“I’m staying with Mr Sayle,” Alex said. He stared at the gun. “Why are you pointing that at me? I’m not doing anything wrong.”
He sounded pathetic. Little boy lost. But it had the desired effect. The guard hesitated, slightly lowering the gun. At that moment Alex struck. It was another classic karate blow, this time twisting his body round and driving his elbow into the side of the guard’s head, just below his ear. He had almost certainly knocked him out with the single punch, but he couldn’t take chances and followed it through with a knee to the groin. The guard folded up, his pistol falling to the ground. Quickly, Alex dragged him back, away from the railing. He looked down. Nobody had seen what had happened.
But the guard wouldn’t be unconscious long and Alex knew he had to get out of there – not just back up to ground level but out of Sayle Enterprises itself. He had to contact Mrs Jones. He still didn’t know how or why, but he knew now that the Stormbreakers had been turned into killing machines. There were less than seventeen hours until the launch at the Science Museum. Somehow Alex had to stop it from happening.
He ran. The door at the end of the passage slid open and he found himself in a curving white corridor with windowless offices built into what must be yet more shafts of the Dozmary Mine. He knew he couldn’t go back the way he had come. He was too tired and even if he could find his way through the mine, he’d never be able to manage the swim a second time. His only chance was the door that had first led him here. It led to the metal staircase that would bring him to D Block. There was a telephone in his room. Failing that, he could use the Nintendo to transmit a message. But MI6 had to know what he had found out.
He reached the end of the corridor, then ducked back as three guards appeared, walking together towards a set of double doors. Fortunately they hadn’t seen him. Nobody knew he was there. He was going to be all right.
And then the alarm went off. A klaxon barking electronically along the corridors, leaping out from the corners, echoing everywhere. Overhead, a light began to flash red. The guards wheeled round and saw Alex. Unlike the guard on the observation platform, they didn’t hesitate. As Alex dived head-first through the nearest door, they brought up their machine-guns and fired. Bullets slammed into the wall beside him and ricocheted along the passageway. Alex landed flat on his stomach and kicked out, slamming the door behind him. He straightened up, found a bolt and rammed it home. A second later there was an explosive hammering on the other side as the guards fired at the door. But it was solid metal. It would hold.
He was standing on a gantry leading down to a tangle of pipes and cylinders, like the boiler room of a ship. The alarm was as loud here as it had been by the main chamber. It seemed to be coming from everywhere. Alex leapt down the staircase three steps at a time and skidded to a halt, searching for a way out. He had a choice of three corridors, but then he heard the rattle of feet and knew that his choice had just become two. He wished now that he had thought to pick up the Browning automatic. He was alone and unarmed. The only duck in the shooting gallery, with guns everywhere and no way out. Was this what MI6 had trained him for? If so, eleven days hadn’t been enough.
He ran on, weaving in and out of the pipes, trying every door he came to. A room with more space suits hanging on hooks. A shower room. Another, larger laboratory with a second door leading out and, in the middle, a glass tank shaped like a barrel and filled with green liquid. Tangles of rubber tubing sprouting out of the tank. Trays filled with test-tubes all around.
The barrel-shaped tank. The trays. Alex had seen them before – as vague outlines on his Nintendo. He must have been standing on the other side of the second door. He ran over to it. It was locked from the inside, electronically, by the glass identification plate against the wall. He would never be able to open it. He was trapped.
Footsteps approached. Alex just had time to hide himself on the floor, underneath one of the work surfaces, before the first door was thrown open and two more guards ran into the laboratory. They took a quick look around – without seeing him.
“Not here!” one of them said.
“You’d better go up!”
One guard walked out the way he had come. The other went over to the second door and placed his hand on the glass panel. There was a green glow and the door buzzed loudly. The guard threw it open and disappeared. Alex rolled forward as the door swung shut and just managed to get his hand into the crack. He waited a moment, then stood up. He pulled the door open. As he had hoped, he was looking out into the unfinished passageway where he had been surprised by Nadia Vole.
