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Alex fails his exams.
Well, he might have passed French. He probably passed Spanish. If Brooklands had let him take a third language he probably would have passed German too, but they had rules against it and no one there was particularly interested in bending them for him.
The rest of them, he knows he failed. The results aren’t out for another couple of months, but they don’t need to be.
Jones has made sympathetic noises about hiring a tutor for him. Perhaps he can take a year off school, she suggests. Some time to study up. They can offer him an apprenticeship while he does - he’s obligated to be in education until eighteen, and as his legal guardians, the bank are very invested in making sure that happens. An apprenticeship would be best for everyone, she says. After all, he’ll never get into a decent sixth form with two GCSEs.
She doesn’t need to add that last part. Alex hears it well enough. Jones has it all planned out. A one-year apprenticeship will turn into two when he’s still not ready to retake his exams next May, because he’s spent so much time working . And then he’ll be eighteen, and he’ll have no GCSEs, and no other qualifications, and well, a position has opened up at the bank, one with a real salary, and really, Jones is doing him a favour offering it to him. His inheritance can’t be released to him until he’s twenty-one, after all. Ian’s will was clear.
It’s a bleak future. Alex considers taking off, but he doesn’t know where he’d go. He could go backpacking across Europe, he supposes. Pick up temporary jobs at restaurants and resorts. Wash dishes and clean hotel rooms. Serve drinks. Take dinner orders. He’s young and speaks multiple languages. He’d be able to find the work.
He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t know what he wants. He knows he doesn’t want to be stuck here, under MI6’s thumb, for the rest of his life.
So he stays, kicking around his empty house. Jack has gone to visit her family. She’d tried to get him to go with her, but half-heartedly. He thinks she might give up on him soon. Time to abandon this sinking ship. Can’t help someone who won’t help himself.
He doesn’t blame her. She’s done everything she can for him. She can’t work a miracle.
He studies. He really does. He has all the CGP workbooks, maths and science and English. He has a timetable that he made for himself in Microsoft Excel. It’s colour-coded. He gets up every morning at eight and he spends eight hours a day studying.
It’s not going to be enough. He’ll get two weeks, maybe three. And then they’ll come for him, and they’ll hold something over his head. This apprenticeship, maybe. Alex has to admit it’s probably still his best option. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll manage to pass his GCSEs next year. Even just Cs in maths and English language would be enough for him to get a real, non-bank job. And then maybe he can take his A-levels online. People do that, right? Night classes?
Of course, he does have another option. Even if the thought of it makes him break out in a confused sweat.
The next job is in Germany. There is a drug ring operating out of Munich, and it’s making headway into the English markets.
Alex hates it when they send him on drug ops. He’s managed to avoid taking anything stronger than Adderall so far, except when someone else drugs him, but one day his cover as a teen addict is going to require him to snort something. Or worse.
Alex is already falling apart. If he adds whatever poorly-cut drugs into the mix, he’ll go down like a lead balloon.
He gets sent to Munich and briefed by the agents in the BND who are meant to be handling him. They’re about as thrilled as all the adults who came before them that he’s involved - that is to say, the extent of their hospitality is that they don’t shoot him on sight.
His German is more Berlin than southern, but he can pretend to have moved recently. He gets given a phone, and a pair of trainers with distress beacons sewn into the tongues. Click your heels together three times for extraction. Alex doesn’t kid himself into believing that they would show if he did. He hasn’t believed that since the early days.
He shows up at raves. Shows up on street corners and in back alleys. He looks grimy and unwashed, but in a way that suggests he simply doesn’t care, rather than that he doesn’t have the means to shower. He has enough money to buy, and he’s not so much of an addict that he’s going to get caught by cops or parents or whoever’s in his life.
It’s funny, Alex thinks gloomily. Most of the rich bastards he’s been sent after have done drugs, but he’s never sent to break up their suppliers’ rings. Probably because they’re supplying his bosses too. Not Jones - she’s far too straight-laced - but higher up. The home office, or something. The House of Lords. Instead he’s here, in a grimy Munich nightclub, pretending to swallow pills.
Not his scene. Alex doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to enjoy nightlife. Two weeks on Malagosto and two years as an agent have taught him far too much about how easy it would be to kill someone somewhere like this. They’d never hear him coming, and he’d be gone before they hit the floor.
He calls the nightclub in, and makes a feeble attempt at warning the agents he’s been loaned out to that if they keep raiding places he’s been seen, people will start to put the pieces together. He doesn’t have much hope that they’ll listen to him. He’ll be surprised if he ends this mission without another stab wound. His last one got infected.
