Alex Rider--Secret Weapon

by Anthony Horowitz

  The doctor and the guard exchanged a look. “I’ll call for an ambulance,” the doctor said.

  “I can’t bear it!” Skoda climbed back into his bed and pulled the blanket up to his chin. “I don’t even want to look.”

  “You go back to sleep, Skoda,” the guard suggested. “We’ll get a stretcher and move him out of here.”

  The doctor and the guard left the room, once again locking the door. Skoda made sure he was alone. Then, at once, he leapt out of bed. It was time to put the second part of his plan into operation. First of all, he grabbed hold of Spider, dragged him out of his bed, and threw him into his own. Then he covered him with the blanket so that none of his face was showing. He took out the black felt-tip pen that he had stolen and went over to the corner of the room. There was a mirror hanging there. As carefully as he could, he drew a spider on his own forehead, placing it right in the middle with the legs pointing at his ears. Finally, he got into Spider’s bed, closed his eyes, and waited for his heart to beat a little more slowly. The secret now was to relax. He had to look dead.

  Skoda knew exactly what he was doing. He and Spider were both bald, thin, and unhealthy. They were about the same age. They were wearing the same prison pajamas. There wasn’t much light in the ward and they looked fairly similar to begin with. But it was the tattoo that actually clinched it. When people looked at Spider, all they saw was the ugly black decoration on his forehead, and they recognized him instantly. The same would have been true if he’d had a peculiar mustache or even a birthmark. When you look for someone in a crowd, you start with what’s obvious.

  Sure enough, when the guard and two paramedics arrived about half an hour later, they didn’t look twice. They simply lifted the man with the tattoo onto a stretcher and carried him out. They didn’t need to check that he was dead. The doctor had already done that when he’d first come in. Nor did they glance at the other prisoner, who was still hiding under his covers and seemed to be asleep. They just wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible so they could all get to bed.

  The supposedly dead man was taken out of the prison in an ambulance and left on a gurney in the morgue at Doncaster Royal Infirmary. It was well after midnight when a nurse noticed that the gurney was empty and an inquiry began to find out who had moved the body and where it might be. By then, Skoda had stolen the wallet and a complete set of clothes belonging to one of the patients in the hospital along with a car, parked outside, that belonged to a doctor. By the time the alarm was raised, he was already on the M1 motorway, heading for London.

  He didn’t know where Alex Rider lived.

  But he knew where he went to school.

  3

  ALEX WAS LATE. IT was one of those days when nothing had quite gone right. His alarm hadn’t gone off and Jack—who had come into his life long ago as his nanny and still occasionally found herself doing the same job—had to drag him out of bed with the breakfast getting cold on the table. He couldn’t find two pages of homework, an essay on renewable energy that had taken him an hour the night before. Then he missed the bus and had to run all the way to Brookland, the local high school, which today wasn’t local enough. He was crumpled and sweaty, and even then he might have made it to homeroom on time except, at the last minute, he was stopped in the corridor.

  “No running!”

  Hearing the voice, he stopped and turned. There was a woman standing behind him and although he hadn’t met her yet, Alex knew at once who she was. Everyone had been talking about the new substitute teacher who had turned up just a few days before. She taught chemistry, and suddenly half the boys in the school were saying it was their favorite subject. Miss Maxwell was young, still in her twenties, and incredibly good-looking, with shoulder-length blond hair, blue eyes, and movie-star lips. She dressed like a teacher in a gray tailored jacket, serious shoes, and glasses. But she walked like a model.

  She wasn’t smiling as she examined Alex. “You’re late,” she said.

  “That’s why I was running,” Alex replied.

  “Mr. Bray has made it clear that he won’t tolerate running in the corridors.” Henry Bray was the principal at Brookland. Everyone liked him, but it was true that he had his occasional crusades. It could be running, hands in pockets, chewing gum, cell phones. It depended on the time of the year. “You have to understand,” she went on. “It’s a health and safety issue. If you slipped, you could hurt yourself quite badly.”

