Chapter Text
“The eco-terrorist group Force Three today claimed responsibility for killing security expert Max Webber, and said their next target would be ‘something the world would never forget’…”
Alex Rider was lying in a bed in a special wing of St. Dominic’s Private Hospital, one of the finest hospitals in Britain, listening to the radio and trying not to go stir crazy. It sounded like the world had already moved onto its next villain while he had just recovered from the last. Alex sighed.
Alex’s hospital neighbour, a boy named Paul, was making small talk. “Still here? That must have been a pretty serious fall,” Paul had said.
Alex didn’t say anything. A phantom pain still haunted him. Unlike Alex, who had been shot at point blank range, Paul was in for appendicitis.
Once Paul left, with nothing to do, Alex lied down and tried to close his eyes. He tossed and turned as his mind went back, again and again, to what had brought him here. He tried thinking about Paul, about how that mysterious father of his hadn’t once visited him, but that just brought his focus back to himself and how he also hadn’t had any visitors, except for MI6’s Mrs Jones, here to apologise about what had happened. And to see if he was ready for another mission, he suspected.
He hadn’t always been so cynical about other people.
A couple centimetres higher and it would have ripped through my heart , Alex thought. He sat up with a jolt. This wouldn’t do. He needed to move around, go on a walk. Maybe the night receptionist, Conor, would let him stand outside for a while. Alex padded up the hallway and was walking down the stairs when he saw Conor at the reception. There was the sound of the automatic doors opening and a young man’s voice said, “Hi! We’re here to visit Paul Drevin. Can you tell us what room he’s in?”
Alex heard as Conor declined the request while sounding more interested in his newspaper than the newcomers. But then his voice trailed off and it was like Alex’s hearing had sharpened tenfold to hear him mumble the room number next to his own, Paul’s room, “Second floor, room eight”. And then in the next moment, Conor was dead, shot through the head by a suppressed rifle. Alex stepped back in shock. Death, again. And by the sounds of it, Paul was going to be next.
Bandages and all, Alex had been before Alan Blunt, the agency’s head, and his second-in-command, Mrs Jones. “After your run in with SCORPIA, I’m afraid we must take extra precautions. You could not be in the hospital under your own name,” Mrs Jones said. To her credit, she looked unhappy for Alex. Blunt did not; he only looked unhappy.
“And we put you in a special wing,” Blunt said. “One specifically meant for special cases like yourself.”
Perhaps Blunt was just thinking of what this was costing.
Alex had looked at the file summarising the hospital admission, and he had thought it was uncomfortably similar to a mission briefing. And he had looked up to Blunt and Mrs Jones one last time. Why? What had triggered his instincts? He must have already known, beneath the surface, that there was something they were not saying that he should be very, very careful with.
Alex acted almost without thinking. It first occurred to him to switch the room numbers between his and Paul’s doors. When the men appeared, searching for a fourteen-year-old boy, Alex let their eyes find him. There were four of them, the leader dressed in camo jackets and combat boots. He had hair dyed purple including, Alex noticed later with amusement after he knocked him out, his eyebrows.
That was the last of them. The first had been taken out by the element of surprise; the second, by a defibrillator, and the third, an unexpected MRI machine. He was good at this. “Four down. Now to call the police…” Alex said.
At that moment something dangerously solid knocked him over the back of his head. “They always forget the getaway driver,” he heard. He didn’t have time to think before everything turned black.
Specks of blood appeared on the wall inside the aeroplane, a delicately light dusting. Alex’s ears were ringing, but the gunshot hadn’t been loud. It was the shock, he knew, of seeing someone die in front of him.
Alex awoke with an aching head. He remembered with embarrassment how cocky he had been. A nasty bruise was definitely going to form.
Why would armed men come for Paul Drevin, he wondered as his brain struggled to work. And why did that name sound familiar, now that he thought about it?
Out the window of this abandoned apartment was a banner strung between two partially constructed buildings. It read:
HORNCHURCH TOWERS
SOON TO BE AN EXCITING NEW DEVELOPMENT FOR EAST LONDON
“Oh, of course!” Alex hit his palm with a fist. “Not Paul—Nikolai Drevin, the Russian billionaire! That must be his father!”
At that moment, the same thugs appeared at the doorway, one of them pointing a gun directly at Alex. Alex found that he was not afraid at all. For him to be afraid of a gun, he had to believe in the skill and strength of the one wielding it. A pale hand with a black semiautomatic flashed through his mind.
“The boss wants to see you.”
“You mean you geniuses aren’t in charge?” Alex said.
“No-one likes a smart-arse, Paul, now move.”
They passed peeling walls and boarded up windows. Pipes could be seen through missing panels in the ceiling. There was graffiti everywhere and cockroaches scuttled in the corners. Alex was brought to a room decorated with an old bathtub, a heap of planks and canvas, several rubbish bags, and a table with two chairs. Behind the table sat a large, stocky man with the most bizarre tattoos Alex had ever seen. They were bright blue and green, covering his entire head and ending abruptly at his neck. His head was a diorama of the Earth.
“Hello, Paul,” he said. “Let me introduce myself. I am the leader of Force Three … My name is Kaspar. Have you heard of me?”
Alex stared at his tattoos in bewilderment. “No, but I’d sure like to sit next to you in a geography exam.”
Kaspar smiled unpleasantly. He started talking about Nikolai Drevin’s environmental crimes and Alex began to get nervous. “You’ve got it all wrong—”
“Liar! Your father’s fortune is built on stolen oil! His pipelines have scarred three continents!” Kaspar’s eyes blazed. “Now he must pay.”
The purple-haired man grabbed Alex’s wrist and Alex saw the glint of a switchblade.
“What? No, wait!”
With a smile, the man pinned Alex’s hand to the table and slowly brought the blade down, the tip resting in the crook of Alex’s ring and pinkie finger, poised at the joint.
“I’m not Paul Drevin!” Alex shouted. He had the clarity of mind to stick to the cover MI6 had made for him. “My name is Ryan Henderson and I was just coming back from the toilet when—”
“He’s lying, boss, he answered to ‘Paul’.”
“I can prove it! What’s Paul in hospital for?”
“Appendicitis,” Kaspar said.
“So look at my bandages.” Alex lifted up his shirt to reveal bandages around his upper chest. Force Three looked with scowls. “Either my appendix has moved or the hospital has really stupid doctors. You can cut off all the fingers you want but Nikolai Drevin won’t pay a penny.”
Kaspar’s expression darkened.
“Now, can I go?” Alex said, smoothing his shirt down.
Kaspar faced away. “If you’re not Paul Drevin, then nobody cares about you anyways.”
Little do you know , Alex thought, but he wondered what MI6 would do. Would they pay the ransom? Would they send in the SAS? Alex tried to imagine Blunt being worried for him.
“Take him back. I will make enquiries…”
“You— You killed him,” Alex said in disbelief. Damian Cray’s body fell with a thump onto the carpet of Air Force One.
“He would have killed me,” Yassen said plainly.
Alex couldn’t take his eyes off Yassen, even when they ached from the stress and fear. Blood crept through the carpet towards him.
Force Three ended up driving off while Alex waited in the empty room. He heard their tyres screech and then smelt smoke in the air. To survive being shot, only to burn alive in a case of false identity? People had said Alex had Rider’s luck to survive all of his missions, but the way Alex saw it, he just wasn’t unlucky enough to have died so far. It held out today: he got out, lungs burning, eyes watering, arms and legs aching, every part of his body sore, but still alive. He was good at this.