Skeleton Key Read online

  Sabina had seen him hesitate. “What d’you think?” she asked.

  “I don’t know…” Alex replied and realized he was shouting to make himself heard above the roar of the waves.

  “The sea’s too strong!” Sabina was a good surfer. The morning before, Alex had watched her skilfully manoeuvring some nasty reefbreaks close to the shore. But now she looked uncertain. “Maybe we should go back to bed!” she yelled.

  Alex took in the whole scene. There were another half-dozen surfers on the beach and, in the far distance, a man steadying a jet ski in the shallow water. He knew that he and Sabina would be the youngest people there. Like her, he was wearing a three millimetre neoprene wetsuit and boots which would protect him from the cold. So why was he shivering? Alex didn’t have his own board but had rented an Ocean Magic thruster. Sabina’s was a wider, thicker board, going for stability rather than speed, but Alex preferred the thruster for its grip and the feeling of control provided by its three fins. He was glad also that he had chosen an eight-foot-four. If he was going to catch waves as big as these, he was going to need the extra length.

  If…

  Alex wasn’t sure he was going into the water. The waves looked about twice as tall as him and he knew that if he made a mistake he could all too easily get killed. Sabina’s parents had forbidden her to go in if the sea looked too rough and he had to admit, it had never looked rougher. He watched another wave come crashing down and might have turned back if he hadn’t heard one surfer calling to another, the words whipping across the empty sands.

  “The Cribber!”

  It couldn’t be true. The Cribber had come to Fistral Beach. Alex had heard the name many times. The Cribber had become a legend not just in Cornwall but throughout the surfing world. Its first recorded visit had been in September 1966, more than twenty feet high, the most powerful wave ever to hit the English coast. Since then there had been occasional sightings, but few had seen it and fewer still had managed to take the ride.

  “The Cribber! The Cribber!” The other surfers were calling its name, whooping and shouting. He watched them dance across the sand, their boards over their heads. Suddenly he knew that he had to go into the water. He was too young. The waves were too big. But he would never forgive himself if he missed the chance.

  “I’m going!” he shouted and ran forward, carrying his board in front of him, the tail connected to his ankle by a tough urethane leash. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sabina raise a hand in a gesture of good luck, but by then he had reached the edge of the sea and felt the cold water grip his ankles. He threw the board down and dived on top of it, the momentum carrying him forward. And then he was lying flat on his stomach, his legs stretched out behind him, his hands paddling furiously over the top of the board. This was the most exhausting part of the journey. Alex concentrated on his arms and shoulders, keeping the rest of his body still. He had a long way to go. He needed to conserve energy.

  He heard a sound above the pounding of the sea and noticed the jet ski pulling away from the shore. That puzzled him. PWCs – personal water craft – were rare in Cornwall and he certainly hadn’t seen this one before. Normally they were used to tow surfers out to the bigger waves, but this jet ski was striking out on its own. He could see the rider, hooded, in a black wetsuit. Was he – or she – planning to ride the Cribber on a machine?

  He forgot about it. His arms were getting tired now and he hadn’t even made it halfway. His cupped hands scooped the water and he felt himself shoot forward. The other surfers were well ahead of him. He could see the point where the waves crested, about twenty metres away. A mountain of water rose up in front of him and he duck-dived through it. For a moment he was blind. He tasted salt and the chill of the water hammered into his skull. But then he was out the other side. He fixed his eyes on the horizon and redoubled his efforts. The thruster carried him forward as if it had somehow been filled with a life of its own.

  Alex stopped and drew breath. Suddenly everything seemed very silent. He was still lying on his stomach, rising and falling as he was swept over the waves. He looked back at the shoreline and was surprised to see how far he had come. Sabina was sitting watching him, a tiny speck in the distance. The nearest surfer was about thirty metres away; too far to help if anything went wrong. There was a knot of fear in his stomach and he wondered if he hadn’t been a bit hasty, coming out here on his own. But it was too late now.

  He sensed it before he saw it. It was as if the world had chosen that moment to come to an end and all nature was taking one final breath. He turned and there it was. The Cribber was coming. It was hurtling towards him. Now it was too late to change his mind.

  For a few seconds Alex stared in astonishment at the rolling, curving, thundering water. It was like watching a four-storey building wrench itself out of the ground and hurl itself onto the street. It was built entirely out of water, but the water was alive. Alex could feel its incredible strength. Suddenly, awesomely, it rose up in front of him. And went on rising until it had blotted out the sky.

  Techniques that he had learned a long time ago took over automatically. Alex grabbed the edge of the board and turned round so that he was once again facing the shore. He forced himself to wait until the last second. Move too late and he would miss everything. But too early and he would simply be crushed. His muscles tensed. His teeth were chattering. His whole body seemed to have become electrified.

  Now!

  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 agai
n. 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.

  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-lo. 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-lo, 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.