Scorpia characters

Appears from the start

One of the founding members of Scorpia's executive board, an old man attending his final meeting before retirement. He has spent his life in the organisation and is leaving it with the board's formal good wishes.

Appears from the start

A member of Scorpia's executive board, heavy, silent and entirely without warmth. He speaks rarely and only about the business in front of him.

First appears in chapter 2

Fourteen and in Venice on a school trip he has no intention of completing. Yassen Gregorovich's dying words have given him a name, and he has come to find the organisation that employed his father. He is angry with MI6, unwilling to ask them anything, and prepared to walk into something he does not understand in order to learn who John Rider was.

First appears in chapter 2

A boy in Alex's year at Brookland, cheerful, unbothered and on the same school trip. He is the one classmate who has worked out that Alex's absences are not illness, and he is entirely willing to help without being told the details.

First appears in chapter 2

The American housekeeper who has raised Alex since his uncle's death. She is at home in London while he is abroad, and she has no way of knowing what he has gone to Venice to do.

First appears in chapter 3

One of Scorpia's twelve executives, an elegant, charming Englishwoman living in a palace on a Venetian canal. She is amused rather than alarmed by a fourteen-year-old who comes looking for the organisation by name, she knows exactly who his father was, and she is the first adult in Alex's life who offers to tell him.

First appears in chapter 5

Alex's father, who died when Alex was a baby, and about whom he has been told almost nothing his whole life: not what he did, not how he died, not even what he looked like. Scorpia is the first place to offer an account of him.

First appears in chapter 5

Tom Harris's older brother, who lives in Italy. He asks few questions and gives Alex practical help and somewhere to go at a point when Alex has neither.

First appears in chapter 7

The head of Scorpia's training school on the island of Malagosto, a courteous, donnish man who lectures on assassination as though it were a branch of engineering and takes genuine professional interest in a promising recruit.

First appears in chapter 7

The most capable young operative Scorpia has, marked by patches of pale skin across his dark face and neck. Trained at Malagosto in every discipline the school teaches, he is quiet, polite and completely without hesitation, and he is given the job of assessing Alex.

First appears in chapter 11

The deputy head of MI6 Special Operations, who has spent several assignments telling Alex that the department is finished with him, and who has no idea where he has gone or who has him.

First appears in chapter 16

The head of MI6 Special Operations, who has known the truth about Alex's father since before Alex was born and has never volunteered a word of it.