There were two bar stools next to the kitchen. He perched on one and invited Alex to do the same. Robert Guppy stayed by the door.
“The story that Ed was working on had nothing to do with Damian Cray,” he began. “At least, not to start with. Ed was never interested in the entertainment business. No. He was working on something much more important … a story about the NSA. You know what that is? It’s the National Security Agency of America. It’s an organization involved in counter-terrorism, espionage and the protection of information. Most of its work is top secret. Code makers. Code breakers. Spies…
“Ed became interested in a man called Charlie Roper, an extremely high-ranking officer in the NSA. He had information – I don’t know how he got it – that this man, Roper, might have turned traitor. He was heavily in debt. An addict…”
“Drugs?” Alex asked.
Marc Antonio shook his head. “Gambling. It can be just as destructive. Ed heard that Roper was here in Paris and believed he had come to sell secrets – either to the Chinese or, more likely, the North Koreans. He met me just over a week ago. We’d worked together often, he and I. He got the stories; I got the pictures. We were a team. More than that – we were friends.” Marc Antonio shrugged. “Anyway, we found out where Roper was staying and we followed him from his hotel. We had no idea who he was meeting, and if you had told me, I would never have believed it.”
He paused and drew on his Gauloise. The tip glowed red. Smoke trickled up in front of his good eye.
“Roper went for lunch at a restaurant called la Tour d’Argent. It is one of the most expensive restaurants in Paris. And it was Damian Cray who was paying the bill. We saw the two of them together. The restaurant is high up but it has wide glass windows with views of Paris. I took photographs of them with a telescopic lens. Cray gave Roper an envelope. I think it contained money, and, if so, it was a lot of money because the envelope was very thick.”
“Wait a minute,” Alex interrupted. “What would a pop singer want with someone from the NSA?”
“That is exactly what Ed wanted to know,” the photographer replied. “He began to ask questions. He must have asked too many. Because the next thing I heard, someone had tried to kill him in Saint-Pierre and that same day they came for me. In my case the bomb was in my car. If I had turned the ignition, I wouldn’t be speaking to you now.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I am a careful man. I noticed a wire.” He stubbed out the cigarette. “Someone also broke into my apartment. Much of my equipment was stolen, including my camera and all the photographs I had taken at la Tour d’Argent. It was no coincidence.”
He paused.
“But why am I telling you all this, Alex Rider? Now it is your turn to tell me what you know.”
“I was on holiday in Saint-Pierre—” Alex began.
That was as far as he got.
A car had stopped somewhere outside the building. Alex hadn’t heard it approach. He only became aware of it when its engine stopped. Robert Guppy took a step forward, raising a hand. Marc Antonio’s head snapped round. There was a moment’s silence – and Alex knew that it was the wrong sort of silence. It was empty. Final.
And then there was an explosion of bullets and the windows shattered, one after another, the glass falling in great slabs to the floor. Robert Guppy was killed instantly, thrown off his feet with a series of red holes stitched across his chest. A light bulb was hit and exploded; chunks of plaster crumbled off the wall. The air rushed in, and with it came the sound of men shouting and footsteps stamping across the courtyard.
Marc Antonio was the first to recover. Sitting by the kitchen, he had been out of the line of fire and hadn’t been hit. Alex too was shocked but uninjured.
“This way!” the photographer shouted and propelled Alex across the room even as the door burst open with a crash of splintering wood. Alex just had time to glimpse a man dressed in black with a machine gun cradled in his arms. Then he was pulled behind one of the screens he had noticed earlier. There was another exit here – not a door but a jagged hole in the wall. Marc Antonio had already climbed through. Alex followed.
“Up!” Marc Antonio pushed Alex ahead of him. “It’s the only way!”
There was a wooden staircase, seemingly unused, old and covered in plaster dust. Alex started to climb … three floors, four, with Marc Antonio just behind him. There was a single door on each floor but Marc Antonio urged him on. He could hear the man with the machine gun. He had been joined by someone else. The two killers were following them up.
He arrived at the top. Another door barred his way. He reached out and turned the handle and at that moment there was another burst of gunfire and Marc Antonio grunted and curved away, falling backwards. Alex knew he was dead. Mercifully, the door had opened in front of him. He tumbled through, expecting at any moment to feel the rake of bullets across his shoulders. But the photographer had saved him, falling between Alex and his pursuers. Alex had made it onto the roof of the building. He lashed out with his heel, slamming the door shut behind him.
He found himself in a landscape of skylights and chimney stacks, water tanks and TV aerials. The roofs ran the full length of the rue Britannia, with low walls and thick pipes dividing the different houses. What had Marc Antonio intended, coming up here? He was six floors above street level. Was there a fire escape? A staircase leading down?
Alex had no time to find out. The door flew open and the two men came through it, moving more slowly now, knowing he was trapped. Somewhere deep inside Alex a voice whispered – why couldn’t they leave him alone? They had come for Marc Antonio, not for him. He was nothing to do with this. But he knew they would have their orders. Kill the photographer and anyone associated with him. It didn’t matter who Alex was. He was just part of the package.
