the accident had been recorded by traffic policemen in a helicopter, and there it was on television. The road was closed. Smoke was still rising from a burnt-out car. There was shattered metal and glass everywhere.
A number of witnesses were interviewed and they described what they had seen. There had been a boy in the front car, they said, the one that had started it all. They had seen him get out the moment it was all over. He had run back down the road and disappeared through the traffic. There had been a man—in a dark suit and sunglasses —who had tried to follow him. But the man had obviously been hurt. He had been limping. The boy had escaped.
Two hours later the road was still closed. The police said they were looking for the boy urgently, to interview him. But apart from the fact that he was about fourteen years old and dressed in black, there was no description.
They didn’t have a name. The traffic in west London had come to a standstill. It would take days to clear up the damage.
Sitting in a hotel room in Mayfair, Julia Rothman saw the report and her eyes narrowed. She knew who the boy was, of course. It couldn’t be anyone else. She wondered what had happened. More to the point, she wondered when Alex Rider would get in touch.
In fact, it wasn’t until seven o’clock that evening that Alex made the call. He was in a phone box near Marble Arch. He was already wearing the brace, giving his mouth time to get used to it. But still he found it hard to stop slurring his words.
A man answered. “Yes?”
“This is Alex Rider.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a call box on the Edgware Road.”
This was true. Alex was dressed once again in the black ninja outfit which Scorpia had supplied him with. The phone box was outside a Lebanese restaurant. He had no doubt that Scorpia would be using sophisticated equipment to trace the call. He wondered how long it would take them to reach him.
He thought back to the car crash. He had to admit that MI6 had stage-managed it brilliantly. No fewer than twenty cars had been involved and they had only had a couple of hours, working with a team of stuntmen, to get it right. Not a single member of the public had been injured. But looking at the television footage and hearing the reports, Scorpia would have to admit that it looked real. That was what Blunt had said from the start. The bigger the pile-up, the less reason there would be for doubt. The front page of the Evening Standard’s final edition carried a photograph of the taxi embedded in the window of the house.
None of this mattered to the voice at the other end of the line.
“Is the woman dead?” it asked. The woman. Scorpia didn’t call her Mrs Jones any more. But then, corpses don’t need names.
“Yes,” Alex answered.
When they came to him, they would find the Kahr P9 back in his pocket with the one bullet fired. If they examined his hands (Blunt was sure they would) there would be traces of gunpowder on his fingers. And there was a bloodstain on the sleeve of his shirt. The same blood type as Mrs Jones. She had supplied the sample.
“What happened?”
“They caught me on the way out. They took me to Liverpool Street and asked me questions. This afternoon they were taking me somewhere else but I managed to get away.” Alex allowed a little panic to enter his voice.
He was a teenager; he had just made his first kill; and he was on the run. “Look. You said you’d bring me in once I’d done it. I’m in a phone box. Everyone’s looking for me. I want to see Nile…” A brief pause.
“All right. Make your way to Bank tube station. There’s an intersection. Seven roads. Be outside the main entrance at nine o’clock exactly and we’ll come and collect you.”
“Who will—” Alex began. But the phone had gone dead.
He hung up and stepped out of the telephone box. Two police cars sped past, their lights flashing. But they weren’t interested in him. Alex took his bearings and started off, heading east. Bank tube station was on the other side of London and it would take him at least an hour to walk there. He had no money on him and couldn’t risk being arrested for fare-dodging on a bus. And when he got there—seven roads! Scorpia were being careful. They could come for him from any direction. If this was a set-up and MI6 were following him, they would have to divide themselves seven ways.
He set off along the crowded pavements, keeping to the shadows, trying not to think what he was letting himself in for. The night was already drawing in. He could see a hard, white moon, dead in the sky. Everything would end, one way or another, the next day. Just over twenty hours remained until Scorpia’s deadline.
It was his deadline too.
That was the one thing he hadn’t told Mrs Jones.
He remembered what had happened on Malagosto. On his last day there he had been sent to see a psychiatrist—
an inquisitive, middle-aged man—who had put him through certain tests and then produced his medical report.
What was it that Dr Steiner had said? He was a little run-down. He needed more vitamins.
And he had given Alex an injection.
Alex had absolutely no doubt that he had been injected with the same nanoshells that were about to kill thousands of other children in London. He could almost feel them in his bloodstream, millions of golden bullets swirling around in his heart, waiting to release their deadly contents. There was a sour taste in his mouth.
Scorpia had tricked him. They had been laughing at him from the very start. Even as Mrs Rothman sipped her champagne in Positano, she must have been thinking of how to get rid of him.
