Snakehead

He was at the Ritz Hotel in London, which—even if they did allow too many tourists into the main rooms—was still his favorite hotel in the world. And tea was definitely his favorite meal. He loved the little sandwiches, cut in perfect triangles, with a scone served with jam and cream to follow. It was all so very English. Even the bone-china teapot and cup had been made by Wedgwood, the Staffordshire family established in 1759.

He sipped his tea and dabbed his lips with a napkin.

The news from Bangkok, he had to admit, was not good.

But he wasn’t going to let that spoil his tea. His mother had always told him that every cloud has a silver lining, and he was looking for one now. It was true that it wouldn’t be easy to replace Anan Sukit. On the other hand, every organization—even a snakehead—needs a change of personnel from time to time. It keeps people on their toes. There were plenty of young lieutenants who deserved promotion. Yu would make a choice in due course.

Much less welcome was the man sitting opposite him.

It was very rare for two members of Scorpia to be seen to-136

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gether in public, but Zeljan Kurst had telephoned him and insisted on a meeting. Major Yu had suggested the Ritz, but now he felt it had been a mistake. The big Yugoslavian, with his bald head and wrestler’s shoulders, couldn’t have looked more out of place. And he was drinking mineral water! Who drank mineral water at four o’clock in the afternoon?

“Why didn’t you report to us about the boy?” Kurst asked.

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” Yu replied.

“Not relevant?”

“This is my operation. I have everything under control.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

It didn’t surprise Yu that the executive board had learned about the destruction of the Chada Trading Agency and the death of Sukit. They were always watching each other’s backs, doubtless working out where to place the knives. It was sad that criminals weren’t the same anymore. No one trusted anyone.

“We’re still not sure what happened last night,” Yu said. It might be teatime in England but it was midnight in Bangkok. “It’s not even clear the boy was responsible.”

“This is Alex Rider,” Kurst snapped. “We underestimated him once before and it was an expensive mistake.

Why haven’t you killed him already?”

“For obvious reasons.” Yu’s hand hovered over an-W a t H o

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other sandwich, but he changed his mind. He had rather lost his appetite. “I was aware of Alex Rider’s presence in Bangkok the moment he arrived,” he continued. “I knew they were coming—a boy and a man—even before they left.”

“Who told you?”

“That’s my secret, and I intend to keep it that way. I could have arranged to have had the Rider child gunned down at Suvarnabhumi airport. It would have been simple. But that would have told ASIS that I was aware of their plans. They already suspect I have inside information. This would have confirmed it.”

“So what do you intend to do?”

“I want to play with him. The fight at the arena was just the beginning, and there’s no real harm done. The place was falling down anyway. But if you ask me, the situation is quite amusing. Here’s the famous Alex Rider, dressed up as an Afghan refugee. He thinks he’s so clever.

But I have him in the palm of my hand and I can crush him at any time.”

“That was what Julia Rothman thought.”

“He’s a child, Mr. Kurst. A very clever child, but a child all the same. I think you’re overreacting.” Something deadly flickered in Kurst’s eyes, and Yu made a mental note not to eat anything more. He wouldn’t put it past Scorpia to slip a radioactive pellet into an egg-and-cress sandwich. They had done it before.

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length. “And I’m warning you, Major Yu, if we feel that things are getting out of hand, you will be replaced.” He got up and left.

Yu stayed where he was, thinking about what had just been said. He suspected that Levi Kroll was behind this.

The Israeli had been maneuvering to take over control of Scorpia ever since Max Grendel had retired. He had also volunteered for the Reef Island business. He would be itching to move in if Yu failed.

He was not going to fail. Royal Blue had been thoroughly tested by Yu’s operatives in Bangkok. The detonation system had been adapted. And in just two days’

time it would set off on the next leg of its journey. All according to plan. But at the same time, Yu had decided to take out a little insurance. He and he alone would set off the bomb. He was the one who would take the credit for the worldwide devastation that would follow.

But how to stop Kroll from seizing control?

It was very simple. A little technological tinkering and nobody would be able to replace him. Yu smiled to himself and called for the bill.

“I should never have let you go,” Ash exclaimed. “I can’t believe I let them do that to you.”

It was one o’clock in the morning in Bangkok, and Alex and Ash were back in their room on the third floor.

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side of an ugly modern bridge. From there, he’d had to find his way across the city on foot, dripping wet, without money and relying only on his sense of direction. He had stopped twice to ask for directions from a monk and from a stall holder closing up for the night. They spoke little English but were able to understand enough to point him in the right direction. Even so, it had been well after midnight by the time he had reached Chinatown. Ash had been pacing the room like a lion in a cage, sick with worry, and had grabbed hold of Alex when he finally arrived. He had listened to the story with disbelief.

“I shouldn’t have let you go,” he said again.

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I’ve heard about these fights. The snakeheads use them all the time. Anyone who crosses them can end up in the ring. People get crippled . . . or killed.”

“I was lucky.”

“You were smart, Alex.” Ash looked at him approvingly, as if seeing him in a completely different light. “You say someone was there shooting. They attacked the building. Did you see who they were?”

“I got a glimpse of someone. But I’m sorry, Ash. It was dark and it was all happening too quickly.”

“Were they Thai or European?”

“I didn’t see.”

Alex was sitting on the bed, wrapped in a blanket. Ash had put his clothes out to dry—not that there was much 140

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chance of that. The night itself was damp, on the edge of a tropical storm. He had also brought Alex a bowl of chicken broth from the restaurant at the end of the alleyway. Alex needed it. He hadn’t eaten since late that afternoon. He was starving and exhausted.

Ash examined him. “I remember the first time I met your father,” he said suddenly. The change of subject took Alex by surprise. “I’d been sent out on a routine operation . . . in Prague. I was just backup. He was in charge . . . for the first time, I think. He was only a couple of years older than me.” He took out a cigarette and rolled it between his fingers. “Anyway, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. A building blown to smithereens. Three ex-KGB agents dead in the street. The Czech police crawling all over us. And he was just like you are now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you take after him,” Ash explained. “John always had the luck of the devil. He’d walk into trouble and somehow he’d get out of it in one piece. And then he’d sit there—the same as you—as if nothing had happened.

Untouched by it.”

“His luck ran out in the end,” Alex said.

“Everyone’s luck runs out in the end,” Ash replied, and turned away, a haunted look in his eyes.

They didn’t talk much more after that. Alex finished his soup and fell asleep almost immediately. The last thing he remembered was Ash, hunched over a cigarette, the W a t H o

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red tip winking at him in the darkness as if sharing a secret.

Despite everything, Alex woke early the next morning.

There were a couple of fat cockroaches crawling up the wall right next to him, but by now he had gotten used to them. They didn’t bite or sting. They were just ugly. He ignored them and got out of bed. Ash had already been out, taking Alex’s wet clothes to a laundry to be spun dry.

He got dressed quickly, and the two of them went out for a bowl of jok— the rice porridge that many of the stalls served for breakfast.

They ate in silence, squatting on two wooden crates at the edge of the road with the traffic rumbling past. It had rained in the night, and there were huge puddles everywhere that somehow slowed the city down even more.

Once again, Ash had slept badly and there were dark rings under his eyes. His wound was hurting him. He did his best not to show it, but Alex noticed him wince as he sat down, and he looked more ragged and drawn out than ever.

“I’m going to have to cross the river,” he said at last.

“The Chada Trading Agency?” Alex shrugged. “You won’t find very much of it left.”

“I was thinking the same thing about our assignment.” Ash threw down his spoon. “I’m not blaming you for what happened last night,” he said. “But it may well be that our friends in the snakehead have no further interest in 142

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smuggling us into Australia. One of their main lieutenants is probably dead. And it has to be said, you took out a large chunk of their operation.”

“I didn’t set fire to the arena!” Alex protested.

“No. But you pulled it into the river.”

“That put the fire out.”

Ash half smiled. “Fair point. But I need to find out how things stand.”

“Can I come?”

“Absolutely not, Alex. I think that’s a bad idea. You go back to the room . . . and watch out for yourself. It’s always possible that they’ll send someone around to settle the score. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He walked off. Alex thought back over what he’d just said. Was Ash angry with him? It was difficult to read his moods . . . as if a life in the secret service had put any display of emotion under wraps. But Alex could see that things hadn’t quite gone as expected. His job was to infiltrate the snakehead, not start a war with it. And the fake papers that were so important to Ash might well be sitting on the bottom of the river—and the rest of the Chada Trading Agency with them.

Alex got to his feet and began to walk slowly along the street, barely glancing at the brightly colored silks that every shop in this area seemed to sell. Thai main streets certainly weren’t like English ones. In England, things were spread out. Here, you’d get whole clusters of shops all selling the same thing: whole streets of silk, whole W a t H o

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streets of ceramics. He wondered how people chose where to go.

He wished Ash had taken him along. The truth was that he didn’t want to spend any more time on his own and he’d had enough of Bangkok. As for his hopes that meeting Ash would tell him anything about himself, so far all he had been given were a few glimpses of the past.

He was beginning to wonder if his godfather would ever open up enough to say anything meaningful at all.

He had just reached the top of the alleyway when he realized he was being followed.

Ash had warned him to keep his eyes open—and perhaps it was thanks to him that Alex spotted the man on the other side of the road, half hidden behind a vegetable stall. He didn’t need to look twice. The man had changed his clothes. Gone were the red poppy and the leather jacket. But Alex was absolutely certain. This was the same square, hard-edged face that he had already seen at the airport and then again outside the Peninsula Hotel. Now he was here. He must have been trailing Alex for days.

The man had dressed himself up as a tourist, complete with camera and baseball cap, but his attention was fixed on the building where Alex and Ash were staying.

Perhaps he was waiting for them to come out. Once again, Alex got the feeling that he knew the man from somewhere. But where? In which country? Could this be one of his old enemies catching up with him? He examined the cold blue eyes beneath the fringe of dark hair. A 144

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soldier? Alex was just about to make a connection when the man turned and began to walk away. He must have decided that there was no one at home. Alex made an instant decision. To hell with what Ash had told him. He was going to follow.

The man had set off down Yaowarak Road, one of the busiest streets in Chinatown, with huge signs carrying Chinese hieroglyphics high into the air. Alex was confident he wouldn’t be seen. As ever, the pavement was cluttered with stalls, and if the man glanced back, Alex could find somewhere to hide in an instant. The real danger was that Alex could lose him. Despite the early hour, the crowds were already out—they formed a constantly shifting barrier between the two of them—and the man could disappear all too easily into a dozen entranceways.

There were shops selling gold and spices. Cafés and restaurants. Arcades and tiny alleyways. The trick was to stay close enough not to lose him but far enough away not to be seen.

But the man didn’t suspect anything. His pace hadn’t changed. He took a right turn, then a left, and suddenly they were out of Chinatown and heading into the Old City, the very heart of Bangkok, where every street seemed to contain a temple or a shrine. The pavements were emptier here, and Alex had to be more careful, dropping farther back and hovering close to doorways or parked cars in case he had to duck out of sight.

They had been walking for about ten minutes when W a t H o

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the man turned off, passing through the entrance to a large temple complex. The gateway itself was decorated with silver and mother-of-pearl and opened into a courtyard filled with shrines and statues: a fantastic, richly decorated world where myth and religion collided in a cloud of incense and a blaze of gold and brilliantly colored mosaic.

The Thai word for a Buddhist monastery or temple is wat. There are thirty thousand of them scattered across the country, hundreds in Bangkok alone. There was a sign outside this one, giving its name in Thai and—

helpfully—in English. It was called Wat Ho.

Alex only had a few moments to take in his surroundings: the ornamental ponds and bodhi trees that grow in every wat because they once gave shelter to the Buddha.

He glanced at the golden figures—half woman, half lion—that guarded the main temple, the delicate slanting roofs, and the mondops . . . incredible, intricate towers with hundreds of tiny figures that must have taken years to carve by hand. A group of monks walked past him.

Everywhere there were people kneeling in prayer. He had never been anywhere so peaceful.

The man he was following had disappeared behind a bell tower. Alex was suddenly afraid that he was going to lose him, at the same time wondering what it was that had brought him here. Could he have been mistaken? Could the man be a tourist after all? He hurried around the corner and stopped. The man had gone. In front of him, a 146

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crowd of Thais were kneeling at a shrine. A couple of backpackers were having their photograph taken in front of one of the terraces. Alex was angry with himself. He had been too slow. The entire journey had been a waste of time.

He took a step forward and froze as a shadow fell across him and a hand pressed something hard into his back.

“Don’t turn around,” a voice commanded, speaking in English.

Alex stood where he was, a sick feeling in his stomach.

This was exactly what Ash had warned him against. The snakehead had sent someone after him, and he had allowed himself to be led straight into a trap. But why here—in a Thai temple? And how did the man know he spoke English?

“Walk across the courtyard. There’s a red door on the other side of the shrine. Do you see it?” Alex nodded. The man had a Liverpool accent. It sounded completely weird in the context of a Bangkok temple.

“Don’t turn around. Don’t try anything. We’re going through the door. I’ll give you more instructions on the other side.”

Another jab with the gun. Alex didn’t need any more prompting. He walked away from the bell tower, skirting the Thai people lost in their prayers. Briefly, he consid-W a t H o

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ered starting a fight, out here, while there were still witnesses. But it would do him no good. The man could shoot him in the back and disappear before anyone knew what had happened. The moment would come . . . but not yet.

The red door was set in the wall of a cloister—

somewhere for the monks to walk in silent contemplation.

It was surrounded by images of the Ramakien, the great story of gods and demons known to every child in Thailand. Gods or demons? He had little doubt to which one of them the man belonged.

As he approached, the door clicked open automatically. There had to be a surveillance camera somewhere, but, looking around, Alex couldn’t see it. There was a modern corridor on the other side, with bare brick walls slanting down toward a second door. This one opened too. All the sounds of the temple had faded away behind him. He felt as if he was being swallowed up.

Alex wasn’t going to let that happen. He timed his move very carefully. The second doorway was narrow, leading into a square-shaped hall that could have been the reception area of a lawyer’s office or a stylish private bank. The walls were covered in wooden panels. There was an antique table with a lamp, a fan turning overhead.

And more bizarre than anything, on the opposite wall, a picture of the queen of England.

As Alex made his way in, he hesitated, allowing the 148

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man to catch up. Then suddenly he punched backward with his elbow, bringing his fist swinging around in the same motion.

It was a move he had been taught when he was training with the SAS in the Brecon Beacons in Wales. The elbow jab winds your man. The fist carries the gun aside, giving you time to spin around and kick out with all your strength. Never try it in the open because you’ll end up getting shot. It only works in a confined space.

But not this time. The man seemed to have been expecting the maneuver. He had simply stepped aside the moment Alex began his move. Alex’s first strike didn’t make contact with anything, and before he could even begin to turn, he felt the cold farewell of the gun pressed against the side of his head.

“Nice try, Cub,” the man said. “But much too slow.” And that was when Alex knew. “Fox!” he exclaimed.

The gun didn’t matter anymore. Alex turned to stand face-to-face with the man—who was now grinning at him like an old friend. Which, in a sense, he was. The two of them had actually met in the Brecon Beacons. There had been four men in the unit to which Alex had been assigned: Wolf, Eagle, Snake, and Fox. None of them had been allowed to use their real names. While he was with them, Alex was Cub. And now that he thought about it, there had been one with a Liverpool accent. It seemed incredible that the two of them should have met up again W a t H o

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in Bangkok, but there could be no doubt about it. Fox was standing in front of him now.

“You were at the airport,” Alex said. “I saw you, wearing a poppy.”

“Yes. I should have taken that off. But I’d just flown in from London myself.”

“And you were at the Peninsula Hotel.” Fox nodded. “I couldn’t believe it was you when I first saw you, so I followed you to be sure. I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since, Alex. Lucky for you . . .”

“Last night . . .” Alex’s head swam. “Was that you at the arena? You set the place on fire!”

“I followed you over to Patpong, and I was there when those men picked you up. Then I followed them down to the Chada Trading Agency. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you.

And it took me ages to weasel my way in. When I arrived, you were already in the ring. I thought you were going to get beaten to a pulp. But I’d seen where the main fuses were, so I sneaked back and turned out all the lights.

Then I came looking for you. Things got a bit dicey when the lights came back on and I had to shoot a few of the opposition and throw a couple of grenades. The last time I saw you, you were in a ferry, trying to get away. It might have helped if you’d untied it first.”

“You shot Anan Sukit.”

“Was that his name? Well, he was trying to shoot you.

It was the very least I could do.”

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“So what is this place?” Alex looked around. “What are you doing in Bangkok? And what’s your real name?

You can’t go on expecting me to call you Fox.”

“My real name’s Ben Daniels. You’re Alex Rider. Of course, I know that now.”

“You’ve left the SAS?”

“I got assigned to MI6 Special Operations. And since you ask, that’s where you are now. This is what you might call the Bangkok office of the Royal and General Bank.” The words were hardly out of his mouth when a door opened on the other side of the hallway and a woman walked into the room. Alex caught it at once . . . the faint smell of peppermint.

“Alex Rider!” Mrs. Jones exclaimed. “I have to say, you’re the last person I expected to see. Come into my office immediately. I want to know—why aren’t you at school?”

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T H E L A S T T I M E A L E X had seen Mrs. Jones, she had been visiting him in a North London hospital. Then she had seemed unsure of herself, regretful, blaming herself for the security lapse that had left Alex close to death on the pavement outside the MI6 offices on Liverpool Street.

She had also been at her most human.

Now she was much more like the woman he had first met, dressed severely in a slate-colored jacket and dress with a single necklace that could have been silver or steel.

Her hair was tied back, and her face—with those night black eyes—was utterly serious. Mrs. Jones was not exactly attractive, but neither did she try to be. In a way, her looks exactly suited her work as head of MI6, Special Operations, one of the most secretive departments of the British secret service. They gave nothing away.

Once again she was sucking a peppermint. Alex wondered if she had given up smoking at some time. Or was the habit also related to her job? When Mrs. Jones spoke, people had a tendency to die. It wouldn’t surprise him if she felt the need to sweeten her breath.

The two of them were sitting in an office on the first floor of the building that stood directly behind Wat Ho. It was a very ordinary room with a wooden table and three 152

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leather chairs. Two large square windows looked out over the temple courtyard. Alex knew that all this could be de-ceptive. The glass was probably bulletproof. There would be hidden cameras and microphones. How many agents were there, mingling among the orange-robed monks?

When it came to MI6, nothing was ever quite what it seemed.

Ben Daniels, the man he had known as Fox, was also there. He was younger than Alex had first thought—no more than twenty-two or twenty-three, laid back and thoughtful. He was sitting next to Alex. The two of them were opposite Mrs. Jones, who had taken her place behind the table.

