“It could be any agent,” Mikato interrupted. “Why should they choose the boy?”
“Because the event involves a field of activity in which a child might pass unnoticed. This is the key to the whole thing. I’ve already seen it in the files. The first time MI6 used Rider, it was because he could pass himself off as the winner of a competition in a computer magazine—and this allowed him to infiltrate Herod Sayle’s production plant in Cornwall. The next time, it was the Point Blanc Academy in France, which he could enter as a student, the teenaged son of a multimillionaire. Then he traveled with two American agents to the island of Skeleton Key. This time he was pretending to be their son and having him with them turned them into an ordinary, happy family. Do you see? There is a pattern. If a teenager is required, they have to choose Alex Rider. There is no one else.”
Another pause. The Italian twins turned briefly to each other and knew at once that they had come to the same decision. Mikato’s face relaxed and he nodded slowly. The Australian smiled to himself.
“Lakek et hatahat sheli!” If there was silent agreement in the room, it was Levi Kroll spitting out the vile oath in Hebrew that shattered it. Now he rose to his feet, addressing everyone around the table. “I do not believe what I am hearing!” he roared. His face was livid, the veins on his cheeks standing out. “This is madness. Listen to me. I am not saying that this child is better than us. I do not for a minute believe that he beat us for any other reason than luck. However, let me tell you now that luck has a part to play in our activities. You can plan everything perfectly, but still a small, unforeseen detail can destroy you. A chance meeting in the street. A gun jamming. Bad weather! You know that this is true.
“And Alex Rider has the luck of the devil on his side. How else do you explain the death of Julia Rothman—and Nile, her second-in-command, for that matter? Major Winston Yu was a genius. He ran the most successful snakehead operation in the Far East. But when he came up against Alex Rider, he died and his snakehead fell apart. There are a dozen ways we can persuade the British to return these worthless statues! I like the idea of a nuclear bomb. We could kidnap a member of the royal family, maybe one of the princes, and send him back one piece at a time until the government agreed to our demands. But I will not agree to take on this child for a third time. Twice was enough. We cannot risk a third humiliation.”
Kroll sat down, breathing heavily.
“Is there anyone else here who shares our colleague’s concerns?” Zeljan Kurst asked.
Like poker players about to reveal their hands, the ten other members of Scorpia eyed each other carefully, but none of them spoke.
“I take it from your silence, then, that you all agree to Mr. Razim’s plan?”
“But I disagree,” Kroll insisted, not waiting for an answer. “And by our own rules, if we are not unanimous, we do not proceed.”
Kurst seemed to consider this. “We might be unanimous,” he purred.
“And how might that happen, Zeljan?” Kroll looked at him curiously, daring him to provide an answer.
Nothing had changed. But the atmosphere inside the conference room was suddenly brittle. The sound of the engines shuddered in the air.
Zeljan Kurst shrugged, his huge shoulders rising and falling a few inches. He ignored Kroll, turning instead to Razim. “You suggested that a criminal might be found floating in the Thames,” he said. “Might it not be more convincing if it were a member of the executive committee of Scorpia?”
“I think that would be admirable,” Razim replied.
“Forget it!” Kroll was back on his feet again, and as if by magic a gun had appeared in his hand. It was a 9mm SP-21 military pistol, designed by Israel Military Industries. He couldn’t possibly have drawn it from a holster. There must have been a spring mechanism inside his jacket that had delivered it into his hand. He aimed it directly at Zeljan Kurst. There was a wild look in his one eye. “I suspected that you’ve been thinking of getting rid of me,” he murmured. “I’m not surprised. I’ve given more than twenty years to this organization and I knew the sort of reward I could expect. The same reward as Max Grendel. Nobody retires from Scorpia, do they?” He laughed briefly. “Maybe some of the rest of you should consider what future you have here.”
The gun didn’t move, but his eye slid briefly toward the twins and then back again.
