Snakehead (27 page)

Ash couldn't answer. His hand tightened on his chest. He had only seconds left.

“We had to test him,” Major Yu explained. “When he came over to us, we had to make sure he was telling us the truth. After all, we had just been tricked by one British intelligence agent—John Rider. So we set him a very simple task, one that would prove to us with no doubt that he was ready to switch sides.”

“I didn't want to…” It wasn't Ash's voice. It was just a whisper.

“He didn't want to, but he did. For the money. He put the bomb on the plane and he detonated it with his own hand. Rather more successful than his mission in Mdina. And the start of a long association with us.”

“Alex…”

Ash tried to look up. But his head fell forward. He was dead.

Major Yu prodded him with his foot. “Well, as they say, Ash to ashes and dust to dust,” he remarked. “I'm glad you heard that from him, Alex. You can take it with you to the grave.”

He raised the gun once again and pointed it at Alex.

There was an explosion, loud and near. But it wasn't the gun. The entire room shook, and dust and metal filings came showering down from the roof. Alex heard a shearing of metal as the crane overhead broke in half and came crashing down. The shock sent Major Yu reeling back. His arm banged against one of the work surfaces and the gun went off, the bullet smashing uselessly into a wall. Major Yu was shouting in agony, and Alex realized that the impact of the blow had shattered the brittle bone in Yu's arm. The gun now lay useless on the ground.

Deafened, half dazed, Alex threw himself onto the gun, snatched it in both hands, desperate to protect himself from further attack. But he was already too late. Yu had already decided to leave. The room was full of smoke. The SAS were here. Alex Rider would have to wait until another day.

There was a trapdoor set in the floor, with the ladder leading down underneath. Somehow, using his one good arm, he pulled it open and climbed down, dropping into the boat below. But the fall had been too far for his bones. The impact broke both his ankles. Howling with agony, barely able to stand, he groped his way over to the controls. He used a knife to cut through the mooring rope. A second later, he was speeding away.

Meanwhile, Alex had staggered over to the controls. On the TV, the little square representing Royal Blue was about two inches above the seabed but edging closer all the time. There was the scanner, wired into the computer. Alex slammed his palm onto the glass panel and let out a sigh of relief as a line of text appeared on the computer screen.

AUTHORIZATION ACCEPTED

There was a pause, then a second line scrolled across.

Override master commands? Y/N

Alex tapped on the
Y
key just as the door crashed open and about half a dozen SAS men somehow managed to burst in, covering every angle with their weapons. Scooter was at the front of them with Texas and X-Ray right behind him. It looked as if Sparks, the young soldier who had once played a guitar on an Australian beach, hadn't made it.

Scooter saw Alex. “Where's Yu?” he demanded.

“Gone.” Alex had his eyes fixed on the screen. A menu had come up. He ran his eye down the list of options, looking for the one that said DISARM or DEACTIVATE. But it wasn't there. Instead, his eyes settled on the last command.

 
DETONATE

“Over here!” It was Texas. He had found Ben Daniels and was already kneeling beside him, tearing open his shirt to examine his wound. One of the other soldiers rushed over with a medical kit.

Alex slid the mouse, highlighting the last command. He looked at the television screen. Royal Blue was still above the seabed but almost touching it. He remembered what he had heard. The bomb still had another half mile to travel, far down into the Earth's crust. A timeline read 23:47:05:00, the microseconds flickering and changing too fast for his eye to follow. But the bomb still had thirteen more minutes until it would be in position. The moon and the sun were not quite ready yet.

Could Alex destroy the bomb without accidentally setting off the tsunami?

In desperation he turned to the SAS leader, who seemed to understand the stakes almost at once.

“Do it,” he said.

Alex double-clicked on the command.

Three thousand, five hundred feet below Dragon Nine but five hundred feet above the seabed, the bomb exploded. Alex felt the entire oil rig shudder violently, and the floor veered crazily beneath his feet as five of the steel tethers along with the drill pipe itself were torn apart.

And half a mile away, speeding through the water in his Sealine yacht, Major Yu heard the explosion and knew, with an overwhelming sense of bitterness and defeat, that even his last hopes had been destroyed. Somehow Royal Blue had been detonated too early. There would be no tsunami. He sat, hunched up in front of the steering wheel, moaning quietly to himself. He had comprehensively failed.

