The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

incredulously. “You rescheduled on the Director General? Alex, the Home Secretary will be there!”

“At ten,” he said. “Mereweather didn’t text back, so I’m guessing it’s okay.”

She shook her head. She was either flabbergasted by his actions, or doing a pretty good impression of it. “The agent I met in South Africa knew you,” she said. She had been thinking on Beard’s comments, his ridiculous anecdote. She couldn’t see the man she had just made love to in the shower as the same in Ryan Beard’s tale.

“Unlikely,” King said.

“I showed him our picture in Majorca. The one I carry in my purse.”

“What?” King stood up. He was around six-foot and towered over her. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“Alex?” she stared up at him. “I wasn’t sure he was from MI6. I knew you were, thought it was worth a shot. He was an embassy man. He would have given assistance to special operatives on missions.”

King turned around. He was shaking, enraged. He took a breath, a step back. “That was information I told you. Forester doctored my past, had me down as an unofficial asset working for MI5. He used that to bring me into MI5 for the operation. After he died, and I continued to work with MI5 and it was all kept official – pension updated, salary re-evaluated. I just went with it – so I could keep working with you. My past with MI6 was never known. By anybody.”

“But your name?”

“I used dozens of aliases with MI6. You know Alex King isn’t my birthname, I had a past. One I’m not proud of. The only people who knew me as Alex King in MI6 are all dead.”

“Dead?”

King nodded, leaned back on the countertop. “The director, the two deputies…” he said. “After I left MI6, I disappeared. But Charles Forrester found me, pulled at my conscience, used Jane’s name to get me to help him. Get me to come over to MI5. I should have moved on after that operation, changed my name, started a new life. But,” he paused, looked at her, his eyes softening. “I’d met you by then. And then, it was too late.”

Caroline looked up at him, then stepped in and cuddled him. She rested her head against his chest. She hadn’t told King she had told Beard his full name. She hadn’t seen King react like that, and didn’t feel she wanted to pour flames on the fire. She wondered if telling the MI6 agent King’s name would have repercussions. She eased backwards, touched his shoulder, rubbed him gently. “I know you’ve done a lot for your country, Alex. I know you’ve killed. And not just in the heat of battle, or in self-defence. But I didn’t know how renowned you were. Ryan Beard told me you went after a traitor in Switzerland. That you sat drinking a coffee and caught the man’s eye. You stared at him and left. The man went home and killed himself. Such was your reputation. He knew he was as good as dead.”

King laughed. “For crying out loud, what a load of bollocks!” he paused. “I was sent to pick him up. Bring him back for an interview without coffee. An interrogation. The police had already found him. His Russian paymasters had cut him off financially. The man was ruined, had nowhere to go. He couldn’t come home, he knew we were after him and he couldn’t use the assets he’d built up with the Russians. He topped himself after one too many peach schnapps.”

“Why so edgy then? Nobody else knows you worked with MI6. Why should Ryan Beard care?”

King shook his head. “Simon Mereweather knew something about me. Information that would only have been in MI6 recruitment files. I think he knows about my past. And that’s worrying, because there should be no reason for him to have looked.”

“And does that matter? It’s our opposite intelligence service. You worked overseas for them, now you work domestically for us.”

King said nothing, but pulled her towards him rested his hands on her shoulders. He knew then, as he looked into her glossy eyes, that he would never tell her what he had done. What action they had forced him to take when they had betrayed him, sent him into hell hoping that he would not return.

41

 

It was only the second time that King had attended a meeting on the top floor of the Security Service’s headquarters at Thames House. He had initially been brought into MI5 to work on an assignment with Charles Forester, the previous deputy director of operations, and taken his briefings outside of MI5’s headquarters. When Director Howard and the administration Deputy Director Elizabeth Chalmers had been killed in a terrorist attack on the building last year, much of MI5’s offices had been housed in Whitehall and a floor set aside at the River House, MI6’s distinct-looking headquarters on the other side of the Thames.

Both King and Caroline had taken briefings either in the field or in office suites in Whitehall. Now that Thames House was fully operation once more, King had only had one previous meeting. And it had been memorable.

King knew what he was. He was a blunt instrument. A hammer to hit nails. Much of the intelligence service’s most commendable work was done online. Its surveillance carried out by satellites. Its sentence handed down by drones and their lethal hellfire missiles. By many, King was viewed as a relic. A product of people still thinking in terms of the cold war. Times had changed, and men like King were outdated. The newly appointed director of MI5 had voiced this to King, then asked for his opinion. King had said if he truly believed that, then he wasn’t up to the appointment of Director.

Times had certainly changed, but a man’s eyes on the ground