There were four men facing her across the desk: two from Special Operations and two others in uniform, from the regular armed forces. She had addressed her question to her Chief of Staff. John Crawley had been with the service for as long as anyone could remember. He had once been an extremely effective field agent. In fact it was said that in just one year, three rival organizations had tried to recruit him while three more had tried to assassinate him. Now, with his thinning hair, his tired eyes and his very ordinary appearance, it was all too easy to underestimate him. That would be a serious mistake.
“The helicopter went out to sea, heading towards the Continent,” he explained. “Our first thought was that it was being taken to Russia. But then, after travelling four and a half miles, it turned south and headed back towards the coast. It was tracked by the Air Traffic Control centre primary and secondary radar systems from Swanwick. It was last seen flying over Felixstowe. And then it vanished into thin air.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I say, Mrs Jones. It was tracked by our satellite systems. We have the signal from its own transponder. And then nothing.”
“So where did it go?”
Crawley shook his head. “We have absolutely no idea. It may have crashed into the River Orwell. That seems most likely. But we’ve already got people on the scene and there’s no sign of anything whatsoever.”
Mrs Jones turned to the man sitting next to Crawley. “Do we have anything from the site?”
The second agent was the youngest person in the room, in his late twenties, black, with very intelligent eyes and hair cut close to the scalp. He was smartly dressed with a crisp, white shirt and bright tie. He moved slowly as the result of a gunshot wound which he had suffered recently, on duty in the Timor Sea. He had recovered with amazing speed and had insisted on returning to work. Mrs Jones liked him. It was she who had recruited him from the SAS and brought him under her wing. His name was Ben Daniels.
He opened a laptop and tapped a button. At once, an image appeared on a seventy-two-inch screen, mounted on the wall. “All the data shows that the helicopter came down in one of these fields,” he said. “We tracked it right up to the last minute but then, as Mr Crawley says, it just disappeared.” He pointed. “As you can see, there are some farm buildings, a barn, a windmill and some houses. There’s a church nearby. The trouble is, none of them are big enough to conceal a helicopter the size of the Super Stallion … even if you somehow took off the roof and landed inside.”
Mrs Jones examined the photographs. There was indeed a barn – but it was half-collapsed. Could the helicopter have been buried in the straw? Surely someone would have checked. She had seen plenty of windmills in Suffolk and this one was typical: wooden-fronted with white blades, used for corn grinding long ago but now abandoned. What about the church? No. Just as Crawley had said, it was too small. She looked through the other photographs. A hill, a haystack, two electricity pylons, the river. If it wasn’t here, where was it?
“It could have landed on a truck,” Ben Daniels continued. “That way, it could have been driven off and we’d have no way of knowing where. You’d need a very big truck, though.”
“This really isn’t good enough, Mrs Jones.” It was one of the military men who had spoken. His name was Air Chief Marshal Sir Norman Clarke and he was the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, the second most powerful man in the British Armed Forces. He was small, bald and angry-looking with a ginger moustache. He tended to bark every word. “The Americans aren’t too pleased. They lost two of their men. Murdered!”
“I can understand that, Sir Norman. But we’re doing everything we can.”
“We’re clearly not doing enough. We need to search the area again. And if the Super Stallion was transported by truck, surely to goodness we should be able to get some sort of CCTV picture?”
“There’s a rather more serious question we should be asking ourselves.” It was the other military man who had spoken. His name was Chichester and he worked in naval intelligence. He was a very gaunt, serious man. He spoke slowly, as if he was testing his every word. “What exactly are they going to do with the helicopter?” he went on. “Could this be the prelude to some sort of terrorist attack?”
“It seems unlikely.” Mrs Jones had already considered the possibility. It had been her first thought when she heard the helicopter had been taken. “The Super Stallion only has a range of a thousand kilometres and although it can carry machine guns, this one wasn’t armed. It’s a transport vehicle.”
“Yes, of course. But who is transporting what?” Sir Norman snapped. From the way he was talking, the whole thing could have been Mrs Jones’s fault. “The prime minister is extremely concerned,” he went on. “We’re talking about a massive piece of equipment here. We can’t just have lost it.”
“We haven’t stopped looking,” Crawley said. “We have the police out in full force. Our agents are all over Suffolk. We’ve managed to keep this out of the newspapers and we’re on full alert.”
Mrs Jones sighed. Her instinct was telling her that this had all the hallmarks of a Scorpia operation. Firstly, the theft had been completely ruthless. Why had it been necessary to kill the two American pilots? They could just as easily have been knocked out. It had also been extremely efficient. And finally, it was completely unfathomable, a bit like a magic trick.
But that was impossible. The criminal organization known as Scorpia was finished. Its members were either dead, under arrest or on the run.
“We need to go back to the immediate area around Felixstowe,” she said. “Let’s get divers into the river and into the sea.” She gestured at the photographs. And we need to search here … the farm, the hills, everything!”
“We’ve already searched it,” Crawley said.
Mrs Jones looked straight into the eyes of her Chief of Staff. “Then search it again.”
