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Alex had known that things were fucked up since about a month after Ian died.
He’d caught up on his homework and he was almost caught up on his catch-up work, and so it was one of the rare evenings where he’d been able to decide what he was going to do with his time. He’d chosen to spend it with Tom.
“I still can’t believe you’re a spy,” Tom told him, tossing the XBOX controller across the room.
“They need me,” Alex told him. “I’m the only person that can do this.”
“Right,” said Tom. “The only hope of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Island is one fourteen year old twat from West London.”
Alex laughed.
Tom didn’t. “Like how doomed is this country if that is true? You’re failing maths, for fuck’s sake.”
“I don’t think calculus is very relevant to being a spy.”
“I don’t think any of the other spies have to work out whether or not it might be relevant.”
“Have you met them?”
Alex shrugged, “A few.”
“But when you go out on missions–”
“Play the game, Tom. I’m here to relax.”
Tom shut up dutifully. For five minutes. And then he paused the game and looked over at his friend. “Alex, I’m just saying, this is fucked up. You know that, right?”
Alex shrugged. “Yeah. But what can you do?”
“Not be a spy?”
Alex thought of Alan Blunt’s reaction to him trying to resign. Thought about Alan Blunt’s careful threats against Jack. Against her ability to finish her degree and have a career and escape all the things that were going on in her life. Against her wellbeing. Mental, physical, spiritual.
“I’m not a spy right now,” Alex said.
Then he unpaused the game.
It wasn’t like Tom was wrong. It was fucked up. But there wasn’t much he could do about it, and he enjoyed the work, and Britain did need him, right?
Six months later, Alex had known he was wrong about a lot of things. He hadn’t quite appreciated how much worse things could get.
He looked down at the gravestone. Jack’s gravestone.
She hadn’t been his mother, or his sister, or even much of a friend in some ways. She was a decade older than him, and friendships were hard when you had that kind of difference. Jack had been more interested in men than boys, and whilst she had cared for him, Alex–
Alex broke down in tears.
He couldn’t tell the usual lies to himself today.
Fuck this shit.
He’d been on his way back from school today. His first day at school in nearly a month. His teachers’ eyes were watchful. Suspicious. His classmates’ eyes were worse. Judgemental, perhaps, or even mocking. On the bad days, scared.
Alex Rider, the orphan, had become Alex Rider, the druggie. Alex Rider, the criminal.
Even Tom had started to keep away from him. Not because Tom was scared of him, but because Tom was scared of what Alex was turning into. Of what MI6 was making him into. Of what everyone else in that world was doing to him.
Sometimes Alex thought that part of him had died in Malagosto. Perhaps it was the waterboarding, or the shooting, or the fact that everyone involved had betrayed everyone else involved a dozen times over before two months had passed. Whatever it was, he hadn’t made it back intact.
Alex Rider and Tom Harris had been friends.
Whatever Alex was now was not the one that Tom Harris could be friends with.
It was better that way, Alex told himself, that Tom was away from it all. It lowered the risk that someone might use Tom to hurt him, like they’d used Jack to hurt him. All it had taken was one small slip up in the field. The wrong age enough to send the terrorists he was infiltrating down a different route. For them to find out the truth, and then to act on it, to tear his life apart.
Alex collapsed amidst the tombstones, too tired to care that it felt disrespectful to sit on a grave like this.
Britain didn’t really need him, as far as Alex could work out. Sure, he was useful, but he was fourteen. He didn’t know his Shakespeare from his Marlowe, and they wanted him to get involved in handling international geopolitics. He didn’t really know where most of the countries they were sending him to were and they definitely weren’t giving him the time to work it out.
And, of course, it hadn’t taken long after Jack’s death for him to realise that MI6 was quietly controlling everything they needed to in the background of his life. They called themselves the Bank, and that was because they were obsessed by money. His uncle’s pension, his dad’s pension, the Rider family assets. All trapped in obscure constructs that someone like him wouldn’t be able to get them out of. Not until he was 18, and that was if he was lucky.
They wouldn’t show him the complete contract, but Alex had found time to do some research when he was out of their eyes. Some of the trusts that were set up in the UK didn’t allow the beneficiary to access the funds directly until he was thirty.
A lifetime away, almost.
And he wasn’t blind to the irony that he was waiting until he was in a warlord’s camp in the middle of Africa to research his British trust fund.
Alan Blunt was a fucking jerk, that was what Alex was saying.
Years drifted by and Alex used every moment he was free of their eyes to investigate it further. Occasionally, just occasionally, he could find ways to get a little freedom. Cash left over from an expenses account. A wallet lifted from a target. Never enough to do anything with, but enough to explore some ideas.