Alex had told her his story, from the time he had splashed down off the Australian coast to his recruitment by ASIS, his meeting with Ash in Bangkok, and his first encounter with the snakehead. He noticed that she had reacted sharply at the mention of Ash. But then, of course, she must have known him. She had been there when his father went undercover, working for Scorpia. She might even have been involved in the operation in Malta that had brought him safely home.

“Well, Ethan Brooke certainly has nerve,” she remarked when he had finished. “Recruiting you without so much as a by-your-leave! He could have talked to us first.”

“I don’t work for you,” Alex said.

“I know you don’t, Alex. But that’s not the point. At the very least you’re a British citizen, and if a foreign gov-A r m e d a n d D a n g e r o u s 153

ernment is going to use you, they might as well ask.” She softened slightly. “For that matter, whatever prompted you to go back into the field? I thought you’d had enough of all this.”

“I wanted to meet Ash,” Alex said. Another thought occurred to him. “Why did you never tell me about him?” he asked.

“Why should I have?” Mrs. Jones replied. “I haven’t seen him for almost ten years.”

“But he worked for you.”

“He worked for Special Operations at the same time as me. In fact, I had very little to do with him. I met him once or twice. That’s all.”

“Do you know what happened in Malta?” Mrs. Jones shook her head. “You’d have to ask Alan Blunt,” she said. “That was his operation. You know it was all a setup. John Rider—your father—was pretending to work for Scorpia, and we had to get him back. We set up a fake ambush in a place called Mdina, but it all went wrong. Ash was nearly killed, and shortly after that he left the service. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Where is Mr. Blunt?”

“He’s in London.”

“So why are you here?”

Mrs. Jones looked at Alex curiously. “You’ve changed,” she said. “You’ve grown up a lot. I suppose we’re to thank for that. You know, Alex, we weren’t going to use you again. I’d agreed with Alan—after what hap-154

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pened with Scorpia, that was going to be the end of it. But the next thing I knew, you’re in America, up to your neck in it with the CIA. I ought to congratulate you, by the way. That business with the Ark Angel space station was quite remarkable.”

“Thank you.”

“And now ASIS! You certainly get around.” Mrs. Jones reached forward and flipped open a file lying on the table in front of her. “It’s strange that we should have run into you this way,” she went on. “But it may be less of a coincidence than you think. Major Yu. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“He’s in charge of the snakehead.” Ethan Brooke had told Alex the name when he was in Sydney.

“Well, to answer your question, I’m here because we’re investigating him. That’s why Daniels is here too.” Mrs. Jones tapped the file with her index finger. “How much did ASIS tell you about Major Yu?” Alex shrugged. He felt uncomfortable suddenly, caught in the middle of two rival intelligence agencies.

“Not very much,” he admitted. “They don’t seem to know a lot about him. That’s part of my job . . .”

“Well, maybe I can help you.” Mrs. Jones paused.

“We’ve been interested in Major Winston Yu for some time, although we haven’t managed to find out too much about him ourselves. We know he had a Chinese mother.

His father is unknown. He was brought up in poverty in Hong Kong—his mother worked at a hotel—but cut for-A r m e d a n d D a n g e r o u s 155

ward eight years and you find him being privately educated in England. He went to Harrow School, for heaven’s sake! How his mother managed to afford the fees is another question.

“He was an average student. We have copies of his reports. On the other hand, he seems to have fit in quite well, which is surprising, considering his race and background. There was a question mark over a rather nasty incident that took place in his first term—a couple of boys killed in a car accident—but nothing was ever proved. He was also very good at sports, a triple house blood, whatever that means.

“He left with reasonable grades and studied politics at London University, got a degree. After that, he went into the army. Trained at Sandhurst and did much better there. He seems to have taken to army life and was at the top of his class with the highest score in military, practical, and academic studies, for which he received highest honors. He joined one of our country’s most distinguished regiments—the Household Cavalry—and served in the Falklands and the first Gulf War.

“Unfortunately, he developed a bone condition that brought an end to his army career. But he was snapped up by intelligence, and for a time he worked for MI6—not Special Operations. He was fairly low-level, gathering and processing information . . . that sort of thing. Well, eventually he’d had enough of it because one day he disappeared. We know he was active in Thailand and Aus-156

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tralia, but there’s no record of his activities, and it was only recently that we were able to identify him as the leader of one of the most powerful snakeheads in the region.”

Mrs. Jones paused. When she looked up again, her eyes were bleak. “This may put you off, Alex. It may even persuade you to go home—and believe me, I wouldn’t blame you. According to our sources, Major Yu may have contacts with Scorpia. It’s even possible that he’s on the executive board.”

Scorpia. Alex had hoped he would never hear that name again. And Mrs. Jones was right. If Ethan Brooke had given him that information, he might have thought twice about the whole thing. He wondered if the head of ASIS had known. Almost certainly. But he’d needed Alex, so he’d decided to keep it under his hat.

“You still haven’t told me why you’re interested in him,” Alex said.

“That’s top secret.” Mrs. Jones gestured with one hand. “But I’ll tell you anyway. Apart from anything else, it may well be that you’re in a position to help us—

assuming that’s something you’d even consider. Anyway, I’ll explain and you can make up your own mind . . .

“Have you ever heard of the Daisy Cutter?” Alex thought for a moment. “It’s a bomb,” he said.

He remembered talking about it once at school, during history. “The Americans used it in Vietnam.”

“They’ve also used it in Afghanistan,” Mrs. Jones said.

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“The Daisy Cutter, also known as BLU-82B or the Blue Boy, is the largest conventional bomb in existence. It’s the size of a car . . . and I mean a Lincoln. Each bomb contains twelve-and-a-half-thousand pounds of ammo-nium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene, and it’s powerful enough to destroy an entire building, easily. In fact, it’ll probably take out a whole block.”

“The Americans used it because it’s terrifying,” Daniels muttered. He was speaking for the first time. “It may not compare to a nuclear bomb, but there’s nothing on the earth like it. The shock wave that it releases is unbelievable.

You have no idea how much damage it can do.”

“They used it in Vietnam to clear landing sites for helicopters,” Mrs. Jones went on. “Drop one on the jungle and you’d have no jungle for half a mile around. They called it the Daisy Cutter because that was the pattern the explosion made. It was used in Afghanistan to scare the Taliban . . . to show them what they were up against.”

“What’s this got to do with Major Yu?” Alex asked. He was also wondering, with a sense of growing unease, what it might have to do with him.

“For the last few years, the British government has been developing a second generation of Daisy Cutters,” Mrs. Jones explained. “They’ve managed to create a similar type of bomb except that it’s a little smaller and it’s more powerful, with an even greater shock wave. They gave it a code name, Royal Blue, and they’d built a prototype at a secret laboratory just outside London.” She 158

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took out a peppermint and twisted off the wrapper with a single movement of her thumb and forefinger. “Three weeks ago the prototype was stolen. Eight of our people were killed. Three of them were security guards. The rest were technicians. It was a very professional operation: perfectly timed, ruthlessly executed.” She slid the peppermint between her lips.

“And you think Major Yu . . . ?”

“These things aren’t easy to transport, Alex. They need to be transported in a Hercules C-130 transport plane.

We lost sight of the bomb, but two days later a C-130

took off with a flight plan that brought it to Bangkok via Albania and Tajikistan. We were able to identify the pilot . . . his name was Feng. He in turn had been employed by a criminal based here in Bangkok . . . a man called Anan Sukit . . .”

“. . . and he works for the snakehead!” Alex finished the sentence.

“He worked for the snakehead,” Mrs. Jones remarked sourly. “Until Daniels put three bullets into him.” It was all beginning to make sense. MI6 Special Operations were chasing a missing bomb that had led them to the snakehead. Alex was investigating the snakehead and that had led him to MI6. It was as if they had met in the middle.

“We were planning to put Daniels into the snakehead,” Mrs. Jones continued. “We’d arranged a cover story for him. He was a rich European who’d flown out A r m e d a n d D a n g e r o u s 159

from London, hoping to put together a big drug deal. Of course, everything changed the moment he spotted you.

As soon as we realized you were here, we decided to keep an eye on you and find out what you were up to. I have to say, we were very surprised when you changed your appearance.” She ran an eye over Alex. “If we hadn’t seen you at the airport, we wouldn’t have recognized you.”

“I like the teeth,” Daniels muttered.

“So what now?” Alex asked. “You said you wanted me to help you.”

“You and Ash have already penetrated the snakehead.

You’ve also shaken things up a bit—no surprises there.

Maybe you can find Royal Blue for us.”

“It shouldn’t be too hard to spot,” Daniels said. “It’s bloody huge. And if it goes bang, you’ll hear it ten miles away.”

Alex considered. Getting involved with MI6 again was the last thing he wanted, but in a way, what Mrs. Jones had told him had changed nothing. He was still working for ASIS. And if he did come across a bomb the size of a family car, there would be no harm in reporting it.

“What do they want it for?” he asked.

“That’s what worries us most,” Mrs. Jones replied.

“We’ve got no idea. Obviously they must be planning something big—but not that big. A nuclear bomb would have been about one thousand times more powerful.”

“So they’re not out to destroy a whole city,” Daniels added.

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“But if this is a Scorpia operation, you can be pretty sure it’s serious and large scale. These people aren’t bank robbers . . . you know that better than anyone. I have to admit, we’re in the dark. Anything you can find out will be helpful to us.”

Once again, Alex fell silent. But he had made up his mind. “I’ll have to tell Ash,” he said.

Mrs. Jones nodded. “I don’t see any harm in that. And in return, we can help you. You and Daniels already know each other. There’s no point in trying to put him in undercover now. But he can continue to watch over you.” Ben smiled. “I’d be happy to do that,” he said.

“We can give you something to contact him anytime.

Has ASIS provided you with any equipment?” Alex shook his head.

Mrs. Jones sighed. “That’s the trouble with the Australians. They always rush into everything without a second thought. Well, we can give you what you need.”

“Gadgets?” Alex’s eyes lit up.

“You’ve got an old friend here. I think you ought to meet.”

Smithers was down the corridor in a room that was a cross between a library, an office, and a workshop. He was sitting at a desk, surrounded by bits of machinery—

like a destructive child on Christmas Day. There was a half-dismantled alarm clock, a laptop computer with its insides spilling out, a video camera divided into about A r m e d a n d D a n g e r o u s 161

fifty different pieces, and a whole tangle of wires and circuits. Smithers himself was wearing sandals, baggy shorts, and a bright yellow, short-sleeved shirt. Alex wondered how he could possibly carry so much weight around in this heat. But he looked perfectly composed, sitting with his great stomach stretching out toward his knees and two very plump pink legs tucked away below. He was fanning himself with a Chinese fan decorated with two in-terweaving dragons.

“Alex? Is that you?” he exclaimed as Alex came into the room. “My dear boy! You don’t look like yourself at all. Don’t tell me! You must have spent some time with Cloudy Webber.”

“Do you know her?” Alex asked.

“We’re old friends. The last time we met was at a party in Athens. We were both in disguise, as it happened, and we chatted for half an hour before we recognized each other.” He smiled. “But I can’t believe you’re back again.

So much has happened since I last saw you. That was in America. Did my Stingo mosquito lotion come in useful?”

Now it was Alex’s turn to smile. The liquid that Smithers had invented attracted insects instead of re-pelling them and it had been very useful indeed, helping to get him past a checkpoint on Flamingo Bay. “It was great, thanks,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Mrs. Jones asked me to think up a few gadgets for our agents out here in the East,” Smithers replied. He 162

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lifted the fan. “This is one of them. It’s very simple, but I rather like it. You see, it looks like an ordinary fan, but actually there are very thin plates of galvanized steel hidden under the silk. And when you bring them together . . .” He folded the fan, then brought it smashing down onto the desk. The wood shattered. “. . . it becomes a useful weapon. I call it . . .”

“. . . the fan club?” Alex suggested.

Smithers laughed. “You’re getting used to my little ways,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve had all sorts of ideas since I came to Bangkok.” He rifled around the surface of the desk and finally found a packet with a dozen sticks of incense. “Everyone burns incense out here,” he explained.

“It comes in jasmine and musk and it’s rather lovely—but my incense has no smell at all.”

“So what’s the point?”

“After thirty seconds it will cause a whole room full of people to throw up. It’s quite the most disgusting gadget I’ve ever invented, and I have to say we had no fun at all testing it. But it’s still quite useful, I think.” He unfolded a sheaf of drawings. “I’m also working on one of these local taxis. They call them tuk-tuks, but this one has got a missile launcher built into the front headlight and a machine gun directly controlled by the handlebars, so I suppose you could say it’s an attack tuk.”

“What’s this?” Alex asked. He had reached out and picked up a small bronze Buddha sitting in the lotus po-A r m e d a n d D a n g e r o u s 163

sition. With its round stomach and bald head, it reminded him a little of Smithers.

“Oh—do be careful with that!” Smithers exclaimed.

“That’s my Buddha hand grenade. Twist the head twice and throw it and anyone within ten yards can say their prayers.”

He took it back and placed it carefully in a drawer.

“Mrs. Jones said you’re taking on the snakeheads,” he continued, and suddenly he was serious. “You be careful, Alex. I know you’ve done tremendously well in the past, but these people are seriously nasty.”

“I know.” Alex thought back to his first meeting with Anan Sukit and the fight in the riverside arena. He didn’t need to be told.

“There are all sorts of things I’d love to equip you with,” Smithers said. “But as I understand it, you’re working undercover as an Afghan refugee. Which means that you won’t be carrying very much. Is that right?” Alex nodded. He was disappointed. Smithers had once given him a Game Boy jammed with special devices, and he would have felt more confident having something like that with him now.

Smithers reached forward and opened an old cigar box. The first thing he took out was a watch, a cheap fairground thing on a plastic strap. He handed it to Alex.

Alex looked at the time. According to the watch, it was six thirty. He shook it. “The watch doesn’t work,” he said.

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“We have to think about the psychology,” Smithers explained. “A poor Afghan refugee wouldn’t own many possessions, but he would be very proud of the few he did have . . . even a broken watch. But this watch will work when it matters. There’s a powerful transmitter and a battery inside. If you get in trouble, set the hands to eleven o’clock and it will send out a signal that will repeat every ten minutes for twenty-four hours. We’ll be able to pick you up anywhere on the globe.”

Smithers rummaged around in the box again and took out three coins. Alex recognized them. They were Thai currency—one baht, five baht, and ten baht, worth about fifty cents between them. “I don’t think anyone would worry about a few local coins,” he said, “but these are rather fun. They’re actually miniature explosives. Let me show you how you detonate them.”

He produced a half-empty packet of chewing gum. At least, that was what it looked like. But then he turned it around in his pudgy fingers and slid open a secret panel.

There were three tiny switches on the other side, marked with the figures 1, 5, and 10. “This is how it works,” he explained. “The coins are magnetic. You have to stick them to a metal surface to activate them. That’ll stop you from accidentally blowing them up in your pocket. Then you flick the appropriate switch . . . just make sure you get the right value. The coins will blow open a lock or even smash a hole in a wall. Think of them as miniature land mines. And do try not to spend them!” A r m e d a n d D a n g e r o u s 165

“Thanks, Mr. Smithers.”

“And finally, I’ve got something that might come in very useful if you find yourself off the beaten track.” Smithers pulled open a drawer in the desk and took out an old belt with a heavy silver buckle. “You can slip it into your jeans. There’s a particularly sharp knife hidden inside the buckle. It’s actually made out of toughened plastic, and it’s rather cunningly designed so it won’t show up on x-ray machines if you go through an airport.

And if you slice open the belt, you’ll find matches, medicine, water-purifying tablets, and knockout pills that are guaranteed to work on eleven different varieties of snake.

I developed it for use in the jungle, and although you’re not heading that way, you never know.” He handed it across. “It’s a shame, really. I’d love to give you the pants that go with it. The legs are highly flammable.”

“Exploding jeans?” Alex asked.

“Flares,” Smithers replied. He reached out and shook Alex’s hand. “Good luck, my boy. And one last word of advice.” He leaned forward as if afraid of being overheard. “I wouldn’t trust these Australians if I were you. I mean, they’re not a bad lot. But they are a bit rough, if you know what I mean. They don’t play by the rules. Just keep your wits about you.” He tapped the side of his nose.

“And call for help the moment you need us. That Ben Daniels is a good guy. He won’t let you down.” Alex gathered up his few weapons and left the room.

As he left, he heard Smithers humming behind him. The 166

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song was that old Australian favorite, “Waltzing Matilda.” Alex wondered what Smithers had meant by his warning.

Did he really know something that Alex didn’t, or was he just being mischievous?

Ben Daniels was waiting on the other side.

“Are you ready, Cub?” he asked.

“Armed and dangerous,” Alex replied.

The two of them left together.

12

T H E S I L E N T S T R E E T S

AS H WA S A L R E A DY I N the room when Alex got back. At first he was angry.

“Where the hell have you been, Alex?” he growled. “I was worried about you. I told you to wait for me here.” Then his eyes narrowed. He glanced down at Alex’s waist.

“That’s a nice belt. Where did you get it?” Alex was impressed. His godfather had spent half his life as a spy, and of course he had been trained to notice every detail. Despite everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, Ash had immediately picked up on this one tiny change in Alex’s appearance.

“It was given to me,” Alex said.

“Who by?”

“I met some old friends . . .”

Quickly Alex described what had happened: how he had seen Ben Daniels in the crowd, followed him to Wat Ho, and found himself in the MI6 stronghold. Mrs. Jones had given him permission to tell Ash about Royal Blue, and he mentioned the possible link between Major Yu and Scorpia. Ash’s eyes grew dark when he heard the name.

“Nobody told me they were involved,” he muttered. “I don’t like this, Alex. And nor will Ethan Brooke. You and 168

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I are meant to be gathering information. Nothing more, nothing less. Now it’s getting messy.”

“That’s not my fault, Ash.”

“Maybe I should go to this temple, have a word with Mrs. Jones.” Ash thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No. There’s no point in arguing with her.

Go on . . .”

Alex went on with his story. It seemed that he was now working not for one but two secret services. He supposed Ash had a point. The mission had certainly been bent out of shape, and suddenly there was a ticking bomb at the heart of it. Why did Scorpia need Royal Blue? If Scorpia was involved, it was bound to be something big—and they wouldn’t care how many people died. But why this bomb? Why not any other?

Alex tried to put it out of his head. He finished by describing how once again Smithers had equipped him.

“So Smithers is still with MI6!” Ash smiled briefly.

“He’s quite a character. And he supplied the belt? What does it do . . . besides keep your pants up?”

“I haven’t had a chance to examine it yet,” Alex admitted. “But there’s a knife in the buckle. And there’s stuff hidden inside. Some sort of jungle survival kit.”

“Who said you were heading into the jungle?” Alex shrugged.