He didn't even feel the shock wave from the explosion until it hit him, but this of course was the main purpose of Royal Blue, to flatten anything for miles around. The pulse smashed into the yacht, destroying the electric system, snuffing out the lights, ripping every fitting apart. Major Yu's bone structure wasn't strong enough to withstand it. Every single bone in his body fractured at the same time. For about two seconds, he remained vaguely human. Then his body, with no frame to support it, crumpled in on itself, a bag of skin full of broken pieces. The boat veered around, a hundred thousand dollars' worth of British engineering with no one to steer it. Zigzagging crazily, it disappeared into the night.

Back on Dragon Nine, Yu's remaining men were being rounded up. The SAS had lost two men, with three more injured. Ben Daniels was still alive. He'd been given a shot of morphine, and there was an oxygen mask strapped to his face.

Scooter had finally noticed the other body lying in the control room.

“Who was that?” he asked.

Alex took one last look at his godfather.

“It was nobody,” he said.

“I
T'S VERY GOOD TO
see you, Alex. How are you getting on at school?”

It seemed a very long time since Alex had last found himself back in this room, the office on the fifteenth floor of the building on Liverpool Street that called itself the Royal and General Bank but that in fact housed the Special Operations division of MI6. Alan Blunt, its chief executive, was sitting opposite him, his desk as neat and as empty as ever: a couple of folders, some papers awaiting signature, a single pen, solid silver, resting at an angle. Everything in its place. Alex knew that Blunt liked it that way.

Blunt didn't seem to have changed at all. Even the suit was the same, and if there was a little more gray in his hair, who would notice when the man had been entirely gray to begin with? But Blunt was not the sort of person to grow old and wrinkled, to wear baggy sweaters, play golf, and spend more time with his grandchildren. His job, the world he inhabited, had somehow pinned him down. He was, Alex decided, a twenty-first-century fossil.

It was the first week of December, and suddenly the temperature had dropped, as if in response to the Christmas decorations, which were going up all around. There had even been a few scatterings of snow. There wasn't enough to stick, but it had added a certain chill to the air. Walking to the office, Alex had passed a Salvation Army band playing “Good King Wenceslas.” The players had been huddling together as if for comfort, and even their music had been cold and mournful…as well as slightly out of tune.

He couldn't hear the music in the office. The windows would doubtless have been double or triple glazed to stop any sound from coming in or—more importantly—leaking out. He focused his attention on the man sitting opposite him and wondered how he should answer the question. Blunt would know already, of course. He would probably have access to Alex's school reports before they were even printed.

Alex had just completed his first week back at Brookland School. Blunt would know that too. Alex had no doubt that he had been under twenty-four-hour surveillance from the moment his Qantas flight had touched down at Heathrow Airport and he had been hurried out through the VIP channel to the waiting car outside. The last time he had taken on Scorpia, he had been shot, and MI6 certainly weren't going to let that happen again. He thought he had seen his tail once: a youngish man standing on a street corner, seemingly waiting for a taxi. When he had looked for him a second later, the man had disappeared. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Blunt's field agents knew how to live in the shadows.

And so, finally, he was back at school.

For most kids of his age, it meant coursework and homework, lessons that dragged on too long, and terrible food. For Alex it was all that and something more. He had been nervous, walking back into Brookland on a chilly Monday morning. It had seemed a long time since he had seen the familiar buildings: the bright red brickwork and the stretches of plate glass. Miss Bedfordshire, the school secretary, who had always had a soft spot for him, had been waiting in the reception area.

“Alex Rider!” she had exclaimed. “What has it been this time?”

“Glandular fever, Miss Bedfordshire.”

Alex's illnesses had become almost legendary in the past year. Part of him wondered if Miss Bedfordshire really believed in them or if she was just playing along.

“You're going to have to drop a whole year if you're not careful,” she remarked.

“I'm very careful, Miss Bedfordshire.”

“I'm sure you are.”

In Sydney, Alex had been worried that he wouldn't fit in, but from the very first moment he arrived, it was almost as if he hadn't been away. Everyone was pleased to see him, and he wasn't as far behind as he had feared. He would have extra tutoring over the Christmas vacation, and with a bit of luck he would be at the same level as everyone else by the time he began the next semester. Surrounded by his friends and swept along by the day's routine—the ringing bells, the slamming doors, and desks—Alex realized that he wasn't just back at school. He was back in normal life.

