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She met him when she was twenty-two. Fresh out of college, fresh out of training, and ready for her first operation as an agent within the CIA.
“Agent Knight, this is Agent Rider.”
“Please, call me Alex.”
He was blonde, tall, and fit. His smile was charming, and his charm was dashing, and his hair was to murder for. Tamara knew his type, and she wasn’t impressed, British accent or not.
“Tamara,” she said, shaking his hand. His handshake was firm, but in a way that was confident rather than aiming to intimidate. “I hear we’ll be working together on this.”
“Yeah, we will.”
“Agent Rider has a great deal of experience with the organisation you’ll be looking to interfere with.”
“Interfere with?” Tamara asked, glancing at her boss in surprise. “You don’t want us to shut them down?”
“SCORPIA serve a purpose,” her boss said. “We just need to make sure that they aren’t trying to expand beyond that. You’ll understand why after this meeting, we hope.”
“Okay,” she said, slightly confused. “Tell me about SCORPIA, then.”
Alex gestured toward the table, the chairs, and the stack of folders in a windowless basement room. “Shall we?”
She didn’t understand what the point was of keeping SCORPIA around by the end of the meeting. Blackmail. Corruption. Assasination. They were a highly organised group of international mercenaries whose specialism seemed to be terrorism. Their leadership was a who’s who of prominent defectors—people who had abandoned their careers because patriotism and idealism was less exciting or less profitable than causing chaos around the globe; sadists who would have faced charges from any civilised country and some of the others as well; masochists who needed a home.
What use did America have for this organisation?
Also missing from the conversation was how, exactly, Alex Rider brought this information to the table. There were no references to surveillance, no information about how he had found the information, no insiders, no people who had been bought off, no agents in deep cover.
She had raised it, concerned for the veracity of the information, but he had simply smiled. Her boss told them to move on, and he did. Quickly, at that.
It made her instincts itch, and she hadn’t been one of the most successful agents at the academy because she had poor instincts.
But, nonetheless, his information was accurate. Bit by bit, person by person, they identified the worst excesses of SCORPIA and brought them to heel. Never enough to cripple the organisation, against her better judgement, but enough to prevent them from wrecking the United States and their allies in somebody else’s name.
Julia Rothman, one of their founding members, removed from the board entirely. Her head vaporised into a mist of red smoke by an anti-material rifle in the hands of Alex Rider himself, positioned on a hill nearly a mile and a half away. An impressive shot, but one he had waved off as ‘good training.’
Simon Thorne, a billionaire with a plan to bring down the American government, quietly taken to one side and arrested at Los Angeles Airport.
Winston Yu, one of SCORPIA’s most promising up-and-coming assets, identified and tracked down. His networks in the Asian peninsula dismantled by the Australia secret services.
Herod Sayle, a computer genius with a vendetta against the British Home Secretary, outed for tax evasion and computer fraud before his company ever took off. His technology, supposedly allowing for non-sterile environments for microchip fabrication, nothing but vaporware.
“How did you know about Sayle,” Tamara asked him one evening, as they sat outside in the late evening sun at a restaurant in Washington, celebrating two years working together. Two years tracking down everything that was wrong with them. “He hadn’t even been contacted by them when we started looking into him. We both know that.”
“Experience,” Alex said, with a wry smile. “And we both know I can’t tell you more than that.”
“Will you ever be able to?”
“I hope so. Eventually.”
The wine loosened her tongue. “Maybe we should get married. You could tell me then.”
Alex flushed. “Sorry?”
Tamara blushed too. “Ignore me.”
And he did. Until the next day, when he asked her if she wanted to go for drinks again.
“What are we celebrating?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
She thought about it for a day. There were rules against fraternisation, but those were only really for people who were managing each other or might end up managing each other. She wasn’t even sure if he worked for the same intelligence agency as her. He was some kind of consultant, technically, as far as she knew, for all that he seemed to work for them full time. There wasn’t really a reason not to.
And there were plenty of reasons to do it. He was fit. She’d known that since the moment they met. Discreet, too, as far as she knew. And, more importantly, he got it. Got what the life of an intelligence officer was like.
She’d picked up that much from the evenings they’d spent together, eating cold pizza out of boxes as they pieced together everything they needed to know.
