Russian Roulette recap

Ordered to kill Alex Rider, the assassin Yassen Gregorovich sets down the story of his own life instead. He was born Yasha Gregorovich in Estrov, a Russian village beside a secret installation, and when an accident released what the installation was making, the army sealed the area and destroyed the village and everyone in it, including his parents. He escaped alone, reached Moscow, and survived on the streets until he was picked up and handed to Vladimir Sharkovsky, an oligarch who kept him as a servant behind his walls and treated him as property. Yasha eventually killed him, which brought him to the attention of Scorpia. Trained on the island of Malagosto and given the name Yassen, he became the organisation's most reliable killer. His instructor, an Englishman known as Hunter, saved his life and was, Yassen alone discovered, a British agent working undercover; his name was John Rider. The account ends with Yassen refusing the contract on John Rider's son.

Previously, and a note on where this book sits: this is the story of Yassen Gregorovich, told from his side, and it retells events the main series reveals gradually. It is best read after Scorpia Rising rather than in the middle of the sequence. What a reader needs to know is that Yassen is the Russian contract killer who murdered Alex Rider's uncle Ian at the start of Stormbreaker, and who then had Alex at his mercy three times and spared him each time. He was shot in Eagle Strike while turning on his own employer, and used his last minutes to tell Alex that he had known his father, that John Rider had once saved his life, and that Alex should go to Venice and find Scorpia if he wanted the truth about him. In Scorpia, Alex learned the rest: John Rider had been an MI6 officer who spent years inside Scorpia under the codename Hunter, and the execution Scorpia filmed was staged by his own side to bring him out.

Yassen Gregorovich, Scorpia's most dependable assassin, is given a contract on a fourteen-year-old English boy named Alex Rider. He is in position and capable of finishing it in a moment, and he does not. Instead he begins to set down an account of his own life, starting in the place he came from: Estrov, a poor village in western Russia where he was born Yasha Gregorovich, the son of parents who worked for the state and asked no questions about the fenced installation in the woods beyond the fields. He was an ordinary boy in an ordinary place, and he had no idea what was being made a few kilometres from his home.

Something goes wrong at the installation and what it was developing escapes. The response is not a rescue: the army seals the district, and the village and everyone in it are destroyed to keep the accident from being known. Yasha's father, understanding what is coming, sends him away, and Yasha escapes alone into the woods while soldiers finish the work behind him. He learns what the plant was really for and that no record of Estrov or its people will be allowed to survive, which means that officially he no longer exists either. With nowhere to go and nobody to appeal to, he makes his way across the country to Moscow.

In Moscow he is one more homeless boy with no papers, sleeping rough, stealing, and being used by people who have found a use for children like him. He survives it, but he is eventually caught and handed on, and ends up inside the walled estate of Vladimir Sharkovsky, an oligarch who grew rich from the wreckage of the Soviet system. Yasha becomes part of a household staff that is not permitted to leave, doing whatever work he is given. Sharkovsky is careless with the people he owns and violent when it amuses him, and there is no authority anywhere that will hear a complaint against him.

The years behind Sharkovsky's walls give Yasha two things: a close view of how men like his employer are protected, and the certainty that no one is coming to help him. When the chance comes he takes it, and he kills Sharkovsky. That single act does not end anything for him; it identifies him. Scorpia, which has been watching the household for reasons of its own, sees exactly what the boy has done and how quietly he did it, and offers him the only future he is likely to be given. He accepts, and is taken to the island of Malagosto in the Venetian lagoon, where the organisation trains the people it intends to use.

At Malagosto, Yasha becomes Yassen, and turns out to be extraordinarily good at the work. His instructor is an Englishman known as Hunter, the best operative Scorpia has and the only one who treats him as more than material, and on an operation together Hunter saves his life at real risk to his own. Yassen also discovers what nobody else in the organisation does: Hunter is a British intelligence officer working under cover, and his real name is John Rider. Yassen keeps it to himself, because the debt matters more to him than Scorpia does, and Rider has a wife and an infant son. The account closes back in the present. Yassen has John Rider's son in his sights and a contract he could complete without difficulty, and he lowers the rifle. He will not kill Alex Rider, and he will never explain why to anyone who pays him.

Yassen finishes his account with the discovery that ended his loyalty to Scorpia without ever changing his behaviour: Hunter, the man who trained him and who saved his life, was not one of them at all. He was a British intelligence officer working inside the organisation, and Yassen worked it out and said nothing, because the debt outweighed everything Scorpia could have paid him for the information. Hunter's name was John Rider, and he had a wife and a baby son. The book then returns to the present, where Yassen has that son in the sights of a rifle and a contract that would be simple to complete. He puts the weapon down. He will not kill Alex Rider, then or later, because of what he owes a man who has been dead for years, and no employer will ever be given a reason for it. He remains what Scorpia made him, and goes on taking other work, having decided the one thing he will not do.