Out in the desert, the flames flickered in the darkness, throwing jagged red shadows across the sand.
20
HALF AN INCH
THE CONVOY WAS MOVING SWIFTLY through the streets of Cairo. There were nine vehicles in all, starting with two police cars and four outriders on motorbikes. The three cars at the center of the procession were identical: oversized black limousines with tinted windows and a miniature Stars and Stripes fluttering at the corner. The cars had begun their journey a mile away, at the American embassy in Garden City, and from the moment they had swung out of the gates and onto the main road, a whole army of Egyptian policemen had been deployed to keep them moving, with officers holding back the traffic at every corner and at every light. From the air, the convoy might have looked like a living animal, a snake perhaps, burrowing its way through a hundred thousand ants.
The secretary of state was in the first limousine. It might have been safer for her to ride in the middle one with CIA agents in front and behind . . . but this was also the more obvious target. Even though the cars were armor plated, an armor-piercing missile launched from a rooftop was always a possibility. All the roofs had been checked. Armed policemen had taken up strategic positions all the way along the route and would remain there until the night was over. The man known as the Engineer had been seen in Cairo. He might have been killed, but not before he had provided an assassin with a weapon. Nothing could be left to chance.
Sitting in the backseat, next to the window, the secretary of state watched the drab buildings and the stationary traffic as they flashed by. She was a small woman with steely eyes and tied-back silver hair, wearing an off-white silk jacket and skirt, a white shirt, and a jade necklace that had been given to her by the Chinese premier on a recent visit. There was a short, bald-headed man in a dark suit next to her. He looked nervous, but she knew it had nothing to do with the security arrangements. He was her foreign policy adviser and was already thinking about what she was going to say. It was always a dangerous business, making new enemies, and her speech tonight would do just that. Her driver and bodyguard—both CIA men—were in the front. They knew nothing. To them, it was just another business trip.
It seemed to have gotten dark very early. It was only half past six, but the sky was already black. It was going to rain. The temperature had risen too high even for this sweltering city and it was obvious that something was going to break soon. The clouds were so heavy that they looked as if they were about to fall out of the sky, and the air was sticking to everything it touched. Even the air-conditioning inside the car seemed to be fighting a losing battle.
“It’s a pretty nasty night, Jeff,” she said. Her foreign policy adviser’s name was Jeff Townsend.
“Could be a downpour,” Jeff agreed.
“I thought it didn’t rain in Cairo.”
“It doesn’t rain often, ma’am. But when it rains . . . it rains.”
The secretary of state had a headache. It had been nagging at her ever since she had touched down in the presidential plane. She leaned forward. “Do you have an aspirin, Harry?”
“Sure thing, ma’am.” Her bodyguard was also a trained medic. He handed her two pills, which she swallowed with a sip of mineral water from a bottle.
The convoy crossed the Nile on University Bridge and swept around El-Gamaa Square—actually a circular area and one that would normally have been jammed with traffic. It continued up a wide avenue with palm trees on each side and lawns and fountains running up the center. The university itself lay straight ahead. Even on a normal day, security at the campus was high, with students passing through a single gateway and showing ID before they were allowed to continue. But this week, security levels had soared with triple checks, full body searches, metal detectors, the works. The main Assembly Hall had been in lockdown for the past twenty-four hours. Egyptian police with sniffer dogs had finished searching the place for the fifth time just a few hours ago.
The limousine drove through the gate. White-suited police stood at attention and saluted as it passed. And then they were in the campus itself, with searchlights swinging across the ground, people everywhere, helicopters hovering overhead. Even the secretary of state began to feel a little anxious. She noticed that inside the compound, the police were wearing black and carried machine guns. Of course, she was used to this. She couldn’t even cross Washington, DC, without the same sort of security. But she was in a strange place, far away from home. And this thick, unnatural darkness. It felt like the end of the world.