He goes to a houseparty, and follows the dealer there to a gross house twenty minutes away that appears to be an outpost, rather than the operation’s centre. He stakes the house out for a week, despite very much not being trained for it, and tracks down two other mid-level members of the local branch of the ring to what appear to be their homes. He has to shower and change to blend into the neighbourhoods they live in. They clearly aren’t hard up for money.
Eventually, he tracks the deliveries to a warehouse in an industrial district. It’s cliched, but it makes sense. There are lorries coming in and out all the time. No one would pay attention to a couple extra.
He calls it in. He’s ordered to have a look around. Just to make sure, they tell him. Well, fuck it. Maybe he’ll set the place on fire a bit. Just enough to damage the goods. Not all of them - if the BND don’t find anything, they’ll send him right back out there - but enough to make a serious dent in the supply.
He pokes around. He finds half a dozen office-type rooms, kitted out with shitty desks and chairs and laptops. He looks around some more, dodging a couple of groups of guards. It isn’t difficult. The smell of weed is very strong on them, and he wouldn’t be surprised if they were dipping into their supply. They don’t notice an undersized shadow slipping past then.
Eventually, he strikes gold. Well. White. A whole room full of bricks of the stuff. Thirty minutes later, the warehouse is in flames. Two hours later, Alex is being shouted at by the handlers. Well, he did try calling them first. It’s not his fault they wouldn’t come and help him. Four hours after that, he’s on a plane back to Heathrow. Despite his exhaustion, he doesn’t sleep on the flight.
Exam results come out the third Thursday of August. Alex had sent Brooklands an addressed envelope months ago, and told them to post them to him. He has no desire to go in and pick them up.
He gets a B in French and an A in Spanish. Despite speaking both fluently, he was in Japan looking for stolen missile plans - no, really - during the year ten mocks. He has no idea how to take an exam. Sitting in a huge, silent sports hall for two hour stretches had nearly driven him mad. Every rustle had made him flinch like a bomb was going off. He’s not sure he answered a single question on either maths paper.
The rest of his results are a collection of Es and Us. The afternoon after his results come in, Jones calls him and asks him to come into the bank. For a friendly chat, she says. She doesn’t have any work for him. She just wants to know what his plans are.
Alex doesn’t want to go. He does.
Alex has nightmares. He has since Ian was killed and they sent him to Sayle. He’s had nightmares about being drowned and shot and burned and stung by a giant jellyfish and fed to crocodiles and waterboarded, and he’s had nightmares about watching Yassen Gregorovich bleed out beside him and being too weak to even lift his hands to cover the wound.
He doesn’t know if that’s true, if he tried to staunch the bleeding and was too exhausted to hold his arms up, or if he didn’t even bother to try. He can’t remember. In the nightmares, he’s paralyzed.
Lately, dreams of Yassen haven’t been nightmares, not in the traditional sense. Broad, hot hands sliding up the insides of his thighs. Bright, pale eyes devouring him alive. His protests brushed off, his hands batted aside. Sometimes it’s a rerun of what happened in Shanghai, but more often his brain is all too happy to invent something new for him.
Tonight it was a bed. Not the bed he fell asleep in tonight, and not the bed he slept on in Shanghai. He was tangled in layers upon layers of silky sheets, the edges of the bed nowhere in sight. Yassen was on top of him, a heavy, present weight between his thighs. The light was dim and warm, like candlelight, like firelight.
It’s hazy now. He thinks he got fucked, but he can’t remember more than that. He wouldn’t know what that actually felt like, not really. All he knows is that he was coming before he was even properly awake, hand shoved into his pyjama bottoms in his sleep.
Does he feel guilty? He should, he thinks. Sometimes he does. Mostly, he’s just resigned.
Yassen might hurt him. Yassen might be worse than MI6.
Alex has seen a lot of shit since he started working for MI6. He’s met a lot of men like Yassen. None of them have been as good, and very few of them have been as professional, but there have been a lot of them, and all of them have hurt him far more than Yassen ever did.
Ian’s death will never stop hurting, but Ian had dealt in death. At least his was quick. And there’s resentment there too - Alex loved his uncle, and still does, but Ian left him to Blunt, to Jones, to the bank. Alex will probably never forgive him for that.
He lies tangled in his sheets, shivering as his sweat cools in the night air. He probably won’t get back to sleep.