The guard had already gone on ahead. Alex slipped out, closing the door behind him, cutting off the sound of the klaxon. He made his way up the metal stairs and through a swing-door. He was grateful to find himself back in the fresh air. The sun had already set, but across the lawn the airstrip was ablaze, artificially illuminated by the sort of lights Alex had seen on football pitches. There were about a dozen lorries parked next to each other. Men were loading them up with heavy, square, red and white boxes. The cargo plane that Alex had seen when he arrived rumbled down the runway and lurched into the air.
Alex knew that he was looking at the end of the assembly line. The red and white boxes were the same ones he had seen in the underground chamber. The Stormbreakers, complete with their deadly secret, were being loaded up and delivered. By morning they would be all over the country.
Keeping low, he ran past the fountain and across the grass. He thought about making for the main gate, but he knew that was hopeless. The guards would have been alerted. They’d be waiting for him. Nor could he climb the perimeter fence, not with the razor wire stretched out across the top. No. His own room seemed the best answer. The telephone was there. And so were his only weapons: the few gadgets that Smithers had given him four days – or was it four years? – ago.
He entered the house through the kitchen, the same way he had left it the night before. It was only eight o’clock, but the whole place seemed to be deserted. He ran up the staircase and along the corridor to his room on the first floor. Slowly, he opened the door. It seemed his luck was holding out. There was nobody there. Without turning on the light, he went inside and snatched up the telephone. The line was dead. Never mind. He found his Nintendo, all four cartridges, his yo-yo and the zit cream and crammed them into his pockets. He had already decided not to stay there. It was too dangerous. He would find somewhere to hide out. Then he would use the Nemesis cartridge to contact MI6.
He went back to the door and opened it. With a shock he saw Mr Grin standing in the hallway, looking hideous with his white face, his ginger hair and his mauve, twisted smile. Alex reacted quickly, striking out with the heel of his right hand. But Mr Grin was quicker. He seemed to shimmy to one side, then his hand shot out, the side of it driving into Alex’s throat. Alex gasped for breath but no breath came. The butler made an inarticulate sound and lashed out a second time. Alex got the impression that behind the livid scars he really was grinning, enjoying himself. He tried to avoid the blow, but Mr Grin’s fist hit him square on the jaw. He was spun into the bedroom, falling backwards.
He never even remembered hitting the floor.
THE SCHOOL BULLY
They came for Alex the following morning.
He had spent the night handcuffed to a radiator in a small, dark room with a single barred window. It might once have been a coal cellar. When Alex opened his eyes, the grey, first light of the morning was just creeping in. He closed them and opened them again. His head was thumping and the side of his face was swollen where Mr Grin had hit him. His arms were twisted behind him and the tendons in his shoulders were on fire. But worse than all this was his sense of failure. It was 1st April, the day when the Stormbreakers would be unleashed. And Alex was helpless. He was the April fool.
It was just before nine o’clock when the door opened and two guards came in with Mr Grin behind them. The handcuffs were unlocked and Alex was forced to his feet. Then, with a guard holding h
im on each side, he was marched out of the room and up a flight of stairs. He was still in Sayle’s house. The stairs led to the hall with its huge painting of Judgement Day. Alex looked at the figures, writhing in agony on the canvas. If he was right, the image would soon be repeated all over England. And it would happen in just three hours’ time.
The guards half-dragged him through a doorway and into the room with the aquarium. There was a high-backed wooden chair in front of it. Alex was forced to sit down. His hands were cuffed behind him again. The guards left. Mr Grin remained.
He heard the sound of feet on the spiral staircase, saw the leather shoes coming down before he saw the man who wore them. Then Herod Sayle appeared, dressed in an immaculate pale grey silk suit. Blunt and the people at MI6 had been suspicious of the Middle-Eastern multi-millionaire from the very start. They’d always thought he had something to hide. But even they had never guessed the truth. He wasn’t a friend of Alex’s country. He was its worst enemy.