“You’re not going to kill me, Zeljan. As you can see, I’ve been prepared for this moment. You think Scorpia is getting stronger? It’s not. It’s finished and the foolishness I’ve heard today proves it. Well, I’m going to be the first to walk out.”
Nobody reacted. It was unheard of for a gun to be produced in the middle of an executive meeting. But they were all confident. Kurst must have known. He must surely have the situation under control.
“You are going to order the captain to bring this boat to the nearest bank and then I am going to leave,” Kroll continued. “You don’t need to worry about me. I have no interest in you anymore. But if any of you ever come after me, I will have stories to tell that will have all of you in jail for longer than any of you can possibly live. Do you understand me?”
Zeljan Kurst’s hands were under the table. Kroll didn’t see his right hand stretch out and press a button in the side of his chair.
“I said . . . do you understand me?”
“I completely understand you,” Kurst replied.
There was the soft tinkle of glass breaking. A hole had appeared in the window just behind Kroll’s head.
Kroll jerked slightly but remained standing. A look of puzzlement spread across his face.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Kurst spoke. “You have been shot in the back of the neck, just above the cervical curve,” he explained. “I’m afraid your spine has been severed and you are, effectively, already dead.”
With an enormous effort, as if knowing this would be the last movement he ever made, Kroll opened his mouth. His hand, with the gun, remained frozen.
“At this moment we are passing the Paris Mint.” Kurst glanced out the window. Sure enough, there was a handsome building with arches and columns stretching for some distance along the waterfront. “I knew of course that you were carrying a gun and suspected you might be foolish enough to try and use it. So I took the precaution of placing a sniper on the roof. Can you still hear me? I would like to think that you have the consolation of knowing that your death will not be wasted.”
Kroll’s legs gave way and he crashed down into his chair, his head and shoulders slumping forward onto the table. The hole in the back of his head was surprisingly small.
“We will have to put Levi in the refrigerator until the time comes to use him,” Kurst went on. “We do not want to give away the time of his death. And whatever clue it is that we place in his pocket, it will have to be something very ingenious. We want to make MI6 work. The more clever they think they are, the more easily they will fall into our trap.” He glanced again at Razim. “There is something else?”
“Yes.” Like everyone else in the room, Razim seemed completely uninterested in the murder that he had just witnessed. It was as if nothing had happened at all. “We can manipulate MI6. And we can ensure that Alex Rider is brought back into service. Once he is in our hands, it will be a simple matter to kill him, although”—he smiled to himself—“I hope you will allow me a little time with him first. There is an experiment that I would like to try.”
“Just be careful,” the Frenchman said.
“Of course. But there is something else that we need and that I didn’t have time to mention before our unfortunate interruption.” He glanced briefly at the dead man, sprawled forward over the table. “Although I have said that we cannot forge the evidence, we nonetheless have to be careful. We live in an age of disinformation. That is to say, there isn’t a document or a report that anyone trusts. People need to see things with their own eyes. We are going to need to capture Alex Rider on film. I want to be able to show him live on TV before he is discovered, as it were, de
ad on TV. I want the whole world to be able to see him in action.”
“And how will you manage that?” Dr. Three asked.
Razim took out a second cigarette. Nobody was going to ask him to stop smoking. Not now. “Actually, it will be very simple,” he drawled. “But it will require the assistance of someone very special . . . someone quite unique. Fortunately, I was able to track this person down and I have already been in communication with him. He has every reason to wish harm to Alex Rider. In fact, he hates Rider more than any of us here.
“I have not yet been able to speak to him about Horseman, but I can assure you that he will be delighted to help us. Although getting him to us is going to be expensive, I have already put a team in place. It will be money well spent.
“All being well, he should be with us at the end of the week. And at that moment, Operation Horseman can begin.”