Ash shook his head. “I’m not sure you should keep it,” he said.

“Why not?”

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“Because it may not fit in with your cover. It didn’t come from Afghanistan like everything else you’re wearing. If we get into any more trouble, it could be noticed.”

“Forget it, Ash. I’m keeping it. But if you like, I’ll make sure it’s out of sight.” Alex untucked his shirt and let it hang over the belt.

“What about the watch? Did Smithers give you that too?”

“Yes.” Alex wasn’t surprised that Ash had also noticed the watch. He held out his wrist. “In case you’re wondering, the hands don’t move. It’s got a transmitter in it.

I can call MI6.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I might need help.”

“If you need help, you can call me.”

“I don’t have your number, Ash.”

Ash scowled. “I’m not sure ASIS would be too happy about any of this.”

Alex held his ground. “I’m not sure I’d be too happy if I ended up dead,” he said.

Ash could see that Alex was in no mood for an argu-ment. “All right,” he said. “Maybe it’s for the best. I won’t have to worry about you so much if I know you’ve got backup. But don’t call MI6 without telling me—okay?

Promise me that. I don’t work for them anymore and when all is said and done, I’ve got my reputation to consider.”

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exploding coins and the detonators concealed in the chewing gum packet. Ash might try to take those too. He changed the subject. “How did you make out?” he asked.

“Did you go to the river?”

Ash lit a cigarette. It still surprised Alex that a man who looked after himself so carefully in every other respect chose to smoke. “It’s all good news,” he said. “I found the arena where you were taken—or what was left of it—and spoke to a guy called Shaw. You may remember him. He was the one who took the photographs.

Richard Shaw. Or Rick to his friends.”

“What was he doing there?”

“There were dozens of them, salvaging what they could out of the wreckage. Papers, computer disks . . .

that sort of thing. Our late friend, Mr. Sukit, had his offices there, and there was plenty of stuff they wouldn’t want the police to find.”

“What did Shaw say?”

“I got him to take me to Sukit’s deputy. Another charming guy. Looked like he’d been in a street fight . . .

face all over the place. He obviously had a lot on his mind but I persuaded him to send us on the next step of our journey. After all, we’d paid the money. And you’d done what they wanted. You’d taken part in their fight . . . even if you had humiliated their champion.”

“What about the fire and all the rest of it?”

“Nothing to do with you. They think the Chada Trad-T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 171

ing Agency was hit by a rival gang. The long and the short of it is that they’re happy to get us out of the way. We leave for Jakarta tonight.”

“Jakarta?”

“We’re moving farther down the pipeline, Alex.

They’re smuggling us into Australia via Indonesia. I don’t know how—but it’ll almost certainly involve some sort of ship. Jakarta’s only about forty-eight hours by sea from Darwin. Maybe it’ll be a fishing boat. Maybe something bigger. We’ll find out soon enough.”

“How do we get to Jakarta?”

“We fly just like anyone else.” Ash produced a folder containing two airplane tickets, passports, visas, and a letter of credit written on fancy paper with the name Unwin Toys printed across the top. “We’re being met at Jakarta International Airport,” he went on. “I’m now a sales manager for Unwin Toys. Flying in to look at their new range and bringing my son with me.”

“Unwin Toys . . . I’ve heard of them.” The name had seemed familiar the moment he saw it.

Now Alex remembered. He had had seen their products all over London, often on market stalls or bargain basements on Oxford Street. They specialized in radio-controlled cars, building kits, and water pistols—always made out of colored plastic, manufactured in the Far East and guaranteed to fall apart a few days after they were opened. Unwin Toys wasn’t a great name, but it was a 172

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well-known one and he found it hard to believe that it could be tied in with the snakehead.

It was as if Ash knew what was in his mind. “Think about it, Alex,” he said. “A big company like Unwin Toys would be a perfect cover for a smuggling operation.

They’re moving goods all over the world and the fact that they’re for little kids . . . it’s the last place you’d think of looking.”

Alex nodded. He could imagine it. A crate full of plastic trucks, each one loaded with a stash of heroin or cocaine. Water pistols that were actually the real thing.

Teddy bears with God knows what inside. All sorts of unpleasant secrets could hide behind such an innocent facade.

“We’re making real progress,” Ash said. “But we still have to be careful. The more we know, the more dangerous we become to the snakehead.” He thought for a moment. “What you said just now, about calling me.

You’re right. I want you to remember a telephone number. Write it on your hand.”

“What telephone number?”

“If anything happens, if we get separated, call the number before you contact anyone else. It’s my cell phone. But the number’s special, Alex. It was given to me by ASIS. You can call from anywhere in the world and you’ll be put through instantly. It will cost you nothing.

The numbers will override any security system in any tele-T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 173

phone network so you can reach me anytime, anywhere.

What do you say?”

Alex nodded. “Fine.”

Ash gave him the number. There were ten digits, but otherwise it was like no cell number Alex had ever heard before. He wrote them on the back of his hand. The numbers would soon fade, but by then he would have memorized them.

“What now?” he asked.

“We rest. Then we get a taxi to the airport. It’s going to be a long night.”

Alex realized the moment had come. They might not be able to speak to each other in Jakarta or on the way to Australia—certainly not in English—and very soon after that, the whole business would be over. Once they had arrived on the northern coast, Alex wouldn’t be needed anymore.

“All right, Ash,” he said. “You promised you’d tell me about my mom and dad. You were the best man at their wedding, and they made you my godfather. And you were there when they died. I want to know all about them because for me, it’s like they didn’t exist. I want to know where I came from . . . that’s all . . . and what they thought about me.” He paused. “And I want to know what happened on Malta. You said that Yassen Gregorovich was there. Was he the one who gave you that scar on your stomach? How did that happen? Was my dad to blame?” 174

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There was a long silence. Then Ash nodded slowly.

He stubbed out his cigarette.

“All right,” he said. “On the plane.” They were thirty thousand feet above the Gulf of Thailand, heading south on the short flight to Jakarta. The plane was only half full. Alex and Ash had a whole row to themselves, right at the back. Ash had smartened himself up a little with a white shirt and a cheap tie. He was, after all, meant to be a sales manager. But Alex hadn’t changed.

He was grubby and a little ragged, still wearing the clothes he had been given in Bangkok. Perhaps that was why the two of them had been seated on their own. In front of them, the other passengers were dozing in the strange half-light of the cabin. Outside, the sun had set. The plane hung in the darkness.

Ash hadn’t spoken while they took off and climbed into the sky. He had accepted two miniature whisky bottles from the stewardess, but he was still sitting in silence, his dark eyes blacker than ever, fixed on the ice in his glass as it slowly melted. He looked even more bummed out than usual. Alex had noticed him swallow two pills with his drink. It had taken him a while to realize that Ash was in constant pain. He was beginning to wonder if his godfather really was going to tell him what he wanted to know.

And then, without warning, Ash began to speak.

“I met your dad on my first assignment for Special T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 175

Operations. He’d only joined a year before me, but he was completely different. Everyone knew John Rider. Top of his class. Golden boy. On the fast track to the top.” There was no rancor in Ash’s voice. There was no emotion at all. “He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four. Recruited out of the parachute force. Before that he’d been at Oxford University. A first class degree in politics and economics. And—oh yes—did I mention that he was also a brilliant athlete? Rowed for Oxford—and won. A good tennis player too. And now he was in Prague, in charge of his first operation, and I was a nobody sent along to learn the ropes.

“Well, as it turned out, the whole thing was a sham-bles. It wasn’t John’s fault. Sometimes it just happens that way. But afterward, at the debriefing, I met him properly for the first time and you know what I liked most about him? It was how calm he was. Three agents had died . . .

not ours, thank God. The Czech police were going crazy.

And the Museum of East European Folk Art and Antiquities had burned down. Actually, it wasn’t really a museum, but that’s another story. And as I say, your dad was more or less the same age as me and he wasn’t even worried. He didn’t shout at anyone. He never lost his temper. He just got on with it.

“After that, we became friends. I’m not sure how it happened. We lived near each other—he had an apartment in an old warehouse in Blackfriars, set back from the river. We started playing squash together. In the end we 176

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must have played about a hundred games, and you know what? I won at least a couple of them. Sometimes we met for a drink. He liked Black Velvet. Champagne and Guin-ness. He was away a lot, of course, and he wasn’t allowed to tell me what he’d been doing. Even though we were in the same service, I didn’t have clearance. But you heard things . . . and I looked in on him a couple of times when he was in the hospital. That was how I met your mother.”

“She was a nurse.”

“That’s right. Helen Beckett. That was her maiden name. She was very attractive. Same color hair as you.

And maybe the same eyes. I actually asked her out, if you want to know. She turned me down very sweetly. It turned out that she actually knew your dad from Oxford.

They’d met a couple of times when she was studying medicine.”

“Did she know what my dad did?”

“I don’t know what he told her, but she probably had a pretty good idea. When you’re treating someone with two broken ribs and a bullet wound, you don’t imagine they fell over playing golf. But it didn’t bother her. She looked after him. They started seeing each other. The next thing I knew, she had moved in with him and we weren’t playing squash quite so often.”

“Did you ever get married, Ash?” Alex asked.

Ash shook his head. “Never met the right girl . . . although I had fun with quite a few of the wrong ones. I’m actually quite glad, Alex. I’ll tell you why.

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“You can’t afford to get scared in our business. Fear’s the one thing that will kill you faster than anything, and although it’s true to say that all agents are fearless, generally what that means is that they’re not afraid for themselves. All that changes when you get married, and it’s even worse when you have kids. Alan Blunt didn’t want your dad to marry. He knew that in the end, he’d be losing his best man.”

“He knew my mother?”

“He had her investigated.” Alex looked shocked, and Ash smiled. “It was standard procedure. He had to be sure she wasn’t a security risk.”

So somewhere inside MI6 Special Operations there was a file on his mother. Alex made a mental note of it.

Maybe one day it would be something he would dig up.

“I was quite surprised when John asked me to be his best man,” Ash went on. “I mean, he was such a hotshot and nobody had even noticed I existed. But he didn’t really have much choice. His brother, Ian, was away on an assignment . . . and there’s something else you might as well know. Spies are pretty solitary. It goes with the territory, and I was the closest thing he had to a best friend.

John was still seeing one or two people from the university—he’d told them he was working for an insurance company—but friendship doesn’t really work when you have to lie all the time.”

Alex knew that was true. It was the same for him at school. Everyone at Brookland believed he had been 178

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struck down by a series of illnesses in the past ten months.

He’d been back at school a bit, and he’d even joined a school trip to Venice. But he’d felt like an outsider. Somehow his friends knew that something wasn’t adding up and the knowledge made them less good friends than they had once been.

“Did he have any other family?” he asked.

“Apart from his brother?” Ash shook his head. “There was no family that I knew of. The wedding was at a registry office in London. There were only half a dozen people there.”

Alex felt a twinge of sadness. He would have liked his mother to have had a white wedding in a country church with a big party in a tent and speeches and dancing and too much to drink. After all, he already knew, her happiness wasn’t going to last long. But he understood that he was getting a glimpse of a secret agent’s life. Friendless, secretive, and a little empty. The plane trembled briefly in the air, and farther down the aisle, one of the call lights blinked on. Outside the window, the sky was very black.

“Tell me more about my mother,” Alex said.

“I can’t, Alex,” Ash replied. He twisted in his seat, and Alex noticed a flicker of pain in his eyes. The pills hadn’t kicked in yet. “I mean, she liked to read. She went to the movies a lot—she preferred foreign films if she had a choice. She never bought expensive clothes, but she still looked good.” Ash sighed. “I didn’t know her that well.

And she didn’t really trust me, if you want the truth.

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Maybe she blamed me. I was part of the world that put John in danger. She loved your dad. She hated what he did. And she was smart enough to know that she couldn’t talk him out of it.”

Ash opened the second miniature and poured the contents into his plastic glass.

“Helen found out she was expecting you at around the same time that John was sent out on his toughest assignment,” Ash continued. “The two things couldn’t have happened at a worse time. But a new organization had come to the attention of MI6. I don’t need to tell you its name. I guess you know more about Scorpia than I do.

Anyway, there it was: an international network of ex-spies and intelligence officers. People who’d gone into business for themselves.

“At first, they were useful. You have to remember that MI6 actually welcomed them when they first arrived. If you wanted information about what the CIA was up to or how the Iranians were getting on with their nuclear program, Scorpia would sell it to you. If you wanted to do something outside the law with no way of having it traced back to you, there they were. That was the whole point about them. They were loyal to no one. They were only interested in money. And they were very good at their job. Until you came along, Alex, they had never really failed.

“But MI6 got worried about them. They could see that Scorpia was getting out of control . . . particularly when 180

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a couple of their own agents got murdered in Madrid. All around the world, intelligence agencies were regulated, which is to say they played by the rules . . . at least, to a certain extent. But not Scorpia. They were growing bigger and more powerful, and at the same time they were becoming more ruthless. They didn’t care how many people they killed so long as they got their check.

“So Alan Blunt—who’d just become the director of MI6 Special Operations—decided to put your father into Scorpia. The idea was to put him inside the organization . . . to get them to recruit him. Once he was there, he’d find out everything he could about them. Who was on the executive board? Who was paying them? Who were their connections within the intelligence agencies?

That sort of thing. But to do that, MI6 had to put your dad into deep cover. That meant faking everything about him.”

“I know about this,” Alex interrupted. “They pretended he’d been in jail.”

“They actually sent him to jail for a time. They had to be thorough. There were newspaper stories about him.

Everyone turned against him. It looked like he lost all his money and he had to sell the apartment. He and Helen moved to some dump in Bermondsey. By then she was three months pregnant. It was very hard on her.”

“But she must have known the truth.”

“I can’t tell you that. Maybe your dad told her. Maybe he didn’t.”

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Alex couldn’t believe that. Somehow he was sure his mother must have known.

“Either way, the setup worked,” Ash continued. “He was recruited into Scorpia. They sent him to their training facility on the island of Malagosto, just a couple of miles from Venice.”

The name made Alex shiver. He had been sent there himself when Scorpia had tried to recruit him.

“As far as Scorpia was concerned, John Rider was a gift,” Ash said. “He was a brilliant operator. He had a track record inside British intelligence. And he was desperate. He was also a very good-looking man, by the way.

One of the senior executives at Scorpia took a fancy to him.”

“Julia Rothman.” Alex had met her too. She had talked about his father over dinner in Positano.

“The very same. She quickly saw John’s potential, and soon he was a senior training officer with special responsibility for some of Scorpia’s younger recruits. And she gave him a code name. He was called Hunter.”

“How do you know all this?” Alex asked.

“That’s a good question.” Ash smiled. “Because, finally, someone had noticed I existed. Alan Blunt sent me out to shadow John in the field. I was his backup. My job was to stay close but not too close . . . to be there if he needed to make contact. And that’s how I came to be there when it all ended.”

“In Malta.”

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“Yeah. In Malta.”

“What happened?”

“Your dad was coming in. He’d had enough of Scorpia and MI6. You were on your way into the world. John just wanted a normal life—and anyway, he’d achieved what he’d set out to do. Thanks to him, we knew the entire structure of command within Scorpia. We had the names of most of their agents. We knew who was paying them and how much.

“The job now was to bring him home without arous-ing suspicion. Julia Rothman would kill him if she found out he was a spy. The plan was to get him back to England and then let him disappear. A new home. A new identity. The whole works . . . he’d start a new life in France with your mom. I should have mentioned that he spoke fluent French, by the way. If things had gone the way they’d planned, you’d be speaking French now. You’d be in a lycée in Marseilles or somewhere and you wouldn’t know anything about all this.

“Well, it was right at this time that Scorpia provided the opportunity to get John out. There was a man called Caxero. He was a petty criminal. A drug dealer, a money launderer . . . that sort of thing. But he must have rubbed someone the wrong way because someone had paid Scorpia to hit him. Your dad was sent to do the job.

“Caxero lived in Mdina in the middle of Malta. It’s an old citadel, completely surrounded by walls. In fact ma-dina is an Arabic word meaning exactly that . . . ‘walled T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 183

city.’ Caxero’s hometown had another name too. It was so quiet and full of shadows, even in the winter, that the locals called it the silent city. And MI6 realized it was the perfect place for the ambush that would bring John home.

“Your dad wasn’t sent there alone. He was accompanied by a young assassin, one of the best who ever came out of Malagosto. I understand you met him. His name was Yassen Gregorovich.”

Alex shivered again. He couldn’t help himself. They were certainly digging deep into his past tonight.

He had met Yassen on his first mission and remembered the slim, fair-haired Russian with the ice-cold eyes.

Yassen could have killed Alex then but had chosen not to.

And then they had met a second time in the south of France. It had been Yassen who had led him into the nightmare world of Damian Cray. Alex thought back to the last moments they had been together. Once again Yassen had refused to kill him, and this time it had cost him his own life.

“What can you tell me about Yassen?” he asked.

“An interesting young man,” Ash replied—but there was a sudden coldness in his voice. “He was born in a place called Estrov. You won’t have heard of it but it was certainly of interest to us. The Russians had a secret facility there . . . bio-chemical warfare, but one day the whole place blew up. Hundreds of people were killed—

and Yassen’s father was one of them. His mother died six months later.

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“The Russians tried to hush the whole thing up. They didn’t want to admit anything had happened, and even now, we don’t know the whole truth. But one thing was certain. By the end of the year, Yassen was totally alone.

He was just fourteen years old, Alex. The same age as you are now.”

“How did Scorpia find him?”

“He found them. He crossed the whole of Russia on his own, with no money and no food. He worked in Moscow for a while, living on the street and running er-rands for the local Mafiya. We still don’t know how he managed to find his way to Scorpia, but the next thing we know, he turns up in Malagosto. Curiously, your dad was in charge of his training for a time. He told me the boy was a natural. It’s funny, isn’t it. In a way, you and Yassen had a lot in common.” Ash turned to Alex, and he seemed suddenly ghostlike in the artificial light of the plane. A strange look came into his eyes. “John had a soft spot for Yassen,” he said. “He really liked him. What do you make of that? The spy and the assassin. A bit of an odd couple, I’d say . . .”

And more than ten years later, Yassen had sacrificed himself for Alex, repaying the debt of an old friendship.

But Alex didn’t tell Ash that. For some reason, he wanted to keep it to himself.

“This was the deal,” Ash said. Suddenly he sounded tired, like he wanted to get this over with. “Caxero was a man of habit—and that’s dangerous if you’re in crime.

T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 185

He liked to have a black coffee and a cognac every night at a little café in the square opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina. That was where they were going to kill him.

John let me know when the hit was arranged. It was going to be at eleven o’clock at night on November 11. All the elevens. We’d be there waiting. We’d let them take Caxero—he was a nasty piece of work and we might as well let Scorpia get him out of the way—and then we’d move in and grab John. But we’d let Yassen escape. He’d report back to Scorpia. He’d tell them that their man had been captured.