Even as she spoke, MI6 agents were sweeping the area. It was already getting dark but they had powerful torches. The beams swept across the grass, picking out the trees, the electricity pylons, the empty and derelict barns. They didn’t go into the windmill. It was too small. There was no point.
Nobody saw that the outer shell was actually very flimsy, made out of plywood that had been bolted together very recently.
Nor did they notice that, unusually, the windmill had seven blades.
ONE OF THE FAMILY
Five thousand miles away, in San Francisco, Alex Rider woke up and took in his surroundings.
He had been living here for a while now, but still it seemed new to him – a bright, colourful house at the top of Lyon Street in the area known as Presidio Heights. He had his own room on the fourth floor, tucked into the rafters. It was reached by a single, narrow staircase that went nowhere else. Every morning, the sunlight streamed in through a window that slanted over his bed and as he got dressed he had a view all the way down to the ocean with Alcatraz – the famous prison – and Angel Island in the distance. The house was old, built in the Victorian style, with extra rooms bolted on almost haphazardly. Inside, it was a jumble of corridors, archways and stripped wooden stairs. There was a garden at the back – a “backyard”, he had to call it – and it was a lovely place to sit in the evenings, overgrown with ivy trailing everywhere, orange and lemon trees and wild flowers tumbling out of terracotta pots.
Sometimes he would remember how far he was from home. Then he would correct himself. That wasn’t true any more. This was his home.
It was the house that Edward Pleasure had bought when he had moved to America to continue his career as a writer and journalist. In a strange way, Alex had helped to pay for it. Edward Pleasure was the author of The Devil You Know, the true story of international pop singer, anti-drugs campaigner and multi-billionaire businessman Damian Cray. The book had become a huge bestseller, turning its author into a celebrity. But it was Alex who had unmasked Damian Cray, almost getting himself killed in the process. The book was full of information that only h
e could have supplied.
Edward Pleasure had more or less adopted Alex after his last mission in Egypt had gone terribly wrong. To the journalist, it seemed that Alex had been completely broken by what had happened. He had barely spoken as the two of them had passed through Heathrow Airport and had simply stared out of the window as they sat together on the plane.
Alex, I want you to think of yourself as one of our family. Edward had spoken the words as the plane dipped down over the American coast. It’s going to be a new beginning for you and we’re going to do everything we can to make it work.
And maybe it had worked. After weeks in California, Alex seemed a little more like his old self. He’d managed to put on some weight, even if he was still a little lean for a boy who had recently turned fifteen. But he went to the gym and seemed to enjoy hiking or hanging out at the beach at weekends. He had cut his fair hair short and occasionally Edward noticed a haunted quality in his eyes. It was also true that his grades at school were giving some cause for concern – but it was early days. Of course it would take him time to settle in. All in all, though, Edward was optimistic. He knew what Alex had been through but believed that, slowly, he was putting it behind him.
The start of another day.
Alex went into the bathroom, showered and cleaned his teeth. Then he got dressed. He had started school at the beginning of the fall semester – the autumn term, he would have called it back in London. There was no uniform at the Elmer E. Robinson High School. Today, Alex threw on sweats, a T-shirt and a hoodie – all of them bought from the same branch of Hollister on Market Street. Glancing at himself in the full-length mirror next to the bed, he decided that he looked American and anonymous. It was only when he spoke that he stood out. Of course, everyone said how much they loved his British accent.
There was a homework assignment on his desk. “Do animals have a conscious life?” It was an essay he’d been given for his Human Geography class but Alex wasn’t even sure that he understood the question. He’d managed to scrawl out the five hundred words demanded but he was fairly certain that he’d get a bad grade … a C or even a fail. When Alex was at Brookland – the school he had gone to in south London – he’d always done well, even when he was missing classes, dragged out of school by MI6. But there was a part of him now that just didn’t care. He picked up the pages and stuffed them into his backpack. Then he went downstairs.
Sabina was already in the kitchen with her mother, sitting down to breakfast. Liz Pleasure had set out pancakes and fresh fruit, cereal and coffee. Alex remembered the first time he had met the family – when they had invited him on a surfing holiday in Cornwall. He had thought then how close they were and had secretly envied them. His own parents had died soon after he was born and he had never had a proper family of his own. Well, now he was one of them. He had become a son to Edward and Liz, a younger brother to Sabina (she was three months older than him). So why didn’t he feel that he belonged? Why did he still walk into the room like an invited guest?
“Good morning, Alex!” Liz beamed at him and poured him a glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice. She was a large, round-faced woman who was always cheerful. If she worried about Alex, she was careful never to show it. “Did you get your homework done?”
“Yes. I finished it last night.” Alex sat down next to Sabina. In the corner, Rocky, the family Labrador, thumped his tail lazily against the floor as if he was glad to see Alex too.
“I had two pages of Math,” Sabina complained. “It took me ages!”
“Well, you should have started it when you got in,” her mother scolded her. “Instead of watching all that TV.”
“Math” not “Maths”. Alex noticed what Sabina had said. She had been in America for less than a year but it seemed to him that she had quickly folded herself into her new life.