4
PRISONER 7
THE BOY WALKING ALONG the garden path and up to the front door of the villa was fifteen years old, with light brown hair that swept down over his eye. He had a thin, rather pale face, well-defined cheekbones, and a slender neck. He was wearing jeans, a black sports shirt, and sneakers. Overall, he was slim, but he was also athletic and had clearly spent time working out in the gym. His arms and chest were almost too well developed for someone of his age. From the way he moved, it seemed that he had all the time in the world. He was listening to music on an iPod, the white cable snaking down to his back pocket.
It was a warm day with the sun beating down on the well-kept lawn that stretched out on either side of the path. There was a vegetable patch with onions and carrots already poking through and, curving behind it, an old brick wall with pink climbing roses and passionflowers. The villa itself was built in the Spanish style with very pale yellow weatherboarding and blue shutters. As he approached the door, the boy unplugged his earphones and heard birdsong, along with the chug-chug-chug of an automatic sprinkler system. He stood still for a moment. Close his eyes and he might be in some quiet corner of England, perhaps a village in Dorset or Kent. But glancing past the garden, he saw the razor-wire fence looming above him. Two guards, both with automatic machine guns, walked past. And once again he was reminded—as if he needed reminding—that he was far from home, in one of the strangest prisons in the world.
Certainly, it was a prison like no other. It had no name. It was featured on no maps. Very few people even knew it existed. The staff who worked there—from the governor to the guards to the cleaners and the cook—had been told that if they ever breathed a word about what they did, they would end up in a cell themselves. The facility had been built at a cost of several million dollars and cost millions more to run, and yet—and this was the most remarkable thing of all—it housed just seven prisoners, each one in his own way so dangerous that there was little chance they would ever be released.
This was the problem. There has been no capital punishment in the United Kingdom since 1963, so what was the government to do with its worst enemies, the men and women who had sworn to bring about its destruction by any means? Of course, there were high-security prisons such as Belmarsh in the east of London or a psychiatric hospital such as Broadmoor in Berkshire—but even these weren’t considered secure enough for the handful of special cases that had to be kept in almost total isolation. These were people who couldn’t be allowed to tell their stories. They couldn’t be killed. So they had to be put somewhere where they might be forgotten.
And so the compound had been constructed. Not in Britain. That was felt to be too close to home. Northern Ireland had been considered. There were still prisons there from the old days that could have been adapted. But instead the overseas territory of Gibraltar had finally been chosen, jutting out of the southern end of Spain. There were plenty of good reasons for this. First of all, it was still British soil. Surrounded by sea on three sides and with a well-patrolled border on the fourth, it was virtually a prison in itself. It was very quiet. Apart from the Spanish occasionally demanding that the land be given back, most people would have been hard-pressed to point to it on a map. And best of all, it was a base for both the British Armed Forces and the Royal Navy. There were already military buildings all over the peninsula. Who would notice one more?
The prison was high up on the Rock and overlooked the Bay of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean—or would have if the walls, six yards high and one yard thick, hadn’t gotten in the way. Electrified razor wire ran inside the walls so that even if a prisoner managed to equip himself with a ladder, perhaps constructed secretly in the prison workshop, he wouldn’t be able to place it anywhere close. The position of the fence had been chosen with care. It couldn’t be seen from outside and there were no watchtowers, no armed guards on patrol. In other words, nothing gave away the true nature of the complex. Nobody lived nearby and passing residents and tourists believed that it was a naval communications center dealing with satellite and Internet traffic.
Most of the security was invisible. There were almost a hundred closed-circuit TV cameras and hidden microphones so that prisoners were observed and listened to from the moment they woke up . . . and even while they were asleep. Movement sensors and thermal imaging cameras provided data twenty-four hours a day so that the guards could tell instantly where everyone was at any time. The dozen cells (five unoccupied) were built on solid rock so tunneling was out of the question, but more sensor wires crisscrossed the floor underneath anyway. No visitors were allowed. No letters were ever sent or received. There was just one entrance and exit: a holding area with an electronic gate at each end. Any vehicle entering or leaving the prison was required to drive onto a reinforced glass plate so that it could be examined and searched from all sides before it was allowed to continue.