  For a moment, Alex felt a sense of unreality that he knew too well. Only a few weeks before, he had been fighting for his life on Air Force One, the presidential plane, with a mad pop singer trying to strangle him. And now he was being warned that he might hurt himself running down a corridor! Sometimes it was impossible to connect the two worlds he inhabited, one minute a schoolboy, the next a very reluctant spy.

  “What’s your name?” Miss Maxwell asked him.

  “I’m Alex Rider.”

  “Oh yes!” She’d obviously heard about him. “You’ve missed some school recently.”

  “I’ve been away . . . sick.”

  “You seem to get sick a lot.”

  Alex shrugged. He didn’t enjoy telling lies. That was the worst part of what had happened to him. It was easier to say nothing at all.

  “Well, just be careful. This is the only warning you’re going to get, Alex. Remember—I’ll be looking out for you.”

  Alex wondered how anyone so pretty could be so severe. As a result of his confrontation with Miss Maxwell, he was late for homeroom and was given a detention. That was just the start of it. Geography, math, biology . . . Alex found himself struggling to keep up in every class. The trouble was, Miss Maxwell was right. He had missed so much school that he was falling far behind, and the only bright spot in the day came when he got a gold star for an essay he’d written on Russian politics and the collapse of the fleet at Murmansk. Alex couldn’t help smiling. What he’d learned about Murmansk hadn’t come out of a book. If it hadn’t been for him, Murmansk—along with half of Russia—would no longer exist.

  He was glad when lunchtime arrived, and after wolfing down his food, he strolled outside for a breath of fresh air. He was joined by Tom Harris, who was his best friend at Brookland. The two of them were almost exactly the same age—their birthdays were two days apart—and they had fallen into a friendship on the day they met. Tom was small and skinny, with messy black hair and freckles. Most of the teachers had given up on him . . . He was last in his class in every subject. But at the same time, everyone liked him. He was good at sports. He was funny. He’d been brilliant in the school play, and even if he never got a single A, everyone agreed he had a future as an actor.

  Tom was in a gloomy mood. “It’s not fair,” he said as he slouched on a bench at the bottom of the schoolyard.

  “What isn’t fair?” Alex said.

  “This trip we’re having to do this afternoon. We won’t be back until five thirty. It’s like having two extra hours of school. And it’s not as if we’re going anywhere interesting.”

  “We’re going to the V and A,” Alex said.

  “Exactly! What’s the point?”

  It was a history trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum. They were leaving at three o’clock. Alex had been looking forward to it, although he didn’t like to say so now.

  “I hate museums,” Tom went on. “My mom and dad used to take me all the time. Old paintings, old dresses, old bits of stone. They once took me to a museum of knitting. You probably think I’m making it up, but it was there, I swear to you, in Nottingham. I was so bored. It was like having a knitting needle driven into my brain. When they told me they were going to get divorced, you know what my first thought was? No more museums! But then I got worried that it would mean twice as many. They can take me alternate weekends . . .”

  “This one may not be so bad,” Alex said.

  But Tom was still complaining.
“They could have taken us in the morning. Or not at all. It makes you think, Alex. Being at school, you have no human rights at all.”

  The bell rang for the next lesson, and Alex and Tom began to move toward the main door. Alex certainly didn’t want to be late a second time. But as they went, something made him look back. There was a man standing close to the gate, on the other side of the fence that surrounded the school. Although Alex couldn’t be certain, he was fairly sure that the man had been there twenty minutes ago when they had come out. Why had he noticed him now? Perhaps it was because he was so still, unmoving. His eyes seemed to be fixed on Alex. He was dressed in a shabby coat with his hands in his pockets, but he was too far away for Alex to recognize him, and even as he looked, the man turned and walked away.

