of their eyes. Sir Graham saw one of the soldiers speaking frantically into a radio transmitter and a second later a fleet of ambulances appeared, lights blazing, speeding towards the plane. So somebody had been prepared for the worst. Sir Graham glanced at Blunt and knew it had been him.
The ambulances were already too late. By the time they arrived, Burke was on his back, gasping his last few breaths. Hill-Smith had joined him, dropping to the floor of the bus, his lips mauve, his eyes empty. The steps were strewn with bodies, one or two feebly kicking, the others deadly still. The man with the blond hair was lost in a tangle of bodies. The straw hat had rolled away, blown across the runway by the breeze.
“What?” Sir Graham rasped. “How?” He couldn’t find the words.
“Invisible Sword,” Blunt said.
At that exact moment, a quarter of a mile away in Terminal Two, passengers were just arriving on a flight from Rome. At passport control the officer noticed a mother and a father with their son. The boy was fourteen years old. He was overweight, with black curly hair, thick glasses and terrible skin. There was a slight moustache on his upper lip. He was Italian; his passport gave his name as Federico Casali.
The passport officer might have looked more closely at the boy. There was some sort of alert out for a fourteen-year-old called Alex Rider. But he knew what was happening out on the main runway. Everyone knew. The whole airport was in a state of panic and right now he was distracted. He didn’t even bother comparing the face in front of him with the picture that had been circulated. What was happening outside was much more important.
Scorpia had timed it perfectly.
The boy took his passport and slouched away, through customs and out of the airport.
Alex Rider had come home.
PIZZA DELIVERY
« ^ »
Spies have to be careful where they live.
An ordinary person will choose a house or a flat because it has nice views, because they like the shape of the rooms, because it feels like home. For spies, the first consideration is security. There’s a comfortable sitting room —but will the window offer a target for a possible sniper’s bullet? A garden is fine—so long as the fence is high enough and there aren’t too many shrubs providing cover for an intruder. The neighbours, of course, will be checked. So will the postman, the milkman, the window cleaner and anyone else who comes to the front door. The front door itself may have as many as five separate locks and there will be alarm systems, night cameras and panic buttons. Someone once said that an Englishman’s home is his castle. For a spy, it can be his prison too.
Mrs Jones lived in the penthouse flat on the ninth floor of a building in Clerkenwell, not far from the old meat market at Smithfields. There were forty flats altogether and the security check run by MI6 had shown that the majority of the residents were bankers or lawyers, working in the City. Melbourne House was not cheap. Mrs Jones had two thousand square metres and two private balconies on the top floor—a great deal of space, particularly as she lived alone. On the open market it would have cost her in excess of a million pounds when she bought it seven years ago. But as it happened, MI6 had a file on the developer. The developer had seen it and had been glad to do a deal.
The flat was secure. And from the moment Alan Blunt had decided his second in command might need protection, it had become more so.
The front doors opened onto a long, rather stark reception area with a desk, two fig trees and a single lift at the far end. There were closed-circuit television cameras above the desk and outside in the street, recording everyone who entered. Melbourne House had porters working twenty-four hours, seven days a week, but Blunt had replaced them with agents from his own office. They would remain there for as long as necessary. He had also installed a metal detector next to the reception desk, identical to the sort you would find in an airport. All visitors had to pass through it.
The other residents hadn’t been particularly happy about this, but they had been assured it was only temporary.
Reluctantly they had agreed. They all knew that the woman who lived alone on the top floor worked for some government department. They also knew that it was better not to ask too many questions. The metal detector arrived; it was installed. Life went on.
It was impossible to get into Melbourne House without passing the two agents on the front desk. There was a goods entrance at the back but it was locked and alarmed. The building couldn’t be climbed. The walls had no footholds of any sort; anyway, there were four more agents on constant patrol. Finally there was an agent on duty outside Mrs Jones’s front door, and he had a clear view of the corridor in both directions. There was nowhere to hide. The agent—in radio contact with those downstairs—was armed with a high-tech, fingerprint-sensitive automatic weapon. Only he could fire it, so if—impossibly—he was overpowered, his gun would be useless.
Mrs Jones had protested about all these arrangements. It was one of the very few times she had ever argued with her superior.
“For heaven’s sake, Alan! We’re talking about Alex Rider.”
“No, Mrs Jones. We’re talking about Scorpia.”
There had been no more discussion after that.
At half past eleven that night, just hours after the deaths at Heathrow Airport, two agents were sitting behind the front desk. Both were in their twenties, dressed in the uniform of security guards. One was plump, with short, fair hair and a childish face that looked as if it would never need a shave. His name was Lloyd. He had been thrilled to get into MI6 straight from university, but he was fast becoming disappointed. This sort of work, for example. It wasn’t what he had expected. The other man was dark and looked foreign; he could have been mistaken for a Brazilian footballer. He was smoking a cigarette, even though it wasn’t allowed in the building, and this annoyed Lloyd. His name was Ramirez. The two men had started their night shift a few hours ago.
They would be there until seven the next morning, when Mrs Jones left.
They were bored. As far as they were concerned, there was no chance of anyone getting anywhere near their boss on the ninth floor. And as if to add insult to injury, they had been told to look out for a fourteen-year-old boy. They had been given a photograph of Alex Rider, and they both agreed that it was crazy. Why would a schoolboy be gunning for the deputy head of Special Operations?
“Maybe she’s his aunt,” Lloyd mused. “Maybe she’s forgotten his birthday and he’s out for revenge.” Ramirez blew a smoke ring. “You really believe that?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
