There was a knock at the door. Alex went over and opened it. Mr Grin was standing outside, still wearing his butler’s uniform.
“Good morning,” Alex said.
“Geurgh!” Mr Grin gestured and Alex followed him back down the corridor and out of the house. He felt relieved to be out in the air, away from all the artwork. As they paused in front of the fountain there was a sudden roar and a propeller-driven cargo plane dipped down over the roof of the house and landed on the runway.
“If gring gly,” Mr Grin explained.
“Just as I thought,” Alex said.
They reached the first of the modern buildings and Mr Grin pressed his hand against a glass plate next to the door. There was a green glow as his fingerprints were read, and a moment later the door slid soundlessly open.
Everything was different on the other side of the door. From the art and elegance of the main house, Alex could have stepped into the next century. Long white corridors with metallic floors. Halogen lights. The unnatural chill of air-conditioning. Another world.
A woman was waiting for them, broad-shouldered and severe, her blonde hair twisted into the tightest of buns. She had a strangely blank, moon-shaped face, wire-framed spectacles and no make-up apart from a smear of yellow lipstick. She wore a white coat with a name tag pinned to the top pocket. It read: VOLE.
“You must be Felix,” she said. “Or is it now, I understand, Alex? Yes! Allow me to introduce myself. I am Fräulein Vole.” She had a thick German accent. “You may call me Nadia.” She glanced at Mr Grin. “I will take him from here.”
Mr Grin nodded and left the building.
“This way.” Vole began to walk. “We have four blocks here. Block A where we are now, is Administration and Recreation. Block B is Software Development. Block C is Research and Storage. Block D is where the main Stormbreaker assembly line is found.”
“Where’s breakfast?” Alex asked.
“You have not eaten? I will send you a sandwich. Herr Sayle is very keen for you to begin at once with the experience.”
She walked like a soldier – back straight, her feet, in black leather shoes, rapping against the floor. Alex followed her through a door and into a bare, square room with a chair and a desk and, on the desk, the first actual Stormbreaker he had ever seen.
It was a beautiful machine. The iMac might have been the first computer with a real sense of design, but the Stormbreaker had far surpassed it. It was black apart from the white lightning bolt down one side – and the screen could have been a porthole into outer space. Alex sat behind the desk and turned it on. The computer booted itself instantly. A fork of animated lightning sliced across the screen, there was a swirl of clouds, and then in burning red the letters SE, the logo of Sayle Enterprises, formed itself. Seconds later, the desktop appeared, with icons for maths, science, French – every subject – ready to be accessed. Even in those brief seconds, Alex could feel the speed and the power of the computer. And Herod Sayle was going to put one in every school in the country! He had to admire the man. It was an incredible gift.
“I leave you here,” Fräulein Vole said. “It is better for you, I think, to explore the Stormbreaker on your own. Tonight you will have dinner with Herr Sayle and you will tell him your feeling.”
“Yeah – I’ll tell him my feeling.”
“I will have the sandwich sent in to you. But I must ask you to please not leave the room. There is, you understand, the security.”
“Whatever you say, Mrs Vole,” Alex said.
The woman left. Alex opened one of the programs and for the next three hours lost himself in the state-of-the-art software of the Stormbreaker. Even when his sandwich arrived, he ignored it, letting it curl on the plate. He would never have said that school-work was fun, but he had to admit that the computer made it lively. The history program brought the battle of Port Stanley to life with music and video clips. How to extract oxygen from water? The science program did it in front of his eyes. The Stormbreaker even managed to make geometry almost bearable, which was more than Mr Donovan at Brookland had ever done.
The next time Alex looked at his watch it was one o’clock. He had been in the room for over four hours. He stretched and stood up. Nadia Vole had told him not to leave, but if there were any secrets to be found at Sayle Enterprises, he wasn’t going to find them here. He walked over to the door and was surprised to find that it opened as he approached. He went out into the corridor. There was nobody in sight. Time to move.
Block A was Administration and Recreation. Alex passed a number of offices, then a blank, white-tiled cafeteria. There were about forty men and women, all in white coats and identity tags, sitting and talking animatedly over their lunches. He had chosen a good time. Nobody passed him as he continued through a Plexiglas walkway into Block B. There were computer screens everywhere, glowing in cramped offices piled high with papers and printouts. Software Development. Through to Block C – Research – past a library with endless shelves of books and CD-ROMs. Alex ducked in behind a shelf as two technicians walked past, talking together. He was out of bounds, on his own, snooping around without any idea of what he was looking for. Trouble, probably. What else could there be to find?
