As usual, Alan Blunt didn’t seem particularly pleased to see him, preferring to study the file on the desk in front of him rather than the boy himself. It was the fifth or sixth time Alex had met the man in overall command of this section of MI6 and he still knew almost nothing about him. Blunt was about fifty, a man in a suit in an office. He didn’t seem to smoke and Alex couldn’t imagine him drinking either. Was he married? Did he have children? Did he spend his weekends walking in the park or fishing or watching football matches? Somehow Alex doubted it. He wondered if Blunt had any existence at all outside these four walls. He was a man defined by his work. His whole life was devoted to secrets, and in the end his own life had become a secret itself. He looked up from the neatly printed report.

“ Crawley had no right to involve you in this business,” he said. Alex said nothing. For once, he wasn’t sure that he disagreed.

“The Wimbledon tennis championships. You nearly got yourself killed.” He glanced quizzically at Alex. “And this business in Cornwall. I don’t like my agents getting involved in dangerous sports.”

“I’m not one of your agents,” Alex said.

“There’s enough danger in the job without adding to it,” Blunt went on, ignoring him. “What happened to the man on the jet ski?” he asked.

“We’re interrogating him now,” Mrs Jones replied.

The deputy head of Special Operations was wearing a grey trouser suit, with a black leather handbag that matched her eyes. There was a silver brooch on her lapel, shaped like a miniature dagger. It seemed appropriate.

She had been the first to visit Alex as he’d recovered in hospital in Newquay and she at least had been concerned about what had happened. Of course, she had shown little or no emotion. If anyone had asked, she would have said that she didn’t want to lose someone who had been useful to her and who might be useful again. But Alex suspected this was only half the story. She was a woman and he was fourteen years old. If Mrs Jones had a son, he could well be the same age as Alex. That made a difference-one that she wasn’t quite able to ignore.

“We found a tattoo on the man’s arm,” she continued. “It seems that he was also a member of the Big Circle gang.” She turned to Alex. “The Big Circle is a relatively new triad,” she explained. “It’s also, unfortunately, one of the most violent.”

“I think I’d noticed,” Alex said.

“The man you knocked out and refrigerated at Wimbledon was a Sai-b. That means ‘little brother’. You have to understand how these people work. You smashed their operation and made them lose face. That’s the last thing they can afford. So they sent someone after you. He hasn’t said anything yet but we believe he’s a Dai-io, or a ‘big brother’. He’ll have a rank of 438… that’s one under the Dragon Head, the leader of the triad. And now he’s failed too. It’s a little unfortunate, Alex, that as well as half-drowning him, you also broke his nose. The triad will take that as another humiliation.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Alex said. It was true. He remembered how the thruster had finally been torn away from his ankle. It wasn’t his fault that it had hit the man in the face.

“That’s not how they’ll see it,” Mrs Jones went on. She sounded like a schoolteacher. “What we’re dealing with here is Guan-shi.”

Alex waited for her to explain.

“Guan-shi is what gives Big Circle its power,” she said. “It’s a system of mutual respect. It ties all the members together. It essentially means that if you hurt one of them, you hurt them all. And if one of them becomes your enemy, they all do.”

“You attack one of their people at Wimbledon,” Blunt rasped, “they send another down to Cornwall.”

“You take out their man in Cornwall, the order goes out to the other members of the triad to kill you,” Mrs Jones said.

“How many other members are there?” Alex asked. “About nineteen thousand at the last count,” Blunt replied.

There was a long silence, punctured only by the distant traffic sixteen floors below.

“Every minute you stay in this country, you’re in danger,” Mrs Jones said. “And there’s not a great deal we can do. Of course, we have some influence with the triads. If we let the right people know that you’re protected by us, it may be possible to call them off. But that’s going to take time and the fact of the matter is, they’re probably working on the next plan of attack right now.”

“You can’t go home,” Blunt said. “You can’t go back to school. You can’t go anywhere on your own. That woman who looks after you, the housekeeper, we’ve already arranged for her to be sent out of London. We can’t take any chances.”

“So what am I meant to do?” Alex asked. Mrs Jones glanced at Blunt, who nodded. Neither of them looked particularly concerned and he suddenly realized that things had worked out exactly as they wanted. Somehow, without knowing it, he had played right into their hands.

“By coincidence, Alex,” Mrs Jones began, “a few days ago we had a request for your services. It came from an American intelligence service. The Central Intelligence Agency-or CIA as you probably know them. They need a young person for an operation they happen to be mounting and they wondered if you might be available.”

Alex was surprised. MI6 had used him twice and both times they had stressed that nobody was to know. Now, it seemed, they had been boasting about their teenage spy. Worse than that, they had even been preparing to lend him out, like a library book.

As if reading his mind, Mrs Jones raised a hand. “We had told them, of course, that you had no wish to continue in this line of work,” she said. “That was, after all, what you had told us. A schoolboy, not a spy. That’s what you said. But it does seem now that everything has changed. I’m sorry, Alex, but for whatever reason, you’ve chosen to go back into the field and unfortunately you’re in danger. You have to disappear. This might be the best way.”

“You want me to go to America?” Alex asked. “Not exactly America,” Blunt cut in. “We want you to go to Cuba… or, at least, to an island just a few miles south of Cuba. It’s called Cayo Esqueleto. That’s Spanish. It means-”

“Skeleton Key,” Alex said. “That’s right. Of course, there are plenty of keys off the coast of America. You’ll have heard of Key Largo and Key West. This one was discovered by Sir Francis Drake. The story goes that when he landed there, the place was uninhabited. But he found a single skeleton, a conquistador in full armour, sitting on the beach. That was how the island got its name. Anyway, no matter what it’s called, it’s actually a very beautiful place. A tourist resort. Luxury hotels, diving, sailing… We’re not asking you to do anything dangerous, Alex. Quite the contrary. You can think of this as a paid holiday. Two weeks in the sun.”

“Go on,” Alex said. He couldn’t help sounding doubtful.

“The CIA is interested in Cayo Esqueleto because of a man who lives there. He’s a Russian. He has a huge house-some might even call it a palace-on a sort of isthmus, that is to say, a narrow strip of land at the very northern tip of the island. His name is General Alexei Sarov.”

Blunt pulled a photograph out of the file and turned it round so that Alex could see. It showed a fit-looking man in military uniform. The picture had been taken in Red Square, Moscow. Alex could see the onion-shaped towers of the Kremlin behind him.

“Sarov belongs to a different age,” Mrs Jones said, taking over. “He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union. This wasn’t very long ago, Alex. The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down.” She stopped. “I suppose none of this means very much to you.”

“Well, it wouldn’t,” Alex said. “I was only two years old.”

“Yes, of course. But you have to understand, Sarov was a hero of the old Russia. He was made a general when he was only thirty-eight-the same year that his country invaded Afghanistan. He fought there for ten years, rising to be second in command of the Red Army. He had a son who was killed there. Sarov didn’t even go the funeral. It would have meant abandoning his men and he wouldn’t do that-not even for one day.”