Ten minutes later, Alex was on his way, cycling to school on the new Raleigh Pioneer 160 that he’d bought to replace his old Condor Roadracer. It wouldn’t have been his first choice, but he’d managed to get a deal from the supplier and it was perfect for getting around London, not too flashy, not likely to get stolen. And after he’d changed the seat to an ergonomically designed Rido R2, it was comfortable enough too. Glancing around, he saw Jack standing at the door, waving him good-bye. That was strange too. Normally, she wouldn’t have left the kitchen.
But it was a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining. Alex forgot about her as he accelerated toward the King’s Road. A moment later he had turned the corner and he was gone.
Jack closed the door.
She was annoyed with herself. She still hadn’t talked to Alex about the letter she had received a week ago. It was typical of her mother to put it all down with pen and paper rather than to telephone or send an e-mail. Her parents weren’t that old, only in their sixties, but they had always been purposefully old-fashioned—as if they were determined to show that their world was better than the one that was taking shape all around them.
And now her father was ill. He’d had a stroke at the start of the spring and he needed someone to look after him. Jack’s mother did what she could. Jack had an older sister, but she was living in Florida with three young children of her own. Jack had now been in England for coming up to ten years and her mother was suggesting, very gently, that she ought to think about coming home.
And in her heart, Jack knew that she was right. Maybe it was time to go.
It wasn’t just because of her father. She had her own future to think about. Here she was in London, almost thirty and single. She had first come to England as a student with a place at St. Martin’s School of Art, planning to become a jewelry designer. She had started working for Ian Rider to pay the fees and somehow she had allowed herself to get sucked into his world. In the early days, she would live at the Chelsea house when Ian Rider was abroad, taking Alex to school, then slipping away to do her studies until it was time to pick him up. But Ian had been away more and more often until it had made sense to move in permanently. Suddenly, without ever really choosing it, she had become part of the family, almost a big sister for Alex. She had adored him from the start, even when he was seven years old. And she felt sorry for him too. She had been told that both his parents had died in a plane crash, and she could see that Ian Rider was no substitute, not when he traveled so much.
And then Ian Rider had died and everything had changed.
Had she ever wondered about her employer? He had told her he worked in international banking and she had taken his word for it, but looking back, she knew that she had been foolish. No international banker kept three different passports in his desk drawer. Jack had come upon them once, looking for a pair of scissors, and she had asked him about them. It was the only time Ian Rider had ever been angry with her.
“Never ask me about my work, Jack. It’s the one thing I’ll never talk about. Not with you. Not with Alex . . .”
She could hear his voice now and wondered how she could have been so stupid. No international bankers stayed away for weeks at a time—and certainly none of them returned with so many inexplicable injuries. Ian had been mugged in Rome, involved in a car crash in Geneva, and broken his arm skiing in Vancouver. He had joked about it, saying he was accident prone . . . until, that is, the final accident had revealed the truth.
What Alex didn’t know, what Jack had never told him, was that she had actually decided to leave two weeks before Ian Rider had set off for Cornwall on the mission that had killed him. She had even gone as far as typing out her resignation letter. She had felt dreadful—but thinking about it, she was sure she was doing the right thing. She wasn’t going to be a nanny and a housekeeper forever, and the longer she stayed, the harder it would finally be to break the bonds with Alex. She would still be his friend, visiting whenever she could. But it was definitely time to move on.
And then the news had come of Ian’s death, the funeral, the first meeting with Alan Blunt, and the almost incredible truth that Ian had been a spy, working for MI6 all along. That was when Alex had been recruited. And what had persuaded Alex to risk his life that first time, investigating the Stormbreaker computer? He hadn’t done it for his country. He hadn’t done it out of respect for his uncle. No—MI6 had threatened to expel Jack from the country, and he had agreed to help them in return for a permanent visa so that she could stay.
How could she abandon him after that? As far as Jack knew, Alex had no living relatives. She had tried to find some trace of his grandparents, but it seemed that all four of them had died young. There were no uncles or aunts. The closest relative she’d been able to dig up was a cousin living in Glossop, and she couldn’t quite imagine Alex starting a new life there. And so she had stayed. She was almost the only person in the world who knew his secret. So long as he was involved with MI6, nobody could take her place.
All that seemed to be behind them now. The last time she had seen Mrs. Jones, it had been a few days before Alex’s fifteenth birthday at St. Dominic’s Hospital in north London. Alex had just gotten back from Kenya—badly hurt—and that was when she had finally put her foot down and insisted that there would be no further missions, that from now on MI6 would leave him alone. Mrs. Jones had made no promises, but Jack had sensed that maybe she had won the argument. Certainly, she had heard nothing since.
In truth, Alex was probably too old for them now. He didn’t look like a child anymore. Jack remembered how he had once crawled up a chimney when he was training with the SAS. He wouldn’t be able to manage that again. There were probably SAS men who were smaller than him now.