“It had to look good. I was in charge of the operation.

This was the first time I was given command. I had nine men, and even though John was our target, we were all carrying real ammunition—not blanks. Yassen might have been able to tell the difference. He was that smart.

We were all wearing concealed body armor. John wouldn’t be aiming at us when we moved in, but Yassen would. And we already knew he was a crack shot.

“I’d put a couple of my people in place that morning.

The cathedral had these two towers—one on either side—and I put one in each. I remember it also had two clocks. One of them was five minutes slow. I thought it was strange, the two faces showing different times. Anyway, the men in the towers had night vision glasses and radios. They could see the whole town from up there.

They’d make sure that nothing went wrong.” Ash paused.

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“Everything went wrong, Alex. Everything.”

“Tell me.”

Ash sipped his whisky. All the ice had melted.

“We arrived at Mdina just after ten thirty. It was a beautiful night. This was November, and all the tourists had gone. There was a sliver of a crescent moon and a sky full of stars. As we came in through the south gate, it was like stepping back a thousand years in time. The roads in Mdina are narrow and the walls are high. And all the bricks are different shapes and sizes. You can almost imagine them being put in place one by one.

“The whole place felt deserted. The shutters were closed on the houses, and the only light seemed to come from the wrought-iron lamps hanging over the corners.

As we made our way up the Triq Villgaignon—that was the name of the main street—a horse-drawn carriage crossed in front of us. They use them to ferry tourists, but this one was on its way home. I can still hear the echo of the horse’s hooves and the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles.

“I got a whisper in my earpiece from the lookout in the tower. Caxero was in his usual place, drinking his coffee and smoking a cigar. No sign of anyone else. It was a quarter to eleven.

“We crept forward . . . past an old chapel on one side of the road, a crumbling palazzo on the other. All the shops and restaurants were closed—some for the whole T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 187

winter. I had seven men with me. We were all dressed in black. We’d spent half the day studying the map of Mdina, and I signaled them to spread out. We were going to surround the square, ready to move in.

“Ten to eleven. I could see the time on the cathedral clock. And there was Caxero. He was a short, round man in a suit. He had a fancy mustache, and he was holding his coffee cup with his little finger pointing into the air.

There were a couple of cars parked in the square next to some cannons and a waiter standing in the door of the café. Otherwise, nothing.

“But then, suddenly, they were there . . . John Rider and Yassen Gregorovich—or Hunter and Cossack.

Those were the names they used. They were five minutes early . . . that was what I thought. That was my first mistake.”

“The clocks . . .”

“The cathedral clocks. Yes. One was right and one was wrong and in all the tension I’d been looking at the one that was five minutes slow. As for Yassen, it was like some trick in a movie. One minute he wasn’t there, the next he was, with John next to him. It was a ninja technique—how to move and to stay invisible—and the irony was it was probably your dad who’d taught him.

“I don’t think Caxero saw them coming. They walked straight up to him and he was still holding that coffee cup in that stupid way. He looked up just as a complete 188

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stranger shot him in the heart. Yassen didn’t do it quickly.

I remember thinking that I’d never seen anyone so relaxed.

“I was worried that my men wouldn’t be in place yet, that not all the exits from the square would be covered.

But in a way that didn’t matter. Don’t forget. We wanted Yassen to escape. That was part of the plan.

“I stepped out of my hiding place.

“Yassen saw me and all hell broke loose.

“Yassen fired at me. Two of his bullets missed, but I felt the third slam into my chest. It was like being hit by a sledgehammer, and if I hadn’t been wearing an armor-plated vest, I’d have been killed. As it was, I was blown off my feet. I went smashing down into the cobbles, almost dislocating my shoulder. But I didn’t hang around, Alex.

I got straight back up again. That was my second mistake.

I’ll come to that later.

“Anyway, suddenly everyone was firing at once. The waiter turned around and dived for cover. About half a second later, the plate-glass window of the café shattered.

It came down like a shower of ice. The men high up in the cathedral were using rifles. The others were entering the square from different sides. Your dad and Yassen had separated—as I knew they would. It was standard procedure. Staying together would have just made it easier for us to catch both of them. For a moment, I thought everything was going to work out all right after all.

T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 189

“It didn’t.

“Three of my men grabbed hold of John. They’d cornered him, and it really would look as if there had been nothing he could have done. They made him throw down his weapon and lie flat on his face. That left three others to go after Yassen. Of course, they’d let him get away. But it would still be close. That was the plan.

“Only Yassen Gregorovich had plans of his own. He was halfway across the square, making for one of the side streets. But then suddenly he stopped, turned around, and fired three times. The gun had a silencer. It hardly made any sound. And this time he wasn’t aiming for the chest. His bullets hit one of my men between the eyes, one in the side of the neck, and one in the throat. Two of them died instantly. The third went down and didn’t move.

“There was still one agent left. His name was Travis, and I’d chosen him personally. He was on the far side of the square, and I saw him hesitate. He didn’t know what to do. After all, I’d given him orders not to shoot Yassen.

Well, he should have disobeyed me. The situation was out of control. Enough people had already died that night.

He should have got the hell out of there—but he didn’t.

He just stood there and Yassen gunned him down too.

A bullet in the leg to bring him down and then another in the head to finish him off. The whole square was lit-tered with bodies. And this whole thing was meant to be bloodless!”

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Ash fell silent.

Alex noticed he had finished his whisky. “Do you want another drink, Ash?” he asked.

Ash shook his head. Then he went on.

“Yassen had gone. We had John. So in a way, we’d succeeded. Maybe I should have left it at that. But I couldn’t. This was my first solo operation, and Yassen Gregorovich had wiped out almost half my task force.

I went after him.

“I don’t know what I was thinking. Part of me knew that I couldn’t kill him. But I couldn’t just let him go.

I pulled off my body armor. It had a quick release and I couldn’t run with it on. Then I started across the square and toward the northern wall. I heard someone shout after me—it might even have been John. But I didn’t care.

I turned a corner. I remember the pink stone and a balcony like something in an opera house. I couldn’t see anyone. I thought Yassen must have got away.

“And then, without any warning, he stepped out in front of me.

“He’d waited! A whole town crowded with MI6 agents and he’d just stood there like he owned the place and none of us could touch him. I ran straight into him. I couldn’t stop myself. His hand moved so fast that I didn’t see it. I felt it smash into the nerve points in my wrist. I lost my gun. It went spinning away into the darkness. At the same time, his gun pressed against my neck.

“He was ten years younger than me. A Russian kid T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 191

who’d got sucked into all this because his parents had died in an accident. And he’d beaten me. He’d taken out half my team. I was going to be next.

“ ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

“ ‘MI6,’ I told him. There was no point in lying. We wanted Scorpia to know.

“ ‘How did you know I would be here?’

“I didn’t answer that. He pushed harder with the gun.

It was hurting me. But that didn’t matter. It would all be over soon anyway.

“ ‘You should have stayed home,’ he said.

“And then he turned and ran.

“To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me.

Maybe his gun had jammed. Or maybe it was simpler than that. He’d killed Caxero, Travis, and three more of my men. Maybe he’d run out of ammunition. I watched him disappear down the next alleyway, and that was when I realized that he’d had a knife as well as a gun. The hilt was sticking out of my stomach. I didn’t feel anything.

But looking down . . . there was so much blood. It was pouring out of me. It was everywhere.” Ash stopped. The soft scream of the plane’s engines rose in pitch for a moment. Alex wondered if they were coming into Jakarta.

“The pain came later,” Ash said. “You have no idea how bad it was. I should have died that night. Maybe I would have. Only your dad had come after me. He’d feared the worst—and he’d put his own life at risk be-192

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cause if Yassen had seen him, he would have known that the whole thing was a setup. By then I was on the ground.

I was slipping away fast. And I was cold. I’ve never felt so cold.

“Your father didn’t take the knife out. He knew that would kill me right away. He put pressure on the wound and kept it there until the ambulance came. I was airlifted to Valetta, where I was in critical condition for a week. I’d lost five pints of blood. In the end, I came through, but . . .

you’ve seen the scar. I’m missing about half my stomach.

There wasn’t anything they could do about that. There are about a hundred things I’m not allowed to eat because there’s nowhere for them to go. And I have to take pills . . . a lot of pills. But I’m alive. I suppose I should be grateful for that.”

There was a long silence.

“Scorpia got my dad in the end,” Alex said.

“Yeah. A couple of months later. After you were born.

I was there at the christening, Alex. It was almost the last time I saw your dad—and if it makes you feel any better, I never saw him happier than when he was holding you.

He and your mother. It was like you made them real people again. You took them out of the shadows.”

“You went with them to the airport. They were on their way to France. You said they were going to Marseille.”

“They were looking for a new house. More than that.

A new life.”

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“You were there when the bomb went off on their plane.”

Ash looked away. “I said I wouldn’t talk about that and I meant it. Somehow Scorpia found out they’d been tricked and they took revenge. That’s all I know.”

“What happened to you, Ash? Why did you leave MI6?”

“I’ll tell you that, Alex, but that’s the end of it. I think I’ve lived up to my side of the bargain.” Ash crumpled his plastic glass and shoved the broken pieces into the compartment in front of him.

“I didn’t come out of it too well, if you want the truth,” he said. “I was on sick leave for six weeks, and the day I got back to Liverpool Street, Alan Blunt called me into his office. He then chewed me out for everything that had gone wrong.

“First of all, there was the thing with the time. The wrong clock. But it turned out that the most stupid mistake I’d made was to stand up after Yassen had shot me.

You see, that had told him we were all wearing body armor and that was the reason he’d shot Travis and the others in the head. It was all my fault . . . at least, according to Blunt.”

“That wasn’t fair,” Alex muttered.

“You know what, mate? I thought more or less the same thing. And finally, chasing after Yassen when the whole point was to let him get away. That was the final 194

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nail in my coffin. Blunt didn’t fire me. But I was demoted.

He made it clear that I wouldn’t be heading up any more operations for some time to come. It didn’t matter that I’d almost been killed. In a way, that just made it worse.” Ash shook his head.

“It was a little while later that your parents died together on that plane, and after that my heart sort of went out of it. I told you when we were in Bangkok. It was your dad who was the patriot, serving his country. For me it was always just a job. And I’d had enough of it. I did a few more months’ desk duty, but then I handed in my resignation and headed down under. ASIS were keen to have me. And I wanted to start again.

“I saw you a few times, Alex. I looked in on you to see that you were okay. After all, I was your godfather. But by then Ian Rider had started adoption proceedings. I had a drink with him the night before I left England, and he told me he was going to look after you and it was obvious you didn’t need me. In fact, if truth be told, you were probably better off without me. I hadn’t been much help, had I!”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” Alex said. “I don’t.”

“Anyway, I saw you again one more time. I was in London, working with the Australian embassy. You were still in elementary school—and Jack was looking after you.”

“You went out with her.”

“A couple of times. We had a laugh together.” T h e S i l e n t S t r e e t s 195

Ash glanced briefly at Alex as if searching for something. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard that MI6 had recruited you,” he muttered. “Alan Blunt doesn’t miss a trick. And then, when you wound up in Australia! But I still wish you hadn’t come on this mission, Alex. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“A bit late now, Ash.”

The lights in the cabin came back on. The stewardesses began to move up the aisle. At the same time, Alex felt his stomach lurch as they began to come down.

They had arrived in Jakarta, the next step on their way.

The end of the pipeline was in sight.

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SO M E T I M E S A L E X W O N D E R E D I F all the airports in the world hadn’t been designed by the same architect: someone with a love of shops and corridors, plate-glass windows and potted plants. Here he was at Soekarno-Hatta, the international airport of Jakarta, but it might just as well have been Perth or Bangkok. The floors might be more polished and the ceilings higher. And every other shop seemed to be selling rattan furniture or the colorful printed cloth known as batik. But otherwise he could have been right back where he started.

They came through passport control quickly. The official in his glass-fronted booth barely glanced at the forged documents before stamping them, and without a word being spoken, they were in. Nor did they have to wait at baggage claim. They had just one suitcase between them, and Ash had carried it on and off the plane.

Alex was tired. It was as if the events of the last five days in Bangkok had finally caught up with him, and all he wanted to do was sleep—although somehow he doubted he would spend what was left of the night in a comfortable bed. Most of all, he wanted time on his own to reflect over what Ash had told him. He had learned more about his past in the last hour than he had in his en-U n w i n T o y s

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tire life, but there were still questions he wanted to ask.

Had his father blamed Ash for the mistakes that had been made in Mdina? Why had his parents decided to go to France, and why had Ash been with them at the airport?

What had he seen that he was so unwilling to talk about?

They passed into the arrivals area, and once again they were surrounded by a crowd of touts and taxi drivers.

This time there were two men waiting for them, both Indonesian, slim and slightly effeminate in jeans and short-sleeved shirts. One of them was holding a placard that read: Karim Hassan. Alex stared at it for a few seconds before the name registered, and he was annoyed with himself. He had completely forgotten that it was the name under which Ash was traveling. Ash was Karim. He was Abdul. It didn’t matter how tired he was. A mistake like that could get them both killed.

Ash went over to them and introduced himself using a mixture of Dari and sign language. The two men didn’t even try to be friendly. They simply turned and walked away, expecting Ash and Alex to follow.

It was ten o’clock, and outside, away from the artificial climate of the air-conditioning, the heat was thick and unwelcoming. Nobody spoke as they crossed the main concourse to the curbside where a dirty white van was parked with a third man in the driving seat. The van had sliding doors and, at the back, no windows. Alex glanced nervously at Ash. He felt as if he was about to be swallowed up, and he remembered the last time he had 198

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gotten into a car with members of the snakehead. But Ash didn’t look worried. Alex followed him in.

The door slammed shut. The two men got in front with the driver, and they moved off. Alex and Ash sat on a metal bench that had been welded to the floor. Their only view was out the front window, and that was so filthy, Alex wondered how even the driver could see where they were going. The van was at least ten years old and had no suspension at all. Alex felt every bump, every pothole. And there were plenty of both.

The airport was about twelve miles from the city, connected by a highway that was clogged with traffic even at this time of the night. Squinting over the driver’s shoulder, Alex barely saw anything until, at last, Jakarta came into sight. It reminded him at first of Bangkok, but as they drew closer, he saw that it was uglier and somehow less sure of itself, still struggling to escape from the sprawling shantytown it had once been.

The traffic was horrible. They were carried into Jakarta on a concrete overpass, and suddenly there were cars and motorcycles above them and below them as well as on both sides. Skyscrapers—bulky rather than beautiful—rose up ahead, a thousand lightbulbs burning uselessly in offices that must surely be empty, coloring the night sky yellow and gray. There were brightly colored food stalls— warungs—along the sidewalks. But nobody seemed to be eating. The crowds were drifting home like sleepwalkers, pushing their way through the noise and U n w i n T o y s

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the dirt and the heat as the storm clouds closed in overhead.

They turned off the overpass and seemed to leave the main sprawl of the city as quickly as they had entered it.

Suddenly the van was rumbling over a dirt track, splashing through puddles, and weaving around loose bricks and rubble. There were no streetlamps, no signs, no illumination from a moon that had been blocked out by cloud. Alex saw only what the headlights showed him.

This was some sort of suburb, a slum area with narrow streets, houses with tin roofs and corrugated iron patches, walls held up by wooden scaffolding. Strange, spiky shrubs and stunted palm trees grew out of the side of the road. There was no pavement. Somewhere a dog barked.

But nowhere was there any sign of life.

They came to a gate that seemed to have been bolted together from pieces of driftwood. Two words—in Indonesian letters—had been scrawled across it in red paint. As they approached, the driver pressed a remote control in the van and the gate opened, allowing them into a large, square compound with warehouses and offices, lit by a couple of arc lamps and fenced in on all sides. The van stopped. They had arrived.

No one else seemed to be there. The doors of the van were pulled back, and the two men led Alex and Ash into one of the warehouses. Alex saw crates piled high, some of them open, spilling out straw and plastic toys. There was a pile of scooters, tangled together, a Barbie house 200

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lying on its side. A furry monkey was slumped with its legs apart, foam hanging out of a gash in its stomach, staring at them with empty glass eyes. Alex hoped it wasn’t an omen. He had never seen a collection of toys that looked less fun. From the look of them—dusty and dilapidated—

they could have been here for years.

Two thin mattresses spread out on the floor told him the worst. This was where they were supposed to sleep.

There was no sign of any toilet or anywhere to wash. Ash turned to the men and signaled, cupping his hand against his mouth. He was thirsty. The men shrugged and walked out.

It was to be the longest nine hours of Alex’s life. He had no sheets or blankets, and the mattress did almost nothing to protect him from the stone floor underneath.

He was sweating. His clothes were digging into him. The whole of Jakarta was in the grip of a storm that refused to break, and the air seemed to be nine parts water. Worst of all were the mosquitoes. They found him almost immediately and refused to leave him alone. There was no point slapping at his face, and after a while Alex stopped bothering. The mosquitoes didn’t seem to care. The only escape would be sleep, but sleep refused to come.

Ash couldn’t talk to him. There was always a chance there might be microphones in the room. Anyway, he was used to this. To Alex’s annoyance, his godfather was asleep almost at once, leaving him on his own to suffer through every minute of the night.

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But at last the morning came. Alex must have drifted into some sort of half sleep because the next thing he knew, Ash was shaking him and gray daylight was seeping in through the windows and the open door. Someone had brought them two glasses of sweet tea and a basket of bread rolls. Alex would have preferred eggs and bacon but decided it was probably better not to complain. Squatting on his mattress, he began to eat.

What was going on? Alex realized that the false passports they had been given in Bangkok had been enough to get them into Indonesia but that Australia, with far stricter border controls, would prove more difficult. The island of Java was about as near as they could get to Australian soil, and the last part of the journey would have to be taken across the sea—a passage of just forty-eight hours, Ash had said. The place they were in now was connected to Unwin Toys . . . a storage depot and office complex from what Alex had seen the night before. They were going to have to wait here until their boat was ready. And what sort of boat would that be? He would find out in good time.

Shortly after nine o’clock, one of the two men who had met them in the airport came for them and led them out of the warehouse where they had slept. The morning light was thick and gloomy, but at least it allowed Alex to take better stock of his surroundings. Unwin Toys reminded him of an old-fashioned prisoner-of-war camp, something out of a movie from World War II. The build-202

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ings were made of wood and seemed to have been slapped together in a hurry, using whatever was at hand, with rickety staircases leading up to the first floor. The main square was cracked and uneven, with weeds sprouting out of the cement. It was hard to imagine an innocent toy wrapped up under a Christmas tree in England might have begun its life here.