Alex spoke with the weary certainty of a man that had found the career that he felt he needed to do. A man who knew that what he was doing was important and needed to be done by him. How he knew about SCORPIA, and what his history was, she didn’t know.
She didn’t even know where he had gone to school. Where he was born. Why he had moved to America from the UK, where his accent suggested he had grown up.
But he had asked her out on a date, and she had enough information to know that she wanted to say yes.
So she did.
Her boss gave her a look in their next meeting. “I hear you’re getting involved with Agent Rider.”
“With all due respect, sir, my personal business is not any of your business.”
“I think there’s some things you ought to be aware of about his past, Tamara.”
“We have worked together closely over the last few years, sir. There are a lot of things which I know he cannot discuss and, frankly, which I suspect you should not be discussing with me either.”
Her boss looked unhappy. “Ask him about Stormbreaker.”
“Stormbreaker?”
“One of his first missions.”
“If it will make you happy, I can do that.” She hesitated, but let a little acid seep into her voice as she moved it decidedly on. “Shall we discuss my personal development plan and potential promotion opportunities next?”
She didn’t ask for nearly three months, enjoying the newness of what they had. And then, one evening, when they were lying on the old ratty couch in her flat, relaxing together, it slipped out.
Alex sat up straight. “Who told you about that?”
“Director Byrne.”
Alex frowned. “He shouldn’t have mentioned that.”
“He told me it was your first mission, and told me to ask about it.”
“That was a long time ago.”
She reached up and caught his face, gently turning it toward her, staring into his eyes. “How long ago?”
Alex looked back. There was a hint of vulnerability on his face. Something real in the way that there often wasn’t with the man she was coming to love. Like all agents, he was a trained liar, and they both knew well enough to leave alone at times.
“Do you know how old I am?” he asked, suddenly.
“You can’t be much older than me,” she said. “I guessed you were late twenties, maybe.”
“I’m twenty-seven,” he said, “and I’ve been working with Joe for nearly thirteen years.”
It took her a second, then she realised. “But—”
He cut her off. “And the first time we met, it was because I was lent out to Joe by my previous employers.”
There was a storm of emotions inside her. A lot of turmoil. British accent, child spy, trained sniper. There were a lot of stories that she could piece together from that, and none of them made her happy. All of them made her angry.
“How old?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen!”
“My last relative died. He worked for them. They decided I would be the perfect person to finish his last case. That was Stormbreaker.”
“And you said yes?”
“There was an American student who lived with me and my uncle. She was on a visa. She was also the last person who could act as a guardian for me after his death. The last one I wanted to, that is. They said that if I didn’t help, then her visa would be revoked.”
“Blackmail.”
“You could put it like that.”
“Which country was it?”
Alex gave her a look. “You know there’s things I can’t tell you.”
“And you can’t tell me that?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
Alex hesitated. “Do you trust me?”
“I do.”
“Then trust me when I say that when you understand why I can’t answer that question, I will be able to tell you everything.”
She had meant it when she said she trusted him, but that was a big ask. She trusted that he knew what he was doing when he asked that.
Their work on SCORPIA continued together, relationship or not.
Yi Fan, an ambitious surgeon from China, was their next big win. They caught him in a warehouse in Malaysia, up to his elbows in blood, surrounded by political prisoners he was harvesting for his organs. His only comment, when they finally took him down, was that he regretted not getting to finish his book.
From what Tamara heard, the CIA were considering letting him. The man was a prodigy in the art of pain, and enhanced interrogation was his specialty. The organ donation thing was, as it turned out, just a side-gig. His way to pay the bills. The CIA had an interest in enhanced interrogation.
“I knew him as Dr Three,” Alex said to her a few weeks later, out of the blue, on an evening when he had turned on the news and stared at it for a long, long time. “He had joined SCORPIA when I first met him.”
“I thought they were still only courting him.”
“Yes,” Alex said. “They were.”
And he said no more.
Tamara’s instincts were itching again, but Alex had made his position clear. One day she would understand why he couldn’t say anything, and then he would explain everything.
Eventually, she was transferred out of what was rapidly becoming the international terrorism and mercenary actions unit. Alex was appointed the lead of it and, as Joe pointed out, it would be ill-advised for her to serve directly underneath her boyfriend of several years.