  Well, you’ve got all sorts of weirdos hanging outside schools. If the man really was up to something, he would have been spotted on the school’s cameras, and security would have come out to move him on. Alex put him out of his mind.

  But Skoda had seen him. Skoda had already made inquiries and knew where he was heading. Skoda had decided what he was going to do.

  4

  THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT Museum in South Kensington is so huge that you could spend a week there and still not see everything it contains. There are about 4.5 million objects on display in an area larger than ten football fields. As Alex followed the long underground passageway that led from the tube station to the museum entrance, he was thinking that this made a welcome break from ordinary school. There were thirty of them in the group, escorted by Mr. Kydd, who taught history, and Miss Maxwell. Alex wondered how she had managed to tag along. After all, she had barely been at the school for forty-eight hours. But at least she hadn’t told him off again.

  They were here to visit an exhibition called Seven Hundred Years of War. It was basically about weapons, and there were hundreds of them on display, from medieval bows to ultra-modern semiautomatic air-burst grenade launch systems. The collection had been drawn from many different cultures. It seemed that there wasn’t a country in the world that hadn’t gone to war at some time in its history. Japan had provided samurai swords, razor-edged fans, and battle pipes. There were spears from Africa, tomahawks from America, clubs and boomerangs carved by the Aboriginal people of Australia, silk garrotes that the Thugee cult had used to strangle their victims in India. The First and Second World Wars each had a room to themselves, with models and photographs of planes, rockets, tanks, frigates, and destroyers. There were glass cases filled with hand grenades, gas masks, pistols, knives, bayonets, and flamethrowers. It really was incredible how many different ways human beings had thought up to kill each other.

  The exhibition was arranged in a warren of rooms, spread out in the basement of the museum. Each room had a different theme, and Alex found himself fascinated as they moved among them. Even Tom seemed to be showing some interest, although he complained that all the weapons were locked away or fastened to the wall and that it would be much more fun to see some of them being demonstrated . . . particularly the flamethrower. They had arrived at three thirty and had a full hour and a half before the exhibition closed for the evening, after which they would return as a group to Brookland before they went home.

  Alex particularly liked some of the secret weapons that were on display. These had been designed so that at first sight they didn’t look like weapons at all. There was a flashlight from Korea that fired a bullet at the touch of a switch, and an umbrella from Bulgaria that shot a poisoned pellet from the tip. It had famously been used to kill a dissident writer in the middle of London back in the seventies. Back in the nineteenth century, someone had come up with another tiny gun that could actually be worn around a finger, like a ring. It was called the Dyson LePetit Protector Ring Pistol. And there were all sorts of devices invented by the British Special Operations Executive during the war: a spring-loaded cosh that leapt out of the sleeve, a dagger concealed in a pencil, a lipstick that fired tear gas. Alex couldn’t help but think of Smithers, who had supplied him with all sorts of bizarre gadgets for his various missions. Would they be on display here one day? he wondered. The exploding ear stud, the book with concealed knockout dart, the stun grenade key ring?

  Alex was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t notice that he had lagged behind. He was in a room dedicated to ninja weapons—the ninjas had lived in ancient Japan and were famous for their fighting methods. He looked up just in time to see the last members of his party leaving the room. It was almost five o’clock, and this section of the museum was closing for the day. The last thing he wanted to do was hold everyone up when they were in a hurry to get home, and he moved quickly to catch up, only to find his way blocked by a museum guard.

  “What is it?” Alex asked. He had barely looked at the man, who was wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, same as all the other museum staff. There was a radio transmitter hanging from his belt.

  “Are you with the Brookland school group?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to wait here a minute.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s been some damage done in the World War Two gallery. The museum director is on his way down.”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Alex said.

  The guard nodded briefly. “In that case, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I won’t keep you long.”