By now there were a dozen or so men and women in the complex. Some of them were office staff, sitting behind windows, tapping away at computers. A truck had arrived and there were people unloading it, passing cardboard boxes from hand to hand. Two guards stood by the gate. They seemed to be unarmed but—with the wire fence surrounding them, the arc lamps, and the security cameras—Alex suspected they must be carrying guns.

This was a secret world. It wanted to keep its distance from the city outside.

He looked up. The clouds were thick, an ugly shade of gray. He couldn’t see the sun, but he could feel it, pressing down on them. Surely it would rain again soon. The entire atmosphere was like a balloon filled with water. At any time it would have to burst.

It was time to go. The white van was there with its engine running. The sliding door was open. Somebody called out to them. Ash took a step forward.

Alex would remember the moment later. It was like a flash photograph . . . a few seconds caught in time when everything is normal and everyone in the picture is still U n w i n T o y s

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unaware of the approaching danger. He heard a car approaching the main gate. It occurred to him that the car was being driven far too fast, that it would surely have to slow down so that the gate could be opened. Then the realization came that the car wasn’t going to slow down, that the driver didn’t need an open gate to enter.

Without any further warning, the gates of the complex were smashed to pieces, one side flying open, the other hanging drunkenly off its hinges as first one, then a second huge Jeep Cherokee burst through. Each one carried five men who came tumbling out almost before the Jeep had stopped. They were all armed with CZ-Scorpion submachine guns or AK-47 assault rifles. Some also carried knives. They were dressed in combat outfits, and most of them wore red berets, but they didn’t look like soldiers. Their hair was too long, and they hadn’t shaved.

Nobody seemed to be in charge. As they spread out across the yard, waving their weapons from side to side and screaming out orders, Alex was convinced that he had stepped into the middle of an armed robbery and that he was about to witness a shoot-out between different Jakarta gangs.

Everyone in the yard had scattered, trying to reach the safety of the buildings, but Ash had stopped dead. He turned to Alex and muttered a single word. “Kopassus.” It meant nothing to Alex. So, making sure nobody could hear him, he added in English: “Indonesian SAS.” He was right.

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Kopassus is an abbreviation of Komando Pasukan Khusus, and it’s the name of one of the most ruthless fighting forces in the world. It is well known—indeed, it is expected—that at least one recruit will die during basic training. After all, they use live ammunition and any injury, even a broken arm or leg, is considered a sign of weakness and will lead to immediate dismissal. In addition to reaching a standard of fitness that is almost superhuman, Kopassus soldiers are expected to acquire a range of specialist skills, including diving, mountaineer-ing, close-quarter combat (CQC), electronic warfare, and at least two foreign languages.

There are five different groups within Kopassus, specializing in sabotage, infiltration, direct action, intelligence, and counterterrorism. The men who had just broken into the compound came from Group 4, also called Sandhi Yudha, a counterintelligence group based in Cijantung in the south of Jakara with special responsibility for smuggling operations in and out of Jakarta. It might have been luck that had brought them here. Or it could have been the result of a tip-off. But Alex saw that as far as he and Ash were concerned, their work might be over. They’d eventually be able to talk their way out of prison . . . Ash would only have to prove that he worked for ASIS. But doing so would destroy his cover. They would never find out how the snakehead had planned to get them into Australia. And, Alex reflected bitterly, he U n w i n T o y s

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would never catch up with the stolen weapon that Mrs.

Jones was looking for—Royal Blue.

In other words, he would have failed twice.

But there was nothing he could do. The Kopassus soldiers had taken up positions across the square so that every angle was covered and nobody could move without being seen. They were still shouting in Indonesian. It didn’t really matter what they were saying. Their aim was to confuse and intimidate the opposition. And they seemed to have succeeded. The civilians inside the compound were standing helplessly. Some of them had raised their arms. The Kopassus was in control.

They were made to line up. Alex found himself between Ash and one of the men who had first met them when they came from the airport. They were covered by at least half a dozen guns. At the same time, three of the soldiers were searching inside the offices and warehouses, making sure there was nobody hiding. One of the toy workers had decided to do exactly that. Alex heard a scream, then the smash of breaking glass as the unfortunate man was hurled, headfirst, through a window. He came crashing down in the courtyard, blood streaming from his face. Another of the soldiers lashed out with a foot and the man howled, then gathered himself to his feet and limped over to join the line.

One last man had climbed out of the jeep. This was presumably the commanding officer. He was unusually 206

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tall for an Indonesian, with a long, slender neck and black hair coming down to his shoulders. Alex heard one of the soldiers refer to him as kolonel and guessed that must be his rank. Slowly the colonel made his way along the line, shouting out instructions. He was asking for ID.

One after another the toy workers produced scraps of paper, driver’s licenses or work permits. The man who had been thrown out of the window held his up with shaking hands. The colonel didn’t seem interested in any of them. Then he reached Ash. Alex tried not to look as Ash took out the fake passport they had been given in Bangkok. He was afraid his eyes might give something away. He glanced down as the colonel opened the passport and held it up to the light. On the edge of his vision, he saw the colonel hesitate. Then suddenly the man struck out, hitting Ash on both sides of the face with the offend-ing document and screaming at him in his own language.

Two soldiers appeared from nowhere, pinning Ash’s arms behind his back and forcing him down onto his knees.

The barrel of a machine gun was pressed into his neck.

The colonel handed the passport to one of his subordi-nates. For a moment he examined Ash’s face, gazing into his eyes as if his true identity might be found there. Then he moved on.

He stopped in front of Alex.

Alex looked up. He was scared, and he didn’t care if he looked it. Maybe the man would decide that he was just a kid and leave him alone. But the colonel didn’t care how U n w i n T o y s

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old he was. He smelled blood. Something like a smile spread over his face, and he rapped out a sentence in Indonesian, holding out a hand for Alex’s ID. Alex froze. He didn’t have his own passport. That was in Ash’s pocket.

But even if he was able to produce it, the colonel would know it was fake. Should he tell the man who he was?

Just a few words in English would do the trick. End the danger. End the mission too.

It began to rain.

No. It wasn’t quite like that. In London, rain has a beginning, a few drops that send people scattering for cover and allow time for umbrellas to rise. In Jakarta, there was no warning. The rain fell as if a skin had burst.

In an instant it was flooding down, warm and solid, an ocean of rain that spluttered out of the drainpipes, hammered against the roofs, and turned the earth to mud.

And with the flood came a brief moment of confusion.

Up until then, the Kopassus had been in complete control of the complex, working with a plan that allowed them to cover every inch of ground. The sudden downpour changed things. Alex didn’t even see where the gunfire began. But someone must have decided that they had too much to lose and that the rain would give them enough cover to risk shooting their way out of here. There were half a dozen shots. The bullets came from somewhere near the warehouse where Alex had slept, a single gun, fired carefully, at exactly equal intervals. One of the Kopassus men went down, clutching his arm. The rest re-208

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acted instantly, diving for cover, returning fire even as they went. The sound of their machine guns was deafening. They didn’t seem to care where they were aiming.

Alex saw an entire wall ripping itself apart, the wooden planks shredded. A man who had been standing near the door was blown off his feet by the first volley. Alex had seen him just two minutes before, sweeping out the yard.

But the Kopassus were taking casualties too. At least three guns were being fired at them. As Alex turned, searching for cover, the soldier whose gun had been pressed against Ash’s neck fell back, a mushroom of blood erupting out of his shoulder. Immediately a second man stepped into his place, firing in the direction from which the bullets had come, the nozzle of his machine gun flashing white behind the rain.

The colonel had pulled out a pistol, a Swiss-made SIG-Sauer P226 and one of the ugliest nine-millimeter weapons on the market. Alex saw him take aim at Ash.

His intention was clear. He had been about to arrest a man and that had provoked a firestorm . . . at least, that was what he thought. Well, whoever the man was, the colonel wasn’t going to let him get away. Rough justice.

He would execute him here and now and put an end to all this.

Alex couldn’t let it happen. With a cry, he hurled himself sideways, his shoulder slamming into the colonel’s stomach. The gun went off, the bullet firing into the air.

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The two of them flew backward, carried by Alex’s veloc-ity, and came crashing down in a puddle. The colonel tried to bring the gun around to aim at Alex. Alex caught hold of his wrist and slammed it down, smashing the back of his hand against a rock. The colonel cried out. Rain was driving into Alex’s face, blinding him. He forced the hand up and down a second time. The fingers opened and the gun fell free.

Part of him knew that this was all wrong. He was on the same side as the Kopassus, both of them fighting the snakehead, who were the true enemy. But there was no time to explain. Alex saw a soldier throw something—a round, black object about the size of a baseball—through the deluge. He knew at once what it was, even before the explosion that tore open the side of the warehouse, smashed three windows, and blew a hole in the roof. A tongue of flame leapt up, only to be driven back by the rain.

More gunfire. The man who had thrown the grenade cried out and reeled backward, clutching his shoulder.

The white van was moving. Alex heard the engine rev, then saw the van begin a clumsy three-point turn. At the same moment, Ash grabbed hold of his arm. His hair was matted. Water was streaming down his face.

“We have to go!” he shouted. With the noise of the rain and shooting there was no chance of his being overheard.

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The colonel lunged sideways and tried to reach the gun. Ash kicked it away, than brought a fist crashing down on the man’s head.

“Ash . . . ,” Alex began.

“Later!”

The van had completed its first turn. It was being brought around to face the shattered gate. Ash started forward, and Alex followed. They reached the van just as it began to pick up speed. Ash reached out and wrenched open the back door. The driver wasn’t waiting for them.

There was a burst of machine-gun fire, and Alex cried out as a line of bullet holes stitched themselves across the side of the van right in front of him.

“Go!” Ash shouted.

Alex threw himself forward, through the door, and into the back of the van. A second later, Ash followed, landing on top of him. The driver didn’t even seem to have noticed they were there. All he cared about was getting away himself. One of the side mirrors exploded, the glass shattering, the metal casing tearing free. The engine screamed as the driver pressed his foot on the accelerator. They leapt forward. There was an explosion, so close that Alex felt the flames scorch the side of his face. But then they were away, shooting out through the gate and into the street beyond.

The van skidded all over the road. It slammed into a wall and one side crumpled, sparks flickering as metal and brick collided. Alex glanced back. One of the van’s U n w i n T o y s

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doors had been blown off, and he saw two soldiers—they looked like ghosts—kneeling in the gate, firing at them.

Bullets, burning white, sliced through the rain. But they were already out of range. They hurtled up the track they had come down the night before . . . by now it was little more than a brown river of mud and debris. Alex looked back, expecting the Kopassus to follow. But the rain was falling so hard that the warehouse complex had already disappeared, and if the two Jeep Cherokees were after them, he wouldn’t have been able to tell.

The driver was the same man who had brought them from the airport. He was clutching the steering wheel as if his life depended on it. He looked in the mirror and caught sight of his two unwanted passengers. At once, he let loose a torrent of Indonesian. But he didn’t slow down or stop. Alex was relieved. It didn’t matter where they were heading. All that mattered was they hadn’t been left behind.

“What was that about?” he demanded. His mouth was right next to Ash’s ear, and he was confident that the driver wouldn’t be able to hear what he said or what language he was speaking.

“I don’t know.” For once, Ash had lost his compo-sure. He was lying on his side, trying to catch his breath.

“It was routine . . . bad luck. Or maybe someone hadn’t paid. It happens all the time in Jakarta.”

“Where are we going?”

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in the half-light and swirling water of the storm, but he must have recognized something. “This is Kota. The old city. We’re heading north.”

“Is that good?”

“The port is in the north . . .”

They had joined the morning traffic, and now they were forced to slow down, falling in behind a line of cars and buses. All the food stalls had disappeared beneath a sea of plastic sheeting, and the people were crowded in doorways, squatting under umbrellas, waiting for the storm to pass.

The driver turned around and shouted something.

Even if it had been in English, Alex doubted that he would have been able to hear.

“He’s taking us to the boat,” Ash explained. “He wants us out of here.”

“You speak Indonesian?”

Ash nodded. “Enough to understand.”

The van emerged from a side street and cut across a main road. Alex saw a taxi swerve to avoid them, its horn blaring. Behind them, an old house loomed out of the rain. It reminded him of something he might have seen in Amsterdam, but then the whole city had belonged to the Dutch once, a far outpost of the East India Company.

They crossed a square. It was lined with cobblestones, and lying in the back of the van, Alex felt every one of them. A crowd of bicyclists swerved to avoid them, crashing into one another and tumbling over in a tangle of U n w i n T o y s

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chains and obscenities. A man pushing a food stall threw himself out of the way with inches to spare.

Then they were on another highway. There was more traffic here—an endless procession of trucks, each one piled up with goods that were concealed beneath garish plastic tarps. The trucks looked overloaded, as if they might collapse at any time under the weight.

Finally, just ahead, the buildings parted and Alex saw fences, cranes, and ships looming high above them. There were warehouses, guard posts, and offices made of corrugated iron, huge gantries, and great stretches of empty concrete with more trucks and vans making their way back and forth. It was almost impossible to see anything through the endless rain, but this was the port. It had to be. There was a security barrier straight ahead of them and, beyond, a stack of containers behind a barbed wire fence. The van slowed down and stopped. The driver turned around and shouted something in a torrent of Indonesian before stepping out of the van. Then he was gone.

“Ash—” Alex began again.

“This is Tanjung Priok Docks,” Ash cut in. “They must be taking us on a container ship.” He pointed. “You see those fenced-off areas? They’re EPZs. Export Processing Zones. Stuff comes into Jakarta. It gets assembled there, and then it’s shipped out again. That’s our way out of here. Once we’re in an EPZ, we’ll be safe.”

“How do we get in there?” Alex had seen the barriers 214

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ahead of them. There were guards on duty, even in the driving rain.

“We pay.” Ash grimaced. “This is Indonesia! The docks are run by the military. But the military are in the pay of the premens. You want a translation? They’re gangsters, Alex. The Indonesian mafia. Small beer compared to the snakeheads but still in control around here.

You can do anything so long as you pay.” Ash got to one knee and peered out of the window. There was nobody in sight. He glanced back at Alex. “Thank you for what you did back there,” he said.

“I didn’t do anything, Ash.”

“The colonel was about to shoot me. You stopped him.” Ash grimaced. “That’s Kopassus for you. Kill the wrong guy and send flowers to the funeral. Really charming.”

“What happens when we get to Australia?”

“Then it’s over. I get a pat on the back from Ethan Brooke. You go home.”

“Will we see each other again?”

Ash looked away. Like Alex, he was completely drenched, his clothes dripping and forming a pool around him in the back of the van. They both looked like ship-wrecks. “Who knows?” he growled. “I haven’t been much of a godfather, have I? Maybe I should have sent you a Bible or something.”

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and this time he wasn’t alone. There were three men with him, their faces hidden beneath the hoods of their plastic anoraks. They were all talking at once, jabbing their fingers at Alex and Ash, gesticulating wildly. Slowly their meaning became clear, and Alex felt a chasm open up beneath him. They wanted Alex to come with them. But Ash was to stay behind. The two of them were being separated.

He wanted to cry out, to argue—but even one word would be fatal, and he forced himself to keep his mouth shut. He tried to resist, pulling away from the hands that grabbed at him. It was useless. As he was bundled roughly out of the van, he took one last look at Ash. His godfather was watching him almost sadly, as if he had guessed that something bad was going to happen and knew that he was powerless to stop it now that it had.

Alex was half dragged onto the road. Ahead of him, a gate had swung open, and he was marched through with a man on each side of him and one ahead. A security guard appeared briefly but the men shouted at him and he quickly turned away.

It was hard to see anything in the driving rain. There was a dock ahead of them and a ship, bigger than any Alex had ever seen, the equivalent of about three soccer fields in length. The ship had a central section where the crew must work and live. Alex could see the bridge, with four or five huge windows and giant windshield wipers swinging 216

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back and forth, fighting against the rain. The ship had a name, printed in English along the bow: the Liberian Star.

It was being loaded with containers, the rectangular boxes dangling from the huge machine known as a spreader, which loomed over them like some sort of monster creature in a science-fiction film. A man in a cabin was controlling the cables and pulleys, lowering each box into place with incredible precision.

They entered the EPZ, where the next containers were waiting their turn, each one painted a different color, some carrying the names of the companies that owned them. Alex saw a yellow box, this one sitting on a truck, and knew that it was his destination. Again, the name was painted in English: Unwin Toys. He looked back, hoping against hope that Ash would be following him after all.

But they were alone. Why had the two of them been separated like this? It made no sense. After all, they were supposed to be father and son. He just hoped that Ash would be in a second container and that somehow they would meet up again when they arrived in Darwin. He turned his hand toward himself. The telephone number that Ash had given him had almost vanished, reduced to an inky blur by the constant rain. Fortunately, Alex had committed it to memory, or at least he hoped so. He would know for sure soon enough . . . if he ever found a phone.

They reached the container, and Alex saw at once that U n w i n T o y s

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it was locked. More than that, there was a steel pin connected to the door. He was able to guess its purpose. All containers had to be checked by customs officials both going on and coming off a ship. Obviously they couldn’t be opened halfway across on their journey or anything—

guns, drugs, people—could be added. The steel pin would have a code number that would already have been checked. It would be checked a second time when they arrived in Australia. And if the pin had been tampered with or broken, the entire container would be impounded and examined.

So how was he expected to get in? Alex could see that this was how he was going to travel. Presumably it was too dangerous for him to have a cabin on board the ship, and anyway, as far as the snakehead was concerned, this was all he was: cargo, to be dumped along with all the other merchandise. The man who had been leading the way turned and put a hand on his shoulder, urging him to get down. Alex realized that he was expected to climb underneath the truck, between the wheels.

A moment later he saw why. The container had a secret entrance, a trapdoor that was open, hanging down.

He could climb in without touching the main door or the pin that secured it, and once the container was in place, part of a tower with dozens more on top and underneath, there would be no way that anyone could examine it. The whole thing was simple and effective, and part of him 218

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even admired the snakehead. It was certainly a huge business, operating in at least three countries. Ethan Brooke had been right. These people were much more than simple criminals.

He crouched under the truck. Immediately he felt claustrophobic. It wasn’t just the weight of the container pressing down on him. He could see that the trapdoor would be locked from the outside. There was a single solid bolt that slid across. Once that happened, he would be trapped. If the ship sank or if they simply decided to drop the whole thing overboard, he would drown in his own oversized metal coffin. He hesitated, and at once the man jabbed him between the shoulders, urging him forward.

Alex turned, pretending to be scared, pleading with his eyes to be reunited with Ash. But how could he make himself understood when he couldn’t utter a single word?

One of the other men thrust something into his hands: a plastic bag with two bottles of water and a loaf of bread.

Supplies for the long journey ahead. The first man pushed him again and shouted. Alex couldn’t delay any longer.

