Stormbreaker (17 page)

He had thought of forcing Mr. Grin to land the plane at Heathrow. The radio had started squawking the moment they'd entered London airspace and had only stopped when Mr. Grin turned it off. But that would never have worked. By the time they reached the airport, touched down, and coasted to a halt, it would be far too late.

And then, sitting hunched up in the cargo area, Alex had recognized the two bundles lying on the floor next to him. They had told him exactly what he had to do.

“Eeerg!” Mr. Grin said. He twisted around in his seat, and for the last time, Alex saw the hideous smile that the circus knife had torn through his cheeks.

“Thanks for the ride,” Alex said, and jumped out of the open door.

The bundles were parachutes. Alex had checked them out and strapped one onto his back when they were still over Reading. He was glad that he'd spent a day on parachute training with the SAS, although this flight had been even worse than the one he'd endured over the Welsh valleys. This time there was no static line. There had been no one to reassure him that his parachute was properly packed. If he could have thought of any other way to reach the Science Museum in the seven minutes that he had left, he would have taken it. There was no other way. He knew that. So he had jumped.

Once he was over the threshold, it wasn't so bad. There was a moment of dizzying confusion as the wind hit him once again. He closed his eyes and forced himself to count to three. Pull too early and the parachute might snag on the plane's tail. Even so, his -hand was clenched and he had barely reached three before he was pulling with all his strength. The parachute blossomed open above him and he was jerked back upward, the harness cutting into his armpits and sides.

They had been flying at ten thousand feet. When Alex opened his eyes, he was surprised by his sense of calm. He was dangling in the air, underneath a comforting canopy of white silk. He felt as if he wasn't moving at all. Now that he had left the plane, the city seemed even more distant and unreal. It was just him, the sky, and London. He was almost enjoying himself.

And then he heard the plane coming back.

It was already a mile or more away, but now he saw it bank steeply to the right, making a sharp turn. The engines rose, the plane leveled out , and it headed straight toward him. Mr. Grin wasn't going to let him get away so easily. As the plane drew closer and closer, he could imagine the man's never-ending smile behind the window of the cockpit. Mr. Grin intended to steer the plane straight into him, to cut him to shreds in midair.

But Alex had been expecting it.

He reached down and took the Game Boy out of his trouser pocket. This time there was no game cartridge in it, but he had slipped Bomber Boy out a long time ago and slid it across the floor of the empty cargo plane. That was where it was now. Just behind Mr. Grin's seat. A smoke bomb. Set off by remote control.

He pressed the start button three times.

Inside the plane the cartridge exploded, releasing a cloud of acrid yellow smoke. The smoke billowed out through the hold, curling against the windows, trailing out of the open door. Mr. Grin vanished, completely surrounded by smoke. The plane wobbled, then plunged down.

Alex watched the plane dive. He could imagine Mr. Grin blinded, fighting for control. The plane began to twist, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The engines whined. Now it was heading straight for the ground, howling through the sky. Yellow smoke trailed out in its wake. At the last minute Mr. Grin managed to bring up the nose again. But it was much too late. The plane smashed into what looked like a deserted piece of dock land near the River Thames and disappeared in a ball of flame.

Alex looked at his watch. Three minutes to twelve.

He was still thousands of feet in the air, and unless he landed on the very doorstep of the Science Museum, he wasn't going to make it. Grabbing hold of the ropes, using them to steer himself, he tried to work out the fastest way down.

Inside the East Hall of the Science Museum, Herod Sayle was coming to the end of his speech. The entire chamber had been transformed for the great moment when the Stormbreakers would be brought on-line.

The room was caught between old and new, between stone colonnades and stainless steel floors, between the very latest in high tech and old curiosities from the Industrial Revolution.