And yet, surprisingly, the prison was a very comfortable place. It was as if the British government had wanted to convince the inmates that it wasn’t completely inhumane. The various buildings scattered inside the walls were low-rise, made of wood and brick. Apart from the bars on the windows in the accommodation block, the complex slightly resembled a vacation village, an impression heightened by the flower beds, olive and cypress trees, and the sprinkler system dotted around the dusty, winding paths. The warden’s villa was almost absurdly pretty. He was a tough ex-army man, living there with his Spanish wife. But his home could have come out of Disneyland.
Each prisoner had his own cell with a bed, a work area, a TV, and a separate shower and toilet. There was a library, a well-equipped gym, a wood and metal workshop, and a dining room. The other buildings included an administration and residential block for the guards, a central control room, and a punishment block. This was a narrow corridor with three rooms built underground. The rooms were soundproofed with no windows, but they had seldom been used. There was no reason to cause any trouble. And as escape was impossible, nobody had ever tried.
Seven prisoners.
Two of them were terrorists, not the people who had carried the bombs but the ones who had decided where they should be placed. They had been captured while planning a nuclear strike on London, and they had been tried in secret and then brought to Gibraltar. Nobody was ever to know how nearly they had succeeded. Two of them were secret agents, spies working for foreign powers. They had managed to get deep inside the intelligence services before they were unmasked, and again, in their case, it was what they knew as much as what they were that made them so dangerous. One man—the oldest in the prison—claimed that he had been a weapons inspector in Iraq and was innocent of any crime. Nobody believed him. The sixth man was a freelance assassin. There were very few pages in his file. He had never revealed his name, his nationality, his age, or the number of people he had killed.
But it was the seventh prisoner, the fifteen-year-old boy standing in front of the governor’s villa, who was without doubt the most remarkable. In fact, he was almost unique; not born but created, given a face that wasn’t his own, taught how to kill—and quite, quite insane.
> His name was Julius Grief and he had been one of the sixteen clones created in a South African laboratory by his natural father, Dr. Hugo Grief. A clone is an exact copy of a human being, manufactured by taking a single cell and cultivating it inside an egg. Julius had not only never met his mother, he didn’t really have one. Until he had been born, cloning had been restricted to laboratory animals. The most famous had been Dolly the sheep. But using technology that he had developed first at the University of Johannesburg and later as minister of science, Grief had cloned the first human beings: sixteen replicas of himself.
They had all grown up together in the Point Blanc Academy, a castle high up in the French Alps, near Grenoble. Dr. Grief had been planning to take over the richest and most powerful families on the planet by kidnapping their teenaged sons and replacing them with his own brood. One by one, the boys had been given painful—and permanent—plastic surgery, making them identical to their targets. None of them had complained. This was the purpose of their entire life. This was what they had been created for. They had never had proper identities of their own. Even their names had been chosen deliberately. Each one of them had been named after a great world leader. Julius’s name had come from Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor. And there had been other boys named Napoleon, Ghengis, Mao Tse, and even (the sixteenth) Adolf.
As things had turned out, Julius had been the last of the boys to be given a new identity. He was going to be Alex Friend, the son of Sir David Friend, a man who had made a fortune from supermarkets and art galleries. He was going to live in a huge house in Yorkshire, in the north of England. He would go riding and shooting with aristocratic friends. It was going to be amazing. And one day, after he had murdered Sir David and his family, it would all belong to him.
And so he had undergone the surgery. He had begun to learn his new role—how to talk like Alex Friend, how to walk like him, how to be him. And then, at the last minute, he had discovered the terrible truth. The boy he was watching day and night, the one he was modeling himself on, was not Alex Friend at all. His real name was Alex Rider and he was, incredibly, a spy working for British intelligence! Julius Grief had been given the wrong face! The face of Alex Rider!