weeks before, he had discovered that his uncle was a secret agent, working for MI6. The uncle—Ian Rider—had been murdered, and MI6 had forced Alex to take his place.
They had given him a crash course in Special Air Service survival techniques and sent him on a lunatic mission on the South Coast. He had been chased, shot at, and almost killed. And at the end of it he had been packed off and sent back to school as if nothing had happened. But first they had made him sign the Official Secrets Act. Alex smiled at the memory of it. He didn’t need to sign anything. Who would have believed him anyway?
But it was the secrecy that was getting to him now. Whenever anyone asked him what he had been doing in the weeks he had been away, he had been forced to tell them that he had been in bed, reading, slouching around the house, whatever. Alex didn’t want to boast about what he’d done, but he hated having to deceive his friends. It made him angry. MI6 hadn’t just put him in danger. They’d locked his whole life in a filing cabinet and thrown away the key.
He had reached the bike shed. Somebody muttered a ‚goodbye' in his direction and he nodded, then reached up to brush away the single strand of fair hair that had fallen over his eye. Sometimes he wished that the whole business with MI6 had never happened. But at the same time—he had to admit it—part of him wanted it all to happen again. Sometimes he felt that he no longer belonged in the safe, comfortable world of Brookland Comprehensive. Too much had changed. And at the end of the day, anything was better than double homework.
He lifted his bike out of the shed, unlocked it, pulled the backpack over his shoulders, and prepared to ride away. That was when he saw the beaten-up white car. Back outside the school gates for the second time that week.
Everyone knew about the man in the white car.
He was in his twenties, bald-headed with two broken stumps where his front teeth should have been and five metal studs in his ear. He didn’t advertise his name. When people talked about him, they called him Skoda, after the make of his car. But some said that his name was Jake and that he had once been to Brookland. If so, he had come back like an unwelcome ghost; here one minute, vanishing the next … somehow always a few seconds ahead of any passing police car or overly inquisitive teacher.
Skoda sold drugs. He sold soft drugs, like pot and cigarettes, to the younger kids, and harder stuff to any of the older ones stupid enough to buy it. It seemed incredible to Alex that Skoda could get away with it so easily, dealing his little packets in broad daylight. But of course, there was a code of honor in the school. No one turned anyone in to the police, not even a rat like Skoda. And there was always the fear that if Skoda went down, some of the people he supplied—friends, classmates—might go with him.
Drugs had never been a huge problem at Brookland, but recently that had begun to change.
A clutch of seventeen-year-olds had started buying Skoda’s goods, and like a stone dropped into a pool, the ripples had rapidly spread. There had been a spate of thefts, as well as one or two nasty bullying incidents— younger children being forced to bring in money for older ones.
The stuff Skoda was selling seemed to get more expensive the more you bought of it, and it hadn’t been cheap at the start.
Alex watched as a heavy-shouldered boy with dark eyes and serious acne lumbered over to the car, paused by the open window, and then continued on his way. He felt a sudden spurt of pure loathing. The boy’s name was Colin, and a year before, he had been hardworking and popular. These days, he was just avoided. Alex had never thought much about drugs, apart from knowing that he would never take them himself. But he could see that the man in the white car wasn’t poisoning just a handful of dumb kids. He was poisoning the whole school.
A policeman on foot patrol appeared, walking toward the gate. A moment later, the white car was gone, black smut bubbling from a faulty exhaust. Alex was on his bike before he knew what he was doing, pedaling fast out of the yard and swerving around the school secretary, who also was on her way home.
‚Not too fast, Alex!' she called out, sighing when he ignored her. Miss Bedfordshire had always had a soft spot for Alex without knowing quite why. And she alone in the school had wondered if there hadn’t been more to his absence than the doctor’s note had suggested.
The white Skoda accelerated down the road, turning left and then right, and Alex thought he was going to lose it. But then it twisted through the maze of back streets that led up to the King’s Road and hit the inevitable four o’clock traffic jam, coming to a halt about two hundred yards ahead.
The average speed of traffic in London is—at the start of the twenty-first century—slower than it was in Victorian times. During normal working hours, any bicycle will beat any car on just about any journey at all. And Alex wasn’t riding just any bike. He still had his Condor Junior Roadracer, handbuilt for him in the workshop that had been open for business on the same street in Holborn for more than fifty years. He’d recently had it upgraded with an integrated brake and gear lever system fitted to the handlebar, and he only had to flick his thumb to feel the bike click up a gear, the lightweight titanium sprockets spinning smoothly beneath him.
He caught up with the car just as it turned the corner and joined the rest of the traffic on the King’s Road. He would just have to hope that Skoda was going to stay in the city, but somehow Alex didn’t think it likely that he would travel too far. The drug dealer hadn’t chosen Brookland Comprehensive as a target simply because he’d been there. It had to be somewhere in his general neighborhood—not too close to home but not too far either.
The lights changed and the white car jerked forward, heading west. Alex pedaled slowly, keeping a few cars behind, just in case Skoda happened to glance in his mirror. They reached the corner known as World’s End, and suddenly the road was clear and Alex had to switch gears again and pedal hard to keep up. The car drove on, through Parson’s Green and down toward Putney. Alex twisted from one lane to another, cutting in front of a taxi and receiving the blast of a horn as his reward. It was a warm day, and he could feel his French and history homework dragging down his back. How much farther were they going? And what would he do when they got there? Alex was beginning to wonder whether this had been a good idea when the car turned off and he realized they had arrived.
Skoda had pulled into a rough tarmac area, a temporary parking lot next to the River Thames, not far from Putney Bridge. Alex stayed on the bridge, allowing the traffic to roll past, and watched as the dealer got out of his car and began to walk. The area was being redeveloped, another block of prestigious apartments rising up to bruise the London skyline.
Right now the building was no more than an ugly skeleton of steel girders and prefabricated concrete slabs. It was surrounded by a swarm of men in hard hats. There were bulldozers, cement mixers, and, towering above them all, a huge, canary yellow crane. A sign read: RIVERVIEW HOUSE. And below it: ALL VISITORS REPORT TO THE SITE OFFICE.
Alex wondered if Skoda had some sort of business on the site. He seemed to be heading for the entrance. But then he turned off. Alex watched him, increasingly puzzled.
The building site was wedged in between the bridge and a cluster of modern buildings.
There was a pub, then what looked like a brand-new conference center, and finally a police station with a parking lot half filled with official cars. But right next to the building site, sticking out into the river, was a wooden jetty with two cabin cruisers and an old iron barge quietly rusting in the murky water. Alex hadn’t noticed the jetty at first, but Skoda walked straight onto it, then climbed onto the barge. He found a door, opened it, and disappeared inside. Was this where he lived? It was already growing dark, and somehow Alex doubted he was about to set off on a pleasure cruise down the River Thames.
He got back on his bike and cycled slowly to the end of the bridge, and then down toward the parking lot. He left the bike and his backpack out of sight and continued on foot, moving more slowly as he approached the jetty. He wasn’t afraid of being caught. This was a public place, and even if Skoda did reappear, there would be nothing he could do. But he was curious, just what was the dealer doing on board a barge? It seemed a bizarre place to have stopped.
Alex still wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he wanted to have a look inside. Then he would decide.
The wooden jetty creaked under his feet as he stepped onto it. The barge was called
