“I don’t want to sleep,” Alex said.
“I know, dear,” Isabel replied. “But Dr. Tanner says you’ve got to get your rest.” She held out the pills. “It’s going to be a big day for you tomorrow,” she went on.
“You’re going to need your rest.”
Alex hesitated, then took the pills. He threw them into his mouth and swallowed the water.
The nurse smiled at him. “It won’t be too bad,” she said. “You’ll see.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Or rather, you won’t . . .”
They checked Alex’s room an hour later and again at eleven. Both times they saw him lying, utterly still, in bed.
In a way, Dr. Tanner was surprised. He had been expecting Alex to try something. After all, Major Yu had warned him to take extreme care with this particular boy, and the
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fact was that tonight was his last chance. But it sometimes happened that way. It seemed that—despite his reputation—Alex had accepted the hopelessness of his situation and had chosen to find a brief escape in sleep.
Even so, Dr. Tanner was a cautious man. Before he went to bed himself, he called the two guards, Quombi and Jacko, into his office.
“I want the two of you outside the room all night,” he ordered.
The two men looked at each other in dismay. “That’s crazy, boss,” Jacko said. “The kid’s asleep. He’s been asleep for hours.”
“He can still wake up.”
“So he wakes up! Where’s he going to go?” Tanner rubbed his eyes. He liked to get a good night’s sleep before he operated, and he was in no mood for a lengthy debate. “I’ve got my orders from Major Yu,” he snapped. “You want to argue with
Jacko—you take the first shift until four o’clock.
Quombi—you take over then. And make sure that dog of yours stays outside the whole time. I just want to be sure that no one goes anywhere tonight. Okay?” The two men nodded.
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow . . .”
At three thirty that night, Jacko was sitting on the porch of Alex’s building, reading a magazine he had read fifty
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times before. He was in a bad mood. He had passed Alex’s window at least a dozen times, listening for the faintest sound. There’d been nothing. It seemed to Jacko that everyone had got themselves into a complete panic about this kid. What was so special about him? He was just one of the many who had passed through the hospital. Some had screamed and cried. Some had tried to buy their way out. All of them had ended the same way.
The last thirty minutes of his watch ticked away. He stood up and stretched. A few yards away, lying on the grass, Spike cocked an ear and growled.
“It’s all right, dog,” Jacko said. “I’m going to bed.
Quombi will be here soon.”
He belched, stretched a second time, and walked off into the darkness.
Ten minutes later, Quombi took his place. The other man was the younger of the two and had spent almost a third of his life in jail until Dr. Tanner had found him and brought him here. He liked his work at the hospital, es- pecially taunting the patients as they got weaker and weaker. But he was in a bad mood right now. He needed his sleep. And he didn’t get paid overtime for working through the night.
As he reached the building, his eye was caught by something glinting in the grass just in front of the door.
It was some sort of foreign coin. Quombi didn’t even wonder how it had gotten there. Money was money. He walked right over and reached down to pick it up.
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He was faintly aware of something falling out of the sky, but he didn’t look up quickly enough to see it. The silver filing cabinet could have crushed him, but he was lucky. One corner struck him, a glancing blow on the side of the head. Even so, it was enough to knock him out instantly. Fortunately, it made little sound as it thudded into the soft grass. Quombi fell like an axed tree. The dog got up and whined. It knew that something was wrong, but it had never been trained for this. It went over and sniffed at the motionless figure, then sat on its hind legs and scratched.
On the first-floor balcony, Alex Rider looked down at his handiwork with grim satisfaction.
He had never been asleep. He had palmed the pills and swallowed only water and had been waiting quietly ever since. He had gotten up several times in the night, waiting for Jacko to leave, and had heard the words he had spoken to the dog. That was when he had gotten dressed and set to work.
Carrying the heavy filing cabinet up one flight of stairs had almost been beyond him, and it was probably only desperation that had lent him strength as he clutched it in both arms and balanced it on his knee. The worst part had been making sure the metal frame never banged against the walls or the wooden steps. Nurse Swaine had a room on the ground floor, halfway down the corridor, and the slightest sound might awaken her.
He had dragged it into the bedroom over the front
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