The driver stopped exactly where he had been told. Even with the unpredictable Cairo traffic, everything had been planned with such precision that the secretary of state was only fifty seconds late. Someone ran forward and opened the door. She got out.
She stood in front of a massive building that resembled a museum, an opera house, or perhaps a library with a million books. It stretched all the way across the main campus, its huge dome supported by five columns with steps that could have been purposefully designed for the arrival of a president or a head of state. A red carpet led the way, with crash barriers on both sides, keeping back the crowds of journalists and photographers. There was the usual line of important people waiting to meet her, and the secretary of state found herself shaking hands with politicians, academics, and businessmen . . . people she had never met before and would never see again. A hundred cameras flashed in the heavy heat. She felt a drop of rain on her shoulder and looked up. A pair of helicopters buzzed overhead, their searchlights scissoring down.
Around the corner from the main entrance, in a separate space where they could be kept out of sight, a whole fleet of brightly colored vans stood silently, feeding on the images of the arrival. These were OBUs—Outside Broadcast Units—and they had been sent to record the speech for worldwide transmission. The BBC were there, along with Sky, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, and news teams from all over the Middle East, jammed together in a tangle of thick black cables and satellite dishes. As the secretary of state continued along the lines, shaking hands and nodding at smiling faces, her image was captured on a hundred television screens. The OBUs were small and packed with equipment: monitor stacks, sound desks, vision racks, electric generators. Some of them had two or three producers already playing with the images, dissolving from one to another, then cutting back to some presenter in a studio miles away. A little girl handed the secretary of state some flowers. The producers grabbed the moment, going in for the close-up, the reaction shot, the applause from the crowd. This was the big speech. It had to have a big buildup too.
The OBUs had arrived earlier in the day, filing in one at a time through the main gate. Each one carried a special permit on the window and every driver had shown his ID. But the vans themselves had not been searched. They were, after all, going to remain outside the building, and even if a journalist or a sound engineer had wanted to break into the Assembly Hall, it would have been completely impossible. Security was too tight. The Outside Broadcast Units were always there. They were part of the event. Nobody had considered that they might represent a threat.
But they were wrong.
One of the vans belonged to a television company called Al Minya and had arrived with the name in bright red letters and a pyramid logo painted on the side. It carried the right permit, and the driver, dressed in white overalls with the same red pyramid on his top pocket, had shown what seemed to be an authentic ID. But if anyone had decided to telephone Al Minya—which was a real cable company—they would have been told that they weren’t actually covering the speech. They hadn’t sent an OBU, although, as it happened, one of their vehicles had recently had to go in for repairs.
If they had checked the license plate, they would have discovered that this was the missing vehicle. They might then have discovered that the driver—shaven headed and built like a bulldog—had never worked in television and that his real name was Erik Gunter.
And finally, they might have searched the van and found an English schoolboy
, sitting with his arms tied and a gag in his mouth, a prisoner, inside.
They had brought Alex Rider back from the Siwa Oasis that afternoon, landing the Sikorsky H-34 at the same building site where he had been taken from the Northern Cemetery. He was wearing his Cairo College uniform and was securely belted in place. Without the belt, he would have slumped forward. He seemed to be half asleep.
Gunter was waiting with the Al Minya van when the helicopter landed, and even he was a little surprised by the change in the boy who had been captured forty-eight hours before. Despite his time in the sun, Alex was an ashen white and there was a lost, empty quality to his eyes. When he was ordered to step down from the cabin, he did just that, and he didn’t move as his hands were tied up in front of him. Gunter led him into the van. Alex stumbled briefly at the doorway, steadying himself on one of the countertops. But he said nothing and he didn’t try to resist. There hardly seemed any point gagging him. He looked completely defeated.
“What have you done to him?” Gunter asked.
Julius Grief had sprung down from the helicopter and followed them across the rubble-strewn ground. Like Alex, he was in school uniform. “We played a little joke on him,” he explained. “But I don’t think he enjoyed it.”