“Three questions,” Sayle snapped. His voice was utterly cold. “Who are you? Who sent you here? How much do you know?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex said.
Sayle sighed. If there had been anything comical about him when Alex had first seen him, it had completely evaporated. His face was bored and business-like. His eyes were ugly, full of menace. “We have very little time,” he said. “Mr Grin…?”
Mr Grin went over to one of the display cases and took out a knife, razor sharp with a serrated edge. He held it up close to his face, his eyes gleaming.
“I’ve already told you that Mr Grin used to be an expert with knives,” Sayle continued. “He still is. Tell me what I want to know, Alex, or he will cause you more pain than you could begin to imagine. And don’t try to lie to me, please. Just remember what happens to liars. Particularly to their tongues.”
Mr Grin took a step closer. The blade flashed, catching the light.
“My name is Alex Rider,” Alex said.
“Rider’s son?”
“His nephew.”
“Who sent you here?”
“The same people who sent him.” There was no point lying. It didn’t matter any more. The stakes had become too high.
“MI6?” Sayle laughed without any sign of humour. “They send fourteen-year-old boys to do their dirty work? Not very English, I’d have said. Not cricket, what?” He had adopted an exaggerated English accent. Now he walked forward and sat down behind the desk. “And what of my third question, Alex? How much have you found out?”
Alex shrugged, trying to look casual to hide the fear he was really feeling. “I know enough,” he said.
“Go on.”
Alex took a breath. Behind him, the jellyfish drifted past like a poisonous cloud. He could see it out of the corner of his eye. He tugged at the handcuffs, wondering if it would be possible to break the chair. There was a sudden flash and the knife that Mr Grin had been holding was suddenly quivering in the back of the chair, a hair’s breadth from his head. The edge of the blade had actually nicked the skin of his neck. He felt a trickle of blood slide down over his collar.
“You’re keeping us waiting,” Herod Sayle said.
“All right. When my uncle was here, he got interested in viruses. He asked about them at the local library. I thought he was talking about computer viruses. That was the natural assumption. But I was wrong. I saw what you were doing last night. I heard them talking on the speaker system. Decontamination and Biocontainment Zones. They were talking about biological warfare. You’ve got hold of some sort of real virus. It came here in test-tubes, packed into silver boxes, and you’ve put them into the Stormbreakers. I don’t know what happens next. I suppose when the computers are turned on, people die. They’re in schools, so it’ll be schoolchildren. Which means you’re not the saint everyone thinks you are, Mr Sayle. A mass-murderer. A bliddy psycho, I suppose you might say.”
Herod Sayle clapped his hands softly together. “You’ve done very well, Alex,” he said. “I congratulate you. And I feel you deserve a reward. So I’m going to tell you everything. In a way it’s appropriate that MI6 should have sent me a real English schoolboy. Because, you see, there’s nothing in the world I hate more. Oh yes…” His face twisted with anger and for a moment Alex could see the madness, alive in his eyes. “You bliddy snobs with your stuck-up schools and your stinking English superiority! But I’m going to show you. I’m going to show you all!”
He stood up and walked over to Alex. “I came to this country forty years ago,” he said. “I had no money. My family had nothing. But for a freak accident, I would probably have lived and died in Beirut. Better for you if I had! So much better!
“I was sent here by an American family, to be educated. They had friends in north London and I stayed with them while I went to the local school. You cannot imagine how I was feeling then. To be in London, which I had always believed to be the heart of civilization. To see such wealth and to know that I was going to be part of it! I was going to be English! To a child born in a Lebanese gutter, it was an impossible dream.
“But I was soon to learn the reality…” Sayle leaned forward and yanked the knife out of the chair. He tossed it to Mr Grin, who caught it and spun it in his hand.