But he had been expecting Alan Blunt to make contact, and sure enough, he had got the call on his cell. Blunt had asked Alex to come to a meeting on Friday afternoon. Alex had noticed the one small difference. Blunt had asked. He hadn't demanded.

So here he was with his backpack still full of books for the weekend: a particularly vicious math paper and
Animal Farm,
by George Orwell. Another British writer, he reflected. Major Yu would surely have loved it. Alex was wearing his school uniform—a dark blue jacket, gray trousers, and a purposefully crooked tie. Jack had bought him a scarf when she was on vacation in Washington and it was hanging loosely around his neck. He felt relieved to look the same as everyone else. He just wanted to get back to normal.

“There are a few things you might like to know,” Blunt said. “Starting with a message from Ethan Brooke. He asked me to pass on his thanks and his good wishes. He said that if you ever decide to emigrate to Australia, he'll be happy to arrange a permanent visa.”

“That's very kind of him.”

“Well, you did a remarkable job, Alex. Quite apart from tracking down our missing weapon, you've more or less destroyed the snakehead. The Chada Trading Agency has gone out of business, as has Unwin Toys.”

“Did you realize it was an anagram?” Mrs. Jones asked. She was sitting in a chair next to the desk, one leg crossed over the other, looking very relaxed. Alex got the sense that she was glad to see him. “Unwin Toys. Winston Yu. That was the vanity of the man…he named it after himself.”

“Have you found him?” Alex asked. He had last seen Yu climbing into the motorboat and didn't know if he'd gotten away.

“Oh yes. We found what was left of him. Not a pleasant sight.” Blunt folded his hands in front of him. “Yu dealt with quite a lot of his own people before ASIS could reach them,” he went on. “I think you know that he killed the captain of the
Liberian Star
…De Wynter. After your escape from the hospital, Dr. Tanner committed suicide, possibly following orders from Yu. ASIS did manage to pick up the rest of the staff, though. Two guards—one of them with a fractured skull—and a handful of nurses. They also arrested a man called Varga…”

The name meant nothing to Alex.

“He was a technician,” Mrs. Jones explained. “He helped adapt Royal Blue to work underwater. He also set up the detonation procedure.”

Now Alex recalled the man he had glimpsed on the
Liberian Star,
setting up the scanner for Major Yu.

“He was a fairly low-level Scorpia operative,” Blunt added. “Out of Haiti, I understand. He's being questioned and may provide some useful information.”

“How is Ben?”

“He's still in the hospital in Darwin,” Mrs. Jones said. “He was lucky. The bullets didn't do any serious damage, and the doctors say he'll be out by Christmas.”

“We'll look after him,” Blunt added.

“Better than you looked after Ash.” Alex looked Blunt straight in the eyes.

“Yes.” Blunt shifted uncomfortably. “I wanted you to know, Alex, that we had no idea about Ash's involvement with Scorpia. Even now I find it hard to believe that he had any involvement with…what happened to your parents.”

“I'm so sorry, Alex,” Mrs. Jones cut in. “I understand how you must be feeling.”

“Do you think Ethan Brooke knew?” Alex asked. It was something he had been thinking about on the long flight home. “He knew someone was a traitor. Someone had been feeding the snakehead with information all along. He put me together with Ash. Was that what he really wanted? To flush him out?”

“It's quite possible,” Blunt said, and Alex was surprised. The head of MI6 wasn't normally so honest. “Brooke is a very devious man.”

“It's what makes him so good at his job,” Mrs. Jones remarked.

It was five o'clock. Outside, it was getting dark. Alan Blunt went over to the window and shooed away a couple of pigeons. Then he lowered the blind.

“There are only a couple of things to add,” he said as he took his place again. “Most important of all, we want you to know that you're safe. Scorpia aren't going to have another crack at you.” He blinked twice. “Not like last time.”

“We've been in contact with them,” Mrs. Jones explained. “We made it clear that if anything happened to you, we would let the whole world know that they had been beaten—for a second time—by a fourteen-year-old boy. It would make them a laughingstock and would destroy what little reputation they have left.”

