Alex’s mind was dead. He had made his decision and, as far as he was concerned, nothing else mattered. Only one good thing had come out of last night. He hadn’t forgotten Tom Harris and his brother. They had heard nothing from him since he had broken into Consanto yesterday evening – and there was still the question of all Jerry’s equipment, left behind on the roof. But Mrs Rothman had promised to deal with that, as Alex had reminded her.
“Go ahead and call them,” she had said. “Apart from anything else, we don’t want them worrying about you and raising the alarm. As for the parachute and all the rest of it, I already told you. I’ll send your friend’s brother a cheque to cover the cost. Five thousand euros? That should do it.” She had smiled. “You see, Alex? That’s what I mean. We want to look after you.”
After she had gone, Alex called Tom from his room. Tom was delighted to hear from him.
“We saw you land so we knew you hadn’t got splatted,” he said. “Then nothing happened for a while. And then the whole place blew up. Was that you?”
“Not exactly,” Alex said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Positano. I’m OK. But, Tom, listen to me…”
“I know.” Tom’s voice was flat. “You’re not coming back to school.”
“Not for a bit.”
“Is this MI6 again?”
“Sort of. I’ll tell you one day.” That was a lie. Alex knew he would never see his friend again. “Just tell Jerry that he’s going to get a cheque soon to pay for all his stuff. And tell him thanks from me.”
“What about Brookland?”
“It would be easier if you said you never saw me. As far as they’re concerned, I disappeared in Venice and that was that.”
“Alex … you sound strange. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine, Tom. Goodbye.”
He hung up and felt a wave of sadness. It was as if Tom was the last link to the world he had known – and he had just severed the connection.
The boat pulled in. There was a jetty, carefully concealed in a natural fault line in the rock so that nobody could be watched arriving at or leaving the island. Nile sprang ashore. He had the ease and grace of a ballet dancer. Alex had noticed the same thing once about Yassen Gregorovich.
“This way, Alex.”
Alex followed. The two of them walked up a twisting path between the trees. For a moment the buildings were hidden.
“Can I tell you something?” Nile said. He flashed Alex his friendliest smile. “I was delighted you decided to join us. It’s great to have you on the winning side.”
“Thank you.”
“But I hope you never change your mind, Alex. I hope you never try to trick us or anything like that. I’m sure you won’t. But after what happened at the Widow’s Palace, I’d hate to have to murder you again.”
“Yes. It wasn’t much fun the last time,” Alex agreed.
“It would really upset me. Mrs Rothman is expecting great things from you. I hope you don’t let her down.”
They had passed through the copse and there was the monastery, its great walls peeling from age and neglect. There was a heavy wooden door with a smaller door set in it, and next to it the one sign that the building might, after all, have been adapted to modern times: a keypad with a built-in video camera. Nile tapped in a code. There was an electronic buzz and the smaller door opened.
“Welcome back to school!” Nile announced.
Alex hesitated. The new term at Brookland would start in a few days’ time. And here he was about to enter a school of a very different kind. But it was too late for second thoughts. He was following the path his father had mapped out for him.
Nile was waiting. Alex went in.
He found himself in a open courtyard with cloisters on three sides and the bell tower rising up above the fourth. The ground was a neat rectangle of grass with two cypress trees side by side at one end. A tile roof slanted in, covering the cloisters, like an old-fashioned tennis court. Five men dressed in white robes stood around an instructor, an older man dressed in black. As Alex and Nile entered, they stepped forward as one, lashed out with their fists and shouted – the kiai that Alex knew from karate.
“Sometimes, with the silent kill, it is not possible to shout out,” the instructor said. He spoke with a Russian or Eastern European accent. “But remember the power of the silent kiai. Use it to drive your chi into the strike zone. Do not underestimate its power at the moment of the kill.”
“That’s Professor Yermalov,” Nile told Alex. “He taught me when I was here. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of him, Alex. I’ve seen him finish a fight with a single finger. Fast as a snake and about as friendly…”
They crossed the courtyard and went through an archway into a vast room with a multicoloured mosaic floor, ornate windows, pillars and intricate wooden angels carved into the walls. This might once have been a place of worship; now it was used as a refectory and meeting place, with long tables, modern sofas and a hatch leading into a kitchen beyond. The ceiling was domed and carried the faint remnants of a fresco. There had been angels here too but they had long ago faded.
There was a door on the far side. Nile went over to it and knocked.
“Entrez!” The voice, speaking French, was friendly.
They went into a tall, octagonal room. Books lined five of the eight walls. The ceiling, painted blue with silver stars, was at least twenty metres high. There was a ladder on wheels reaching up to the top shelves. Two windows looked out onto more woodland but much of the light was blocked out by leaves, and an iron chandelier with about a dozen electric bulbs hung down on a heavy chain. The centre of the room was taken up by a solid-looking desk with two antique chairs in front of it and one behind. This third chair was occupied by a small, plump man in a suit and waistcoat. He was working at a laptop computer, his stubby fingers typing at great speed. He was peering at the screen through gold-rimmed glasses. He had a neat black beard that tapered to a point under his chin. The rest of his hair was grey.