Edward Pleasure was away. He was working on a news story in Los Angeles and wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks. Liz was also a writer, finishing a book about fashion. She had a study at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and worked from there. “Did you sleep OK?” she asked.
Alex looked up. He hesitated for just a moment, then answered automatically. “Yes. I slept fine.”
He hadn’t. The nightmare had woken him again. He was back in the chapel at the eighteenth-century fort in the desert outside Cairo. Razim was there – the madman and agent of Scorpia who hoped to make a name for himself by finding an exact measurement for pain. And Julius Grief was standing in front of him, bobbing up and down in excitement. The boy was also mad in his own way. He had been surgically altered to turn him into an exact replica of Alex and it was as if Alex was looking into a fairground mirror, seeing a distorted version of himself.
Alex was tied to a chair, unable to take his eyes off the television screen in front of him. Wires had been attached to different parts of his body: his neck, his fingers, his forehead, his naked chest. He could feel the chill of the air conditioning against his skin. But there was something even colder in the room. It was his own terror. Razim and Julius Grief were about to murder the person he most loved and they were forcing him to watch.
Once again he saw Jack Starbright on the screen. She was his closest friend. She had looked after him for most of his life. But there was nothing he could do for her now. She had managed to escape from her cell by prising out one of the bars in the window. She had found a car, parked in the courtyard outside. The keys had been left in the ignition. She climbed in, unaware that this was what they wanted her to do – that her every move was being monitored. In his dream Alex screamed at her to stop. He was twisting in the chair, straining against the ropes that held him. Julius Grief was laughing.
The car drove out of the fort and into the desert. And then, as it had done the night before and every night after Alex had finally managed to fall asleep, it blew up. There had been a bomb concealed inside. Razim had stage-managed the entire escape simply to torture him. Alex saw the flames as he had seen them fifty times before and woke up in his room on the fourth floor, his pillow damp with sweat and tears.
Sabina’s mother had served him a pancake but he pushed the plate away, unable to eat. She noticed this and eyed him warily. “Aren’t you hungry, Alex?”
“No, thanks.” Alex tried to smile. “I’m fine with orange juice.”
“Well, make sure you eat at midday. Sabina – keep an eye on him!”
“Yes, Mum,” Sabina said. She couldn’t keep the worry out of her voice. She knew there was something wrong.
A few minutes later, Alex and Sabina left. They were both at the same high school, just a few blocks north, close to the huge park – the Presidio – that gave the area its name. To Alex, the Elmer E. Robinson High School looked more like a university, with half a dozen low-rise buildings spread across beautifully kept lawns and an oversized Stars & Stripes fluttering at the entrance. There was a theatre, a brand-new library, a thousand-seat auditorium, tennis courts, basketball courts and, of course, an American football field. It was home to over two thousand students and made Brookland seem small and old-fashioned.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” Sabina asked as they approached the fountain that stood outside the main entrance. “I know how hard this must be for you.”
“I’m fine, Sab. Really.”
“Maybe you should change your mind about Los Angeles. We can have lots of fun down there and Dad really wants to see you.”
Normally, Edward Pleasure came home at weekends but he had a Saturday meeting and the family had decided to take advantage of the warm weather and spend some time together on the coast at Santa Monica.
“No. I’ll be fine and it’s good that the three of you have a bit of time on your own.” They’d reached the steps leading up to the main door. “I’ll see you later. Have a good day.”
“You too.”
The two of them went their separate ways. Sabina had deliberately stayed close to Alex in his first week as he tried to settle in, but they’d agreed that it
would probably be easier for both of them if they moved apart, allowing Alex to make his own friends. Anyway, Alex had noticed that Sabina had met someone else. Blake was seventeen, broad-shouldered, blond-haired with an easy smile. He was the senior basketball captain and one of the most popular boys in the school. Alex had taken an immediate dislike to him and then felt annoyed with himself for doing so. What was wrong with him? He’d never been like this when he was in the UK.
It wasn’t working out. He had to admit it. Most of the students at EERHS had been welcoming but somehow he was still on his own … and he understood why. You can’t make friends unless you’re completely honest and there was simply too much mystery about Alex, too much that he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t tell anyone why he had no parents, why he was living with Sabina and her family, what he had been doing for the past year, why he had come to the United States or even how he had managed to get a visa. He just hoped things would get better in time. After a year, or maybe two years, people would begin to accept him.
The bell was about to go for the first class of the day. Alex strolled over to his locker to take out some books but as he opened the metal door, a hand came out of nowhere and slammed it shut again. Alex felt a tightness in his stomach as he turned round. Yes. It was just as he had thought. Clayton Miller and Colin Maguire. CM and CM. The two of them had decided to give him another dose of their daily medicine.
Alex knew that there were boys like them in every school in the world and no matter how hard teachers tried or how many parents complained, nothing would make them go away. They were bullies. Nobody knew quite why they did what they did. Perhaps they were victims themselves, damaged in some way by their own families. Perhaps they were unwell. But they were always together. They were always picking on someone. EERHS had a Student Code of Conduct that forbade any sort of abuse … physical, mental or cyber. Unfortunately, it seemed they hadn’t read it.