Four hours later, the Al Minya van was in its place at the very end of the line, farthest away from the entrance where the secretary of state had arrived. Along with all the other OBUs, it was plugged into the main feed being delivered by the television network inside the Assembly Hall and received the same images as all the news channels. Julius Grief hadn’t come with them. Gunter and Alex were alone.
Gunter was beginning to feel unnerved by the long silence and by the semiconscious boy sitting tied by his arms and feet to a metal chair between two banks of machinery. He took out his gun—it was a black, Russian-made Tokarev TT-33, the same gun that Alex had found in his office—and laid it on the desk, within easy reach. He had checked that the door of the OBU was locked, but if anyone tried to come in, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill them. Then he clicked open a can of Coke and turned one of the dials on the control panel in front of him.
“. . . and the secretary of state has just arrived, and we can see her entering the building. The man beside her is Jeff Townsend, who has been her foreign policy adviser for the past two years . . .”
The voice was that of a CNN newscaster. Gunter could see the secretary of state on one of the monitors. She was walking down a wide corridor with officials applauding on both sides. Then the image cut to the audience waiting inside the Assembly Hall. There were two thousand people there, sitting on three levels. Everyone was dressed smartly, packed together in rows that curved around in front of a stage that was decorated with a single podium and two American flags.
From where he was sitting, Alex had a good view of the screen. But he didn’t seem to be interested. Gunter wondered if he even knew where he was. Well, it didn’t matter. He glanced at his watch. The speech was due to start in twelve minutes. And five minutes after that, Alex would be dead.
He stretched a hand out and turned off the sound.
“I expect you want to know what this is all about,” Gunter said. He didn’t really care if Alex wanted to know or not. He just felt a need to break the silence between them.
With the gag in his mouth, Alex couldn’t talk. He didn’t look as if he wanted to.
Gunter thought for a moment, then took out a knife, which flicked open in his hand. “I’m going to untie you,” he said. “Because you’ll be leaving here shortly. But if you even try to stand up or to get out of that chair before I give you permission, I will shoot you in the stomach. Do you understand that?”
Alex nodded very slightly.
“Good.”
Gunter stood up and leaned over him, cutting the ropes behind him, releasing his arms. He stepped back quickly in case Alex tried to lash out—but the boy didn’t even seem to be aware that he was free. Gunter cut the rest of the cords, took off the gag, and sat down again. There was very little space between them. The gun was right next to him and his eyes had never left Alex’s. The different screens inside the OBU showed pictures of the audience, the Assembly Hall from outside, the empty stage.
“That’s better,” Gunter said. “We still have a bit of time together and I’d quite like to explain what’s going on. The fact of the matter is that Scorpia has put together a rather brilliant plan and this is where it ends—just you and me, in this van. You get a bullet, I’m afraid. And do you know what I get? A million dollars—just for moving one finger half an inch.
“I’ve never actually killed a kid before, and for what it’s worth, I don’t feel too good about it. But you see, it’s not my fault. You don’t know anything about me, so let me tell you. When I came out of Afghanistan . . . Do you know how many bullets I have in me? They dug two of them out, but there are still two of them lodged inside—they couldn’t reach them—and they’re killing me. I can feel them. I took those bullets for my men and I was glad to do it. But when I got home, well, suddenly I discovered that I wasn’t quite the hero that I thought. They put me in a hospital in Birmingham—it was even a mixed ward, can you believe it? I was in pain all the time. You have no idea how much pain. But when I rang the bell, nobody came. Sometimes I was just left there to soil the bed. It was disgusting. And in the end, when I was able to limp out of there, oh yes, they gave me the medal. But they didn’t give me a decent pension. The army didn’t want to know. I couldn’t even get a job. You know? Nobody gives a damn about the war in Afghanistan. Nobody cares. So when Scorpia came along, when they offered me this opportunity, do you think I was going to say no? A million dollars, Alex. And too bad that I have to kill a kid. But right now I have to look out for number one.”