But if Jack was relieved that this part of their lives was behind them, there was one side effect that she hadn’t foreseen. Alex didn’t need her so much now. That was what it all boiled down to. He wasn’t going to come home wounded with burns or bullet holes. There was no need to protect him. And the two of them were growing apart. Recently Alex had begun spending more and more time without her, with his friends. Take this weekend, for example. He’d casually mentioned that he was taking off with Tom Harris and hadn’t even stopped to consider that he would be leaving her on her own. It was the same last spring, when he’d been away for two weeks with Sabina. Jack didn’t mind. It was how it should be. He was a teenager. But she didn’t feel wanted. And that told her that—at last—it was time to move on.
All she had to do was tell Alex. She would leave at the end of the summer vacation and together they would find someone to take her place. Of course he’d be sad. He’d probably argue with her, but in the end he’d see it her way. Jack got up and set about clearing the breakfast things. She had put it off too many times already, but her mind was set. She would talk to him when he got home tonight.
“Okay. We’re going to start with a warm-up.” Grant Donovan, head of math at Brookland School, pressed a button and six geometric shapes appeared on the whiteboard. Each one had an angle marked x. “In three of these diagrams, x equals forty-five degrees,” he explained. You’ve got five minutes to tell me which, and the first person to finish gets this week’s bonus prize.”
“I hope it’s better than last week’s bonus prize,” someone called out.
“The last one of you to finish gets a page of negative multiplications to take home.”
There was a general groan and everyone put their heads down.
Alex tried to concentrate on the shapes, but they were just floating in front of him, refusing to come into focus. All the triangles looked the same to him, like one of those puzzles in a “spot the difference” magazine. It had been the same in English Lit an hour before, trying to make sense of a passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “If music be the food of love . . .” Or was it “the love of food,” and what did it mean, anyway? He was finding it hard to think. He could see the words on the page, but they refused to come together to
make sentences.
He put his pen down and ignored the triangles. There was something on his mind, and he wouldn’t be able to do anything until he had worked out what it was. He played back the events of the day. He had gotten out of bed as usual, showered, and dressed. He’d actually finished his homework the night before—nothing to worry about there. He knew his lines for the school play. No money worries. He still had plenty left from his weekly allowance.
Then down to breakfast. He replayed the conversation with Jack and in particular the moment he had told her he would be away for the weekend. That was it. She’d been upset. He’d actually challenged her about it, and although she’d denied it, he could tell from her voice . . .
Now that he thought about it, Alex realized that the two of them had been spending less time together recently. What with homework, the school play, the rowing, and all the rest of it, there were days when they hardly spoke at all. Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. Jack had always been there for him. She was always looking after him. But he’d given her the impression that she didn’t matter to him at all.
He glanced out the window. There was a building site across the road, a new block of apartments going up opposite the school. Everyone was already joking about who exactly would want to live with a view of seven hundred teenagers—not to mention the noise at half past eight in the morning and a quarter to four every afternoon. The site was empty today. The builders seemed to come in more or less when they felt like it, but Alex noticed a single man making his way across the roof in a crouching run with a bag slung across his shoulder.
What to do about Jack? Alex made a resolution. He would talk to her tonight. He would tell her that he would be lost without her and that he needed her as much as he always had. Of course she knew all this, but it was still worth saying. And he didn’t have to spend the whole weekend with Tom. Maybe he could come back on Sunday afternoon and the two of them could go over to Borough Market or something. The thought made Alex feel more comfortable, and he turned his attention back to the first of the triangles. ABC was a right angle . . . ninety degrees. The other two angles couldn’t possibly be the same, so no forty-five degrees here. Cross that one out and move on to the next.
Three desks away, a lean ginger-haired boy named Spencer was aiming a missile at someone in the front row. He was balancing a piece of eraser on a plastic ruler that he was bending back. He released the ruler, catapulting the eraser across the room. It missed the boy in the front row and bounced off the wall. Someone sniggered.
Mr. Donovan had seen him. “If you want to stay in the top group, Spencer, try not to behave like a fifth-grader. Okay?” He sounded more tired than annoyed.
“Yes, sir.”
“Two more minutes. You should have cracked half of them by now.”
Alex was nowhere near. He was suddenly aware that he wasn’t feeling very well. It wasn’t particularly hot in the classroom, but he was sweating. The skin on his forehead and the back of his neck was damp, as if he had caught a fever. There was a pounding in his head and he was almost finding it difficult to breathe. What was wrong with him? It was eleven o’clock in the morning. He hadn’t had lunch yet, so for once the cafeteria couldn’t be blamed. He felt a pain in his chest and realized that his old wound was throbbing like some sort of biological alarm clock that had just gone off. As if it was reminding him . . .
Or warning him.
The man on the roof. Suddenly Alex was back on Liverpool Street, stepping out of the offices of MI6 seconds before a sniper had opened fire with a bullet that had knocked him to the ground, almost killing him. What had he seen—out of the corner of his eye? No. It was impossible. It couldn’t be happening again. Not here. Very slowly, forcing himself not to give anything away, Alex turned his head. He was just a bored schoolboy looking out the window, he told himself. If there really was someone there, if they were focusing on him even now, he mustn’t give them an excuse to fire.