She moved to the American division, and started going undercover. White collar crimes, mostly, but occasional diversions into terrorism when they got too ambitious. Which happened more frequently than she had originally expected.
She hadn’t expected billionaires to be particularly ethical, but she was taken aback by how unethical they ended up being.
Of all the ones she met, Nikolei Drevin was the worst. A first-generation immigrant, the only thing bigger than his wallet was the chip on his shoulder he had for anything that he deemed unreasonable oversight. Obsessed with space, and Mars, and the journey to it, he was as slimy as anyone Tamara had ever met.
Alex froze when she mentioned who she was currently assigned to.
“Drevin?” he muttered, his eyes troubled. “I didn’t realise he was in America already.”
“Signed the paperwork on his visa last year.”
“Be careful, okay?”
“It’s my job, Alex.”
“Drevin is trouble. And if I’m saying that then you know that—”
“Is this another one of those things you can’t tell me?”
Alex winced. It had been an occasional comment throughout the four years of their relationship. A mildly sore point between them which came up from time to time. Things which Alex couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, tell her about.
“I think I’ll be able to talk to you about this one,” he said. “I’ll have to check a few things.”
“Check a few things.”
“Yeah.”
“With who?”
“Joe.”
That was more information than she normally got. And he looked unusually serious. No quips, no comments, just quiet concern for her about Drevin.
She kissed him softly, “You chat to Joe. I’ll be careful.”
Then, a year later, it all made sense.
Drevin. Him and his kid. Force Three. The ‘agent’ on loan from MI6.
She knew that agent.
Alex.
She shut off her emotions, locking them all away. Be cold, be distant, don’t give it away. She was smart enough to know that there was something she shouldn’t give away here. That there had to be a reason. She trusted Alex enough for that.
The island, the space port, the scuba incident.
The kiss, because Alex was Alex, no matter how old he wasn’t, and the teen looked like she was the sun, the moon, the stars.
She had spent years seeing that look on an older man’s face.
She knew that look well.
It was almost enough to cool her rage.
Almost.
The failure, the capture.
They beat her, demanded answers from her, answers she didn’t have.
Then they came for her. They saved her.
She went home to her Alex. The adult Alex. The one who had, what—travelled through time?
She stormed into their house, the soreness from being shot and beaten by one of Drevin’s goons barely felt through the haze of anger she had accumulated in the taxi from the office.
“Tamara! I didn’t know you were going to—”
Alex’s head snapped back as she slapped him.
He looked at her for a second, stunned. Then recognition lit up his face.
“Ah,” he said. “You met him.”
“Fourteen, Alex!” She shouted, “Fourteen! And they put him in a fucking rocket and sent him up to space.”
“He will make it back to Earth safely.”
“You mean that you will. Or did. Or—”
He rubbed at his cheek, wincing slightly. “Yeah.”
“How the fuck did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “There was a mission in Asia. One of SCORPIA’s crazy ideas. Something to do with rebirth and second lives and the forever after. About five years from now. Or a bit over ten years ago. I interrupted what they were doing and the next thing I knew, I was in China and phones weren’t so good as they get.”
Tamara threw her hands up and paced around their apartment. Around their life together. They had holiday snaps up on the wall, for God’s sake. “And you couldn’t tell me?”
“I told Joe. We started seeing changes to what we talked about. We kept it small. Kept it simple.”
“SCORPIA. That’s how you know so much about them. About who they are, how they operate, where they operate.”
“They trained me, originally. Only briefly, and they never trusted me, but even a little information known in advance makes a big difference.”
“Did this one get trained by them?”
Alex hesitated. “We’re not sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
“We couldn’t work it out. But we think so.”
“You couldn’t stop it?”
“There were more important things to stop.”
“Like what?”
“There was an attack. Eleventh of September, 2001. I wanted to stop that.”
Tamara stared at him. “I remember that happening.”
“Some things we can’t stop. We worked that one out. My uncle still died. They still recruited me. We couldn’t stop that.”
“But I remember it happening. You said you stopped it. The plane hit the tower. I remember it.”
“One plane hit one tower,” Alex shrugged. “There were four planes that day that were supposed to get hijacked. The first time around, three of them hit buildings. Thousands of deaths. Worst terrorist attack on American soil.”