He crawled under the truck and over to the trapdoor.

The men gestured and he pulled himself up. But as he went, he stumbled. One of his hands caught hold of the sliding bolt and he steadied himself.

That was his last sight of Indonesia. Mud, dripping rain, and the undercarriage of a truck. He pulled himself into the container, and seconds later the trapdoor U n w i n T o y s

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slammed shut behind him. He heard the bolt slide across with a loud clang. Now there was no way out.

It was only as he straightened up that he realized he could see. There was light inside the container. He looked around. Two dozen anxious faces stared at him.

It seemed he wasn’t going to make this part of the journey alone.

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I N FAC ,

T

T H E R E W E R E twenty people inside the container, huddled together in the half-light thrown by a single battery-operated light. Alex knew at once that they were refugees. He could tell from their faces: not just foreign but afraid, far removed from their own world. Most of them were men, but there were also women and children . . . a couple of them as young as seven or eight. Alex remembered what Ethan Brooke had told him about illegal immigrants when he was in Sydney. “Half of them are under the age of eighteen.” Well, here was the proof of it.

There were whole families locked together in this metal box, hoping and praying that they would arrive safely in Australia. But they were powerless, and they knew it, utterly dependent on the good will of the snakehead. No wonder they looked nervous.

A gaunt, gray-haired man, wearing a loose, dark yellow colored shirt and baggy pants, made his way forward.

Alex guessed he must be in his sixties. He might once have been a farmer. His hands were coarse, and his face had been burned dry by the sun. He muttered a few words to Alex. He could have been speaking any language—

Dari, Hazaragi, Kurdish, or Arabic—it would have made no difference. Alex knew that without Ash, he was ex-T h e L i b e r i a n S t a r 221

posed. He had no way of communicating and nobody to hide behind. What would these people do if they discovered that he was an imposter? He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

The man realized that Alex hadn’t understood him.

He tapped his chest and spoke a single word. “Salem.” That was presumably his name.

He waited for Alex to reply, and when none came, he turned to a woman, who came forward and tried a second language. Alex turned away and sat in a corner. Let them think he was shy or unfriendly. He didn’t care. He wasn’t here to make friends.

Alex drew his legs toward his chest and buried his face against his knees. He needed to think. Why had he been separated from Ash? Had the snakehead somehow found out that the two of them were working for ASIS? All in all, he doubted it. If the snakehead even suspected who they were, they would have dragged them out together and shot them. There had to be another reason for the last-minute decision at the harbor but try as he might, Alex couldn’t work out what it was.

There was a sudden jolt. The whole container shook, and one of the children began to cry. The other refugees drew closer together and stared around them as if they could somehow see through the flat metal walls. Alex knew what had happened. One of the huge machines—

the spreaders—had picked them up, lifting them off the truck and loading them onto the Liberian Star. Right now, 222

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they could be fifty yards above the dock, dangling on four thin wires. Nobody was moving, afraid of upsetting the balance. Alex thought he heard the hum of machinery somewhere above his head. There was a second jolt and the electric light flickered. And that was a horrible thought. Suppose it went out! Could they endure the entire journey in pitch darkness? The container was swaying very slightly. Somebody shouted, a long way away. They began the journey down.

Alex hadn’t been able to see very much of the Liberian Star in the rain and the confusion of their arrival, but he had taken in the metal boxes piled up on great blocks, one on top of the other, separated by a space that couldn’t have measured more than a couple of feet. Where would they end up? On top, in the middle, or buried somewhere deep in the hold? He had to fight back a growing sense of claustrophobia. There were no holes drilled in the walls.

The only air would come in through the cracks around the door and the secret trapdoor. The container had already reminded Alex of a coffin. Now he felt as if he and the twenty other occupants were about to be buried alive.

They came to a halt. Something clanged against the outer wall. Two of the children whimpered, and Salem went over to them, putting his arms around their shoulders and holding them close. Alex took a deep breath.

There could be no going back now—that much was certain. They were on board.

And what next? Ash had said it would take them forty-T h e L i b e r i a n S t a r 223

eight hours to reach northern Australia, and by the time they had waited to be unloaded, it could be as much as three or four days. Alex wasn’t sure he could bear to sit in here all that time, locked up with these strangers. He had only the two bottles of water and the bread that he had been given at the last moment. He hoped the other refugees had brought their own supplies. There was a chemical toilet in the far corner, but Alex knew that conditions inside the container would soon become disgusting. For the first time, he understood how desperate these people must be even to dream of making such a journey.

For his own part, he knew he couldn’t just sit here. He was worried about Ash—and he was going to learn nothing about the snakehead, locked up in the dark. Of course, there was always the watch that Smithers had given him. But despite everything, there was no real reason to send out a distress signal. There was still a chance that Ash was somewhere on board the Liberian Star. Alex was just going to have to find him.

He had made up his mind. There was nothing he could do until the ship had left Jakarta, but once they were at sea, there was every chance that the container would be unguarded. Why bother when there was no chance of escape? Alex closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

He needed to gather his strength. He wasn’t going to use the watch, but there was another gadget Smithers had given him. Alex had already slipped it into position. When the time was right, Alex would use it to break out.

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• • •

He waited until they were halfway across before he made his move.

At least twenty-four hours had passed, night blending into day with no difference between the two inside this blank, airless box. The smell was getting worse and worse. At least no one had been seasick, but the chemical toilet was barely adequate for so many people. Nobody was talking. What was there to say? In a way, the crossing had become a sort of living death.

Alex had caught up on the sleep he’d missed at Jakarta, although he’d had bad dreams . . . Ash, Thai boxing, sardines! Now he’d had enough.

He dug into his pocket and took out the pack of chewing gum, then slid open the panel in the side. He had to hold it against the light to see properly, but there were the three numbers: 1, 5, and 10, each with its own switch.

The five-baht coin was already in position. When Alex had climbed into the container, he had pretended to stumble, and as he reached out to steady himself, he had slipped it behind the sliding bolt. As long as none of the snakehead members had seen it, it was still there, mag-netically held in place underneath him. Now was the time to find out. He would just have to hope that the noise of the engines and the sea swell would cover any sound made by the explosion.

He went over to the trapdoor and knelt beside it. He couldn’t hear anything outside, but that was hardly sur-T h e L i b e r i a n S t a r 225

prising. The other refugees were looking at him, wondering what he was doing. There was no point in waiting any longer. Alex pressed the switch marked 5.

There was a sharp crack underneath the trapdoor, and a wisp of acrid smoke rose up inside the container. One of the women began to gabble at Alex, but he ignored her.

He pressed down with one hand, and to his relief, the trapdoor fell open, forming a small chute that angled into the darkness between the two blocks. The bolt had snapped in half. There was just enough room for Alex to slither out—but into what? It was always possible that he would find himself in the very depths of the hold, hemmed in on all sides, with nowhere else to go.

He had caused a minor panic inside the container.

Everyone was talking at once, at least half a dozen languages fighting with one another all around him. Salem came over to him and tugged at his shirt, pleading with him not to do whatever it was he had planned. He looked bewildered. Who was this boy, traveling on his own, who had dared to antagonize the snakehead by attempting to leave without their permission? And how had he done it?

They had heard the bolt shatter, but that was all. It seemed to have happened by magic.

Alex looked Salem in the eyes and pressed a finger against his lips. He was pleading with the old man to be silent and not to let the others give him away. It was the most he could hope for. These people were here to make a journey. He had nothing to do with them. With a bit of 226

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luck, none of them would try to follow him out or, worse still, tell the ship’s crew what had happened. But if he waited any longer, one of them might try to stop him. It was time to go.

Still not sure what he was letting himself in for, Alex slid through the trapdoor headfirst, easing himself into the black square that had opened up below. It was much cooler outside. He had been sharing the same air with twenty people for an entire day and night, and he had been unaware how stifling it had become. It was noisier too. He could hear the hum of the ship’s engines, the grinding of machinery in constant motion.

But at least there was a way out. Alex found himself in what was effectively a long, flat tunnel. The containers were piled up on top of him, and he could feel their huge weight pressing down. But there was a crawl space about half a yard high between the floor above him and the ceiling of the container below. He could see the daylight bleeding in—a narrow strip like a crack in a brick wall.

Using his knees and elbows, he pushed himself toward it.

It was a painful process, constantly scraping his legs and banging his shoulders on the rusty metal above and below him.

At last he reached the edge, only to find himself high above the deck, caught three stories up a tower of containers with no obvious way to climb down. Alex could see the ocean rushing past on the other side of the ship. There T h e L i b e r i a n S t a r 227

was no sign of land. For a moment he was tempted to crawl back inside. He had nowhere to run. Swimming was out of the question. He would be safer back with Salem and the others.

And was there really any chance of finding Ash? The Liberian Star was huge. It probably held a thousand containers. Ash could be stuck in any one of them, locked up with his own crowd of refugees. Alex had never felt so helpless. But going back would be admitting defeat. Ever since he had first encountered the snakehead in Bangkok, he had allowed them to push him around. He’d had enough. It was time to fight back.

He had come out at one of the long sides of the container, with a sheer drop to the deck below. There was no way down, so he crawled all the way along the edge and over to the front. He had more luck here. The container doors were fastened with long steel rods that formed a climbing frame, and there were the metal security pins and locks that would provide perfect footholds. Alex knew he had to move quickly. It was still light—he guessed it must be late afternoon—and he would be seen by anyone who happened to appear on deck. On the other hand, he would have to be careful. If he slipped, there was a long way to fall.

Holding on to one of the bars, he squeezed himself out and then began the journey down, trying to ignore the sea spray that whipped into his back and made every surface 228

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slippery. His worst fear was that a crew member would come out, and despite the danger, he forced himself to move faster, finally dropping the last few yards and crashing down onto the deck, anxious to get himself out of sight. Nobody had seen him. He looked back up, checking the position of the container just in case he needed to return. There was the name, Unwin Toys, in great white letters. Alex thought about the secret it concealed. He had to admit that he had never come across a criminal organization—or a crime—quite like this.

He looked around. It was only now, crouching in the open air, that he realized quite how enormous the Liberian Star actually was. It measured at least three hundred yards in length, and it must have been about fifty yards across. The containers were piled up like metal office blocks, surrounded by decks, gantries, and ladders that would allow the crew to scurry around in what little space was left. Alex was at the back of the ship, where the huge anchor chains disappeared into a cavity below. In front of him, the bridge rose up, the eyes and brain of the entire ship. Behind him, the water boiled, churned up by the propellers below. He guessed they must be traveling at about thirty-five knots, or thirty miles per hour.

He had already accepted the fact that he had no hope at all of finding Ash. But now that he was out, he decided to explore. They could only be about twenty-four hours from Darwin. If he could survive that long without being T h e L i b e r i a n S t a r 229

seen, he might be able to get off the ship and find a telephone. The number that Ash had given him had completely vanished from the back of his hand. He just hoped that he had remembered it correctly and that Ash would still be able to take his call.

In the next couple of hours, Alex explored a large part of the ship. He quickly realized that despite their great size, container ships are almost entirely made up of containers and that their layout is actually very simple, with two decks running all the way from fore to aft and only a limited area for the crew to live and work. And the crew is actually surprisingly small. Only once did he spot a couple of crewmen—Filipinos in blue overalls, leaning against a handrail, smoking cigarettes. Alex slipped behind a ventilation shaft and waited until they left. That was something else to his advantage in this strange, entirely metal world. There were a thousand places to hide.

It was more dangerous inside, where the clean, brightly lit passageways were lined with dozens of doors, any one of which could open at any time. Alex was looking for the food store—he was hungry—but just as he came upon it, another crewman appeared, and he had to duck down the nearest stairway to get out of sight. The stairs led to a cargo hold. As he waited for the man to disappear, Alex heard voices . . . two men talking. They were speaking in English. Intrigued, he continued down.

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that was like an oversized metal cube, with sheer walls rising to the deck above. A single container had been stored here. It was also marked Unwin Toys and was locked with the same security pin as the others. Four men were standing in a semicircle, deep in conversation. One of them was obviously in charge. He was standing with his back to Alex, and from his position high above, all Alex could make out was a thin, rather frail-looking body and strange white hair. The man was leaning on a walking stick. He was wearing gray gloves.

Alex assumed they were going to unlock the container, but what happened next took him completely by surprise.

One of the men lifted something that looked like a television remote control and pressed a button. Immediately one side of the container opened electronically, the sec-tions separating like elevator doors. There was a click, and then the floor of the container slid forward, bringing the contents out where they could be examined. What a box of tricks! The security pin was still in place and wouldn’t need to be touched.

Alex knew at once what he was looking at. There could be no mistaking it. Royal Blue. That was the name that Mrs. Jones had given it. She had told him it was the most powerful non-nuclear weapon on the planet. Alex’s first impression was that the bomb was strangely old-fashioned, like something out of World War II. In the great emptiness of the hold, it looked small, but he guessed that it was about the size of a family car. He won-T h e L i b e r i a n S t a r 231

dered what it was doing out here—and where were they taking it? Australia? Was the white-haired man planning to set it off there?

Right now, it was surrounded by a bank of machinery, and as soon as the container had clicked into position, two of the men set to work connecting it all up. There was some sort of scanner—it looked like an office photocopier—and a laptop computer. A third man was explaining something.

He was black, with a pockmarked face, very white teeth, and cheap plastic glasses that were too heavy for his face.

He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with half a dozen pens in the breast pocket. Alex edged forward to hear what he was saying.

“. . . We had to modify the bomb to change the method of detonation.” The man had an accent that Alex couldn’t quite place—French, perhaps. “It would normally explode one yard above the ground. But this one will be required to explode one-half mile below it. So we have made the necessary adaptations . . .”

“A radio signal?” the white-haired man asked.

“Yes, sir.” The tall man indicated a piece of equipment. “This is how you communicate with the bomb. The timing is crucial. I estimate that Royal Blue will only be able to function at that depth for around twenty minutes.

You must send the signal during that time.”

“I want to be the one who sends the signal,” the white-haired man said. He spoke perfect English, like an old-fashioned news broadcaster.

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“Of course, sir. I received your e-mail from London.

And as you can see, I’ve arranged a fairly simple device.

It allows you to scan your fingerprints into the system.

From that moment on, you will have complete control.”

“That’s absolutely first rate. Thank you, Mr. Varga.” The white-haired man pulled off one of his gloves, revealing a hand that was small and withered. It could have belonged to someone who was dead. Alex watched as he placed it against the scanner. Mr. Varga pressed a few buttons on the laptop. A green bar of light appeared underneath the hand, traveling across the palm. It only took a couple of seconds, and then it was over.

One of the other men was overweight, with thinning ginger hair. He was about fifty years old, dressed in a white shirt and pants with blue and gold bands on his shoulders. The white-haired man now turned to him.

“You can put Royal Blue back into the container, Captain De Wynter,” he said. “It’ll be unloaded the moment we arrive at East Arm.”

“Yes, Major.”

“And one other thing . . .”

But the white-haired man—the major—never finished the sentence. There was a scream from a siren, so loud that Alex was almost knocked off the platform and had to cover his ears to protect himself from the noise. It was an alarm signal. The fourth man, who had so far said nothing, swung around, revealing a machine gun—a T h e L i b e r i a n S t a r 233

lightweight Belgian M249—hanging at his waist. Captain De Wynter pulled out a cell phone and speed dialed.

The siren stopped. The captain listened for a few seconds, then reported what he had heard, speaking in a low voice. Half deafened, Alex couldn’t hear a word he said.

The white-haired man shook his head angrily. “Who is he? Where did he come from?”

“They are holding him on the deck,” De Wynter replied.

“I want to see him for myself,” the white-haired man exclaimed. “Come with me!”

The four of them left together, making for a door set in the side of the hold. A moment later they were gone, and to his astonishment, Alex found himself alone with the bomb. It seemed to be a heaven-sent opportunity, and without even hesitating, he climbed down the staircase and went over to the container. And there it was right in front of him. MI6 was searching for Royal Blue all over Thailand, but he had found it in the middle of the South China Sea. He had found Winston Yu at the same time—for that was surely who the white-haired man must be. After all, he had just heard the captain refer to him as “Major.” But why were they both here? What did the major want with the bomb? Alex wished he had heard more.

He ran his eyes over it. Close up, it struck him as one of the ugliest things he had ever seen—blunt and heavy, 234

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built only to kill and destroy. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if he could detonate it. That would put an end to Yu’s plans, whatever they were. But Alex had no wish to die, and anyway, there were at least twenty refugees, some of them children, concealed in the ship. They’d be killed too.

Perhaps he could disarm it. But there was no point. Yu or the man called Varga would soon see what he had done and simply reverse it. Could he use another of the exploding coins? No—they might be able to penetrate the thick shell of Royal Blue, but what then? And anything he damaged, Yu could easily replace.

He had to do something. The four men might be back at any time. He glanced at the laptop, and that was when he saw the instruction, printed in capital letters on the screen.

> PLACE HAND ON SCREEN

The laptop was connected to the scanner. Alex could see the outline of a human hand, positioned exactly to read the user’s fingertips. Acting on impulse, he placed his own hand on the glass surface. There was a click, and the green light rolled underneath his palm. On the laptop, the readout changed.

> FINGERPRINT PROFILE ACCEPTED

> Add further authorization Y/N?

> Delete previous authorization Y/N?

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Alex reached out and pressed Y for the first instruction and N for the second. There was no point in advertising that he had been here. The screen returned to its first message.

> PLACE HAND ON SCREEN

So that was interesting. He had given himself the power to override the system if he ever happened to come across it again—and with a bit of luck, neither Major Yu nor Mr. Varga would notice.

There was nothing more to be done here. Alex made his way back to the staircase and went up, intending to find somewhere to hide. He would wait until he got to Darwin. Then he would contact Mrs. Jones and tell her about her precious bomb. If she asked him nicely, he could even defuse it for her.

He reached the deck. Major Yu had arrived there ahead of him—Alex could hear his voice although he couldn’t make out any of the words. Quickly he climbed a ladder that led to a narrow passageway dividing two of the container towers. There was no chance of anyone spotting him here. Feeling bolder, he made his way to the end and found himself looking down on the foredeck, where a single mast rose up amid a tangle of winches and cables.

What he saw there chilled him.

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haps announcing some problem in the engine room. It had gotten Major Yu and his men out of the way at exactly the right moment. But now he realized that it hadn’t been good news at all. In fact, it could hardly be worse.

The old man from the container—Salem—had decided to follow Alex out. He must have squeezed through the trapdoor and found his way onto the deck.

But there his luck had run out. A couple of the crewmen had discovered him. They were holding him now with his hands pinned behind his back while Major Yu questioned him. Captain De Wynter and Mr. Varga were watching. Salem was having difficulty making himself understood. He had been beaten. One of his eyes was swollen half shut, and there was blood trickling from a cut on his cheek.

