear that interestin' story youse was telling your mate there".
"Oh yeah? And what of it?"
He held out a hand and flashed the man a dazzling grin.
"Mark Williams. The Daily Mirror. How would youse like to get that story published?"
3.58 pm, Monday, 11th July
Miami, U.S.A.
Alex stood at the window, trying to make sense of the world in which he now found himself. Seven hours on a plane had drained something out of him which even the surprise of a seat in first class had been unable to put back. He felt disengaged as if his body had managed to arrive but had left half his brain somewhere behind.
It was late afternoon here in Miami, and the heat was still intense. But in England, eight thousand kilometres away, it was night - and Alex was struggling to stay awake.
After calling Crawley and watching as they arrested the man he'd left unconscious in a freezer, he'd been shipped off to St Dominic's to get patched up, before being returned right back to where he'd started. Blunt had made him finish out the final two weeks of Wimbledon - to avoid suspicion, he'd said, but personally, Alex thought it was so they'd have something to distract him with while they planned his next little "adventure".
Unfortunately, he'd been right.
It had only been the day before when he'd been hauled out of the bare concrete block that was now his room and led up to Blunt's office, where he, Jones, and Crawley had all awaited him like a particularly horrible scene of dejavú.
It was Mrs Jones who explained who the man that had attacked him was - although Alex hadn't asked - labelling him as a member of the Big Circle gang, a relatively new Chinese triad that already had almost twenty thousand members. The man he'd fought had lost face when Alex had beaten him. So now, of course, the entire triad was out for his blood.
And wasn't it just incredible that at the exact same time he needed to leave England, MI6 had a mission for him in the States?
Pure coincidence. Very lucky for them. He should be relieved.
Or so Alan bloody Blunt had said.
And it wasn't just an MI6 operation either - the CIA were running the damn thing. They needed someone young, like him, to pose as the child of two American agents who needed to blend in, and they had "wondered if you might be available".
Alex had briefly considered grabbing the man's Mont Blanc fountain pen and stabbing him in the throat with it.
In all honesty, though, he'd been surprised. MI6 had already used him twice and both times they had stressed that nobody was to know. Now, it seemed, they had been boasting about their teenage spy. Worse than that, they had even been preparing to lend him out, like a bloody library book!
"We're not asking you to do anything dangerous, Alex. Quite the contrary. You can think of this as a paid holiday. Two weeks in the sun".
Like how they hadn't asked him to do anything dangerous when investigating Sayle? Or Point Blanc? Or Wimbledon?! They never "paid" him to begin with, and either way, it wasn't as if he ever had much of a choice, and so, only a few hours later, he'd been stepping off a plane in Florida and being ushered into a stretch limousine of all bloody things, and then-
Then he met Joe Bryne.
Aged about sixty, with grizzled white hair and a moustache, he looked fit but moved slowly, as if he had just got out of bed or needed to get into it. He was wearing a dark suit that looked out of place in Miami, a white shirt and a knitted tie.
He was also the deputy director of the CIA.
"You have quite a reputation".
"Do I?"
"You do. Dr Grief and that guy in England - Herod Sayle. Don't worry, Alex, we're not meant to know about these things, but these days… nothing happens in the world without someone hearing about it".
He'd wondered, briefly, if that was a poorly hidden threat - Byrne's way of telling him that he knew about the tracker in his wrist, a warning for him not to go off script during this mission - or even a message aimed directly at Alan Blunt who was no doubt listening in on the other side of the world, demanding to know absolutely everything that his borrowed toy spy was up to.
"You've done some great work for your country".
"I'm not sure I did it for my country. It's just that my country didn't give me a lot of choice".
"Well, we're really grateful you've agreed to help us now… We've booked you a hotel just a few blocks from here. But first I want you to meet special agents Turner and Troy".
Turner and Troy. They were going to be Alex's "mother" and "father" during their "family holiday" to Skeleton Key - an island just off the coast of Cuba that was home to General Alexei Sarov, an ex-military man, who was due to meet the Russian president in just two weeks time; something which the CIA were decidedly uneasy about.
As a result, they were sending in two agents to discreetly spy on the man as part of a "simple surveillance operation", and according to Blunt, Alex was being sent in to act as their cover.
"Couldn't they use an American boy?
"The Americans would never use one of their own young people in an exercise like this. They have a… different set of rules to us".
"You mean they'd be worried about getting him killed".
"We wouldn't have asked you, Alex, but you have to leave London. In fact, you have to leave England. We're not trying to get you killed. We're trying to protect you and this is the best way".