“Alex Rider! Please … come in.” The man looked up from his computer with obvious pleasure. “I would have recognized you at once. I knew your father very well and you look just like him.” Apart from a slight French accent, his English was perfect. “My name is Oliver d’Arc. I am, you might say, the principal of this establishment – the head teacher, perhaps. I was just looking at your personal details on the Internet.”
Alex sat down on one of the antique chairs. “I wouldn’t have thought they’d be posted on the Internet,” he commented.
“It depends which search engine you use.” D’Arc gave Alex a sly smile. “I know Mrs Rothman told you that your father was an instructor here. I worked with him and he was a good friend to me, but I never dreamt that I would one day meet his son. And it is Nile who brings you here. Nile graduated from here a few years ago. He was a brilliant student – the number two in his class.”
Alex glanced at Nile and for the first time saw a flicker of annoyance cross the man’s face. He remembered what Mrs Rothman had said … something about Nile having a weakness … and he wondered what it was that had prevented him becoming number one.
“Are you thirsty after your journey?” d’Arc asked. “Can I get you anything? A sirop de grenadine, perhaps?”
Alex started. The red fruit juice was his favourite drink when he was in France. Had d’Arc got that off the Internet too?
“It was what your father always drank,” d’Arc explained, reading his thoughts.
“I’m all right, thank you.”
“Then let me tell you the programme. Nile will introduce you to the other students who are here at Malagosto. There are never more than fifteen and at the moment there are only eleven. Nine men and two women. You will join in with them and over the next few days we will examine your progress. Eventually, if I consider you have the ability to become part of Scorpia, I will write a report and your real training will begin. But I have no doubts,
Alex. You are very young, only fourteen. But you are John Rider’s son and he was the very best.”
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Alex said.
“Please. Go ahead.” D’Arc sat back, beaming.
“I want to join Scorpia. I want to be part of what you do. But you might as well know now that I don’t think I could kill anybody. I told Mrs Rothman and she didn’t believe me. She said I’d only be doing what my dad had done, but I know how I am inside and I know I’m different to him.”
Alex hadn’t been sure how d’Arc would react. But he seemed completely unconcerned. “There are a great many Scorpia activities that do not involve killing,” he said. “You could be very useful to us, for example, for blackmail. Or as a courier. Who would suspect that a fourteen-year-old on a school trip was carrying drugs or plastic explosives? But these are early days, Alex. You have to trust us. We will discover what you can and can’t do and we will find the work that suits you best.”
“I was eighteen when I killed my first man,” Nile added. “That’s only four years older than you are now.”
“But, Nile, you were always exceptional,” d’Arc purred.
There was a knock at the door and a moment later a woman came in. She was Thai, slender and delicate and several inches shorter than Alex. She had dark, intelligent eyes and lips that could have been drawn with an artist’s pencil. She stopped and made the traditional greeting of the Thai people, bringing her hands together as if in prayer and bowing her head.
“Sawasdee, Alex,” she said. “It is very nice to meet you.” She had a very gentle voice and, like the principal, her English was excellent.
“This is Miss Binnag,” d’Arc said.
“My name is Eijit. But you can call me Jet. I have come to take you to your room.”
“You can rest this afternoon and I will see you again at dinner.” D’Arc stood up. He was very short. His pointed beard only just rose above the level of the desk. “I’m so glad you’re here, Alex. Welcome to Malagosto.”
The woman called Jet led Alex out of the room, back across the main hall and down a corridor with a high vaulted ceiling and bare plaster walls.
“What do you do here?” Alex asked.
“I teach botany.”
“Botany?” He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.
“It is a very important part of the syllabus,” Jet retorted. “There are many plants that can be useful to our work. The oleander bush, for example. You can extract a poison similar to digitalis from the leaves and this will paralyse the nervous system and cause immediate death. The berries of the mistletoe can also be fatal. You must learn how to grow the rosary pea. Just one pea can kill an adult in minutes. Tomorrow you can come to my greenhouse, Alex. Every flower there is another funeral.”
She spoke in a way that was completely matter-of-fact. Again Alex felt a sense of unease. But he said nothing.
They passed a classroom that might once have been a chapel, with more faded frescos on the walls, and no windows. Another teacher, with ginger hair and a ruddy, weather-beaten face, was standing in front of a blackboard, talking to half a dozen students, two of them women. There was a complicated diagram on the board and each student had what looked like a cigar box on the desk in front of them.
“… and you can lead the main circuit through the lid and back into the plastic explosive,” he was saying. “And it’s right here, in front of the lock, that I always put the trembler switch…”
Jet had paused briefly at the door. “This is Mr Ross,” she whispered. “Technical specialist. He’s from your country, from Glasgow. You’ll meet him tonight.”
They moved on. Behind him, Alex heard Mr Ross speaking again.