And then he remembered something he had seen when he entered the rue Britannia, and suddenly he was running, without even being sure that he was going in the right direction. He heard the clatter of machine-gun fire and black tiles disintegrated centimetres behind his feet. Another burst. He felt a spray of bullets passing close to him and part of a chimney stack shattered, showering him with dust. He jumped over a low partition. The edge of the roof was getting closer. The men behind him paused, thinking he had nowhere to go. Alex kept running. He reached the edge and launched himself into the air.
To the men with the guns it must have seemed that he had jumped to a certain death on the pavement six floors below. But Alex had seen building works: scaffolding, cement mixers – and an orange pipe designed to carry builders’ debris from the different floors down to the street.
The pipe actually consisted of a series of buckets, each one bottomless, interlocking like a flume at a swimming pool. Alex couldn’t judge his leap – but he was lucky. For a second or two he fell, arms and legs sprawling. Then he saw the entrance to the pipe and managed to steer himself towards it. First his outstretched legs, then his hips and shoulders, entered the tube perfectly. The tunnel was filled with cement dust and he was blinded. He could just make out the orange walls flashing past. The back of his head, his thighs and shoulders were battered mercilessly. He couldn’t breathe and realized with a sick dread that if the exit was blocked he would break every bone in his body.
The tube was shaped like a stretched-out J. As Alex reached the bottom, he felt himself slowing down. Suddenly he was spat back out into daylight. There was a mound of sand next to one of the cement mixers and he thudded into it. All the breath was knocked out of him. Sand and cement filled his mouth. But he was alive.
Painfully he got to his feet and looked up. The two men were still on the roof, far above him. They had decided not to attempt his stunt. The orange tube had been just wide enough to take him; they would have got jammed before they were halfway. Alex looked up the street. There was a car parked outside the entrance to Marc Antonio’s studio. But there was nobody in sight.
He spat and dragged the back of his hand across his lips;
then he limped quickly away. Marc Antonio was dead, but he had given Alex another piece of the puzzle. And Alex knew where he had to go next. Sloterdijk. A software plant outside Amsterdam. Just a few hours on a train from Paris.
He reached the end of the rue Britannia and turned the corner, moving faster all the time. He was bruised, filthy and lucky to be alive. He just wondered how he was going to explain all this to Jack.
BLOOD MONEY
Alex lay on his stomach, watching the guards as they examined the waiting car. He was holding a pair of Bausch & Lomb prism system binoculars with 30x magnification, and although he was more than a hundred metres away from the main gate, he could see everything clearly … right down to the car’s number plate and the driver’s moustache.
He had been here for more than an hour, lying motionless in front of a bank of pine trees, hidden from sight by a row of shrubs. He was wearing grey jeans, a dark T-shirt and a khaki jacket, which he had picked up in the same army supplies shop that had provided the binoculars. The weather had turned yet again, bringing with it an afternoon of constant drizzle, and Alex was soaked through. He wished now that he had brought the thermos of hot chocolate Jack had offered him. At the time, he’d thought she was treating him like a child – but even the SAS know the importance of keeping warm. They had taught him as much when he was training with them.
Jack had come with him to Amsterdam and once again it had been she who had checked them into a hotel, this time on the Herengracht, one of the three main canals. She was there now, waiting in their room. Of course, she had wanted to come with him. After what had happened in Paris, she was more worried about him than ever. But Alex had persuaded her that two people would have twice as much chance of being spotted as one, and her bright red hair would hardly help. Reluctantly she had agreed.
“Just make sure you get back to the hotel before dark,” she said. “And if you pass a tulip shop, maybe you could bring me a bunch.”
He smiled, remembering her words. He shifted his weight, feeling the damp grass beneath his elbows. He wondered what exactly he had learnt in the past hour.
He was in the middle of a strange industrial area on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Sloterdijk contained a sprawl of factories, warehouses and processing plants. Most of the compounds were low-rise, separated from each other by wide stretches of tarmac, but there were also clumps of trees and grassland as if someone had tried – and failed – to cheer the place up. Three windmills rose up behind the headquarters of Cray’s technological empire. But they weren’t the traditional Dutch models, the sort that would appear on picture postcards. These were modern, towering pillars of grey concrete with triple blades endlessly slicing the air. They were huge and menacing, like invaders from another planet.
The compound itself reminded Alex of an army barracks … or maybe a prison. It was surrounded by a double fence, the outer one topped with razor wire. There were guard towers at fifty-metre intervals and guards on patrol all around the perimeter. In Holland, a country where the police carry guns, Alex wasn’t surprised that the guards were armed. Inside, he could make out eight or nine buildings, low and rectangular, white-bricked with high-tech plastic roofs. Various people were moving around, some of them transported in electric cars. Alex could hear the whine of the engines, like milk floats. The compound had its own communications centre, with five huge satellite dishes mounted outside. Otherwise, it seemed to consist of laboratories, offices and living quarters. One building stood out in the middle of it all: a glass and steel cube, aggressively modern in design. This might be the main headquarters, Alex thought. Perhaps he would find Damian Cray inside.
But how was he to get in? He had been studying the entrance for the last hour.