A phone that they didn’t have eyes on.
A laptop kept safely away from the home.
Nothing that he could use too often, but enough to give him tools. Options. Opportunities.
To keep an eye on his friends. To get the occasional message out to them, even. To let them know that he was still alive, for as much as that was worth to them. They rarely replied, which was probably good, but Alex got the feeling that they wanted him out of MI6 almost as much as he did.
And then there was everything else that he could get into. Like opportunities for a little more information than he should.
Enough, for example, to dig into the housekeeper that Blunt had so kindly provided after Jack’s death.
Her name was Lucy.
She was a prostitute.
Or, at least, had been.
Alex had found her profile on the wrong kind of website, with the kind of photos that made grown men pause and consider spending a few thousand pounds on a night of passion.
It made Alex slightly ill, knowing that this woman had been controlled by Blunt. That this is what Blunt had made her do. He could imagine the kind of clientele that she had been asked to provide her services for.
But, given enough time, the little bit of freedom he’d won had given him the opportunity to work out what made her tick.
She had a child, as it turned out. The lovechild of someone powerful enough to hush her up if she made a fuss. Blunt was the kinder option for keeping it quiet, it seemed.
Alex bought her kid a box of Lego for their birthday and slid it across the table to her over breakfast without comment.
Her face went white.
He caught her as she fainted.
“I’m not threatening you,” he told her, once she woke up enough to sip on the cup of tea he’d made for her.
Milky, with two sugars, just how she liked it.
“But you know–”
“Do you know why they put you here?” he asked.
“They said you were dangerous.”
“I am very dangerous,” Alex agreed, angry that it was true. “And I am fifteen.”
“Fifteen?” Her eyes widened. “But–”
“Perhaps we could come to an arrangement.”
“What do you want?”
“Your silence.”
She looked confused.
Alex took a breath, and then took a risk. He put his phone on the table. The one he wasn’t supposed to have.
She looked at it, then she looked at him, then her eyes flicked to the camera behind his shoulder. Where it couldn’t see what was on the table between them. She understood immediately.
“Children should not be in this world,” she told him. “Not now. Not ever.”
“It wasn’t my choice.”
She understood immediately. She thought about it for a second, and then she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I can keep it secret.”
Alex slid the phone back into this pocket, and pushed the Lego across the table. “As an apology for the misunderstanding.”
She picked it up and put it in her bag silently. Then she turned to him. “What would you have done if I said no?”
Alex shrugged. “I would have learnt a lot about MI6.”
And his small gamble paid off in a way he didn’t expect.
He nodded at the flight attendant as she passed him a coke and a little plastic cup. His ‘dad’ next to him on the plane snorted. “That’s the third one of those. Keep it up and we’ll need to see the dentist when you get back.”
“I think I’m allowed to relax a little,” Alex told the field agent. “We’re on holiday, right?”
“Just because I got us tickets to the football doesn’t mean that you should rot your teeth.”
It was a role that the field agent was clearly uncomfortable playing, Alex thought, which was precisely why they were practicing it on the plane. That and the fact that if he was focusing on getting their cover right before it mattered, then he wouldn’t notice that Alex was sitting tall enough in his seat that the envelope underneath his jumper wouldn’t stand out.
All it had taken was one letter, Alex thought, for Blunt’s little plan to collapse.
His mother, her pension, the trust fund he set up for him.
The one which, at the age of sixteen, became his.
Lucy had passed the letter to him without a word, sliding it between the other random junk that came through the door. She hadn’t said a word, but she hadn’t turned up for work the week before he left for Brazil either.
She wasn’t stupid.
That and Alex had helped her make her own plans, where he could. Put her in touch with a few people who might be able to help, slid her some of the cash he’d been hiding, did the things for her that he’d wished someone had been able to do for him.
Loyalty went both ways. That was what Alex had learnt. Money mattered, but it was not just money that mattered.
He smiled at his fake father. “I think I’m going to get some sleep,” he said. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us, right?”
Florida was eight hours away.
It was a shame, Alex thought, that this agent was going to lose track of him in the airport.
It was a shame, Alex thought, that this agent was going to have to answer questions about where his teenage son went in the middle of an airport.
And it was a shame, Alex thought, that he wouldn’t get to be a fly on the wall when Alan Blunt realised one of his assets had flown the nest.
How many countries could he get to from the busiest airport in Florida?
Alex smiled as he drifted off into the arms of Morpheus.
That was a question that he thought MI6 might not enjoy answering.