Alex opened the window and climbed out. It was better not to think about it at all. He would just do it. After all, if this had been the ground floor, or a climbing-frame in the school yard, it would have been child’s play. It was only the sheer brick wall stretching down to the pavement, the cars and buses moving like toys so far below and the blast of the wind against his face that made it terrifying. Don’t think about it. Do it.
Alex lowered himself on to the ledge outside Crawley’s office. His hands were behind him, clutching on to the window-sill. He took a deep breath. And jumped.
A camera located in an office across the road caught Alex as he launched himself into space. Two floors above, Alan Blunt was still sitting in front of the screen. He chuckled. It was a humourless sound. “I told you,” he said. “The boy’s extraordinary.” “The boy’s quite mad,” the woman retorted. “Well, maybe that’s what we need.” “You’re just going to sit here and watch him kill himself?” “I’m going to sit here and hope he survives.” Alex had miscalculated the jump. He had missed the flagpole by a centimetre and would have plunged down to the pavement if his hands hadn’t caught hold of the Union Jack itself. He was hanging now with his feet in mid-air. Slowly, with huge effort, he pulled himself up, his fingers hooking into the material. Somehow he managed to climb back up on to the pole. He still didn’t look down. He just hoped that no passerby would look up.
It was easier after that. He squatted on the pole, then threw himself across to the ledge outside Ian Rider’s office. He had to be careful. Too far to the left and he would crash into the side of the building, but too far the other way and he would fall. In fact he landed perfectly, grabbing hold of the ledge with both hands and then pulling himself up until he was level with the window. It was only then that he wondered if the window would be locked. If so, he’d just have to go back.
It wasn’t. Alex slid the window open and hoisted himself into the second office, which was in many ways a carbon copy of the first. It had the same furniture, the same carpet, even a similar print on the wall. He went over to the desk and sat down. The first thing he saw was a photograph of himself, taken the summer before on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where he had gone diving. There was a second picture tucked into the corner of the frame. Alex aged five or six. He was surprised by the photographs. He had never thought of Ian Rider as a sentimental man.
Alex glanced at his watch. About three minutes had passed since Crawley had left the office, and he had said he would be back in five. If he was going to find anything here, he had to find it quickly. He pulled open a drawer of the desk. It contained five or six thick files. Alex took them and opened them. He saw at once that they had nothing to do with banking.
The first was marked: NERVE POISONS – NEW METHODS OF CONCEALMENT AND DISSEMINATION. Alex put it aside and looked at the second. ASSASSINATIONS – FOUR CASE STUDIES. Growing ever more puzzled, he quickly flicked through the rest of the files, which covered counter-terrorism, the movement of uranium across Europe and interrogation techniques. The last file was simply labelled: STORMBREAKER.
Alex was about to read it when the door suddenly opened and two men walked in. One of them was Crawley. The other was the driver from the breaker’s yard. Alex knew there was no point trying to explain what he was doing. He was sitting behind the desk with the Stormbreaker file open in his hands. But at the same time he realized that the two men weren’t surprised to see him there. From the way they had come into the room, they had expected to find him.
“This isn’t a bank,” Alex said. “Who are you? Was my uncle working for you? Did you kill him?”
“So many questions,” Crawley muttered. “But I’m afraid we’re not authorized to give you the answers.”
The other man lifted his hand and Alex saw that he was holding a gun. He stood up behind the desk, holding the file as if to protect himself. “No—” he began.
The man fired. There was no explosion. The gun spat at Alex and he felt something slam into his heart. His hand opened and the file tumbled to the ground. Then his legs buckled, the room twisted and he fell back into nothing.
“SO WHAT DO YOU SAY?”
Alex opened his eyes. So he was still alive! That was a nice surprise.
He was lying on a bed in a large, comfortable room. The bed was modern but the room was old, with beams running across the ceiling, a stone fireplace and narrow windows in ornate wooden frames. He had seen rooms like this in books when he was studying Shakespeare. He would have said the building was Elizabethan. It had to be somewhere in the country. There was no sound of traffic. Outside he could see trees.
Someone had undressed him. His school uniform was gone. Instead he was wearing loose pyjamas, silk from the feel of them. From the light outside he would have guessed it was early evening. He found his watch lying on the table beside the bed and he reached out for it. The time was twelve o’clock. It had been half-past four when he was shot with what must have been a drugged dart. He had lost a whole night and half a day.
There was a bathroom leading off the bedroom; bright white tiles and a huge shower behind a cylinder of glass and chrome. Alex stripped off the pyjamas and stood for five minutes under a jet of steaming water. He felt better after that.
He went back into the bedroom and opened the cupboard. Someone had been to his house in Chelsea. All his clothes were here, neatly hung up. He wondered what Crawley had told Jack. Presumably he would have made up some story to explain his sudden disappearance. He took out a pair of Gap combat trousers, a Nike sweatshirt and trainers, got dressed, then sat on the bed and waited.
About fifteen minutes later there was a knock and the door opened. A young Asian woman in a nurse’s uniform came in, beaming.