“Scorpia may be finished anyway,” Blunt said. “But they got the message. We'll keep an eye on you just to be on the safe side, but I don't think you need to worry.”

“And what was the other thing?” Alex asked.

“Only that we hope you found what you were looking for, Alex.” It was Mrs. Jones who had answered.

“I found some of it,” Alex said.

“Your father was a very good man,” Blunt muttered. “I've told you that before. You obviously take after him, Alex. And maybe, when you leave school, you'll think again about intelligence work. We still need people like you, and it's not a bad career.”

Alex stood up. “I'll show myself out,” he said.

 

He took the subway back to Sloane Square and then a bus along King's Road to his house. He had told Jack he would be late home from school. The two of them would have supper together when he arrived, and then he would start his homework. He was seeing his friend Tom Harris on Saturday. The Chelsea soccer team were playing at home against Arsenal, and somehow Tom had managed to scrounge two tickets. Otherwise, Alex had no plans for the weekend.

Jack Starbright was waiting for him in the kitchen, putting the final touches to a salad. Alex helped himself to a glass of apple juice and hoisted himself onto one of the bar stools by the counter. He liked to talk to Jack while she cooked.

“How did you make out?” she asked.

“It was fine,” Alex said. He reached out and stole a piece of tomato. “Alan Blunt offered me a job.”

“I'll kill you if you take it.”

“Don't worry. I let him know I wasn't interested.”

Jack knew everything that had happened to Alex since she had left him in Sydney, including Ash's final moments on Dragon Nine. He had told her his story the moment he got home, and when he had finished, she had turned away and sat for a long minute in silence. When she had finally turned back again, there had been tears in her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” Alex had said. “I know you liked him.”

“That's not what's upsetting me, Alex,” she had replied.

“Then what?”

“It's this world. MI6. What it did to him, to your parents. I suppose I'm scared about what it'll do to you.”

“I think I've finished with it, Jack.”

“That's what you said last time, Alex. But the question is—has it finished with you?”

Now Alex glanced at the table. He noticed that it was set for three. “Who's coming for supper?” he asked.

“I forgot to tell you.” Jack smiled. “We have a surprise guest.”

“Who?”

“You'll find out when they get here.” She had barely spoken the words when the front doorbell rang. “That's good timing,” she went on. “Why don't you answer it?”

Alex noticed something strange in her eyes. It wasn't like Jack to have secrets from him. He was still holding the piece of tomato. He tossed it back into the salad, swung himself down, and went out to the hall.

He could just make out a figure shimmering behind the mottled glass of the front door. Whoever it was had activated the automatic light on the porch. Alex threw open the door and stopped in complete surprise.

A young, dark-haired, and very attractive girl was standing there. The car that had dropped her off was just moving away. Alex was so stunned that it took him a minute to recognize her. Even then, he didn't believe who it was.

“Sabina!” he exclaimed. The last time he had seen Sabina Pleasure, the two of them had been on Richmond Bridge on the river Thames when she had told him she was leaving for America. He had been convinced that he would never see her again.

That had been only a few months ago, but she looked completely different. She must be almost sixteen now. Her hair had grown longer, and her shape had changed. She looked wonderful in tight-fitting DKNY jeans and a soft cashmere jersey.

“Hi, Alex.” She stood where she was as if she were a little wary of him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Aren't you glad to see me?”

“Of course I am. But…” Alex's voice trailed off.

Sabina smiled. “That was my dad in the car. We're visiting for Christmas. He's over here writing a story for the paper. Something about some sort of weird church or something. He got me out of school early, and we're going to stay over here until the new year.”

“In London?”

“Where else?”

“Is your mom here?”

“Yeah. We're renting an apartment in Notting Hill.”

The two of them stared at each other. There were all sorts of things Alex wanted to say. He didn't know where to begin.

“Are you two going to come in?” Jack called from the kitchen. “Or would you like me to serve dinner in the street?”

There was a moment of awkwardness. Alex realized that he hadn't even invited Sabina into the house. Worse than that, he was actually blocking the way. He stepped to one side to let her pass. She smiled a little nervously and stepped inside. But the doorway was narrow, and as she came in, he felt her briefly against him. Her hair brushed his cheek, and he smelled the perfume she was wearing. At that moment, he realized how glad he was to see her. It was as if everything was beginning all over again.