SPY LIFE

MI6

ALAN OPENED HIS EYES. So he was still alive! That was a nice surprise. He was lying on a bed in a large, comfortable room. The bed was modern, but the room was old with beams running across the ceiling, a stone fireplace, and narrow windows in an ornate wooden frame. He had seen rooms like this in books when he was studying Shakespeare. He would have said the building was Elizabethan. It had to be somewhere in the country. There was no sound of traffic. Outside he could see trees. Someone had undressed him. His school uniform was gone. Instead he was wearing loose pajamas, silk from the feel of them. From the light outside he would have guessed it was midmorning. His eyes scanned the room looking for small details with his analysing green eyes. He found his watch lying on the table beside the bed and he reached out for it. The time was twelve o‟clock. It had been around half past four when he had been shot with what must have been a drugged dart. He had lost a whole night and half a day. There was a bathroom leading off from the bedroom—bright white tiles and a huge shower behind a cylinder of glass and chrome. Alan stripped off the pajamas and stood for five minutes under a jet of steaming water. He felt better after that. He went back into the bedroom and opened the closet. Someone had been to his house in Chelsea. All his clothes were here, neatly hung up. He took out a pair of Gap combat trousers, Nike sweatshirt and sneakers, got dressed, then sat on the bed and waited. About fifteen minutes later there was a knock and the door opened. A young Asian woman in a nurse‟s uniform came in, beaming. “Oh, you‟re awake. And dressed. How are you feeling? Not too groggy, I hope. Please come this way. Mr. Spencer is expecting you for lunch.” Alan hadn‟t spoken a word to her. He followed her out of the room, along a corridor and down a flight of stairs. The house was indeed Elizabethan, with wooden panels along the corridors, ornate chandeliers, and oil paintings of old bearded men in tunics and ruffs. The stairs led down into a tall galleried room with a rug spread out over flagstones and a fireplace big enough to park a car in. A long, polished wooden table had been set for three. There was something about the person sitting at the table that made his skin crawl. And yet the man was ordinary to look at. Gray suit, gray hair, gray lips, and gray eyes. His face was expressionless, the eyes behind the square, gunmetal spectacles, completely empty. Perhaps that was what had disturbed Alan. Whoever this man was, he seemed to have less life than anyone in the cemetery. Above or below ground. "Thats Mr Mark Spencer" The woman wispered.

there was a dark, rather masculine woman with a strange, oval shaped head chewing gum were already sitting down. "Mrs. Spencer?" alex thought to himself

“Alan.” Mark smiled briefly as if it was something he didn‟t enjoy doing. “It‟s good of you to join us.” Alan sat down. “You didn‟t give me a lot of choice.” “Yes. I don‟t quite know what Paul was thinking of, having you shot like that, but I suppose it was the easiest way. May I introduce my colleague, Mrs. Sani.” The woman nodded at Alan. Her eyes seemed to examine him minutely, but she said nothing.

“Who are you?” Alan asked. “What do you want with me?” “I‟m sure you have a great many questions. But first, let‟s eat…” Spencer must have pressed a hidden button or else he was being overheard, for at that precise moment a door opened and a waiter—in white jacket and black trousers—appeared carrying three plates. “I hope you like meat,” Spencer continued. “Today it‟s carre‟d„agneu.”

“You mean, roast lamb.”

“The chef is French.”

Alan waited until the food had been served. Spencer and Mrs. Sani drank red wine. He stuck to water. Finally, Spencer began. “As I‟m sure you‟ve gathered,” he said, “the MATIRIX INSURANCE COMPANY is not a Insurance Company. In fact, it doesn‟t exist … it‟s nothing more than a cover. And it follows, of course, that your dad had nothing to do with Insurance. He worked for me. My name is Spencer. You've given me quite the trouble by avoiding and running for two years which was very courageous. Your dad was not a criminal. I am the chief executive of the Special Operations Division of MI6. And your Dad was, for want of a better word, a spy.” Alan couldn‟t help smiling. “You mean … like James Bond?” “Similar, although we don‟t go in for numbers. Double 0 and all the rest of it. Your dad was a field agent, highly trained and very courageous and criminal minded. He successfully completed assignments in Iran, Washington, Hong Kong, and Havana … to name but a few. I imagine this must come as a bit of a shock for you.” Alan thought about the dead man, what he had known of him. His privacy. His long absences abroad. And the times he had come home injured. A bandaged arm one time. A bruised face another. Little accidents, Alan had been told. But now it all made sense. “I‟m not shocked,” he said.

Blunt cut a neat slice off his meat. “Andrew Paul‟s luck ran out on his last mission,” he went on. “He had been working undercover here in England, in Cornwall, and was driving back to London to make a report when he was killed. Mrs. Jones here is our head of operations. It was she who gave your Dad his last assignment.”

“We‟re very sorry to have lost him, Alex.” The woman spoke for the first time. She didn‟t sound very sorry at all.

“Do you know who killed him?”

“Yes .

“Are you going to tell me?”

“No. Not now.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don‟t need to know. Not at this stage.”

“All right.” Alan considered what he did know. “My Dad was a spy. Thanks to you he‟s dead. I found out too much so you knocked me out and brought me here. Where am I, by the way?”

“This is one of our training centers,” Mrs. Sani said.

“You‟ve brought me here because you don‟t want me to tell anyone what I know. Is that what this is all about? Because if it is, I‟ll sign the Official Secrets Act or whatever it is you want me to do, but then I‟d like to go. This is all crazy, anyway. And I‟ve had enough. I‟m out of here.” Spencer coughed quietly. “It‟s not quite as easy as that,” he said. “Why not?” “It‟s true that what you know and what I‟m about to tell you must go no further. But the fact of the matter is, Alan, that we need your help.”

“My help?”

“Yes.”

He paused. “Have you heard of a man called MANTIS HARID?” Alan thought for a moment. “I‟ve seen his name in the newspapers. He‟s something to do with technology. And he owns Casinos. Doesn‟t he come from somewhere in USA?”

“Yes. From Texas.” Spencer took a sip of wine. “Let me tell you his story, Alan. I‟m sure you‟ll find it of interest. "Mantis Harid was born in complete poverty in the backstreets of Ohio. His father was a begger. His mother took in washing. He had nine brothers and four sisters, all living together in three small rooms along with the family goat.

Young Mantis never went to school and he should have ended up unemployed, unable to read or write, like the rest of them. “But when he was eight, something occurred that changed his life. He was walking down bergner road—in the middle of Ohio—when he happened to see an upright Cupboard fall out of a fourteenth-story window. Apparently it was being moved and it somehow overturned. Anyway, there were a couple of English tourists walking along the pavement underneath and they would both have been crushed—no doubt about it—except at the last minute Mantis threw himself at them and pushed them out of the way. The cupboard missed them by an inch. “Of course, the tourists were enormously grateful to the youngwaif and it now turned out that they were very rich. They made inquiries about him and discovered how poor he was … the very clothes he was wearing had been passed down by all nine of his brothers. And so, out of gratitude, they more or less adopted him. Flew him out of Ohio to Texas and put him into a school over here, where he made astonishing progress. He got excellent exam results and—here‟s an amazing coincidence—at the age of fifteen he actually found himself sitting next to a boy who would grow up to become prime minister of Great Britain. Our present prime minister, in fact. The two of them were at school together. “I‟ll move quickly forward. After school, Mantis went to Cambridge, where he got a degree in Physcology. He then set out on a career that went from success to success. His own Casinos and Bars as well as his own Cryto blockchains… But what drew him to our attention was his most recent invention. A quite revolutionary computer that he calls the NINTENTION....”