Alex didn’t speak.
Gunter leaned over and suddenly slapped him. Alex’s head rocked backward. “Talk to me, dammit,” he said. “I want to know what you think.”
“I don’t think anything,” Alex said.
Gunter nodded, as if this was enough. “I wonder if you’ve ever heard of the Elgin marbles,” he went on. “Did you ever study them in class? Or perhaps you visited them at the British Museum. Well, believe it or not—and this must sound very strange to you, sitting here in the middle of Cairo—that’s what this is all about. There was this rich Greek guy called Ariston and he wanted them sent back to Athens. Can you believe that? He was the one who hired Scorpia, and they’ve been playing you like a puppet on a string . . . you and MI6. You’ve been complete idiots from the very start.
“This is how it works.” Gunter tilted his watch again. “In eleven minutes’ time, the American secretary of state is going to begin a speech. She’ll make some general remarks about the Middle East . . . We’ve already seen a draft of what she’s going to say. And then, she’ll start talking about the balance of power in the world and how completely and utterly useless and untrustworthy we Brits have become. And at that moment there’ll be a shot in the auditorium . . . a hidden assassin . . . and I’m afraid the poor woman will be killed. There will, of course, be an immediate panic. There are two thousand people in there and they’ll all come stampeding out. It’s dark and it looks like it’s about to rain, which will help. Nobody will have any idea what’s going on—which is exactly what we want. Because at that moment, I’m going to kill you too.”
Gunter was about to continue, but just then an image came up on one of the television screens and he reached out and jabbed one of the buttons on the console, freezing it. Still keeping half an eye on Alex, he turned a dial. The image zoomed in and Alex saw exactly what he was meant to see. A row of boys and girls in dark blue and light blue uniforms—the politics group from the Cairo International College of Arts and Education. The principal, Monty Jordan, was at one end of the line. Miss Watson was at the other. Julius Grief was between them, chatting to Gabriella, the daughter of the ambassador. Of course, she would think he was Alex. He looked like Alex and he sounded like Alex, and she hadn’t
really known him long enough to tell the difference.
“Ah—there you are!” Gunter exclaimed. “Did you ever wonder how your name got onto the politics group? I put it there, of course. They do lots of visits like this and there was no way they were going to miss the American secretary of state. Mr. Jordan got tickets for the whole group and there you are, right in the middle of them.
“Any minute now, you’ll stand up and leave the auditorium. You’ll tell the principal that you’re not feeling well and need some fresh air. You’ll slip around the back, passing quite close to this van, as it happens. Then you’ll go back inside through a service door, and that’s when the shot will be fired. And the next time anyone sees you, you’ll be lying dead on the tarmac with a bullet in your head.”
“You want people to think that I killed her.” It was the first time that Alex had volunteered anything, and he sounded almost matter-of-fact, as if he didn’t care what happened.
“Exactly. You’ve finally worked it out. You see, Scorpia has been recording you and filming you for quite a few weeks now. They’ve created a whole file about you—the Horseman file, they call it. What’s in it? Well, there’s a lot of information about your other missions, proving that you’ve worked for MI6 in the past. But there’s also a film of the day Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones drove to see you in Chelsea, including a recording of the entire conversation. With a little editing, it will prove conclusively that they sent you to Cairo, although it won’t say why. We even intercepted the e-mail booking that shows that MI6 paid for your flight tickets.
“And then there’s the matter of the weapon being used to kill the secretary of state. You’ll remember that I took several pictures of you holding it, and at the same time you’ll have left your DNA and fingerprints all over it. We’ve also got plenty of evidence tying you in with the death of Mr. Habib. I was actually quite surprised that you fell for that old trick, listening in on my telephone call outside the school office. I knew you’d followed me to the House of Gold. And what does everyone think? You see Habib, you get the gun, and the next minute he’s dead and the boat’s been blown up. Who did it? Well, you did, of course.”