  A whole minute went by and Alex was aware that the basement was suddenly very quiet. He was tempted to push past the guard and rejoin the group, but he was nervous about making a bad situation worse. The man might claim he’d been attacked or something . . . and if it came to that, someone in authority versus a schoolboy, who would be believed? At the same time, Alex knew there was something wrong. The guard was looking at him strangely, and now it occurred to Alex that his uniform didn’t fit. The shirt and the trousers were both one size too large. His face was also unnaturally pale. It had all the color of a corpse. He was missing two teeth. Alex only noticed because the man’s lips had curled into an unpleasant smile. He was enjoying this.

  Alex realized he was in danger before he understood why. Suddenly he remembered the man he had seen standing outside the school and knew that this was the same man, and he had been held back on purpose. He was angry with himself. It was something he should have learned by now. Just because someone is wearing a uniform—a policeman, a fireman, a nurse—it doesn’t mean that’s what they are. He’d seen the clothes. He hadn’t examined the person inside them.

  It was too late now. The guard was already moving toward him, his face no longer concealing a grimace of pure hatred. Alex didn’t hesitate. He kicked out, his right foot lashing through the air. The guard had been expecting it. His hand swung down, catching Alex’s ankle. He twisted hard, then jerked upward. Alex lost his balance and was thrown backward. His shoulders slammed into one of the display cases, smashing the glass, which rained down over him. He slipped to the ground and lay there, momentarily dazed. Some of the ninja weapons had tumbled out: a length of chain, a blowpipe, and a handful of shuriken, five-pointed stars with razor-sharp edges, designed for throwing. The guard strolled to the other side of the room and drew a curved sword off the wall. Alex watched, fascinated, as the smooth silver blade came clear of its mountings.

  The guard weighed it in his hand. He stepped forward so that he stood over Alex, who was lying on his back, surrounded by broken glass. “You don’t remember me,” he said. His voice was trembling with excitement. There was insanity in his eyes.

  “Yes . . .” Alex was fighting for time, trying to work out what to do next. “You were at Madame Tussauds.”

  “What?” The guard frowned.

  “The Chamber of Horrors. Third from the left, next to Jack the Ripper—”

  The guard swung the sword in front of him. The blade was so sharp that Alex could almost feel it cutting the air. He knew he
had made a stupid joke, but he didn’t care. He wanted to annoy his attacker, to throw him off guard. That way, he would be more likely to make a mistake.

  “I was at Putney,” the guard said. “The Blue Shadow.”

  The Blue Shadow! Alex remembered the canal boat, the crane, the police conference, and at that moment everything made sense. “Skoda!” he muttered.

  “That was what people called me. I had a business. I had money. I had everything going for me—and then you came along! You tipped up the boat. You hooked me on a crane. How did you do that? Why did you do that?” The words were pouring out. “And because of you, I broke bones. I was in the hospital for five weeks. You ruined me.”

  “You ruined a lot of people . . . the drugs you were selling.”

  “I gave people what they wanted!” Skoda stopped. His eyes were wide. There was a vein beating in his forehead.

  Alex looked around him, wondering why nobody had come. Surely they would have heard the breaking glass. But it was late. The museum was emptying and they were far down in the basement. And what next? What happened now? It seemed to him that Skoda had been so intense, so determined to explain himself, he had forgotten the sword he was holding. He remembered it now.

  “This is all I want,” he rasped. “This is all I’ve dreamed about. Alex Rider.” He spoke the name with contempt. “I’ll go back to prison. I’ll be in prison for the rest of my life. But I won’t mind, knowing that you’re dead.”

  “You’re too late, Skoda,” Alex said, and then continued, speaking to someone in the door behind him, “I’m glad you’re here. You can take him now.”

  Skoda turned. It was the oldest trick in the book. There was no one there. He was distracted for just one second, but that was enough time for Alex to make his move, snatching up the chain and rolling to one side. Skoda knew he had been tricked, spun around, and slashed down with the sword. It missed Alex’s arm by an inch, the blade thudding into the wooden floor. For another precious few seconds it stuck fast, and by the time Skoda pulled it free, Alex was on his feet.