Crocodile Tears

“I don’t need any help,” Alex said.

Bulman smiled. His teeth were as white as his shirt. “You haven’t heard what I’ve got to say.”

“Then why don’t you get on with it?” Jack cut in. “Because we were having supper and we didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Smells good.” Bulman drew a business card out of his wallet and slid it across the table. Jack came over and sat next to Alex. They both read it. There was the name—Harry Bulman—and beneath it his job description: Freelance Journalist. There was also an address in north London and a telephone number.

“You work for the press,” Jack said.

“The Mirror, the Express, the Star . . .” Bulman nodded. “If you ask around, you’ll find I’m fairly well known.”

“What are you doing here?” Alex asked. “You said you could help me. I don’t need a journalist.”

“As a matter of fact, you do.” Bulman took out a packet of chewing gum. “Do you mind?” he asked.

“I’ve given up smoking and I find this helps.” He unwrapped a piece and curled it into his mouth. He looked around again. “This is a nice place you’ve got here.”

“Please get on with it, Mr. Bulman.”

Alex could hear that Jack was running out of patience. But the journalist had already outmaneuvered them twice. He had simply walked in here, and for the moment neither of them was asking him to leave.

“All right. Let’s cut to the chase.” Bulman rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “You might not know this, but many journalists have a specialist area. It might be food, sports, politics . . .

whatever. My specialty is intelligence. I spent six years in the army—I was in the commandos—and I hung on to my old contacts when I left. I always figured they might come in handy. I was actually thinking about writing a book, but that didn’t work out, so I started touting myself around Fleet Street.

MI5, MI6, CIA . . . any bits of gossip I managed to pick up, I’d string together as a story. It wasn’t going to make me rich. But I did okay.”

Alex and Jack were listening to this in silence. Neither of them liked the way it was going.

“And then, a couple of months ago, I started to hear these strange rumors. They began with an event that took place at the Science Museum last April, when Herod Sayle was about to launch his Stormbreaker computer system. What happened to the Stormbreakers, by the way? There was going to be one in every school in the country, but suddenly they were recalled and that was that. They were never seen again.”

He waited for a response, but Alex simply met his questioning gaze with silence.

“Anyway, back to the Science Museum. It seems that someone, an agent of MI6 Special Operations, parachuted through the roof and took a shot at Sayle. No name. No pack drill. Nothing unusual about that. But then I was talking to a mate in a pub, and he told me that the bloke at the end of the parachute wasn’t a man at all. It was a boy. He swore to me that Special Operations had gone out and recruited a fourteen-year-old and that this was their latest secret weapon.

“Of course, I didn’t believe it at first. But I decided to have a nose around, so I started asking questions. And do you know what? It all turned out to be true. MI6 had taken some poor bloody kid, trained him up with the SAS in the Lake District, and sent him out on active service no less than three times. It took me a while longer to find out the name of this boy wonder. In the SAS, he was known as

‘Cub.’ But I persisted . . . I’m not so bad at this job . . . and in the end I got what I wanted. Alex Rider.

That’s you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex said.

“You’re making a mistake, Mr. Bulman,” Jack added. “Your story is ridiculous. Alex is still at school.”

“Alex is still at Brookland,” Bulman agreed. “But according to the school secretary, a very nice lady named Miss Bedfordshire, he’s been away an awful lot recently. Don’t blame her, by the way. She didn’t know I was a journalist. I pretended I was calling from the local council. But let me see . . .” Bulman took out a notebook.

“You were away for the first time last April. You were also away at the end of last year. That would have been at exactly the same time that a teenage boy dropped in on an oil rig in the Timor Sea, fighting alongside the Australian SAS. And who was that kid at Heathrow Airport when Damian Cray had a nasty accident in a jumbo jet? Now there’s a funny thing, isn’t it? An international pop singer one minute—a multimillionaire—and the next minute the papers are announcing that he’s had a heart attack. Well, I suppose I’d have a heart attack too if someone pushed me into the turbine of a plane.” Bulman snapped the notebook shut. “Nobody’s been allowed to write anything about any of this.

National security and all the rest of it. But I’ve spoken to people who were at the Science Museum, at Heathrow, and in Australia.” He fixed his eyes on Alex. “And they’ve all described you to a T.” There was a long silence. Jack’s fish pie had gone cold. Alex was stunned. He had always supposed MI6 would protect him from publicity. He had never expected a journalist to turn up at his own home.

Jack was the first to speak. “You’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “Alex took a bit of time off last term because he was sick. You can’t possibly think—”

“Please don’t treat me like an idiot, Miss Starbright,” Bulman cut in, and suddenly there was steel in his voice. “I’ve done my homework. I know everything. So why don’t you stop wasting my time and face up to the facts?” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a bunch of photographs. Alex winced. He guessed what was coming even before the journalist spread them on the table. And he was right. The pictures had been taken just a few hours before in Brompton Cemetery. They showed Alex in action against the three men who had attacked him, kicking out in one frame, spinning over the gravestone in another.

“When were these taken?” Jack asked. She was obviously shaken.

“This afternoon,” Alex replied. “They followed me from school and came up to me in the cemetery.” He looked accusingly at Bulman. “You set it all up.”