“OK,” he decided. “You can take it up. You go straight to floor number six. You do not go anywhere else. Do you understand that?”
“Why should I want to go anywhere else? I’ve got pizza for someone called Foster and she’s on the sixth floor.” The delivery man reloaded the bag and walked away.
“You go through the metal detector,” Ramirez ordered.
“You got a metal detector? I thought this was a block of flats, not Heathrow Airport.” The delivery man handed his helmet to Ramirez and, with the canvas bag over his shoulder, walked through the metal frame. The machine was silent.
“There you are!” he said. “I’m clean. Now can I deliver the pizza?”
“Wait a minute!” The fair-haired agent sounded threatening. “You forgot the Coke—and your promotions card.” He picked the two items up from the reception desk and handed them over.
“Yeah. Thanks.” The delivery man began to walk towards the lift.
He had known he would be stopped.
Behind the wig and the black latex mask, Alex Rider heaved a sigh of relief. The disguise had worked. Nile had told him it would and he’d had no reason to doubt it. He had been careful to make his voice sound older, with an authentic accent. The motorbike leathers had thickened out his build and he was wearing special shoes that had added three centimetres to his height. He hadn’t been worried about his bag being searched. The moment he’d set eyes on them Alex had known that Lloyd and Ramirez were new to the game, with little field experience.
If they had taken him up on his offer and demanded to call the pizza company, Alex would have given them a business card with the phone number. But it would have been Scorpia who answered. If they had been smart, the two agents might have telephoned up to the sixth floor. But Sarah Foster—the owner of the flat—was away.
Her line had been switched from outside. The call would be redirected … again to Scorpia.
Everything had gone exactly as planned.
Alex had been taken from Malagosto to Rome, where he had boarded a flight with two Scorpia people he had never seen before. They had been with him at Heathrow, accompanying him through passport control to ensure there was no problem. How could there have been? Alex was in disguise—he had a false passport. And there seemed to be some sort of security alert at the airport—everyone was running around in circles. Doubtless it had been engineered by Scorpia.
From Heathrow he had been taken to a house in the middle of London, catching only a glimpse of the front door and the quiet, leafy road before he was whisked inside. Nile had been waiting for him there, sitting on an antique chair with his legs crossed.
“Federico!” He greeted Alex by the name on his fake passport.
Alex said little. Nile swiftly briefed him. He was given another disguise—the pizza delivery man costume—as well as everything he needed to break into Mrs Jones’s flat and kill her. How he got out again would be his problem.
“It’ll be easy,” Nile said. “You’ll just walk out the way you came in. And if there is any trouble, I’m sure you’ll cope, Alex. I have every faith in you.”
Scorpia had already reconnoitred the flat. Nile showed him the plans. They knew where the cameras were, how many pressure pads had been installed, how many agents had been commandeered. And everything had been worked out, right down to the Coke bottle which Alex had deliberately left on the reception desk and which had been handed back to him without being passed through the metal detector frame. It was simple psychology. A plastic bottle filled with liquid. How could it possibly contain anything metallic?
Alex reached the lift and stopped. This was the vital moment.
He had his back to the two agents. He was standing between them and the lift, blocking their line of vision. He had already slipped the special offers card out of the canvas bag as he walked, and he was holding it in both hands. In fact, one side of the card peeled off to reveal a thin silver plate engraved with the letter G and the numbers one to nine. It was identical to the plate beside the lift. The other side was magnetic. Casually, Alex leant forward and placed the fake panel over the real one. It was held in place immediately. Sticking it there had also activated it. Now it was just a matter of timing.
The lift doors opened and he entered. As he turned round, he saw the two agents watching him. He reached out and pressed the button for the ninth floor. The lift doors slid shut, cutting off his view. A second later, the lift jerked and moved up.
The two agents saw the numbers changing beside the lift door. Ground … one … two… What they didn’t realize was that they weren’t following the real progress of the lift. A tiny chip and a watch battery inside the silver plate were illuminating the fake numbers. The real numbers were blocked out behind.
Alex arrived at the ninth floor.
The silver panel showed he had stopped at floor six.
It had taken him thirty seconds to travel up from the ground floor. In that time, Alex had discarded the motorbike leathers to reveal, underneath, clothes that were loose, light-wearing and black: the uniform of the ninja assassin. He tugged off his wig and grabbed hold of the latex covering his face. It came off almost in one piece. Finally, he removed the gold tooth. The doors slid open. Once again he was himself.
He had already been shown a floor plan of the entire building. Mrs Jones’s flat was to the right—and there were two unforgivable lapses of security. Although there were closed-circuit television cameras in the fire escapes, there were none in the corridor. And the agent standing in front of the door could see all the way from one end to the other, but he couldn’t see into the lift. Two blind spots. Alex was about to take advantage of them both.
The agent on the ninth floor had heard the lift arrive. Like Lloyd and Ramirez downstairs, he was new to the job. He wondered why they had sent the lift up. Perhaps he should radio down and find out. Before he could make any decision, a boy with fair hair and death in his eyes stepped out. Alex Rider was holding one of the drinking straws that the two agents had seen but not examined. He had unwrapped it, and it was already between his lips. He blew.
The fukidake—or blowgun—was another lethal weapon used by the ninjas. A needle-sharp dart fired into a major artery could kill instantly. But there were also darts that had been hollowed out and filled with poison. A ninja could hit a man over a distance of twenty metres or more without making any sound at all. Alex was much closer