“Do try and concentrate, please, Miss Craig. We don’t want you blowing us all up…”
They left the main building and walked over to the nearest apartment block that Alex had seen from the boat. Again, the building looked dilapidated from the outside but it was elegant and modern inside. Jet showed Alex to an air-conditioned room on the second floor. It was on two levels, with a king-sized bed overlooking a large living space with sofas and a desk. There were french windows with a balcony and a sea view.
“I’ll come back for you at five,” Jet told him. “You have an appointment with the nurse. Mrs Rothman wants you to have a complete examination. We meet for drinks at six and dinner is early, at seven. There’s a night exercise tonight; the students are diving. But don’t worry. You won’t be taking part.”
She bowed a second time and backed out of the room. Alex was left alone. He sat down on one of the sofas, noticing that the room had a fridge, a television and even a PlayStation 2 – presumably put in for his benefit.
What had he got himself into? Had he done the right thing? Dark uncertainties rose up in his mind and he deliberately forced them back again. He remembered the video he had been shown, the terrible images he had seen. Mrs Jones mouthing those two words into the radio transmitter. He closed his eyes.
Outside, the waves broke against the island shore and the students in their white robes went once again through the motions of the silent kill.
Just over seven hundred miles away, the woman who had been so much in Alex’s thoughts was examining a photograph. There was a single sheet of paper attached to it and both were stamped with the words TOP SECRET in red. The woman knew what the photo meant. There was only one course of action open to her. But for once – and for her it really was a first – she was reluctant. She couldn’t allow emotion to get in the way. That was when mistakes were made, and in her line of work that could be disastrous. But even so …
Mrs Jones took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. She had received the photograph and report a few minutes ago. Since then she had made two calls, hoping against hope that there might have been a mistake. But there could be no doubt. The evidence was right there in front of her. She reached out and pressed a button on her phone, then spoke.
“William – is Mr Blunt in his office?”
In an outer office her personal assistant, William Dearly, glanced at his computer screen. He was twenty-three, a Cambridge graduate; he was in a wheelchair. “He hasn’t left the building yet, Mrs Jones.”
“Any meetings?”
“Nothing scheduled.”
“Right. I’m going there now.”
It had to be done. Mrs Jones took the photograph and the typed sheet and walked down the corridor on the sixteenth floor of the building that pretended to be an international bank but which was in fact the headquarters of MI6 Special Operations. Alan Blunt was her immediate superior. She wondered how he would react to the news that Alex Rider had joined Scorpia.
Blunt’s office was at the very end of the corridor with views overlooking Liverpool Street. Mrs Jones entered without knocking. There was no need. William would have rung to say she was coming. And sure enough, Blunt registered no surprise as she came in. Not that his round, strangely featureless face ever showed any emotion. He too had been reading a report, several centimetres thick. She could see he had made neat notes using a fountain pen and green ink for instant recognition.
“Yes?” he asked as she sat down.
“This just came in from SatInt. I thought you should see it.” SatInt was satellite intelligence. She passed it across.
Mrs Jones watched Alan Blunt carefully as he read the single page. She had been his deputy for seven years and had worked with him for another ten before that. She had never been to his home. She had never met his wife. But she probably knew him better than anyone in the building. And she was worried about him. Quite recently he had made a huge mistake, refusing to believe Alex when it came to that business with Damian Cray. As a result, Cray had come within minutes of destroying half the world. Blunt had been given a severe dressing down by the home secretary, but it wasn’t just that he was finding hard to live with. It was the fact that he, the head of Special Operations, had been bettered by a fourteen-year-old-boy. Mrs Jones wond
ered how much longer he would stay.
Now he examined the photograph, his eyes unblinking behind his steel-framed spectacles. It showed two figures, a man and a boy, getting out of a boat. It had been taken above Malagosto and blown up many times. Both faces were blurred.
“Alex Rider?” Blunt asked. There was a dead tone to his voice.
“The picture was taken by a spy satellite,” Mrs Jones said. “But Smithers ran it through one of his computers and it’s definitely him.”
“Who is the man with him?”
“We think it could be a Scorpia agent called Nile. It’s hard to tell. The photograph is black and white, but so is he. I’ve downloaded his details for you.”
“Are we to infer that Rider has decided to switch sides?”
“I’ve spoken to his housekeeper, the American girl … Jack Starbright. It seems that Alex disappeared four days ago from a school trip to Venice.”
“Disappeared where?”
“She didn’t know. It’s very surprising that he hasn’t been in touch with her. She’s his closest friend.”
“Is it possible that the boy has somehow become involved with Scorpia and has been taken by force?”
“I’d like to believe it.” Mrs Jones sighed. It couldn’t be avoided any longer. “But there was always a chance that Yassen Gregorovich managed to speak to Alex before he died. When I met Alex after the Cray business, I knew something was wrong. I think Yassen must have told him about John Rider.”
“Albert Bridge.”
“Yes.”
“That’s very unfortunate.”
There was a long silence. Mrs Jones knew that Blunt would be turning over a dozen possibilities in his mind, considering and eliminating each one in a matter of seconds. She had never met anyone with such an analytical brain.