“Will?”
Betty placed the potato wedges into a pan and began frying them on the stovetop. “We were ordered to do it. The logistical help we gave him wasn’t really necessary; I’d never met anyone so self-sufficient. What was necessary was that he needed to be integrated into society.”
“Ordered by whom?”
“Will thought we were friends of your father before he was killed. We let him believe that. The truth was different.”
Patrick and Alistair had been the ones who’d instructed the team.
“Why are you telling me this?” Tears ran down Sarah’s face as she put the chicken in the oven.
“Because you need to realize how selfish you are.” Betty tossed the potatoes in oil.
The comment shocked Sarah. “I’m not selfish. I just don’t know what he does!”
Betty continued cooking. “When he wasn’t studying, we’d spend time with him doing things. The four of us had a rule that none of us would talk about our prior military service, that it was essential we talk about normal life. We told him how to open a bank account, how to join the local library, how to eat in a restaurant.” She drained the oil from the potatoes. “And how to cook. In the evenings, we’d play board games with him. He became rather good at Monopoly”-she smiled-“though he did try to cheat sometimes by stealing Monopoly money and hiding it under his side of the board.”
Sarah wiped tears away and took a sip of wine. “He was like that when we were kids. Took me years to realize that he’d marked the cards we were playing with.”
Betty chuckled. “Seems he hasn’t changed.” Opening the oven door, she sprinkled the potato wedges around the chicken. “After two weeks, I told him that we were leaving. He didn’t want us to go, said that he liked us being around. I replied that he needed to start socializing with other students. So we left.” Betty leaned against the work surface, staring at nothing. “Since then, I’ve often wondered if we should have stayed a bit longer.”
“Maybe you should have done!” Sarah put her wine down. “Perhaps it would have stopped him getting involved in stuff that”-she swept an arm through the air-“screws up other people’s lives.”
Betty frowned and turned toward Sarah. “What do you think he does for a living?”
“I don’t know. But I suspect that whatever it is, it’s illegal.”
“You think he’s a criminal?”
Sarah nodded.
Betty considered this. “I suppose he is.”
Sarah muttered, “I thought so!”
Betty knew that Will would be furious with her for what she was about to say. “After all, spying is a crime in most countries.”
Sarah looked incredulous. “He’s a spy? For whom?”
“For us, silly. Britain.” Already, she regretted saying anything, though part of her knew it was the right thing to do. “He’s an MI6 officer, has been since he graduated from university.”
“Why. . why didn’t he tell me?”
“Because he’s not allowed to. The Service uses him on very specific projects. There are only a few people in MI6 who know he’s an officer.” She wondered if she should stop talking. “They singled him out and put him on a very tough training course. Only him. Despite the odds against it, he passed, and for the last eight years he’s been deployed almost continuously.” She hesitated. “The other reason I suspect he didn’t tell you is because you wouldn’t let him do so.”
The hostility was back in Sarah’s face. “No. All the good you did for him after he left the Legion was undone. They made him become the person he didn’t want to be. Probably much worse.”
Betty said more to herself, “I don’t think so.” She frowned. “No. . I don’t think so, at all.” She looked at Sarah. “There’s no doubt he’s exceptionally good at what he does. He’s driven by guilt that he couldn’t save your mother, and has been trying to make up for that by putting himself at great risk to protect others. But he knows there’s another world out there. During the two weeks we spent with him, we gave him the tools to live within that world.”
“Maybe, but he still chooses to do what he does.”
Betty nodded. “He won’t quit while there’s a job to be done. But he’s working hard to have a different side to his life. You can’t see that because you’ve made no effort to get to know him during the last few years.”
“Of course not! He’s a dangerous man.”
“Not to you. You’re the only family he has left.”
“I saw what he’s capable of.”
Betty was silent.
Fresh tears ran down Sarah’s face. “The gang of criminals came in; they bound my mother with tape, some of it over her mouth; one of them threw me to the floor and put a boot on my head; then Will came in the room. He was. . was only a boy.”
“He was seventeen.”
Sarah shook her head. “Only a boy, to me. They sent him out of the room to fetch cash. My mother died. He came back in holding a knife. I looked at him, he looked at me. The boy was gone. And he killed them.”
“How do you think that made him feel?”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen such explosive violence come from someone. Probably it made him realize how good he was at it.”
“That’s not what I meant. How do you think it made him feel, seeing you look at him with an expression that suggested you no longer knew him?”
Sarah didn’t respond.
“He’s been living with that ever since.” Betty sighed. “And he’s been trying to get you to understand that the boy you once knew is still inside him.” Her tone became stern. “But you made a judgment about him, wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t reply to his letters, wouldn’t do anything that could unbalance your perfect self-centered world. And as a result, he’s felt totally disconnected from people around him because he’s believed that if you can’t see the good in him, then others must feel the same.”
“He brings danger into people’s lives!”
“No, he doesn’t!”
A split second after Betty had uttered the words, a high-velocity round smashed through a window and struck the wall inches from Sarah’s head.
Sarah screamed.
Betty shouted, “Get down!”
Alfie burst into the room, his handgun held high. “Direction of shot?”
Betty crouched by the kitchen table. “West, from one of the mountains.”
Alfie moved to Sarah, put a hand on the back of her head, and pushed her roughly to the ground. “Stay down.”
James called out in a terrified voice, “What’s happening?”
“Get behind cover and stay there until I tell you to move!” Alfie stared at the broken window, waiting.
Nothing happened.
They stayed like this for twenty minutes, Sarah sobbing, Betty and Alfie motionless as they gripped their guns.
Alfie narrowed his eyes. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
The sniper got onto one knee on the mountainside and started stripping down his weapon. The man next to him continued staring through his binoculars toward the house. A third man was on his cell phone confirming to Kurt Schreiber that they had sufficiently unsettled the property’s occupants to get them to move locations.
Just as Mr. Schreiber had wanted.
Because he couldn’t allow Sarah’s guardians to become too familiar with their surroundings and therefore further refine their security protocols.
They watched Alfie sprint to the car, start the engine, and stand next to the vehicle while training his handgun toward the darkness ahead. Betty rushed toward the vehicle, gripping Sarah and James. Five seconds later the car was speeding off down the track.
That didn’t matter.
The rest of the surveillance team were all waiting in vehicles, ready to tail them to their next location.
And Mr. Schreiber had promised his men that if he gave the order to kill their target, it would happen there.
Twenty-Seven
Kurt Schreiber glanced at Simon Rubner. “You’ve performed impeccably. After tonight, take a couple of weeks off.”