“Why else would they target a school?” Mrs. Jones asked.
“Let’s consider the possibilities.” Blunt thought for a moment. The eyes behind the square-framed glasses were bleak. He was weeks away from retirement. He hadn’t expected this. “Scorpia is planning an assault of some sort on an international school in Cairo. They send Levi Kroll to London for reasons that are unclear but that seem to be connected to the recruitment of this new head of security. It may well be that Kurst was in London last February for exactly the same purpose . . .
“It would seem likely that they’re planning to put their own man inside the school, although looking at his file, this man Gunter seems to be beyond reproach. He’s a war hero, for heaven’s sake! However, I agree with you. It seems a bit of a coincidence that the last head of security should have been taken out by a hit-and-run driver. So . . . let’s assume that Kroll was killed by a rival organization, because if it had been his own people, they’d have made sure he had nothing in his pockets when he was found. In fact, the body wouldn’t have been found at all. It seems to me there are two questions we have to consider. Is this the most likely explanation of what has occurred? And what should we do?”
“We could warn the school,” Mrs. Jones suggested.
“I’m not so sure. Warn them about what? We can only guess what Scorpia is planning and we have no idea when it’s going to happen. We could talk to the Egyptian government, but they’re unlikely to listen to us—besides which, we have to consider the bigger picture. What about the Syrians, the Americans, and all the other families? If we tell them about this, we’ll have half the intelligence agencies in the world at each other’s throats. It could all turn into a complete mess.”
“But if Scorpia knew we were onto them, they might decide not to proceed.”
“Exactly.”
Mrs. Jones saw the glint in Blunt’s eye and suddenly she understood. “You want them to go ahead,” she said.
“I want them to try,” Blunt agreed. “We could turn this whole thing into a trap. Just for once, we’re one step ahead of them, and if they actually decide to make a move, this could be an opportunity to finish them, once and for all.”
“But you wouldn’t seriously risk the lives of the children at this international school?”
“Of course not. We’ll put an agent inside to keep an eye on the situation, and the moment Scorpia shows themselves, we’ll be ready for them.” Blunt thought for a moment. “What we need—,” he began.
“No.” It was unheard of for Mrs. Jones to interrupt her superior when he was speaking. But she did so now. “We can’t do it.”
Blunt blinked slowly. “You know what I’m thinking.”
Of course she did. Mrs. Jones had spent hundreds of hours with Blunt. Soon she might replace him. She knew him inside out. “We can’t use Alex,” she said.
“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Jones. But you must admit that this would have been exactly the sort of mission for him. Put a fourteen-year-old into a school and nobody would look twice. Just like at Point Blanc.”
“Alex is fifteen now,” Mrs. Jones reminded him. “And that business in Kenya was the end of it, Alan.” She didn’t often use his Christian name when there were other people in the room, but for now she ignored Redwing, who had lapsed back into silence, waiting her turn. “He was badly hurt . . . burned. He was in the hospital again. We both agreed. He’s been through enough.”
“I’m not sure I agreed.”
“We also have orders from Downing Street.” Mrs. Jones didn’t dare disobey an instruction that came directly from the prime minister, not when she might be weeks away from taking over at MI6.
Blunt understood that. “I still suggest we put one of our people inside,” he said.
Mrs. Jones relaxed. “As a teacher?”
“A teacher or a cleaner. Get Crawley onto it. Smithers to provide surveillance and communications equipment. In the meantime, let’s keep an eye on all known Scorpia agents, particularly if they show up anywhere near the Egyptian border.” He turned to Redwing, as if noticing her for the first time. “Your thoughts, Redwing?”
“I just have a couple of things to add, sir,” Redwing said. “I have no argument with anything that Mrs. Jones has said, but it does seem a little odd that Kroll would have flown into Heathrow Airport and then traveled all the way across London to Woolwich, if that really was where he was killed. Why didn’t he just fly into City Airport? It would have been much closer.”
Blunt was pleased. It was exactly the same thought that had already occurred to him. “There are no direct flights from Cairo,” he said. “But for that matter, why didn’t he use a private jet?”
“What really puzzles me is the medical report. First of all, from the contents of the dead man’s stomach, we know that the last meal he ate included snails, roast pork, potatoes, and some sort of dessert made with Grand Marnier. It’s the sort of meal you might eat in Paris or London, but it’s not exactly what you’d expect from a man who’d just flown in from Cairo.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, even in first class, he wouldn’t have been served snails on the plane. And pork is an unusual choice in a Muslim country. For that matter we found no Egyptian spices or herbs of any sort. No rice or falafel. Of course, he could have been staying in an international hotel. He may hate Egyptian food. But it still feels strange.”
“And there’s something else?”
“Yes, sir. When we examined the body, we found a tiny fragment of glass buried in the back of the neck. It had been driven in by the impact of the bullet.” Redwing paused. “It’s certainly possible that Kroll was shot in London, somewhere close to the River Thames. He could have been standing on one of the banks or perhaps on a bridge. He was shot and fell into the water.