He finished speaking, a gabble of words that were swept away by the wind. It wasn’t cold out on the deck, but Alex found himself shivering. Major Yu still had his back to him. Alex watched as he carefully removed one of his gloves and reached into his jacket pocket. He took out a small pistol. Without hesitating, without even paus-ing to aim, he shot the old man between the eyes. The single report of the bullet was like a crack of wood. Salem died on his feet, still held up by the two crewmen. Yu nodded and the men tilted him backward, tipping his life-less body over the rails. Alex saw it fall into the water and disappear.

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Then Major Yu spoke again, and somehow his words carried up as if amplified.

“There is a child on this ship,” he exclaimed. “He has escaped from the container. I don’t know how. He must be found immediately and killed. Bring the dead body to me.”

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T H E C A P TA I N O F T H E Liberian Star was not normally a nervous man, but right now he was sweating. Standing in front of the stateroom door, he tried to compose himself, mopping his forehead and tucking his cap under his arm. He was aware that he might have only a few minutes to live.

Hermann de Wynter was Dutch, unmarried, out of shape, and saving money for a retirement somewhere in the sun. He had been working for the snakehead for eleven years, transporting containers all over the world.

Never once had he asked what was inside. He knew that in this game, the wrong question could prove fatal. So could failure. And now it was his duty to tell Major Yu that he had failed.

He took a breath and knocked on the door of the stateroom that Yu occupied, on the same level as the main deck.

“Come!”

The single word sounded cheerful enough, but De Wynter had been present the day before. Yu had smiled as he killed the Afghan refugee.

He opened the door and went in. The room was well appointed, with a thick carpet, modern English furniture, H i d e - a n d - S e e k

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and soft lighting. Yu was sitting at a table, drinking a cup of tea. There was also a plate of shortbread, which De Wynter knew was organic and came from Highgrove, the estate belonging to the Prince of Wales.

“Good morning, Captain.” Yu motioned for him to come in. “What news do you have for me?” De Wynter had to force the words into his mouth. “I am very sorry to have to report, Major Yu, that we have been unable to find the boy.”

Yu looked surprised. “You’ve been working for eighteen hours.”

“Yes, sir. None of the crew has slept. We spent the whole night searching the ship from top to bottom.

Frankly, it’s incredible that we have found no trace of him.

We’ve used motion detectors and sonic intensifiers. Nothing! Some of the men think the child must have slipped overboard. Of course, we still haven’t given up . . .” His voice trailed off. There was nothing more to say, and he knew that making too many excuses would annoy Major Yu all the more. De Wynter stood there, waiting for whatever might come. He had once seen Yu shoot a man simply for being late with his tea. He just hoped his own end would be as quick.

But to his amazement, Major Yu smiled pleasantly.

“The boy certainly is trouble,” he admitted. “Frankly, I’m not at all surprised that he’s managed to give you the slip.

He’s quite a character.”

De Wynter blinked. “You know him?” he asked.

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“Oh yes. Our paths have already crossed once before.”

“But I thought . . .” De Wynter frowned. “He’s just a refugee! A street urchin out of Afghanistan.”

“Not at all, Captain. That’s what he’d like us to believe. But the truth is that he’s quite unique. His name is Alex Rider. He works for British intelligence. He’s what you might call a teenage spy.”

De Wynter sat down. This was in itself remarkable.

After all, Major Yu hadn’t offered him a seat.

“Forgive me, sir,” he began. “But are you saying that the British managed to get a spy on board? A child . . . ?”

“Exactly.”

“And you knew?”

“I know everything, Captain De Wynter.”

“But . . . why?” De Wynter had completely forgotten his earlier fear. Somewhere in the back of his mind, it occurred to him that he had never spoken to Major Yu so familiarly or for such a length of time.

“It amused me,” Yu replied. “This boy is rather full of himself. He travels to Bangkok disguised as a refugee.

His mission is to infiltrate my snakehead. But all along, I know who he is and I am simply choosing the moment when I will bring his young life to a fitting end. I have friends who would like me to do it sooner rather than later. But the time is my choice.”

Yu poured himself some more tea. He picked up a shortbread cookie, holding it between his gloved fingers, and dipped it into the cup.

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“My intention was to allow him to travel as far as Darwin,” he continued. “As it happens, I have a use for him, and he might as well travel with the other refugees as anywhere else. Unfortunately, the old man was unable to tell me how he managed to break out of the container, and it’s certainly an unwelcome surprise. But I am still confident that you will be able to locate him eventually. After all, we have plenty of time.”

The Dutchman felt his mouth go dry again. “I’m afraid not, sir,” he muttered. “In fact, it may already be too late.”

“Why is that?” Major Yu’s eyebrows rose behind the round wire frames.

“Look out of the window, sir. We’ve arrived at Darwin. They’ve already sent out a couple of tugs to tow us in.”

“Surely we can delay docking for a few more hours.”

“No, sir. If we do that, we could be stuck here for a week.” De Wynter ran a hand over his jaw. “The Australian ports run like clockwork,” he explained. “Everything has to be very precise. We have an allocated time for arrival, and it’s a small window. If we miss it, another ship will take our place.”

Yu considered. Something very close to anxiety appeared in his shrunken schoolboy face. This was exactly what Zeljan Kurst had warned him about in London. Like it or not, Alex Rider had taken on Scorpia once before and beaten them. Yu had thought it impossible that such 242

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a thing could happen a second time. And yet the boy did seem to have the luck of the devil. How had he managed to get out of the container? It was a shame nobody had been able to understand the old man before he had died.

“Even if we dock, the boy cannot possibly leave the ship,” De Wynter said. “There is only one exit—the main gangway, and that will be guarded at all times. He can jump into the sea, but I will have men on lookout. We can cover every angle with rifles. We’ll pick him off in the water. A single shot. No one will hear anything. We’ll only be in Darwin for a few hours. Our next port is Rio de Janeiro. We’ll have three weeks to flush him out.” Major Yu nodded slowly. Even as De Wynter had been speaking, he had made up his mind. In truth, he had little choice. Royal Blue had to be unloaded immediately in order to continue its journey. He couldn’t wait. On the other hand, there was something that Alex Rider didn’t know. Whatever happened, all the cards were in Yu’s hand.

“Very well, Captain,” he muttered. “We’ll tie up at Darwin. But if the boy does slip through your fingers a second time, I suggest you kill yourself.” He snapped a cookie in half. “It will spare me the trouble, and it will, I assure you, cause you a great deal less pain.” Alex Rider had heard everything that Major Yu had said.

The man who sat on the executive board of Scorpia and who headed the most powerful snakehead in south-H i d e - a n d - S e e k

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east Asia would have been horrified to know that Alex was hiding in perhaps the most obvious place in the world. Under his own bed.

Alex had known what he was up against. The moment he had seen the refugee killed on the deck and had heard Yu give the order for the crew to hunt him down, he had realized he needed to find somewhere on the ship that nobody would even dream of looking. It was true there were hundreds of hiding places—ventilation shafts, the crawl spaces between the containers, cabins, cable hous-ings, and storage units. But none of these would be good enough, not with the entire crew searching for him non-stop throughout the night.

No—it had to be somewhere completely unthink-able . . . and the idea had come to him almost at once.

Where was the last place he would go? It had to be the captain’s cabin or better still, Major Yu’s own quarters on board the Liberian Star. The crew almost certainly weren’t allowed in either. It wouldn’t even occur to them to look inside.

He’d only been given a few minutes’ start. As the crew members organized themselves and the various listening devices were handed out, Alex was racing. The layout of the ship was fairly easy to understand. He had seen much of it already. The engine rooms and the crew’s cabins were somewhere down below. Yu, the captain, and the senior officers—anyone important—would surely be housed above sea level, somewhere in the central block.

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Breathless, imagining the crewmen fanning out behind him, Alex stumbled on a door that led to the spotlessly clean, brightly lit corridor that he had explored the day before. He was on the right track. The first door he came to opened into a conference room, full of charts and computers. Next came a living space with a bar and TV. He heard the clatter of saucepans and ducked back as a man wearing a chef’s hat suddenly crossed the corridor and disappeared into a room opposite. A moment later, he emerged again and went back the way he had come, carrying a box of canned food.

Alex hurried forward. The chef had clearly entered some sort of larder, and Alex wasted a few seconds pulling out a bottle of water for himself. He was going to need it. Continuing down the corridor, he passed a laundry, a game room, and a miniature hospital. He came to an elevator and was tempted to take it. According to the display, there were six floors above him. But he didn’t have time and dreaded waiting for it to arrive, only to find it packed with Yu’s men.

He came upon Yu’s stateroom at the very end of the corridor. It wasn’t locked—but there wasn’t a man on board the Liberian Star who would have dared enter even if the door had been open and Yu miles away. Alex slipped inside. He saw a table with a number of files and documents spread across the surface and wished he had time to examine them. What secrets they might reveal! But he H i d e - a n d - S e e k

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didn’t dare touch anything. Moving even one page a frac-tion of an inch might give him away.

He looked around him, taking in the pictures on the walls—scenes of the English countryside with, in one image, a traditional hunt setting out across what might be Salisbury Plain. A sophisticated stereo system and a plasma TV. A leather sofa. This was where Yu worked and relaxed when he was on board.

The bedroom was next door. Here was another bizarre touch. Yu slept in an antique four-poster bed. But Alex knew at once that it was perfect for his needs. There was a silk valance that trailed down to the floor, and lifting it up, Alex saw a space half a yard high that would conceal him perfectly. God—it reminded him of being six years old again, playing hide-and-seek with Jack Starbright on Christmas Eve. But this wasn’t the same. This time he was on a container ship, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, surrounded by people who were determined to kill him.

Same game. Different rules.

Alex took a swig of the water he had stolen and slid underneath, easing the silk valance back into shape. Very little light bled through underneath. Alex prepared himself, trying to find a comfortable position. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to move a muscle once Yu entered the room.

He was suddenly struck by the craziness of his plan.

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Could he really stay here all night? How stupid would he look if Yu found him? He was briefly tempted to crawl out and find somewhere else. But it was already too late. The search would have begun, and he couldn’t risk starting again.

In fact, it was several hours before Yu came in. Alex heard the outer door open and close again. Footsteps.

Then music. Yu had turned on the stereo system. His taste was classical . . . Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, the music they played at the Albert Hall in London every summer. He listened to the piece while he ate his dinner.

Alex heard one of the stewards deliver it to him and caught a faint scent of roast meat. The smell made him hungry. He sipped a little more water, glumly reflecting that it was all he had to last the night.

Later Yu turned on the television. Somehow he had managed to tune in to the BBC, and Alex heard the late-night news.

“Pop singer Rob Goldman was in Australia this week, just five days before the conference taking place on Reef Island, which has come to be known as Reef Encounter and which has been timed to take place at exactly the same time as the G8 summit in Rome.

“Goldman played to a sold-out audience at the Sydney Opera House and told an enthusiastic crowd that peace and an end to world poverty were possible—but that they would have to be achieved by people, not politicians.

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“Speaking from 10 Downing Street, the British prime minister said that he wished Sir Rob every success but insisted that the real work would be done in Rome. It’s a view that not many people seem to share . . .” Much later, Major Yu went to bed. Alex barely breathed as he came into the bedroom. Lying in the semi-darkness with muscles that were already aching, he heard the major undress and wash in the adjoining bathroom.

And then came the inevitable moment: the creak of wood and shifting metal springs as Yu climbed into bed, just inches above the boy he was so determined to find. Fortunately, he didn’t read before he slept. Alex heard the click of the light switch, and the last glimmer of light was extinguished. Then everything was silent.

For Alex, the night was yet another long, dreary ordeal.

He was fairly sure that Major Yu was asleep, but he couldn’t be certain, and he didn’t dare sleep himself in case the sound of his breathing or an accidental movement gave him away. All he could do was wait, listening to the hum of the engines and feeling the pitch of the ship as they drew ever closer to Australia. At least that was one consolation. Every second that he remained undiscovered brought him a little closer to safety.

But how was he to get off the Liberian Star? One exit—guarded. The decks watched. Alex didn’t like the idea of diving overboard and swimming . . . even assuming he could manage it without being crushed or 248

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drowned. And there would be a dozen or more men waiting to take a potshot at him. Well, he would just have to worry about that when the time came.

The ship plowed on through the darkness. The minutes dragged slowly past. At last a glimmer of light crept across the floor, pushing away the shadows of the night.

Yu woke up, washed, dressed, and took his breakfast in the stateroom. That was the worst part for Alex. He had barely moved for ten hours, and all his bones were aching.

Still Yu refused to leave. He was working at his desk. Alex heard the rustle of pages turning and, briefly, the rattle of computer keys. And then the steward brought a mid-morning snack, and a short while later De Wynter arrived with the news of his failure.

So Major Yu knew who he was—and had known from the start! Alex tucked that information away, hoping he would be able to make sense of it later. For now, all that mattered was that his plan had worked and the long hours of discomfort had been worth it. They were docking at Darwin. Surely any minute now, Yu would go out on deck to see dry land.

But it was another two hours before he left. Alex waited until he was quite sure that he was alone, then rolled out from underneath the bed. He glanced into the stateroom. Yu had gone, but he had left some of the cook-ies, and Alex wolfed them down. Yu might notice—but Alex was too hungry to care. At the same time, he tried to ease some feeling back into his muscles. He had to preH i d e - a n d - S e e k

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pare himself. He knew that he had just one chance to get away. They would set off to sea again in just a few hours’

time, and if he was still on board, he would be finished.

He went over to the window. The Liberian Star had already berthed at the section of the port of Darwin known as the East Arm Wharf. To his dismay, Alex realized that they were still a very long way from land. The East Arm was an artificial cement causeway stretching far out into the ocean, with the usual array of gantries, cranes, and spreaders waiting to receive the ships. It was a world apart from the docks at Jakarta. Quite apart from the blinding Australian sun, everything seemed very clean and ordered.

There were two long rows of parked cars and beyond them, a neat, modern warehouse and some gas tanks—

all of them painted white.

A van drove past, heading up the dock. Two men walked past in fluorescent jackets and hard hats. Even assuming Alex could get off the ship, he still wouldn’t be safe. It was at least a mile to the mainland, and presumably there would be security barriers at the far end. At least Yu wouldn’t dare gun him down in plain sight. That was one consolation. But however Alex looked at it, this wasn’t going to be as easy as he had hoped.

Even so, he couldn’t wait any longer.

Alex crept over to the door and opened it an inch at a time. The corridor was empty, lit by the same hard light that made it impossible to tell if it was night or day. He had already worked out a strategy based on what he had 250

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overheard in the cabin. Everyone was waiting for him to break out. That meant their attention would be fixed on the main gangplank and the decks. So the rest of the ship was his. Right now he needed a diversion. He set out to create one.

He hurried past the elevator and found a staircase leading down. He could hear a deep throbbing coming from below and guessed that he was heading the right way—to the engine room. He came upon it quite suddenly, a strangely old-fashioned tangle of brass valves and silver pipes and pistons, all connected to one another in a steel framework like an exhibition in an industrial museum. The air was hot down here. There was no natural light. The machinery seemed to stretch on for a mile, and Alex could imagine that a ship the size of the Liberian Star would need every inch of it.

The control room was raised slightly above the engines, separated from them by three thick glass observation windows and reached by a short flight of metal stairs. Alex crept up on his hands and feet and found himself looking at a much more modern room with rows of gauges and dials, TV screens, computers, and intricate switchboards. A single man sat in a high-backed chair, tapping at a keyboard. He looked half asleep. Certainly he wasn’t expecting trouble down here.

Alex saw what he was looking for: a metal cabinet about fifteen yards high with thick pipes leading in and out and a warning sign.

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AIR SUPPLY

DANGER: DO NOT CUT OFF

He didn’t know what needed the air or what would happen if it didn’t get it, but the bright red letters were ir-resistible. He was going to find out.

He reached into his pocket and took out the one-baht coin that Smithers had given him. Using it would mean he would only have the ten-baht coin left. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t be needing it. Alex watched the man in the chair for a minute, then slipped into the control room and placed the coin against the pipe just where it entered the cabinet. The man didn’t look up. The coin clicked into place, activating the charge inside. Alex tiptoed out again.

He found the chewing gum pack, slid the side open, and pressed the switch marked 1. The bang was very loud and, to his surprise and delight, highly destructive. The explosion not only tore open the pipe, it wrecked the electrical circuits inside the cabinet too. There was a series of brilliant sparks. Something like white steam gushed out into the control room. The man leapt up. Another alarm had gone off, and red lights were flashing all around him.

Alex didn’t wait to see what would happen next. He was already on his way out.

Down the stairs, past the engines, and back up again.

This time he took the elevator, guessing that in an emergency, the crew would be more likely to use the stairs. He 252

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pressed the button for the sixth floor, and the elevator slid smoothly up.

He knew where he was heading. He had seen the bridge when he was being loaded into the container at Jakarta and had noticed that it had its own deck, a sort of balcony with a railing and a view over the entire ship.

This was going to be his way off the Liberian Star. For—

once again—Yu’s guns might be pointing everywhere, but surely they wouldn’t be pointing here.

The elevator reached the sixth floor and the doors slid open. To Alex’s dismay, he found himself facing a squat Chinese crewman who had been waiting to come down.

The man was even more shocked than Alex and reacted clumsily, scrambling for the gun that was tucked into the waistband of his pants. That was a mistake. Alex didn’t give him time to draw it, lashing out with the point of his foot, aiming straight between the man’s legs. It wasn’t so much a karate strike, more an old-fashioned kick in the balls, but it did the trick. The Chinaman gurgled and collapsed, dropping the gun. Alex scooped it up and continued on his way.

And now he was armed. Alarms were going off everywhere, and Alex wondered what damage he had done with the second coin. Good old Smithers! He was the one man in MI6 who had never let him down. The corridor led directly to the bridge. Alex passed through an arch-way, climbed three steps, and found himself in a narrow, H i d e - a n d - S e e k

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curving room, surprisingly empty, with large windows looking over the decks, the containers, and, to one side, the port.

There were two men on duty, sitting in what could have been dentist’s chairs in front of a bank of television screens. One was a second officer that Alex hadn’t seen before. The other was Captain De Wynter. He was on the telephone, talking in a voice that sounded strained and hoarse with disbelief.

“It’s the reefers,” he was saying. “We’re going to have to shut them all down. The whole ship could go up in flames . . .”

The reefers were refrigerated containers. There were three hundred of them on the Liberian Star, storing meat, vegetables, and chemicals that needed to be transported at low temperatures. The containers themselves needed constant cooling, and Alex had smashed the pipes that provided exactly that. At the very least, he was going to cause Major Yu tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of losses as the contents deteriorated. If the chemicals became unstable in the heat, he might even set fire to the whole ship.