Because the man was a sniper. He had no doubt of it. Why else would he be running with his head down and his shoulders hunched unless he was trying not to be noticed? And what sort of builder carries a long, narrow leather bag across his back? There was no sign of him now, but Alex visualized the shape and the size of the bag and knew with the ice-cold grip of certainty exactly what it must have contained. Not a shovel. Not a drill. Not anything you might use to construct a block of apartments. Anyway, nobody was working there today. This man was there for something else.
And he was still up there somewhere, hiding. Alex looked again, scanning the seemingly empty roof. Yes. There he was, lying flat on his stomach with his head pointing this way. He was partly concealed behind a wall of scaffolding with a plastic sheet hanging in front of him like a flimsy window. Alex couldn’t see the gun, but he could sense it and knew there could be only one target it was aiming at.
There is a sort of telepathy between the hunter and the hunted, between the sniper and his target. Alex couldn’t possibly know when the man was going to fire, but he jerked back instinctively, and it seemed to him that there was a faint tinkle and a thud at exactly that same moment. Right in front of him a gash appeared as if by magic in the surface of his desk, splinters of wood flying upward. Alex stared at the damage. The enormity of what had just happened flooded over him. Someone had taken a shot at him. Someone had tried to kill him. If he had still been leaning forward over his notepad, the bullet would have driven into the top of his head.
“Alex . . . ?” Mr. Donovan had seen the movement, but he hadn’t noticed the tiny, round hole in the window. Even if he had, it would have taken him several more seconds to put it all together. Snipers do not fire into school classrooms—certainly not in England. As far as he could see, Alex had just had some sort of fit. Either that or he had been stung by a wasp. One or two of the other boys were looking around curiously. The diagrams on the whiteboard suddenly seemed a thousand miles away.
“Get down!” Alex didn’t shout, but there could be no mistaking the urgency in his voice. “Someone’s shooting at us.”
“What?”
Alex was already on his feet, backing away from his desk, moving out of the gunman’s sight line before he could fire a second shot. He knew that while he was in the room, he was putting the entire class in danger. Several of the boys around him had stood up, making themselves targets. Some of them had noticed the hole in the window and knew he was telling the truth. Panic was already sweeping through the room.
“Get down!” This time he shouted the words louder, but they still just stood there. Of course, this was Alex Rider. Everyone knew the rumors about him—that he was involved in things that it was better not to talk about. But this situation was just too incredible. It couldn’t be happening.
And then there was a second shot. Tom Harris yelled and spun around, and to Alex’s horror he saw that his best friend had been shot in the arm, that his jacket was torn, and that blood was already seeping through the sleeve.
“Everyone on the floor!” Mr. Donovan had finally taken command, and his order was followed by the crash of upturned desks and chairs as twenty-two boys dived for cover. Tom was the last to react, still in shock, one hand gripping his wound. Alex glanced at the window, knowing that he couldn’t offer himself as a target. But if the man fired again, Tom would be directly in his line of fire. Alex ran three paces and threw himself at his friend, rugby-tackling him to the ground. Tom howled with pain. His face was completely white.
Bells began to clang all over the school. Alex hadn’t seen him do it, but he guessed Mr. Donovan must have hit the fire alarm before taking cover himself. Everyone was huddling together against the side wall. Alex propped Tom up, quickly examining his wound. There was blood everywhere—it was all over Alex’s hands—but he didn’t think his friend had been too badly hurt. A flesh wound only. If Tom had been unlucky, the bullet might just have chipped a bone, but Alex was sure it had gone straight in and out.
“Nobody move!” Mr. Donovan was shouting.
“We’re safe here. The police and the fire engines will be on their way.”
Brilliant. The rest of the school would be evacuating into the yard, making themselves perfect targets for the man on the roof. Alex thought of warning the math teacher, trying to explain what had just happened. But then he realized that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a case of a psychopath with a grudge against kids. The man had come here for him.
And with that thought came a surge of anger so powerful that Alex felt himself almost overwhelmed. He had given up spying. He hadn’t been near MI6 for months. He was just a schoolboy trying to get through the day. But someone thought otherwise. Someone had made the cold-blooded decision to send a man with a gun to kill him and to hurt anyone else who happened to get in the way. Who was it? Was this revenge for something Alex had done in the past? Or was this some new enemy with a plan of his own?
Alex had to know. If the sniper got away today, he would be free to come back tomorrow or the day after. In fact, Alex would be in permanent danger. In the space of a second he had been plunged back into his old life and he didn’t want to be there. He was furious.
“Alex! What do you think you’re doing?”
Alex was already on his feet. Mr. Donovan stared at him, still crouching, afraid to move. “Don’t leave, Alex! You’ve got to stay here!”
But he was too late. Alex had crossed the room and thrown open the door. A second later he had disappeared into the corridor, fighting his way past the rest of the school as they surged down the corridors, following the well-practiced fire drills that would take them outside.
As he burst into the yard, he was already fumbling for his keys, heading for the bike shed. The bells were still ringing. All around him, seven hundred schoolboys were chattering and laughing, looking out for the smoke while their teachers tried to shout them into straight lines. Alex ignored them. He found his bike, unlocked it, and jumped on.