Pure fucking coincidence. Very fucking lucky for them. He should be fucking relieved.
"If I help your friends in the CIA, you can get the triad to leave me alone?"
"We have contacts in the Chinese underworld. But it will take time, Alex. Whatever happens, you're going to have to go into hiding - at least for the next couple of weeks. So why not do it in the sun?"
The only good thing about the entire bloody disaster - if you could even call it that - was that he'd gotten to see Smithers again. The man had been as jolly as ever, rambling about how excited he was to build even more gadgets for a teenager, and how their friends at the CIA were fine operators except he should never trust them and they had no sense of humour.
Half an hour later, he'd been equipped with a knock-out needle phone, expanding bubblegum, and a stun grenade footballer keychain.
"Better safe than sorry" Smithers had said, and Alex wondered, privately, if the man knew just how well so-called safe missions had gone for him in the past.
"Good luck, Alex. I hope you get on all right with the CIA. They're not really like us, you know… and heaven knows what they'll make of you".
10.14 am, Tuesday, 12th July
Miami, U.S.A.
Evidently, they didn't make much of him.
When it came to Tom Turner and Belinda Troy, Alex had never met two people less pleased to see him.
"I'll just have some orange juice and toast" he told the waiter at breakfast the next morning.
"Wholemeal or granary?"
"Granary. With butter and jam-"
"You mean jelly!" Troy paused until the waiter had gone and then scowled. "No American kid asks for jam. You ask for that at Santiago Airport and we'll be in jail - or worse - before you can blink".
"I wasn't thinking-"
"You don't think, you get killed. Worse, you get us killed". She shook her head. "I still say this is a bad idea".
"How's Lucky?" Turner asked.
Alex's head spun. What was he talking about? Then he remembered. Lucky was the Labrador dog that the Gardiner family was supposed to have back in Los Angeles.
"He's fine. He's being looked after by Mrs Beach".
She was the woman who lived next door. But Turner wasn't impressed.
"Not fast enough" he said, "If you have to stop to think about it, the enemy will know you're telling a lie. You have to talk about your dog and your neighbours as if you've known them all your life".
They asked him a few more questions while they waited for the food to arrive. Alex answered on autopilot. He watched a couple of teenagers go past on skateboards and wished he could join them. That was what a fourteen-year-old should be doing in the Miami sunshine. Not playing spy games with two sour-faced adults who had already decided they weren't going to give him a chance.
"So who is the Salesman?" he asked after their food arrived. He'd heard Byrne mention the name yesterday when he'd introduced Alex to the two agents.
"You don't need to know that" Turner replied.
Alex decided he'd had enough. He put down his knife.
"Alright" he said, "You've made it pretty clear that you don't want to work with me. Well, that's fine, because I don't want to work with you either. And for what it's worth, nobody would ever believe you were my parents because no parents would ever behave like you two!"
"Alex-" Troy began.
"Forget it! I'm going back to London. And if your Mr Byrne asks why, you can tell him I didn't like the jelly so I went home to get some jam".
He stood up. Troy was on her feet at the same time. Alex glanced at Turner. He was looking uncertain too. He guessed that they would have been glad to see the back of him. But at the same time, they were afraid of their boss - and as much as he hated to admit it, he was scared of his own boss too, and desperately hoped that the CIA agents wouldn't call his bluff, because if this little moment of rebelliousness got back to Blunt...
"Sit down, Alex" Troy eventually said, "We were out of line. We didn't mean to give you a hard time. It's just gonna take us a bit of time to get used to the situation. Turner and me… we've worked together before but… we don't know you".
Turner nodded. "You get killed, how's that gonna make us feel?"
"I was told there wasn't going to be any danger" Alex said, "Anyway, I can look after myself".
"I don't believe that".
He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped himself. There was no point arguing with these people. They'd already made up their minds, and anyway, they were the sort who were always right. But at least now, they had decided to loosen up a bit.
"You want to know about the Salesman?" Troy began, "He's a crook. He's based here in Miami. He's a nasty piece of work - he sells things. Drugs. Weapons. False identities. If you need something and it's against the law, the Salesman will supply it. At a price, of course".
"I thought you were investigating Sarov?"
Or had Alan bloody Blunt lied to him for the umpteenth time?
"We are". Turner hesitated. "The Salesman may have sold something to Sarov. That's the connection".
"What did he sell?"
"We don't know for sure". Turner was looking increasingly nervous. "We just know that two of the Salesman's agents flew into Skeleton Key recently. They flew in but they didn't fly out again. We've been trying to find out what Sarov was buying".