A podium had been set up in the center for Sayle, the prime minister, his press secretary, and the minister of state for education. In front of them were twelve rows of chairs-for journalists, teachers, invited friends. Alan Blunt was in the front row, as emotionless as ever. Mrs. Jones, dressed in black with a large brooch on her lapel, was next to him. On either side television towers had been constructed with cameras focusing in as Sayle spoke. The speech was being broadcast live to schools throughout the country and it would also be shown on the evening news. The hall was packed with another two or three hundred people, standing on first- and second-floor galleries, looking down on the podium from all sides. As Sayle spoke, tape recorders turned and lightbulbs flashed. Never before had a private individual made so generous a gift to the nation. This was an event. History in the making.

“. . . it is the prime minister, and the prime minister alone who is responsible for what is about to happen,” Sayle was saying. "And I hope that tonight, when he reflects on what has happened today throughout this country, that he will remember our days together at school and everything he did at that time. I think tonight the country will know him for the man he is. One thing is sure. This is a day you will never forget."

He bowed. There was a scattering of applause. The prime minister glanced at his press secretary, puzzled. The press secretary shrugged with barely concealed rudeness. The prime minister took his place in front of the microphone.

“I'm not quite sure how to respond to that,” he joked, and all the journalists laughed. The government had such a large majority that they knew it was in their best interests to laugh at the prime minister's jokes. “I'm glad that Mr. Sayle has such happy memories of our school days together and I'm glad that the two of us, together, today, can make such a vital difference to our nation's schools.”

Herod Sayle gestured at a table slightly to one side of the podium. On the table was a Stormbreaker computer and, next to it, a mouse. “This is the master control,” he said. “Click on the mouse and all the computers will come on-line.”

“Right.” The prime minister lifted his finger and adjusted his position so that the cameras could get his best profile. Somewhere outside the museum, a clock struck twelve.

Alex heard the clock from about five hundred feet up, with the roof of the Science Museum rushing toward him.

He had seen the building just after the plane had crashed. It hadn't been easy finding it, with the city spread out like a three-dimensional map right underneath him. On the other hand, he had lived his whole life in West London and had visited the museum often enough. First he had seen the Victorian pile that was Albert Hall. Directly south of it was a tall white tower surmounted by a green dome: Imperial College. As Alex dropped, he seemed to be moving faster. The whole city had become a fantastic jigsaw puzzle and he knew he only had seconds to piece it together. A wide, extravagant building with churchlike towers and windows. That had to be the Natural History Museum. The Natural History Museum was on Cromwell Road. How did you get from there to the Science Museum? Of course, turn left at the lights up Exhibition Road.

And there it was. Alex pulled at the parachute, guiding himself toward it. How small it looked compared to the other landmarks, a rectangular building jutting in from the main road with a flat gray roof and, next to it, a series of arches, the sort of thing you might see on a railway station or perhaps an enormous conservatory. They were a dull orange in color, curving one after the other. It looked as if they were made of glass. Alex could land on the flat roof. Then all he would have to do was look through the curved one. He still had the gun he had taken from the guard. He could use it to warn the prime minister. If he had to, he figured, he could use it to shoot Herod Sayle.

Somehow he managed to maneuver himself over the museum. But it was only as he fell the last five hundred feet, as he heard the clock strike twelve, that he realized two things. He was falling much too fast. And he had missed the flat roof.

In fact, the Science Museum has two roofs. The original is Georgian and made of wired glass. But sometime recently it must have leaked because the curators constructed a second roof of plastic sheeting over the top. This was the orange roof that Alex had seen.

He crashed into it with both feet at about thirty miles per hour. The roof shattered. He continued straight through, into an inner chamber, just missing a network of steel girders and maintenance ladders. He barely had time to register what looked like a brown carpet, stretched out over the curving surface below. Then he hit it and tore through that too. It was no more than a thin cover, designed to keep the light and dust off the glass that it covered. With a yell, Alex smashed through the glass. At last his parachute caught on a beam. He jerked to a halt, swinging in midair inside the East Hall.

This was what he saw.