The other officer saw Alex first. He muttered something in Dutch, and De Wynter looked around, the phone still in his hand.

Alex raised the gun. “Put it down,” he said.

De Wynter went pale. He lowered the phone.

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What did he do now? Alex realized that he had made it this far without any real plan at all. “I want you to get me off this ship,” he said.

“That’s not possible.” De Wynter shook his head. He was afraid of the gun, but he was even more afraid of Major Yu.

Alex glanced at the phone. Presumably it could be connected to Darwin. “Call the police,” he said. “I want you to bring them here.”

“I cannot do that either,” De Wynter replied. He looked a little sad. “There is no way I will help you, child.

And there is nowhere for you to go. You might as well give yourself up.”

Alex looked briefly out the window. One of the containers bound for Australia was already being lifted off the ship, dangling on wires beneath a metal frame so huge that in comparison it seemed no bigger than a matchbox.

The spreader was controlled by a man in a glass-fronted cabin, high up in the air. The container rose up. In a few seconds it would swing across and down to the piles that were already mounting on the dock.

He judged the distance and the timing. Yes—he could do it. He had arrived at the bridge at exactly the right moment. He pointed the gun directly at De Wynter. “Get out of here,” he snapped.

The captain stayed where he was. He didn’t believe Alex had the nerve to pull the trigger.

“I said—get out!” Alex swung his hand and fired at a H i d e - a n d - S e e k

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radar screen right next to the chair where De Wynter was sitting.

The sound of the gunshot was deafening inside the confined space. The screen shattered, fragments of glass scattering over the work surface. Alex smiled to himself.

That was another piece of expensive equipment on the Liberian Star that was going to need replacing.

De Wynter didn’t need telling again. He got up and slowly left the bridge, following the second officer, who was already clambering down the stairs. Alex waited until they had gone. He knew they would call for help and come back with half a dozen armed men, but he didn’t care. He had seen his way out. With a bit of luck, he would be gone long before they arrived.

A glass door led onto the outer walkway. Alex opened it and found himself about twenty yards above the nearest container, far enough to break his neck if he fell. The sea was another thirty yards below that. Diving into the water was out of the question. He could see Yu’s men on the main deck, waiting for him to try. But he was too high. They wouldn’t need to shoot him. The impact would kill him first.

But the container he had seen was directly in front of him, moving closer all the time as it traveled over the deck. Alex climbed onto the railing in front of him and tensed himself. The container loomed over him.

He jumped—not down, but up, his arms stretching out. For a moment he was suspended in space, and he 256

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wondered if he was going to make it. He grimaced, trying not to imagine the crushing pain, his legs smashing into the deck if he fell. But then his hands caught hold of the lashings beneath the container and he was being carried outward, his legs dangling in the air, his neck and shoulder muscles screaming. The man operating the spreader couldn’t see him. He was like an insect, clinging to the underbelly of the container. And Yu’s men hadn’t noticed him either. They were following orders, their eyes fixed on the deck and the sea below.

Alex had thought the container was moving quickly when he was on the bridge. Now that he was desperately holding on, it seemed to take forever to reach the dock, and he was certain that at any moment, one of Yu’s men would glance up and see him. But he was already over the side of the ship, and now he saw another danger. Drop too early and he would break a leg. Leave it too late and he risked being crushed as the container was set down.

And then someone saw him.

He heard a yell of alarm. It was a worker on the wharf, wearing overalls, a fluorescent jacket, and a hard hat.

He probably wasn’t working for Yu, but that didn’t matter . . . as far as Alex was concerned, he was just as much a threat. Alex couldn’t wait any longer. He let go with both hands and fell for what seemed an eternity through the air. He had been hanging over a container with a tarp cover. The tarp provided a soft landing—even if the wind was knocked out of him as he hit it, shoulders first. He H i d e - a n d - S e e k

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didn’t stop to recover his breath but rolled over and climbed down the sides.

As he ran down the dock, dodging behind the containers, Alex tried to work out a strategy. The next few minutes were going to be vital. If he was captured by the port authorities, there was always a chance that he might be handed back to Major Yu. Or if he was locked up, Yu would know where to find him. Either way, Alex knew what the result would be. He would end up dead. He had to stay out of sight until he had reached the mainland itself. So long as he was on the East Arm Wharf, he would never be safe.

But once again luck was on his side. As he came around the corner of the last container tower, a pickup truck drew up in front of him, the back filled with old cartons and empty gas cans. The driver rolled down the window and yelled something at another dockworker.

The man replied and the two of them laughed. By the time the truck rumbled forward again, Alex was in the back, lying on his stomach, concealed among the cartons.

The truck followed a railroad line, curving around on the edge of the water, and stopped at a barrier, as Alex had expected. But the security guards knew the driver and waved him through. The truck picked up speed. Alex lay there, feeling the warm Australian breeze on his shoulders as they drove away.

He had done it! He had achieved everything that Ethan Brooke and ASIS had demanded. He had been smuggled 258

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illegally into Australia, and on the way he had uncovered much of Major Yu’s network: the Chada Trading Agency in Bangkok, Unwin Toys, the Liberian Star. For that matter, he had also located Royal Blue for Mrs. Jones. If he could just get to Darwin in one piece and find Ash, his mission would be over and he could finally go home. All he had to do was find a phone.

Twenty minutes later, the truck stopped. The engine cut out and Alex heard the driver door open and shut again. Cautiously, he looked out. The port was out of sight. They had parked outside a café, a brightly colored wooden shack on an empty road. It was called Jake’s, and it had a hand-painted sign reading: The Best Pies in Darwin. Alex was desperate for food. He had barely eaten anything for two days. But it was what he saw next to the café that mattered more to him right now. It was a public telephone.

He waited until the driver had disappeared into the building, then climbed out and ran over to the phone.

Apart from the last coin that Smithers had given him, he had no money, but according to Ash, he wouldn’t need any to make the call. Now, what was the number he had been given? For a horrible moment, the separate digits danced in his head, refusing to come together. He forced himself to concentrate. 795 . . . No, 759 . . . Somehow the full number took shape. He punched it in and waited.

He’d gotten it right. Somehow the numbers were able to override the system, and Alex heard the connection H i d e - a n d - S e e k

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being made. The phone rang three times before it was answered.

“Yes?”

Alex felt a wave of relief. It was Ash’s voice. “Ash . . .

it’s me. Alex.”

“Alex . . . thank God! Where are you?”

“I’m in Darwin, I think. Or somewhere near it.

There’s a café called Jake’s. About fifteen minutes from the port.”

“Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you.”

“Are you here too? How did you get here?” A pause, then Ash replied, “I’ll tell you when I see you.

Just watch out for yourself.” There was another silence.

Alex listened for background noise, anything that might tell him where Ash was. But there was nothing. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can,” Ash said, and hung up.

Alex knew that something was wrong. It had definitely been Ash on the phone but he hadn’t sounded like himself. His voice had been strained, and there had been something in that last pause. It was almost as if he had been waiting to be told what to say.

Alex made a decision. He had contacted Ash first as he had promised. But that might not be enough. He turned his wrist and looked at the watch that Smithers had given him, then deliberately moved the hands to eleven o’clock.

According to Smithers, the watch would send out a signal every ten minutes. Ash might not be happy about it, but Alex didn’t care. He wasn’t going to take any more 260

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chances. He just wanted to know that MI6 were on their way.

After that, he waited for Ash to arrive. Alex couldn’t think what else to do. He was exhausted after three nights with almost no sleep and weak from lack of food. He crept around the side of the café and sat in the shade, keeping himself out of sight. It was likely that Major Yu’s men were still looking for him, and apart from the knife concealed in his belt, he had no way of defending himself.

He had left the gun behind on the bridge. He wished he had it with him now.

Ten minutes later, the door of the café opened and the driver who had brought him here came out carrying a brown paper bag. He got into the pickup truck and drove off again, leaving a plume of dust behind him.

More time passed. There were flies buzzing around Alex’s face, but he ignored them. The café seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by scrubland and on the edge of a road with little traffic. Alex had to struggle not to doze off. But then he saw a car heading toward him, a black four-wheel drive with tinted windows. It pulled in outside the café. Ash got out.

But he wasn’t alone. He hadn’t been driving. His hands were chained in front of him. His black hair was in disarray, and his shirt was torn. A streak of blood ran down the side of his face. He hadn’t seen Alex yet. He looked dazed.

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Major Yu got out of the back of the car. He was wearing a white suit with a lavender shirt, buttoned at the neck. He moved slowly, supporting himself on a walking stick. As always, his hands were gloved. At the same time, the driver and another man got out. They were taking no chances. The three of them surrounded Ash. Yu took out the pistol he had used to kill the old man on the Liberian Star. He held it up against Ash’s head.

“Alex Rider!” he called out in a thin voice, filled with hate. “You have three seconds to show yourself. Otherwise you will see your godfather’s brains all over the highway. I am counting now!”

Alex realized he wasn’t breathing. They had Ash! What was he to do? Give himself up and they would both be killed. But could he forgive himself if he turned and ran?

“One . . .”

He regretted now that he hadn’t used the telephone to call ASIS, the police, anyone. He had known something was wrong. How could he have been so stupid?

“Two . . .”

He had no choice. Even if he tried to run, they would catch him. There were three of them. They had a car. He was in the middle of nowhere. Ash wasn’t moving. His shoulders were slumped and he looked miserable, completely defeated.

He stood up, showing himself.

Major Yu lowered the gun and Alex began to walk for-262

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ward, worn out and defeated. Ash must have been on the Liberian Star all the time, a prisoner like him. His eyes were full of pain.

“I’m sorry, Alex,” he rasped.

“Well, here you are at last,” Major Yu said. “I have to say, you’ve caused me a great deal of time and inconvenience.”

“Go to hell,” Alex snarled.

“Yes, my dear Alex,” Yu replied. “That’s exactly where I’m taking you.”

Yu raised the hand with the walking stick, then swung it with all his strength. This was the last thing that Alex remembered—a silver scorpion glinting brilliantly as it swooped toward him out of an Australian sun. He didn’t even feel it as it smashed into the side of his head.

“Pick him up!” Yu commanded.

He turned his back on the unconscious boy and climbed back into the car.

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T H E R E WA S A VA S E of roses on the table. Alex smelled them first . . . sweet and slightly cloying. Then he opened his eyes and allowed them to come into focus. They were bright pink, a dozen of them arranged in a porcelain vase with a lace mat underneath. Alex felt sick. The side of his head was throbbing, and he could feel the broken skin where the walking stick had hit him. There was a sour taste in his mouth. He wondered how long he had been lying here.

And where was he? Looking around at the antique furniture, the grandfather clock, the heavy curtains, and the stone fireplace with two sculpted lions, he would have said he was back home in Britain—although he knew that wasn’t possible. He was lying on a bed in what could have been a country hotel. A door to one side opened into a bathroom. There were bottles of Molton Browne shampoo and bubble bath beside the sink.

Alex rolled off the bed and staggered into the bathroom. He splashed water on his face and examined himself in the mirror. He looked terrible. Quite apart from the dark hair and skin color and the two fake teeth, his eyes were bloodshot, there was a huge bruise next to his eye, and generally he could have been dumped here by a 264

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garbage truck. On an impulse, he reached into his mouth and pulled out the two plastic caps on his teeth. Major Yu knew perfectly well who—and what—he was. There was no need for any further pretense.

He ran himself a bath, and while the water was flowing, he went back into the bedroom. The main door was locked, of course. The window looked out onto a perfect lawn with—bizarrely—a set of croquet hoops arranged in neat lines. Beyond, he could see a rocky outcrop, a jetty, and the sea. He turned back. Someone had left him a snack: smoked salmon sandwiches, a glass of milk, a plate of McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes. He ate it all greedily. Then he stripped off his clothes and got into the bath. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, and he didn’t like to think, but whatever it was, he might as well be clean.

He felt a lot better after half an hour in the hot scented water and although he hadn’t been able to get off all the makeup Mrs. Webber had put on him, at least some of his own color had returned. There were fresh clothes in the wardrobe: a Vivienne Westwood shirt and Paul Smith jeans and underwear—both London-based designers. He was still wearing his old clothes, but the belt that Smithers had given him had been taken away. Alex wondered about that. Had Major Yu discovered the knife hidden in the buckle or the jungle supplies inside the leather itself? He was sorry that he hadn’t gotten the chance to use it.

Maybe there would have been something inside that could help him now.

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On the other hand, nobody had searched the pockets of his jeans—or if they had, they had missed the ten-baht coin and the chewing gum pack with the secret detonators. The watch was also still in place, the hands fixed at eleven o’clock, and that gave Alex a sense of reassurance.

The eleventh hour indeed. Major Yu might think he held all the cards, but the watch would still be transmitting, and even now MI6 Special Operations must be closing in.

Alex got dressed in the new clothes and sat down in a comfortable armchair. He had even been supplied with some books to read: Biggles, The Famous Five, and Just William. They weren’t quite his taste, but he supposed he should appreciate the thought.

Just after midday, there was a rattle of a key turning in the lock and the door opened. A maid, wearing a black dress with a white apron, came in. She looked Indonesian.

“Major Yu would like to invite you for lunch,” she said.

“That’s very kind of him,” Alex replied. He closed his copy of Biggles Investigates. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of our eating out?”

“He’s in the dining room,” the maid replied.

Alex followed her out of the room and down a wood-paneled corridor with oil paintings on the walls. They all showed scenes of the English countryside. Briefly he thought of overpowering the maid and making another bid for freedom, but he decided against it. There was part of him that reacted against the idea of attacking a young 266

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woman, and anyway, he had no doubt that—following the events on the Liberian Star—Yu would be taking no chances. Security here would be tight.

They reached a grand staircase that swept down to a hall with a suit of armor standing beside a second, mon-umental fireplace. More classical paintings everywhere.

Alex had to remind himself that he was still in Australia.

The house didn’t fit here. It felt as if it had been imported brick by brick, and he was reminded for a moment of Nikolei Drevin, who had transported his own fourteenth-century castle from Scotland to Oxfordshire. It was strange how very bad men felt a need to live somewhere not just spectacular but slightly insane.

The maid held back and gestured Alex through a door and into a long dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the sea. The room was carpeted with a table and a dozen chairs, suitable for a medieval banquet. The paintings in this room were modern: a portrait by David Hockney and a wheel of color by Damian Hirst. Alex had seen similar works in galleries in London and knew that they must be worth millions. Only one end of the table had been laid. Major Yu was sitting there, waiting for him, the walking stick leaning against his chair.

“Ah, there you are, Alex,” he said in a pleasant voice, as if they were old friends meeting up for the weekend.

“Please come and sit down.”

As he walked forward, Alex examined the snakehead M a d e i n B r i t a i n

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boss properly for the first time, taking in the round, shrunken head, the wire-frame glasses, the white hair sitting so oddly with the Chinese features. Yu was wearing a striped blazer with a white, open-necked shirt. There was a silk handkerchief poking out of his top pocket. His gloved hands were crossed in front of him.

“How are you feeling?” Yu asked.

“My head hurts,” Alex replied.

“Yes. I’m afraid I must apologize. I really don’t know what came over me, hitting you like that. But the truth is, I was angry. You did a lot of damage on the Liberian Star and made it necessary for me to murder Captain De Wynter, which I didn’t really want to do.” Alex filed the information away. So De Wynter was dead. He had paid the price for failing a second time.

“Even so, it was unforgivable of me. My mother used to say that you can lose money, you can lose at cards, but you should never lose your temper. Can I offer you some apple juice? It comes from High House Farm in Suffolk, and it’s quite delicious.”

“Thank you,” Alex said. He didn’t know what was going on here but had decided he might as well play along with this madman. He held out his glass, and Yu poured.

At the same time, the Indonesian maid came in with the lunch: cold roast beef and salad. Alex helped himself. He noticed that Yu ate very little and held his knife and fork as if they were surgical implements.

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you,” Major Yu began. “Ever since you destroyed our operation Invisible Sword and caused the death of poor Mrs. Rothman, I’ve been wondering what sort of boy you were . . .”

So Mrs. Jones had been right. Major Yu was indeed part of Scorpia. Alex filed the information away, knowing with a sense of dread that it gave Yu another reason to want to kill him . . . to settle an old score.

“It’s just a shame that we have so little time together,” Yu went on.

Alex didn’t like the sound of that. “I have a question,” he said.

“Please go ahead.”

“Where is Ash? What have you done with him?”

“Let’s not talk about Ash.” Yu gave him a thin smile.

“You don’t have to worry about him. You’ll never see him again. How is the beef, by the way?”

“A little bloody for my taste.”

Yu sighed. “It’s organic. From Yorkshire.”

“Where else?” Alex was getting a bit fed up with all this. He toyed with his knife, wondering if he had the speed and the determination to stick it into the man’s heart. It might be five or ten minutes before the maid came back. Enough time to find a way out of here . . .

Yu must have seen the idea forming in Alex’s eyes.

“Please don’t think of anything foolish,” he remarked.

“There is a pistol in my right-hand jacket pocket, and, as the Americans would say, I am very quick on the draw. I M a d e i n B r i t a i n

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think I could shoot you dead before you had even left your chair—and that would spoil a perfectly pleasant lunch. So come now, Alex. I want to know all about you.

Where were you born?”

Alex shrugged. “West London.”

“Your parents were both English?”

“I don’t want to talk about them.” Alex looked around.

Suddenly the paintings, the furniture, the clothes, even the food made sense. “You seem to like England, Major Yu,” he remarked.

“I admire it greatly. If I may say so, Alex, I have enjoyed having you as my adversary because you are English. It is also one of the reasons I have invited you to eat with me now.”

“But what about Invisible Sword? You tried to kill every child in London.”

“That was business, and I really was very unhappy about it. You might also like to know, by the way, that I voted against sending a sniper to kill you. It seemed so crude. Some more apple juice?”

“No, thank you.”

“So where do you go to school?”

Alex shook his head. He’d had enough of this game. “I don’t want to talk about myself,” he said. “And certainly not to you. I want to see Ash. And I want to go home.”

“Neither of which is possible.” Yu was drinking wine.

Alex noticed that even that was English. He remembered Ian Rider once describing English wine as the sort of liq-270

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uid that might have been extracted from a cat. But Yu sipped it with obvious enthusiasm.

“I love England, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Since you won’t talk about yourself, perhaps you will permit me to tell you a little about me. My life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me . . .”

“I’ve never much cared for horror stories,” Alex said.

Yu smiled again—but his eyes were cold. “I like to think of myself as a genius,” he began. “Of course, you might remark that I have never invented anything or written a novel or painted a great painting, despite what I said just now, it is unlikely that I will become a household name. But different people are talented in different ways, and I think I have achieved a certain greatness in crime, Alex. And it’s not surprising that my life story is a remarkable one. How could someone like me have anything else?”