A single road led up to the gate, with a traffic light at each end. It was a complicated process. When a car or a truck arrived, it stopped at the bottom of the road and waited. Only when the first traffic light changed was it allowed to continue forward to the glass and brick guardhouse next to the gate. At this point, a uniformed man appeared and took the driver’s ID, presumably to check it on a computer. Two more men examined the vehicle, checking that there were no passengers. And that wasn’t all. There was a security camera mounted high up on the fence and Alex had noticed a length of what looked like toughened glass built into the road. When the vehicles stopped they were right on top of it, and Alex guessed that there must be a second camera underneath. There was no way he could sneak into the compound. Cray Software Technology had left nothing to chance.
Several trucks had entered the compound while he had been watching. Alex had recognized the black-clothed figure of Omni painted – life-sized – on the sides as part of the Gameslayer logo. He wondered if it might be possible to sneak inside one of the trucks, perhaps as it was waiting at the first set of lights. But the road was too open. At night it would be floodlit. Anyway, the doors would almost certainly be locked.
He couldn’t climb the fences. The razor wire would see to that. He doubted he could tunnel his way in. Could he somehow disguise himself and mingle with the evening shift? No. For once his size and age were against him. Maybe Jack would have been able to attempt it, pretending to be a replacement cleaner or a technician. But there was no way he would be able to talk his way past the guards, particularly without speaking a word of Dutch. Security was too tight.
And then Alex saw it. Right in front of his eyes.
Another truck had stopped and the driver was being questioned while the cabin was searched. Could he do it? He remembered the bicycle that was chained to a lamppost just a couple of hundred metres down the road. Before he had left England he had gone through the manual that had come with it and had been amazed how many gadgets Smithers had been able to conceal in and around such an ordinary object. Even the bicycle clips were magnetic! Alex watched the gate slide open and the truck pass through.
Yes. It would work. He would have to wait until it was dark – but it was the last thing anyone would expect. Despite everything, Alex suddenly found himself smiling.
He just hoped he could find a fancy-dress shop in Amsterdam.
By nine o’clock it was dark but the searchlights around the compound had been activated long before, turning the area into a dazzling collision of black and white. The gates, the razor wire, the guards with their guns … all could be seen a mile away. But now they were throwing vivid shadows, pools of darkness that might offer a hiding place to anyone brave enough to get close.
A single truck was approaching the main gate. The driver was Dutch and had driven up from the port of Rotterdam. He had no idea what he was carrying and he didn’t care. From the first day he had started working for Cray Software Technology, he had known that it was better not to ask questions. The first of the two traffic lights was red and he slowed down, then came to a halt. There were no other vehicles in sight and he was annoyed to be kept waiting, but it was better not to complain. There was a sudden knocking sound and he glanced out of the window, looking in the side mirror. Was someone trying to get his attention? But there was no one there and a moment later the light changed, so he threw the gearstick into first and moved on again.
As usual he drove onto the glass panel and wound down his window. There was a guard standing outside and he passed across his ID, a plastic card with his photograph, name and employee number. The driver knew that other guards would inspect his truck. He sometimes wondered why they were so sensitive about security. After all, they were only making computer games. But he had heard about industrial sabotage … companies stealing secrets from each other. He supposed it made sense.
Two guards were walking round the truck even as the driver sat there, thinking his private thoughts. A third was examining the pictures being transmitted by the camera underneath it. The truck had recently been cleaned. The word GAMESLAYER stood out on the side, with the Omni figure crouching next to it. One of the guards reached out and tried to open the door at the back. It was, as it should have been, locked. Meanwhile
the other guard peered in through the front cabin window. But it was obvious that the driver was alone.
The security operation was smooth and well practised. The cameras had shown nobody hiding underneath the truck or on the roof. The rear door was locked. The driver had been cleared. One of the guards gave a signal and the gate opened electronically, sliding sideways to let the truck in. The driver knew where to go without being told. After about fifty metres he branched off the entrance road and followed a narrower track that brought him to the unloading bay. There were about a dozen other vehicles parked here, with warehouses on both sides. The driver turned off the engine, got out and locked the door. He had paperwork to deal with. He would hand over the keys and receive a stamped docket with his time of arrival. They would unload the vehicle the following day.
The driver left. Nothing moved. There was nobody else in the area.
But if anyone had walked past, they might have seen a remarkable thing. On the side of the truck, the black-clothed figure of Omni turned its head. At least, that was what it would have looked like. But if that person had looked more closely, they would have realized that there were two figures on the truck. One was painted; the other was a real person, clinging impossibly to the metal panelling in exactly the same position as the picture underneath.
Alex Rider dropped silently to the ground. The muscles in his arms and legs were screaming and he wondered how much longer he would have been able to hold on. Smithers had supplied four powerful magnetic clips with the bike and these were what Alex had used to keep himself in place: two for his hands, two for his feet. He quickly pulled off the black ninja suit he had bought that afternoon in Amsterdam, rolled it up and stuffed it into a bin. He had been in plain sight of the guards as the truck drove through the gate. But the guards hadn’t looked too closely. They had expected to see a figure next to the Gameslayer logo and that was just what they had seen. For once they had been wrong to believe their eyes.