“From the moment I arrived at the school, I was mocked and bullied. Because of my size. Because of the colour of my skin. Because I couldn’t speak English well. Because I wasn’t one of them. They had names for me. Herod Smell. Goat-boy. The Dwarf. And they played tricks on me. Drawing-pins on my chair. Books stolen and defaced. My trousers ripped off me and hung out on the flagpole, underneath the Union Jack.” Sayle shook his head slowly. “I had loved that flag when I first came here,” he said. “But in only weeks I came to hate it.”
“Lots of people are bullied at school—” Alex began – and stopped as Sayle back-handed him viciously across the face.
“I haven’t finished,” he said. He was breathing heavily and there was spittle on his lower lip. Alex could see him reliving the past. And once again he was allowing the past to destroy him.
“There were plenty of bullies in that school,” he said. “But there was one who was worse than any of them. He was a small, smarmy shrimp of a boy, but his parents were rich and he had a way with the other children. He knew how to talk his way around them … a politician even then. Oh yes. He could be charming when he wanted to be. When there were teachers around. But the moment their backs were turned, he was on to me. He used to organize the others. Let’s get the Goat-boy. Let’s push his head in the toilet. He had a thousand ideas to make my life miserable and he never stopped thinking up more. All the time he goaded me and taunted me and there was nothing I could do because he was popular and I was a foreigner. And do you know who that boy grew up to be?”
“I think you’re going to tell me anyway,” Alex said.
“I am going to tell you. Yes. He grew up to be the bliddy Prime Minister!”
Sayle took out a white silk handkerchief and wiped his face. His bald head was gleaming with sweat. “All my life I’ve been treated the same way,” he continued. “No matter how successful I’ve become, how much money I’ve made, how many people I’ve employed. I’m still a joke. I’m still Herod Smell, the Goat-boy, the Lebanese tramp. Well, for forty years I’ve been planning my revenge. And now, at last, my time has come. Mr Grin…”
Mr Grin went over to the wall and pressed a button. Alex half-expected the snooker table to rise out of the floor, but instead a panel slid up on every wall to reveal floor-to-ceiling television screens which immediately flickered into life. On one screen Alex could see the underground laboratory, on another the assembly line, on a third the airstrip with the last of the lorries on its way out. There were closed circuit television cameras everywhere and Sayle could see every corner of his kingdom without even leaving the room. No wonder Alex had been discovered so easily.
“The Stormbreakers are armed and ready. And yes, you’re right, Alex. Each
one contains what you might call a computer virus. But that, if you like, is my little April Fools’ joke. Because the virus I’m talking about is a form of smallpox. Of course, Alex, it’s been genetically modified to make it faster and stronger … more lethal. A spoonful of the stuff would destroy a city. And my Stormbreakers hold much, much more than that.
“At the moment it’s isolated, quite safe. But this afternoon there’s going to be a bit of a party at the Science Museum. Every school in Britain will be joining in, with the schoolchildren gathered round their nice, shiny new computers. And at midday, on the stroke of twelve, my old friend the Prime Minister will make one of his smug, self-serving speeches and then he’ll press a button. He thinks he’ll be activating the computers and in a way he’s right. Pressing the button will release the virus and by midnight tonight there will be no more schoolchildren in Britain, and the Prime Minister will weep as he remembers the day he first bullied Herod Sayle!”
“You’re mad!” Alex exclaimed. “By midnight tonight you’ll be in jail.”
Sayle dismissed the thought with a wave of the hand. “I think not. By the time anyone realizes what has happened, I’ll be gone. I’m not alone in this, Alex. I have powerful friends who have supported me—”
“Yassen Gregorovich.”
“You have been busy!” He seemed surprised that Alex knew the name. “Yassen is working for the people who have been helping me. Let’s not mention any names or even nationalities. You’d be surprised how many countries there are in the world who loathe the English. Most of Europe, just to begin with. But anyway…” He clapped his hands and went back to his desk. “Now you know the truth. I’m glad I was able to tell you, Alex. You have no idea how much I loathe you. Even when you were playing that stupid game with me, the snooker, I was thinking how much pleasure it would give me to kill you. You’re just like the boys I was at school with. Nothing has changed.”