Anthony Horowitz - Alex Rider 1 - Stormbreaker (v1.0)

The Mercedes pulled up in the front and the driver got out. “Follow me.”

“What about my luggage?” Alex asked.

“It’ll be brought.”

Alex and the driver went through the front door and into a hall dominated by a huge canvas— Judgment Day, the end of the world painted four centuries ago as a swirling mass of doomed souls and demons. There were artworks everywhere. Watercolors and oils, prints, drawings, sculptures in stone and bronze, all crowded together with nowhere for the eye to rest. Alex followed the driver along a carpet so thick that he almost bounced. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic and he was relieved when they passed through a door and into a vast, cathedral-like room that was practically bare.

“Mr. Sayle will be here shortly,” the driver said, and left.

Alex looked around him. This was a modern room with a curving steel desk near the center, carefully positioned halogen lights, and a spiral staircase leading down from a perfect circle cut in the ceiling about fifteen feet high. One entire wall was covered with a single sheet of glass, and walking over to it, Alex realized that he was looking at a gigantic aquarium. The sheer size of the thing drew him toward it. It was hard to imagine how many thousands of gallons of water the glass held back, but he was surprised to see that the tank was empty. There were no fish, although it was big enough to hold a shark.

And then something moved in the turquoise shadows and Alex gasped with a mixture of horror and wonderment as the biggest jellyfish he had ever seen drifted into view. The main body of the creature was a shimmering, pulsating mass of white and mauve, shaped roughly like a cone. Beneath it, a mass of tentacles covered with circular stingers twisted in the water, at least ten feet long. As the jellyfish moved, or drifted in the artificial current, its tentacles writhed against the glass so that it looked almost as if it was trying to break out. It was the single most awesome and repulsive thing Alex had ever seen.

“Physalia physalia.” The voice came from behind him and Alex twisted around to see a man coming down the last of the stairs.

Herod Sayle was short. He was so short that Alex’s first impression was that he was looking at a reflection that had somehow been distorted. In his immaculate and expensive black suit with gold signet ring and brightly polished black shoes, he looked like a scaled-down model of a multimillionaire businessman. His skin was dark and his teeth flashed when he smiled. He had a round, bald head and very horrible eyes. The gray pupils were too small, surrounded on all sides by white. Alex was reminded of tadpoles before they hatch. When Sayle stood next to him, the eyes were at the same level as his and held less warmth than the jellyfish.

“The Portuguese man-of-war,” Sayle continued. He had a heavy accent brought with him from the Cairo marketplace. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t keep one as a pet,” Alex said.

“I came upon this one when I was diving in the South China Sea.” Sayle gestured at a glass display case and Alex noticed three harpoon guns and a collection of knives resting in velvet slots. “I love to kill fish,” Sayle went on. “But when I saw this specimen of Physalia physalia, I knew I had to capture it and keep it. You see, it reminds me of myself.”

“It’s ninety-nine percent water. It has no brain, no guts, and no anus.” Alex had dredged up the facts from somewhere and spoken them before he knew what he was doing.

Sayle glanced briefly at him, then turned back to the creature hovering over him in its tank. “It’s an outsider,” he said. “It drifts on its own, ignored by the other fish. It is silent and yet it demands respect. You see the nematocysts, Mr. Lester? The stinging cells? If you were to find yourself wrapped in there, it would be an unforgettable death.”

“Call me Alex,” Alex said.

He’d meant to say Felix, but somehow it had slipped out. It was the most stupid, the most amateurish mistake he could have made. But he had been thrown by the way Sayle had appeared and by the slow, hypnotic dance of the jellyfish. The gray eyes squirmed. “I thought your name was Felix.”

“My friends call me Alex.”

“Why?”

“After Alex Ferguson. He’s the manager of my favorite soccer team.” It was the first thing Alex could think of. But he’d seen a soccer poster in Felix Lester’s bedroom and knew that at least he’d chosen the right team. “Manchester United,” he added.

Sayle smiled. “That’s most amusing. Alex it shall be. And I hope we will be friends, Alex. You are a very lucky boy. You won the competition and you are going to be the first teenager to try out my Stormbreaker. But this is also lucky, I think, for me. I want to know what you think of it! I want you to tell me what you like … what you don’t.” The eyes dipped away and suddenly he was businesslike. “We have only three days until the launch,” he said. “We’d better get a bliddy move on, as my father used to say. I’ll have my man take you to our room and tomorrow morning, first thing, you must get to work. There’s a math program you should try … also languages. All the software was developed here at Sayle Enterprises. Of course we’ve talked to children. We’ve gone to teachers, to education experts. But you, my dear … Alex. You will be worth more to me than all of them put together.”

As he had talked, Sayle had become more and more animated, carried away by his own enthusiasm. He had become a completely different man. Alex had to admit that he’d taken an immediate dislike to Herod Sayle. No wonder Blunt and the people at M16 had mistrusted him! But now he was forced to think again. He was standing opposite one of the richest men in England, a man who had decided out of the goodness of his heart to give a huge gift to English schools. Just because he as small and slimy, that didn’t necessarily make him an enemy. Perhaps Blunt was wrong after all.

“Ah! Here’s my man now,” Sayle said. “And about bliddy time!”

The door had opened and a man had come in, dressed in the black suit and tails of an old-fashioned butler. He was as tall and thin as his master was short and round, with a thatch of close-cropped ginger hair on top of a face that was so pale it was almost paper white From a distance it had looked as if he was smiling, but as he drew closer, Alex gasped. The man had two horrendous scars, one on each side of his mouth, twisting up all the way to his ears. It was as if someone had at some time attempted to cut his face in half. The scars were a gruesome shade of mauve. There were smaller, fainter scars where at one time his cheeks had been stitched.

“This is Mr. Grin,” Sayle said. “He changed his name after his accident.”