"What's all this got to do with the Russian president?" Alex still wasn't sure he was being told the truth.
"We won't know that until we know what it was that Sarov bought" Troy said, as if explaining something to a six-year-old.
"I've been working undercover with the Salesman for a while now" Turner went on, "He trusts me. And today just happens to be his birthday, so he invited me to go for a drink on his boat".
12.21 pm, Tuesday, 12th July
Miami, U.S.A.
"Something's gone wrong" Troy suddenly said.
"What do you mean?"
Alex followed her gaze to the Salesman's boat - Mayfair Lady - that Turner had disappeared onto twenty minutes before, only to find that the engines had started up. The men who had been loading it earlier that morning were now untying it from the pier. Slowly, it began to move away.
"It was a ten-minute meeting. Tom wasn't meant to be going anywhere!" Troy's face was suddenly pale. "His cover's been blown. They must have found out he's an agent. They're taking him out to sea with them".
She was standing up now but not moving, paralysed with indecision. The boat was still moving. Even if she ran forward, she would never reach it in time.
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know".
"Are they going to…?"
"If they know who he is, they'll kill him!" She snapped the words as if this was somehow Alex's fault, as if it was a stupid question that he should never have asked.
And maybe it was this that decided him.
Suddenly, before he even knew what he was doing, he was on his feet and running. He was angry. At Blunt, at Byrne, and Troy and Turner both. He was going to show them that he was more than the dumb English kid they obviously thought he was.
"Alex!" Troy called out but he ignored her - he had already reached the boardwalk.
The two teenagers he had seen earlier were sitting in the sun and they didn't see him snatch one of their skateboards and jump onto it. It was only as he pushed off, propelling himself over the wooden surface towards the departing boat, that one of them shouted in his direction, but by then it was too late.
He shifted his weight, suddenly aware that he had neither helmet nor knee pads. If he came off now, it was going to hurt. But that was the least of his worries. The boat was pulling away. In seconds it would be too far away to reach. Alex hit the ramp the men had used to load and unload the boat. He soared upwards and suddenly he was in mid-air, flying. He felt the skateboard fall away from his feet, heard it splash into the sea - but his own momentum carried him forward.
He stretched out his arms and somehow his scrabbling fingers made contact with the rail that curved round the back of the boat. His body smashed into the metal stern, his feet dipping into the water above the propellers. Using all his strength, he pulled himself up and over the rail. And then, finally, he was on the deck, soaked to the knees, his entire body aching from the impact.
But he was onboard.
Alex slipped off his shoes and socks and then crept forward, nervous about being seen. The first two windows of the boat's main cabin were closed but the third was open and crouching below it he heard a voice.
"You are a foolish man. Your name is Tom Turner. You work for the CIA. And I am going to kill you".
"You're wrong. I don't know what you're talking about!"
Alex levered himself upwards until his head reached the level of the window and he could look in.
The cabin was rectangular, with a wooden floor partially covered by a carpet that had been rolled back - presumably to avoid bloodstains. Turner was sitting in a chair with his hands tied behind his back. His fair hair was damp and blood trickled out of the comer of his mouth.
There were two men in the cabin with him. One was a deckhand in jeans and a black T-shirt. The other had to be the Salesman. Alex sank down again. He couldn't go into the cabin. There were two of them and only one of him.
He needed a diversion.
Glancing quickly at the upper deck, he ran on tiptoe back to where he had crouched down on the stern. He'd noticed two large cans earlier on, and now, unscrewing one of the lids, he was relieved to find that they were exactly what he'd hoped they were - petrol.
Taking off his shirt, he ripped it apart in his hands. Quickly he pushed the sleeve into the can, soaking it in petrol. Then he pulled it out, leaving only the end still inside; a makeshift fuse. He reached into his pocket and took out the book of matches that he'd found in his hotel room that morning.
The whole thing was alight in seconds.
Running forward again, he returned to the cabin. He could hear the Salesman still speaking inside. Alex looked back over his shoulder. Nothing had happened. Why hadn't the petrol caught fire? Had the wind blown out his makeshift fuse?
And then it exploded.
A great mushroom of flame and black smoke leapt into the air at the back of the boat, snatched away instantly by the wind. Somebody shouted. Alex saw that the petrol had splashed all over both decks. There was fire everywhere.
"See what is happening!"
