Crocodile Tears - Anthony Horowitz [38]
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Jack nodded. “All right. I’ll wait for you here.” She glanced at the magazines. “I can catch up with the latest banking news.”
Alex and Mrs. Jones walked over to the elevator, and she pressed the button for the sixteenth floor. Only she knew that the button had read her fingerprint and that if she hadn’t been authorized to travel up, two armed guards would have been waiting when she arrived. She was also aware of the thermal intensifier concealed behind the mirror, as well as the early warning chemical detector that had been added recently. Even the floor was examining the soles of Alex’s shoes. The dust and residue under his feet might, in certain circumstances, provide valuable information about where he had been.
Mrs. Jones seemed more relaxed now that the two of them were on their own. “So, how is school going?” she asked.
“Okay,” Alex said. Mrs. Jones sounded friendly enough, but he had learned to treat even the most casual question with suspicion.
“And how was Scotland?”
How had she known he had gone to Scotland for the New Year? Did she know what had happened there? Alex decided to put her to the test. “I had a great time,” he said. “I really liked Loch Arkaig. In fact, I made quite an in-depth visit.”
Mrs. Jones didn’t even blink. “I haven’t been there myself.”
They arrived at the sixteenth floor and left the elevator, walking down a heavily carpeted corridor with doors that had numbers but no names. They stopped outside 1605. Mrs. Jones knocked, and without waiting for an answer, they went in.
Alan Blunt was sitting behind his desk as if he had been there forever, as if he never left. He was the same gray man in the same gray suit with the same files open in front of him. Sometimes Alex tried to imagine the head of Special Operations with a wife and children, going to a film or playing sports. But he couldn’t do it. Like Mrs. Jones, Blunt had no life outside these four walls. Was that what he had dreamed about when he was young, being locked into a job that would never let him go? Had he actually ever been young?
“Sit down, Alex.” Blunt waved Alex to a chair without looking up from his paperwork. He wrote something down and underlined it. Alex wondered what he had just done. He could have been ordering extra office stationery. He could have just sentenced someone to death. The trouble with Blunt was that either way he would have shown the same lack of emotion.
He glanced briefly at Alex. “You’re getting taller.” He sounded disapproving—but that made sense. The younger and more innocent Alex looked, the more useful he was to MI6.
There was a long silence. Alex took the seat he had been offered. Mrs. Jones sat down beside the desk. Blunt made a few last notes, the nib of his pen scratching against the page. At last he finished what he was doing. “I understand you have a problem,” he said.
Jack hadn’t said very much on the telephone. She’d had enough dealings with MI6 to know that nobody says anything important on an unsecured line. So Alex quickly explained what had happened: the fight in the cemetery, Harry Bulman’s visit, the newspaper story he was intending to write.
He finished talking. Blunt reached out and wiped a speck of dust off the surface of the desk.
“That’s very interesting, Alex,” he said. “But I’m not sure there’s very much we can do.”
“What?” Alex was astonished. “Why not?”
“Well, as you’ve often reminded us, you don’t actually work for us. You’re not part of MI6.”
“That’s never stopped you from using me.”
“Perhaps not. But it’s not our business to interfere with the freedom of the press. If this man, Bulman, has found out about your activities over the past year, there’s not a great deal we can do. Are you asking us to arrange an accident?”
“No!” Alex was horrified. He wondered if Blunt was even being serious.
“Then what exactly do you have in mind?”
Alex drew a breath. Maybe Blunt was trying to confuse him deliberately. He wasn’t sure how to respond. “Do you really