“But the fragment of glass tells another story. He was inside, on the other side of a window. In which case the body was then taken and dumped in the river. But if that was what happened, what was the point? Is it possible that the body was meant to be found?”
“And you’re suggesting that the note was planted?” Blunt considered. “But why would Scorpia want us to know what they were doing?”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me, sir,” Redwing admitted.
There was a long silence. Blunt made his decision.
“We’ll go ahead and put someone in the school,” he said. “It may be a complete waste of time, but I can’t see that it will do any harm. Still, it’s a shame to waste the resources of an active agent.”
Mrs. Jones glanced at him. Once again, she saw what was going through his mind. Alex Rider would already be on his way to Cairo if Blunt had his way.
But it wasn’t going to happen. Alex Rider was history. Mrs. Jones had never said as much to him, but she had promised it to herself, and no matter what her own future was within MI6, it was one promise she was determined not to break.
PART TWO
ALEX
7
ANGLE OF ATTACK
“ALEX! YOU’VE OVERSLEPT AGAIN. Get yourself out of bed!”
Jack Starbright was standing in the doorway of Alex’s bedroom on the first floor of the house they shared near the King’s Road in Chelsea. It was seven forty-five in the morning and he should have been up and getting dressed, but all she could see was the back of his head with a clump of messy light brown hair poking out from underneath the duvet and the curve of his body beneath.
“Alex . . .,” she said again.
A hand appeared, clutched hold of the pillow, and dragged it down. “What day is it, Jack?” The voice came from nowhere, muffled beneath the bedclothes.
“It’s Friday. It’s a school day.”
“I don’t want to go to school.”
“Yes, you do.”
“What’s for breakfast?”
“You’ll find out when you’ve had your shower.”
Jack closed the bedroom door and a few seconds later Alex emerged from bed, wrinkling his ey
es against the morning light. He threw back the covers and rolled into a sitting position, looking around the wreck that was his room. There were crumpled clothes on the floor, school-books and folders everywhere, DVDs and games stacked up beside his computer, posters peeling off the walls. He and Jack had actually had one of their very rare arguments a few weeks before. It wasn’t that she wanted him to tidy the room. That wasn’t the problem. In fact, it was the other way around. He had insisted that she stop tidying it for him—as she had done every day for the last eight years. In the end she had understood. This was his space. And this was the way he wanted it.
He stripped off his pajamas and stumbled into the shower. The blast of hot water woke him up instantly and he stood there, letting it pound onto his shoulders and back. This was his favorite part of the morning, five minutes when he didn’t belong to anyone—not to Jack and not to Brookland School—when he could collect his thoughts and prepare himself for whatever the day might throw his way.
He wasn’t a spy anymore. That was the important thing. That was what he had to remind himself. Four months had passed without so much as a whisper from MI6. He had made it through the second half of the spring term and the first five weeks of the summer without being recruited, kidnapped, or forced into some hare-brained mission on the other side of the world. He was getting used to the fact that it was never going to happen again. He was tall now, five foot ten. His shoulders had broadened and he had virtually lost the little-boy looks that had been so useful to Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones. His hair was longer. He was fifteen years old. There had been times when he had thought it was a birthday he would never see.
And what had happened in those four months? School, of course. Alex had even begun to think about college . . . It would be only three years away. He already knew that science and math were his strong suits. His physics teacher, Mrs. Morant, insisted that he had a natural talent. “I can see you at Oxford or Cambridge, Alex. If you just apply yourself and try to turn up for school a little more often.” Then there were sports. Alex had been chosen as the captain of the first team at soccer. And drama—he was playing Teen Angel in the summer production of Grease, although he still wasn’t convinced he could actually sing.
He seemed to be at home less and less, hanging out on the King’s Road with Tom Harris and James Hale, who were still his two best friends. He played soccer on weekends and had joined a rowing club near Hammer-smith. He was in the fifteen-to-twenty-one group, and he loved the rhythm of it, slicing through the water on a Saturday afternoon, down through Putney and Richmond and on to Hampton Court, even if his muscles ached for the rest of the weekend. The cox, barking out instructions with an old-fashioned bullhorn, was a girl of his own age, Rowan Gently, and she was obviously interested in him. He had joked that her name sounded like their progress up the Thames.
But he was still seeing Sabina—even if most of their contact was made through Facebook. It wasn’t easy being thousands of miles apart with an eight-hour time difference so that while Alex was getting up and frantically grabbing his clothes, she was still sound asleep. It was almost as if they were on different planets, and part of him knew that if she didn’t return to England soon, it would be almost impossible to maintain their friendship.
He had seen her quite recently. Her parents had invited him out for ten days during the Easter holidays, and Jack had stumped up the cost of the transatlantic flight. It had given her a chance to have a break too.
It had been a fantastic vacation . . . something the two of them had promised themselves after their near-death encounter with Desmond McCain in Scotland at the start of the year. They had explored San Francisco—the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz prison—and driven down the winding coastal road to Big Sur, where they had spent the weekend hiking and camping in some of the most stunning countryside in California.