He heard the Salesman snap the command and a second later the deckhand came racing out and then disappeared round the other side of the cabin. That just left the Salesman on his own with Turner. Alex waited a few seconds, then stepped into the doorway, once again reaching into his trouser pocket. Turner saw him before the Salesman. His eyes widened.
The Salesman turned.
For a moment neither of them moved. The Salesman was looking at a fourteen-year-old boy, barefoot and naked from the waist up. It obviously hadn't occurred to him that Alex could be any threat to him, that it was this boy who had set fire to his boat.
And in that moment of hesitation, Alex made his move.
When he brought his hand up, he was holding a mobile phone. He had already dialled two nines before he'd gone in. He pressed the button for a third time as he aimed with the phone.
"It's for you!"
He felt the phone shudder in his hand and, silently, a needle spat out of the top, just like Smithers said it would. It travelled across the cabin and hit the Salesman square in the chest, and he slumped to the floor, unconscious.
Alex jumped over him, picked up a knife from the table and went over to Turner.
"What the hell…?" the CIA man began, "What did you do to him? What happened? I heard an explosion!"
"Yeah. That was me. I set the boat alight".
"What?!"
"I set fire to the boat".
"But we're on the boat!"
"I know".
The deck was full of people. Two of them, young men in dirty white shirts and jeans, were fighting the flames with extinguishers. There were two on the roof, and another on the deck. All of them were shouting. The explosions had taken them by surprise and all they cared about was getting the fire under control. However, as Turner came out of the cabin, one of the men saw him - and called out.
"Move!" Turner shouted.
He ran for the edge of the boat. Alex followed. There was the deafening chatter of a machine gun and what was left of the canopy above his head was torn to shreds. He saw Turner dive over the side. There was another burst from the machine gun and Alex felt the deck rip itself apart centimetres from his bare feet. Splinters slammed into his ankle and heels. He dashed forward and threw himself over the handrail.
For what felt like an eternity everything was chaos.
Then he plunged headfirst into the Atlantic and disappeared beneath the surface. After the battlefield that Mayfair Lady had become, its water was warm and soothing. Something whizzed past him and he realised that he was still being shot at.
He opened his eyes. The saltwater stung but he needed to know how far he was going. He looked up. Light glimmered at the surface but there was no sign of the boat. His lungs were beginning to hurt. With his body crying out for oxygen, Alex kicked reluctantly for the surface.
He came up gasping, with water streaming down his face. Turner was next to him. The CIA agent looked more dead than alive. Alex wondered if he had been hit, but there was no sign of any blood. Perhaps he was in shock.
"Are you alright?" Alex asked.
"Are you crazy?" Turner was so angry that he actually swallowed water as he spoke. He spluttered and fought to keep himself from going under. "You could have gotten us killed!"
"I just saved your life!"
"You think so? Look!"
With a sense of dread, he swivelled around in the water.
Mayfair Lady hadn't been destroyed. The fire was out. And the boat was coming back.
Alex could make out four or five men standing at the bow. All of them were armed. They had seen him. One of them pointed and shouted. He and Turner were helpless, sitting targets, to be picked off like ducks in a fair. What could he do?
Mayfair Lady drew closer, slicing through the water.
And then it exploded.
This time the explosions were huge, final. There were three of them, simultaneous, in the bow, the middle and the stern. Alex felt the shock wave travel through the water. The blast was deafening. He knew at once that nobody could have survived. And with that knowledge came a terrible thought.
Was it his fault?
Had he killed them all?
There was the sound of an outboard motor. Alex twisted around. A speedboat was racing towards them. He saw Belinda Troy at the wheel. She must have somehow commandeered it and come after them.
"What happened?! I saw the boat blow. I thought you were-"
"It was the kid". Turner's voice was neutral. "He cut me free…"
"You were tied up?"
"Yes. The Salesman knew I was with the agency. He was going to kill me. Alex knocked him out. He had some sort of cell phone…"
He was stating the facts. The boat rocked gently. Nobody moved.
"He blew up the boat. He killed them all".
"No". Alex shook his head. "The fire was out. You saw! They'd got the boat under control. They were turning round, about to come back-"
"For God's sake! What do you think happened? You think one of the lights fused and Mayfair Lady just happened to blow up? You did it, Alex. You set the gas alight and that's what happened".
Gas. The American for petrol. It was one of the words they had tested him on at the restaurant that morning. It felt like a century ago.
"I saved your life" Alex said, hopelessly, desperately.
"Yeah. Thanks, Alex".
But Turner's voice was bleak. Troy climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. The speedboat turned and they headed back towards the shore.
So much for a safe two weeks in the sun...