Far below him, all around him, three hundred people had stopped and were staring up at him in shock. There were more people sitting on chairs directly underneath him and some of them had been hit. There was blood and broken glass. A bridge made of green glass slats stretched across the hall. There was a futuristic information desk and in front of it, at the very center of everything, was a makeshift stage. He saw the Stormbreaker first. Then, with a sense of disbelief, he recognized the prime minister standing, slack jawed, next to Herod Sayle.

Alex hung in the air, dangling at the end of the parachute. As the last pieces of glass fell and disintegrated on the terra-cotta floor, movement and sound returned to the East Hall in an ever-widening wave.

The security men were the first to react. Anonymous and invisible when they needed to be, they were suddenly everywhere, appearing from behind colonnades, from underneath the television towers, running across the green bridge, guns in hands that had been empty a second before. Alex had also drawn his own gun, pulling it out from the waistband of his trousers. Maybe he could explain why he was here before Sayle or the prime minister activated the Stormbreakers. But he doubted it. Shoot first and ask questions later was a line from a bad film. But even bad films are sometimes right.

He emptied the gun.

The bullets echoed around the room, surprisingly loud. Now people were screaming, the journalists punching and pushing as they fought for cover. The first bullet smashed into the information desk. The second hit the prime minister in the hand, his finger less than an inch away from the mouse. The third hit the mouse, blowing it into fragments. The fourth hit an electrical connection, disintegrating the plug and shortcircuiting it. Sayle had dived forward, determined to click on the mouse himself. The fifth and the sixth bullets hit him.

As soon as Alex had fired the last bullet, he dropped the gun, letting it clatter to the floor below, and held up the palms of his hands. He felt ridiculous, hanging there from the ceiling, his arms outstretched. But there were already a dozen guns pointing at him and he had to show them that he was no longer armed, that they didn't need to shoot. Even so, he braced himself, waiting for the security men to open fire. He could almost imagine the hail of bullets tearing into him. As far as they were concerned, he was some sort of crazy terrorist who had just parachuted into the Science Museum and taken six shots at the prime minister. It was their job to kill him. It was what they'd been trained for.

But the bullets never came. All the security men were equipped with radio microphones, and in the front row, Mrs. Jones had control. The moment she had recognized Alex she had been speaking urgently into her brooch.

“Don't shoot! Repeat-don't shoot! Await my command!”

On the podium, a plume of gray smoke rose out of' the side of the broken, useless Stormbreaker. Two security men had rushed to the prime minister, who was clutching his wrist, blood dripping out of his hand. The photographers and journalists had begun to shout questions. Their cameras were flashing and the television cameras too had been swung around to focus in on the figure swaying high above. More security men were moving to seal off the exits, following orders from Mrs. Jones, while Alan Blunt looked on, for once in his life out of his depth.

But there was no sign of Herod Sayle. The head of' Sayle Enterprises had been shot twice, but somehow he had disappeared.

“YOU SLIGHTLY SPOILED things by shooting the prime minister,” Alan Blunt said. “But all in all you're to be congratulated, Alex. You not only lived up to our expectations. You way exceeded them.”

It was late afternoon the following day, and Alex was sitting in Blunt's office at the Royal & General building on Liverpool Street wondering just why, after everything he had done for them, the head of M16 had to sound quite so much like the principal of a secondrate private school giving him a good report. Mrs. Jones was sitting next to him. Alex had refused her offer of a peppermint, although he was beginning to realize it was all the reward he was going to get.

She spoke now for the first time since he had come into the room. “You might like to know about the clearing-up operation.”

“Sure . . .”

She glanced at Blunt, who nodded. “First of all, don't expect to read the truth about any of this in the newspapers,” she began. “We put a D-notice on it, which means nobody is allowed to print anything. Of course, the ceremony at the Science Museum was being televised live, but fortunately we were able to cut the transmission before the cameras could focus on you. In fact, nobody knows that it was a fourteen-year-old boy who caused all the chaos.”

“And we plan to keep it that way,” Blunt muttered.

“Why?” Alex didn't like the sound of that.