This was the most difficult part, the movement that was hardest to learn but impossible to forget. The pop-up. Alex could feel the board travelling with the pulse of the wave. His speed and the speed of the water had become one. He brought his hands down, flat on the board, arched his back and pushed. At the same time, he brought his right leg forward. Goofy-footed. When he was snowboarding, he was exactly the same. But he didn’t care, as long as he could actually stand up without losing his balance, and already he was doing just that, balancing the two main forces, speed and gravity, as the thruster sliced diagonally across the wave.
He stood straight, his arms out, his teeth bared, perfectly centred on the board. He had done it! He was riding the Cribber. Sheer exhilaration coursed through him. He could feel the power of the wave. He was part of it. He was plugged into the world and although he must be travelling at sixty, seventy kilometres per hour, time seemed to have slowed down almost to a halt and he was frozen in this one, perfect moment that would be with him for the rest of his life. He yelled out loud, an animal cry that he couldn’t even hear. Spray rushed into his face, exploding around him. He could barely feel the thruster under his feet. He was flying. He had never been more alive.
And then he heard it over the roar of the waves. It was coming up fast to one side of him, the whine of a petrol engine. To hear anything mechanical here, at this time, was so unlikely that he thought he must have imagined it. Then he remembered the jet ski. It must have gone out to sea and then circled round, behind the waves. Now it was coming in fast.
His first thought was that the rider was “dropping in”. It was one of the unwritten laws of surfing. Alex was up and riding. This was his wave. The rider had no right to cut into his space. But at the same time, he knew that was crazy. Fistral Beach was practically deserted. There was no need to fight for space. And anyway, a jet ski coming after a surfer…it was unheard of.
The engine was louder now. Alex couldn’t see the jet ski. His entire concentration was fixed on the Cribber, on keeping his balance, and he didn’t dare turn round. He was suddenly aware of the rushing water, thousands of gallons of it, thundering under his feet. If he fell he would die, ripped apart before he could drown. What was the jet ski doing? Why was it coming so close?
Alex knew he was in danger quite suddenly and with total certainty. What was happening had nothing to do with Cornwall and his surfing holiday. His other life, his life with MI6, had caught up with him. He remembered being chased down the mountainside at Point Blanc and knew that the same thing was happening again. Who or why didn’t matter. He had just seconds to do something before the jet ski ran him down.
He flicked his head and saw it for just a second. A black nose like a torpedo. Gleaming chrome and glass. A man squatting low over the controls, his eyes fixed on Alex. The eyes were filled with hatred. They were less than a metre away.
There was only one thing Alex could do and he did it instantly, without thinking. The aerial is a move that demands split-second timing and total confidence. Alex twisted round and projected himself off the top of the wave and out into the air. At the same time, he crouched down and seized hold of the thruster, one hand on each side. Now he really was flying, suspended in midair as the wave rolled away beneath him. He saw the jet ski race past, covering the area where he had been only seconds before. He spun round, drawing an almost complete circle in the air. At the last moment, he remembered to place his foot right in the centre of the board. This would take all his weight when he landed.
The water rushed up to meet him. Alex finished his circle and plunged once again onto the face of the wave. It was a perfect landing. Water exploded around him but he remained upright and now he was just behind the jet ski. The rider turned back and Alex saw the look of astonishment on his face. The man was Chinese. Impossibly, incredibly, he was holding a gun. Alex saw it come up, water dripping off the barrel. This time there was nowhere he could go. He didn’t have the strength to try another aerial. With a shout, he threw himself off the board and forward, onto the jet ski. He felt a jolt, his leg almost being pulled off as his board was torn away by the suddenly malevolent water.
There was an explosion. The man had fired. But the bullet missed. Alex thought he felt it pass over his shoulder. At the same moment, his hands grabbed the man’s throat. His knees crashed into the side of the jet ski. And then the entire world was whipped away as man and machine lost control and tumbled into a spinning vortex of water. Alex’s leg jerked a second time and he felt the leash snap. He heard a shout. Suddenly the man wasn’t there any more. Alex was on his own. He couldn’t breathe. Water pounded down on him. He felt himself being sucked helplessly into it. He couldn’t struggle. His arms and legs were useless. He had no strength left. He opened his mouth to scream and the water rushed in.
Then his shoulder hit something hard and he knew he had reached the bottom of the sea and that this would have to be his grave. He had dared to play with the Cribber and the Cribber had taken its revenge. Somewhere, far above, another wave broke over him, but Alex didn’t see it. He lay where he was, finally at peace.
TWO WEEKS IN THE SUN
Alex wasn’t sure what was more surprising. To be still alive, or to find himself back in the London headquarters of the Special Operations division of MI6.
The fact that he was still breathing was, he knew, entirely down to Sabina. She had been sitting on the beach, watching in awe as he rode the Cribber towards her. She had seen the jet ski coming up behind him even before he did and had known instinctively that something was wrong. She had started running the moment Alex had leapt into the air and was already in the water by the time he crashed down next to the jet ski and then disappeared below the surface. Later on, she would say that there had been a collision… a terrible accident. From that distance it was impossible to see what had really taken place.
Sabina was a strong swimmer and luck was on her side. Although the water was murky and the waves still huge, she knew where Alex had gone down and she was there in less than a minute. She found him on her third dive, dragged his unconscious body to the surface and then pulled him ashore. She had learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at school and she used that knowledge now, pressing her lips against his, forcing the air into his lungs. Even then, she was sure that Alex was dead. He wasn’t breathing. His eyes were closed. Sabina pounded on his chest-once, twice-and was finally rewarded with a sudden spasm and a fit of coughing as Alex came to. By then, some of the other surfers had arrived. One of them had a mobile phone and called for an ambulance. There was no sign of the man on the jet ski.
Alex had been lucky too. As it turned out, he had ridden the Cribber just far enough to be near the end of its journey, when the wave had been at its weakest. A ton of water had fallen onto him, but five seconds earlier and it might have been ten tons. Also, he hadn’t been too far from the shore when Sabina found him. Any further out and she might never have found him at all.
Five days had passed since then.
It was Monday morning, the start of a new week. Alex was sitting in room 1605, on the sixteenth floor of the anonymous building in Liverpool Street. He had sworn that he would never return here. The man and the woman with him in the room were the last two people he wanted to see. And yet here he was. He had been drawn in as easily as a fish in a net.