“Oh, you’re awake. And dressed. How are you feeling? Not too groggy, I hope. Please come this way. Mr Blunt is expecting you for lunch.”
Alex hadn’t spoken a word to her. He followed her out of the room, along a corridor and down a flight of stairs. The house was indeed Elizabethan, with wooden panels along the corridors, ornate chandeliers and oil paintings of old, bearded men in tunics and ruffs. The stairs led down into a tall, galleried room with a rug spread out over flagstones and a fireplace big enough to park a car in. A long, polished wooden table had been laid for three. Alan Blunt and a dark, rather masculine woman unwrapping a sweet were already sitting down. Mrs Blunt?
“Alex.” Blunt smiled briefly, as if it was something he didn’t enjoy doing. “It’s good of you to join us.”
Alex sat down. “You didn’t give me a lot of choice.”
“Yes. I don’t quite know what Crawley was thinking of, shooting you like that, but I suppose it was the easiest way. May I introduce my colleague, Mrs Jones.”
The woman nodded at Alex. Her eyes seemed to examine him minutely, but she said nothing.
“Who are you?” Alex asked. “What do you want with me?”
“I’m sure you have a great many questions. But first, let’s eat.” Blunt must have pressed a hidden button, or else he was being overheard, for at that precise moment a door opened and a waiter – in white jacket and black trousers – appeared carrying three plates. “I hope you eat meat,” Blunt continued. “Today it’s carré d’agneau.”
“You mean, roast lamb.”
“The chef is French.”
Alex waited until the food had been served. Blunt and Mrs Jones drank red wine. He stuck to water. Finally, Blunt began.
“As I’m sure you’ve gathered,” he said, “the Royal & General is not a bank. In fact it doesn’t exist … it’s nothing more than a cover. And it follows, of course, that your uncle had nothing to do with banking. He worked for me. My name, as I told you at the funeral, is Blunt. I am Chief Executive of the Special Operations Division of MI6. And your uncle was, for want of a better word, a spy.”
Alex couldn’t help smiling. “You mean … like James Bond?”
“Similar, although we don’t go in for numbers. Double O and all the rest
of it. He was a field agent, highly trained and very courageous. He successfully completed assignments in Iran, Washington, Hong Kong and Cairo – to name but a few. I imagine this must come as a bit of a shock to you.”
Alex thought about the dead man, what he had known of him. His privacy. His long absences abroad. And the times he had come home injured. A bandaged arm one time. A bruised face another. Little accidents, Alex had been told. But now it all made sense. “I’m not shocked,” he said.
Blunt cut a neat slice of meat. “Ian Rider’s luck ran out on his last mission,” he went on. “He had been working undercover here in England, in Cornwall, and was driving back to London to make a report when he was killed. You saw his car at the yard.”
“Stryker & Son,” Alex muttered. “Who are they?”
“Just people we use. We have budget restraints. We have to contract some of our work out. Mrs Jones here is our Head of Special Operations. She gave your uncle his last assignment.”
“We’re very sorry to have lost him, Alex.” The woman spoke for the first time. She didn’t sound very sorry at all.
“Do you know who killed him?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No. Not now.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t need to know. Not at this stage.”
“All right.” Alex put down his knife and fork. He hadn’t actually eaten anything. “My uncle was a spy. Thanks to you he’s dead. I found out too much, so you knocked me out and brought me here. Where am I, by the way?”
“This is one of our training centres,” Mrs Jones said.
“You’ve brought me here because you don’t want me to tell anyone what I know. Is that what this is all about? Because if it is, I’ll sign the Official Secrets Act or whatever it is you want me to do, but then I’d like to go home. This is all crazy anyway. And I’ve had enough. I’m out of here.”
Blunt coughed quietly. “It’s not quite as easy as that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s certainly true that you did draw attention to yourself both at the breaker’s yard and then at our offices on Liverpool Street. And it’s also true that what you know and what I’m about to tell you must go no further. But the fact of the matter is, Alex, we need your help.”
“My help?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Have you heard of a man called Herod Sayle?”
Alex thought for a moment. “I’ve seen his name in the newspapers. He’s something to do with computers. And he owns racehorses. Doesn’t he come from somewhere in Egypt?”
“No. From the Lebanon.” Blunt took a sip of wine. “Let me tell you his story, Alex. I’m sure you’ll find it of interest…
“Herod Sayle was born in complete poverty in the back streets of Beirut. His father was a failed hairdresser. His mother took in washing. He had nine brothers and four sisters, all living together in three small rooms along with the family goat. Young Herod never went to school and he should have ended up unemployed, unable to read or write, like the rest of his family.
“But when he was seven, something occurred that changed his life. He was walking down Olive Street, in the middle of Beirut, when he happened to see an upright piano fall out of a fourteenth-storey window. Apparently it was being moved and it somehow overturned. Anyway, there were a couple of American tourists walking along the pavement below and they would both have been crushed – no doubt about it – except that at the last minute Herod threw himself at them and pushed them out of the way. The piano missed them by a millimetre.