“And you stopped it?”
“We saved nearly two thousand lives.”
She stared at him. Then she shoved herself back to her feet and paced around the room again. “What the fuck do we do now?”
“Order pizza, watch a movie, let you rest and recover from what Drevin did to you?”
“You knew what Drevin was going to do to me?”
Alex shook his head. “No. In my original life, you were taken away. You seemed fine when I saw you. Nothing like what happened this time.”
“They shot me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They beat me.”
“Are you angry?”
“Yes!”
“At me?”
She paused. She thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“What I did made things worse for you. I’m sorry that my choices hurt you like this.”
“You don’t know that it was your choices.”
Alex stayed quiet.
“Fuck!” she screamed. “How the fuck have you lived like this?”
“You helped.”
“Shut up.”
Alex held up his hands.
“Did you plan all of this?” She gestured between them. “Did you make sure that we met, or—”
“The first time I knew Joe was going to introduce me to you was the day I shook your hand. He doesn’t know we met either. Though I’d guess he’s worked it out by now.”
Tamara flushed. Joe had, indeed, had some words to say after their debrief about the fact she’d kissed a teenage boy, no matter who he would turn out to be. He’d wished her luck too, with this exact conversation she supposed in hindsight.
“I wasn’t even intending on anything like this. Knowing some of what is coming is hard to live with. And not knowing what is coming is worse, sometimes.”
Tamara folded her arms. “Explain.”
“Do you remember that flood in Africa a few years ago? The crazy guy. McCain.”
“Yeah.”
“That didn’t happen for a few more years originally. I stopped it.”
“You stopped it.”
“Not this time. Killed hundreds. My fault.”
Tamara didn’t know what to say.
“And other stuff too. I was a kid, last time around. What nineteen year old bothers to read the newspaper? Keeps up on current affairs? 2008 caught me off guard.” Alex looked guilty. Lost, even. “If I had been better informed. If I had known. If I had just been interested the first time around—”
“—and so you focused on SCORPIA.”
“Before I came back, SCORPIA was on the rise again. Everything I’d done to shut them down had never been enough. Sixteen million people killed at their hands. For their clients. For their egos and their wallets. And now? In this world? They’ll be lucky if they can organise a piss-up in a brewery.”
For a moment, Tamara tried to imagine it. Tried to imagine coming back from the future to a world you knew far less well than you might hope you did. Knowing what mistakes had been made, and trying to stop a few of them, only for things to go wrong in ways you couldn’t expect. It hurt her brain.
It was too much.
She thought she was ready for this, but she wasn’t.
It was far too much.
She sat down next to the love of her life.
“I want pepperoni,” she said, “and we’re watching one of my films tonight.”
“We can talk about it if you want to,” Alex said. “You know now. There isn’t much more I can hide from you that you don’t already—”
“Pepperoni,” she said, curtly. “And we will talk about this tomorrow.”
He ordered it mutely.
“And a footrub,” she said, imperiously. “In penance.”
It wasn’t her feet that were hurting really, but a foot rub was a compromise between showing she wasn’t going to kill him and giving her the space that she needed to process it.
Alex snorted.
“I’m serious,” she said, putting her feet in his lap. “You have a lot of apologising to do.”
“I can do that,” he said.
“And tell Joe we’re taking three months off.”
“To talk?”
She looked over at him, and sighed. There were a lot of things to be angry about. This wasn’t one of them. She patted his arm fondly. Reassuringly.
“To talk,” she confirmed.
Alex sighed, relief evident in the way his shoulders rose, in the way tension vanished from his face.
They sat in silence for a moment, a fragile truce between them.
Then Alex broke the silence. “So did you kiss him this time around?”
Tamara blushed.
“‘Cus you know he isn’t me, right?”
Tamara glared at him.
“And I’m just saying that you’re going to have given him a lot of really awkward and confusing dreams about older women which—”
“Alex, shut up.”
He laughed, and it wasn’t at her, and that was fine, and Tamara wondered whether he was going to tell her about the ring he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk now that he knew his secrets.
She wasn’t quite sure yet, but she thought she might hope so.
Three months to talk.
That, she thought, would be enough to learn about who Alex had really been, and who he really was, and whether any of it was different to the Alex she knew.
She doubted it.