‚Sorry,' The Gentleman said. ‚Closed for maintenance.' The doors slid shut. He was on his own. He pressed the button for the sixty-first floor.
He had been given this job only a week before. He’d had to work fast, killing the real maintenance engineer, taking his identity, learning the layout of Roscoe Tower, and getting his hands on the sophisticated piece of equipment he had known he would need. His employers wanted the multimillionaire eliminated as quickly as possible. More importantly, it had to look like an accident. For this, The Gentleman had demanded—and been paid —one hundred thousand dollars. The money was to be paid into a bank account in Switzerland; half now, half on completion.
The elevator door opened again. The sixty-first floor was used primarily for maintenance.
This was where the water tanks were housed, as well as the computers that controlled the heat, air- conditioning, security cameras, and elevators throughout the building. The Gentleman turned off the elevator, using the manual override key that had once belonged to Sam Green, then went over to the computers. He knew exactly where they were. In fact, he could have found them wearing a blindfold. He opened his briefcase. There were two sections to the case.
The lower part was a laptop computer. The upper lid was fitted with a number of drills and other tools, each of them strapped into place.
It took him fifteen minutes to cut his way into the Roscoe Tower mainframe and connect his own laptop to the circuitry inside. Hacking his way past the Roscoe security systems took a little longer, but at last it was done. He tapped a command into his keyboard. On the floor below, Michael J. Roscoe’s private elevator did something it had never done before. It rose one extra floor—to level sixty-one. The door, however, remained closed. The Gentleman did not need to get in.
Instead, he picked up the briefcase and the silver toolbox and carried them back into the same elevator he had taken from the lobby. He turned the override key and pressed the button for the fifty-ninth floor. Once again, he deactivated the elevator. Then he reached up and pushed. The top of the elevator was a trapdoor that opened outward. He pushed the briefcase and the silver box ahead of him, then pulled himself up and climbed onto the roof of the elevator. He was now standing inside the main shaft of Roscoe Tower. He was surrounded on four sides by girders and pipes blackened with oil and dirt. Thick steel cables hung down, some of them humming as they carried their loads. Looking down, he could see a seemingly endless square tunnel illuminated only by the chinks of light from the doors that slid open and shut again as the other elevators arrived at various floors. Somehow the breeze had made its way in from the street, spinning dust that stung his eyes. Next to him was a set of elevator doors that, had he opened them, would have led him straight into Roscoe’s office. Above these, over his head and a few yards to the right, was the underbelly of Roscoe’s private elevator.
The toolbox was next to him, on the roof of the elevator. Carefully, he opened it. The sides of the case were lined with thick sponge. Inside, in the specialty molded space, was what looked like a complicated film projector, silver and concave with a thick glass lens. He took it out, then glanced at his watch. Eight thirty-five A.M. It would take him an hour to connect the device to the bottom of Roscoe’s elevator, and a little more to ensure that it was working. He had plenty of time.
Smiling to himself, The Gentleman took out a power screwdriver and began to work.
At twelve o’clock, Helen Bosworth called on the telephone. ‚Your car is here, Mr. Roscoe.'
‚Thank you, Helen.'
Roscoe hadn’t done much that morning. He had been aware that only half his mind was on his work. Once again, he glanced at the photograph on his desk. Paul. How could things have gone so wrong between a father and a son? And what could have happened in the last few months, to make them so much worse?
He stood up, put his jacket on, and walked across his office, on his way to lunch with Senator Andrews. He often had lunch with politicians. They wanted either his money, his ideas—or him. Anyone as rich as Roscoe made for a powerful friend, and politicians need all the friends they can get.
He pressed the elevator button, and the doors slid open. He took one step forward.
The last thing Michael J. Roscoe saw in his life was the inside of his elevator with its white marble walls, blue carpet, and silver handrail. His right foot, wearing a black leather shoe that was handmade for him by a small shop in Rome, traveled down to the carpet and kept going—
right through it. The rest of his body followed, tilting into the elevator and then through it. And then he was falling sixty floors to his death.
He was so surprised by what had happened, so totally unable to understand what
The elevator remained where it was. It looked solid but, in fact, it wasn’t there at all. What Roscoe had stepped into was a hologram, an image being projected into the empty space of the elevator shaft where the real elevator should have been. The Gentleman had programmed the door to open when Roscoe pressed the call button, and had quietly watched him step into oblivion. If the multimillionaire had managed to look up for a moment, he would have seen the silver hologram projector, beaming the image, a few yards above him. But a man getting into an elevator on his way to lunch does not look up. The Gentleman had known this. And he was never wrong.
At 12:35, the chauffeur called up to say that Mr. Roscoe hadn’t arrived at the car. Ten minutes later, Helen Bosworth alerted security, who began to search around the foyer of the building. At one o’clock, they called the restaurant. The senator was there, waiting for his lunch guest. But Roscoe hadn’t shown up.
In fact, his body wasn’t discovered until the next day, by which time the multimillionaire’s disappearance had become the lead story on the news. A bizarre accident—that’s what it looked like. Nobody could work out what had happened. Because by that time, of course, The Gentleman had reprogrammed the computer, removed the projector, and left everything as it should have been before quietly leaving the building.
Two days later, a man who looked nothing like a maintenance engineer walked into JFK
International Airport. He was about to board a flight for Switzerland. But first, he visited a flower shop and ordered a dozen black tulips to be sent to a certain address. The man paid with cash. He didn’t leave a name.
BLUE SHADOW
THE WORST TIME TO FEEL alone is when you’re in a crowd. Alex Rider was walking across the school yard, surrounded by hundreds of boys and girls his own age. They were all heading in the same direction, all wearing the same blue and gray uniform, all of them thinking probably much the same thoughts. The last lesson of the day had just ended. Homework, supper, and television would fill the remaining hours until bed. Another school day. So why did he feel so out of it, as if he were watching the last weeks of the spring term from the other side of a giant glass screen?
Alex jerked his backpack over one shoulder and continued toward the bike shed. The bag was heavy. As usual, it contained double homework … French and history. He had missed three weeks of school and was working hard to catch up. His teachers had not been sympathetic. Nobody had said as much, but when he had finally returned with a doctor’s letter (‚a bad dose of flu with complications') they had nodded and smiled and secretly thought him a little bit pampered and spoiled. On the other hand, they had to make allowances. They all knew that Alex had no parents, that he had been living with an uncle who had died in some sort of car accident. But even so. Three weeks in bed! Even his closest friends had to admit that was a bit much.
And he couldn’t tell them the truth. He wasn’t allowed to tell anyone what had really happened. That was the hell of it.
Alex looked around him at the children streaming through the school gates, some dribbling soccer balls, some on their cell phones. He looked at the teachers, curling themselves into their secondhand cars. At first, he had thought the whole school had somehow changed while he was away. But he knew now that what had happened was worse. Everything was the same. He was the one who had changed.
Alex was fourteen years old, an ordinary schoolboy in an ordinary West London school. Or he had been. Three