“Of course, they were enormously grateful to the young waif, and it now turned out that they were very rich. They made enquiries about him and discovered how poor he was … the very clothes he was wearing had been passed down by all nine of his brothers. And so, out of gratitude, they more or less adopted him. Flew him out of Beirut and put him into a school over here, where he made astonishing progress. He got nine O-levels and – here’s an amazing coincidence – at the age of fifteen he actually found himself sitting next to a boy who would grow up to become Prime Minister of Great Britain. Our present Prime Minister, in fact. The two of them were at school together.
“I’ll move quickly forward. After school, Sayle went to Cambridge, where he got a first in Economics. He then set out on a career that went from success to success. His own radio station, record label, computer software … and, yes, he even found time to buy a string of racehorses, although for some reason they always seem to come last. But what drew him to our attention was his most recent invention. A quite revolutionary computer which he calls the Stormbreaker.”
Stormbreaker. Alex remembered the file he had found in Ian Rider’s office. Things were beginning to come together.
“The Stormbreaker is being manufactured by Sayle Enterprises,” Mrs Jones said. “There’s been a lot of talk about the design. It has a black keyboard and black casing—”
“With a lightning bolt going down the side,” Alex said. He had seen a picture of it in PC Review.
“It doesn’t only look different,” Blunt cut in. “It’s based on a completely new technology. It uses something called the round processor. I don’t suppose that will mean anything to you.”
“It’s an integrated circuit on a sphere of silicon about one millimetre in diameter,” Alex said. “It’s ninety per cent cheaper to produce than an ordinary chip because the whole thing is sealed in, so you don’t need clean rooms for production.”
“Oh. Yes…” Blunt coughed. “Well, the point is, later today, Sayle Enterprises are going to make a quite remarkable announcement. They are planning to give away tens of thousands of these computers. In fact, it is their intention to ensure that every secondary school in Britain gets its own Stormbreaker. It’s an unparalleled act of generosity, Sayle’s way of thanking the country that gave him a home.”
“So the man’s a hero.”
“So it would seem. He wrote to Downing Street a few months ago:
“My Dear Prime Minister
You may remember me from our school-days together. For almost forty years I have lived in England and I wish to make a gesture, something that will never be forgotten, to express my true feelings towards your country.
“The letter went on to describe the gift and was signed Yours humbly, by the man himself. Of course, the whole Government was cock-a-hoop.
“The computers are being assembled at the Sayle plant down in Port Tallon, Cornwall. They’ll be shipped across the country at the end of this month and on April 1st there’s to be a special ceremony at the Science Museum in London. The Prime Minister is going to press the button that will bring all the computers on-line … the whole lot of them. And – this is top secret by the way – Mr Sayle is to be rewarded with British citizenship, which is apparently something he has always wanted.”
“Well, I’m very happy for him,” Alex said. “But you still haven’t told me what this has got to do with me.”
Blunt glanced at Mrs Jones, who had finished her meal while he was talking. She unwrapped another peppermint and took over.
“For some time now, our department – Special Operations – has been concerned about Mr Sayle. The fact of the matter is, we’ve been wondering if he isn’t too good to be true. I won’t go into all the details, Alex, but we’ve been looking at his business dealings … he has contacts in China and the former Soviet Union; countries that have never been our friends. The Government may think he’s a saint, but there’s a ruthless side to him too. And the security arrangements down at Port Tallon worry us. He’s more or less got his own private army. He’s acting as if he’s got something to hide.”
“Not that anyone will listen,” Blunt muttered.
“Exactly. The Government’s too keen to get their hands on these computers to listen to us. That was why we decided to send our own man down to the plant. Supposedly to check on security. But in fact his job was to keep an eye on Herod Sayle.”
; “You’re talking about my uncle,” Alex said. Ian Rider had told him that he was going to an insurance convention. Another lie in a life that had been nothing but lies.
“Yes. He was there for three weeks and, like us, he didn’t exactly take to Mr Sayle. In his first reports, he described him as short-tempered and unpleasant. But at the same time, he had to admit that everything seemed to be fine. Production was on schedule. The Stormbreakers were coming off the line. And everyone seemed to be happy.
“But then we got a message. Rider couldn’t say very much because it was an open line, but he told us that something had happened. He said he’d discovered something. That the Stormbreakers mustn’t leave the plant and that he was coming up to London at once. He left Port Tallon at four o’clock. He never even got to the motorway. He was ambushed in a quiet country lane. The local police found the car. We arranged for it to be brought up here.”
Alex sat in silence. He could imagine it. A twisting lane with the trees just in blossom. The silver BMW gleaming as it raced past. And, round a corner, a second car waiting… “Why are you telling me all this?” he asked.
“It proves what we were saying,” Blunt replied. “We have our doubts about Sayle, so we send a man down. Our best man. He finds out something and he ends up dead. Maybe Rider discovered the truth—”
“But I don’t understand!” Alex interrupted. “Sayle is giving away the computers. He’s not making any money out of them. In return he’s getting British citizenship. Fine! What’s he got to hide?”
“We don’t know,” Blunt said. “We just don’t know. But we want to find out. And soon. Before these computers leave the plant.”