As he pulled on his trousers and set about trying to find two matching socks, Alex remembered the last night he had spent with Sabina. The two of them had sat together on the porch of the white-painted wooden house that Edward Pleasure had rented in Pacific Heights, a quiet, leafy part of the city. It was a brilliant night, the sky deep black and scattered with stars.
“I wish you didn’t have to go back.”
“Me too,” Alex said.
“It’s crazy. You’re my closest friend and you’re thousands of miles away.”
“When do you think you’ll come back to England?”
Sabina sighed. “I’m not sure we ever will. Dad’s doing really well out here and he’s got his green card now, which means he can live here permanently. And Mum likes it.” She put her arm around his neck. “Do you think we’ll stay together, Alex?”
“I don’t know.” There didn’t seem any point in lying. “You’ll probably meet some American football player and I’ll never hear from you again.”
“You know that’s not true.” Sabina paused. “Maybe you can come back in the summer. You know you’re always welcome. We could go to Yellowstone. Or maybe to LA . . .”
“I’d like that.”
Alex remembered how Sabina had looked at him then. But it was the way she had kissed him good-bye that he remembered most.
Alex grabbed a shirt, but before he put it on, he turned around and examined his shoulders in the mirror. It was something he did automatically, every day. The burns had faded, but they were still there like a series of exclamation marks, the scars from the burning aviation fuel that had rained down on him in the airfield in Laikipia, Kenya. The doctors had told him they would probably stay with him for life. Well, he could add them to the museum of injuries that his body had become. The bullet wound in his chest, the various bruises, the thin white line that had been seared across the back of his hand by, of all things, a poisonous spider’s web.
Did he miss it? Did he mind being an ordinary schoolboy once again? Alex felt he had passed through a tunnel. There had been a brief time when he had needed the danger, when he was almost glad to be part of the secret world of MI6. After all, that was what he had been trained for virtually all his life. His father had been a spy. His uncle, Ian Rider, had been a spy. Between the two of them, they had made sure he would follow in what had become a family tradition.
But now he was out in the light. Enough time had passed since Kenya to remind him that real life was better. Herod Sayle, Dr. Grief, Mrs. Rothman, Major Sarov, Damian Cray, Winston Yu, and most recently, Desmond McCain. He had come up against them and they were all dead. It was time now to leave them behind.
He glanced at his watch. Despite Jack’s wake-up call, he was going to be late for school—and this in the week when the principal, Mr. Lee, had announced double detention for latecomers, part of Brookland’s annual crack-down on personal discipline. One term it had been crooked ties and shirts out of pants. The next it had been chewing gum. Now it was timekeeping. It was good to have such little things to worry about. Alex buttoned up his shirt and looped his tie over his head. Then he hurried down to the kitchen for breakfast.
There were two soft-boiled eggs waiting for him on the table. Alex was amused to see that Jack still insisted on cutting his toast into Marmite soldiers. She was making coffee for herself and tea for him, and as he took his place, she brought the two cups over.
“Alex—you look a complete mess. Your tie’s crooked, you haven’t brushed your hair, and that shirt’s crumpled.”
“It’s only school, Jack.”
“If I ran the school, I wouldn’t let you in.”
She set the two cups on the table and sat down herself, watching fondly as Alex sliced off the tops of his eggs and dipped the first soldier in. “Have you got any plans this weekend?” she asked. “I thought maybe after you finished rowing, we could take off somewhere . . . get out of London.”
“Actually, I’m away this weekend.” Alex had forgotten to tell her.
“Where?”
“Tom’s invited me over. His brother’s coming over from Italy and we thought we
’d get together.” Tom Harris was as much of a mess as ever, living with his mother after his father had walked out. Alex had met his brother, Jerry, when he’d first gone chasing after Scorpia, in Rome. Tom and Jerry. As Tom often said, the names told you everything you needed to know about their parents.
“Okay. That’s fine. I’ll put out a toothbrush and a spare set of clothes.”
Was there something in Jack’s voice? Alex glanced in her direction, but she seemed okay. She looked the way she always did—relaxed and a bit ramshackle, dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and a loose-fitting cardigan. She was sitting with her elbows on the table, cradling her coffee cup and smiling. But just for a moment she hadn’t quite sounded like herself. It was as if she had something on her mind.
“Is something the matter?” Alex asked.
“No!” She pulled herself together. “No. I’m sorry. I just stayed up a little too late last night and I’m a bit tired.”
That would make sense. Jack had recently started teaching herself Italian. Alex wasn’t quite sure why, although one of the reasons might have been the Italian teacher who was twenty-nine, dark, and built like a boxer. She was certainly taking it seriously with private lessons twice a week and tapes every night.
“You’re not worrying about me, are you? I haven’t heard a thing from MI6.”
“I know,” Jack said. “It’s not that.” She shook her head. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”