“You’re just in time to show us what you can do before lunch,” Gordon Ross announced. His Scottish accent made almost everything sound like a challenge. “You got a high score the day before yesterday. In fact, you were second in the class. Let’s see if you can do even better today. But this time I may have built in a little surprise!”
He handed Alex a gun, a Belgian-made FN semiautomatic pistol. Alex weighed it in his hand, trying to find the balance between himself and his weapon. Ross had explained that this was essential to the technique he called instinctive firing.
“Remember—you have to shoot instantly. You can’t stop to take aim. If you do, you’re dead. In a real combat situation you don’t have time to mess around. You and the gun are one. And if you believe that you can hit the target, you will hit the target. That’s what instinctive firing is all about.” Now Alex stepped forward, the gun at his side, watching the mocked-up doors and windows in front of him. He knew there would be no warning. At any time, a target could appear. He would be expected to turn and fire.
He waited. He was aware of the other students watching him. Out of the corner of his eye he could just make out the shape of Gordon Ross. Was the teacher smiling?
A sudden movement.
A target had appeared in an upper window and immediately Alex saw that the bull’s-eye targets with their impersonal rings had been replaced. A photograph had appeared instead. It was a life-sized colour picture of a young man. Alex didn’t know who he was—but that didn’t matter. He was a target.
There was no time to hesitate.
Alex raised the gun and fired.
Later that day, Oliver d’Arc, the principal of Scorpia’s Training and Assessment Centre, sat in his office on Malagosto, talking to Julia Rothman. Her image filled the screen of the laptop computer on his desk. There was a webcam perched on a shelf and his own image would be appearing simultaneously somewhere in the Widow’s Palace just across the water, in Venice. Mrs Rothman never came to the island. She knew it was under surveillance by both the American and British intelligence services, and one day they might be tempted to target the island with a non-nuclear ballistic missile. It was too dangerous.
It was only the second occasion they had spoken since Alex had arrived. The time was exactly seven o’clock in the evening. Outside, the sun had begun to set.
“How is he progressing?” Mrs Rothman asked. Her own webcam didn’t flatter her; her face on the screen looked cold and a little colourless.
D’Arc considered. He ran a thumb and a single finger down the sides of his chin, stroking his beard. “The boy is certainly exceptional,” he murmured. “Of course, his uncle, Ian Rider, trained him all his life, almost from the moment he could walk. I have to say, he did a good job.”
“And?”
“He is very intelligent. Quick-witted. Everyone here genuinely likes him. Unfortunately, though, I have my doubts about his usefulness to us.”
“I am very sorry to hear that, Professor d’Arc. Please explain.”
“I will give you two examples, Mrs Rothman. Today Alex returned to the shooting range. We’ve been putting him through a course of instinctive firing. It’s something he’s never done before and, I have to say, it takes many of our students several weeks to master the art. After just a few hours on the range, Alex was already achieving impressive results. At the end of his second day he scored seventy-two per cent.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with that.” D’Arc shifted in his seat. In his formal suit and tie, shrunk to fit Mrs Rothman’s computer screen, he looked rather like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Today we switched the targets,” he explained. “Instead of black and red rings, Alex was asked to fire at photographs of men and women. He was supposed to aim at the vital areas: the heart … between the eyes.”
“How did he do?”
“That’s the point. His score dropped to forty-six per cent. He missed several targets altogether.” D’Arc took off his glasses and polished them with a cloth. “I also have the results of his Rorschach psychological test,” he went on. “He was asked to identify certain shapes—”
“I do know what a Rorschach test is, Professor.”
“Of course. Forgive me. Well, there was one shape that every student who has ever come here has identified as a man lying in a pool of blood. But not Alex. He said he thought it was a man flying through the air with a backpack. Another shape, which is invariably seen as a gun pointing at someone’s head, he believed to be someone pumping up a football. At our very first meeting, Alex told me that he couldn’t kill for us, and I have to say that, psychologically speaking, he seems to lack what might be called the killer instinct.” There was a long pause. The image on the computer screen flickered.
“It’s very disappointing,” d’Arc went on. “Having met Alex, I must say that a teenage assassin would be extremely useful to us. The possibilities are almost limitless. I think we should make it a high priority to find one of our own.”
“I doubt there are many teenagers quite as experienced as Alex.”
“That’s what I began by saying. But even so…”
There was another pause. Mrs Rothman came to a decision. “Did Alex see Dr Steiner?” she asked.
“Yes. Everything was done exactly as you instructed.”
“Good.” She nodded. “You say that Alex won’t kill for us, but you could still be proved wrong. It’s just a question of giving him the right target—and this time I’m not talking about paper.”
“You want to send him on an assignment?”
“As you know, Invisible Sword is about to enter its final, critical phase. Introducing Alex Rider into the mix right now might provide an interesting distraction, at the very least. And if he did succeed, which I believe he might, he could be very useful indeed. All in all, the timing couldn’t be better.” Julia Rothman leant forward so that her eyes almost filled the screen.
“This is what I want you to do…”
There were two hundred and forty-seven steps to the top of the bell tower. Alex knew because he had counted every one of them. The bottom of the tower was empty, a single chamber with bare brick walls and a smell of damp. It had clearly been abandoned years ago. The bells themselves either had been stolen or had fallen down and been lost. The stairs were made of stone and twisted