He walked softly, casually, down the corridor, heading for the last block. A murmur of voices reached him and he quickly stepped into an alcove, squatting down beside a drinking fountain as two men and a woman walked past, all wearing white coats, arguing about Web servers. Overhead, he noticed a security camera swivelling towards him. In another five seconds it would be on him, but he still had to wait until the three technicians had gone before he could sprint forward, just ahead of the wide-angle lens.
Had it seen him? Alex couldn’t be sure. But he did know one thing: he was running out of time. Maybe the Vole woman would have checked up on him already. Maybe someone would have brought lunch to the empty room. If he was going to find anything, it would have to be soon…
He started along the glass passage that joined Blocks C and D, and here at last there was something different. The corridor was split in half, with a metal staircase leading down into what must have been some sort of basement. And although every building and every door he had seen so far had been labelled, this staircase was blank. The light stopped about halfway down. It was almost as if the stairs were trying not to get themselves noticed.
The clang of feet on metal. Alex shrank back and a moment later Mr Grin appeared, rising out of the floor like a vampire on a bad day. As the sun hit his dead, white face, his scars twitched and he blinked several times before walking off into Block D.
What had he been doing? Where did the stairs go? Alex hurried down them. It was like stepping into a morgue. The air-conditioning was so strong that he could feel it on his forehead and on the palms of his hands, fast-freezing his sweat.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He was in another long passageway, stretching back under the complex, the way he had come. It led to a single metal door. But there was something very strange. The walls of the passage were unfinished; dark brown rock with streaks of what looked like zinc or some other metal. The floor was also rough, and the way was lit by old-fashioned bulbs hanging on wires. It all reminded him of something … something he had seen very recently. But he couldn’t remember what.
Somehow Alex knew that the door at the end of the passage would be locked. It looked as if it had been locked for ever. Like the stairs, it was not labelled. And somehow it seemed too small to be important. But Mr Grin had just come up the stairs. There was only one place he could have come from and that was the other side. The door had to lead somewhere!
He reached it and tried the handle. It wouldn’t move. He pressed his ear against the metal and listened. Nothing, unless … was he imagining it? … a sort of throbbing. A pump or something like it. Alex would have given anything to see through the metal – and suddenly he realized that he could. The Nintendo DS was in his pocket. He took it out, inserted the Exocet cartridge, turned i
t on and held it flat against the door.
The bottom screen flickered into life; a tiny window through the metal door. Alex was looking into a large room. There was something tall and barrel-shaped in the middle of it. And there were people. Ghost-like, mere smudges on the screen, they were moving back and forth. Some of them were carrying objects – flat and rectangular. Trays of some sort? There seemed to be a desk to one side, piled with apparatus that he couldn’t make out. Alex pressed the B button, trying to zoom in. But the room was too big. Everything was too far away.
He fumbled in his pocket and took out the earphones. Still holding the Nintendo against the door, he pressed the wire into the socket and slipped the earphones over his head. If he couldn’t see, at least he might be able to hear – and sure enough the voices came through, faint and disconnected, but audible through the powerful speaker system built into the machine.
“…in place. We have twenty-four hours.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s all we have. They come in tonight. At 0200.”
Alex didn’t recognize any of the voices. Amplified by the tiny machine, they sounded like a telephone call from abroad on a very bad line.
“…Grin … overseeing the delivery.”
“It’s still not enough time.”
And then they were gone. Alex tried to piece together what he had heard. Something was being delivered. Two hours after midnight. Mr Grin was arranging the delivery.
But what? Why?
He had just turned off the Nintendo and put it back into his pocket when he heard behind him the squeak of a shoe that told him he was no longer alone. He turned round and found himself facing Nadia Vole. Alex realized that she had tried to sneak up on him. She had known he was down here.
“What are you doing, Alex?” she asked. Her voice was poisoned honey.
“Nothing,” Alex said.
“I asked you to stay in the computer room.”
“Yes. But I’d been there all morning. I needed a break.”
“And you came down here?”
“I saw the stairs. I thought they might lead to the toilet.”
There was a long silence. Behind him, Alex could still hear – or feel – the throbbing from the secret room. Then the woman nodded as if she had decided to accept his story. “There is nothing down here,” she said. “This door leads only to the generator room. Please…” She gestured. “I will take you back to the main house, yes? And later you must prepare for the dinner with Herr Sayle. He wishes to know your first impressions of the Stormbreaker.”
Alex walked past her and back towards the stairs. He was certain of two things. The first was that Nadia Vole was lying. This was no generator room. She was hiding something. And she hadn’t believed him either. One of the cameras must have spotted him and she had been sent to find him. So she knew that he was lying to her.
Not a good start.
Alex reached the staircase and climbed up into the light, feeling the woman’s eyes, like daggers, stabbing into his back.
NIGHT VISITORS
Herod Sayle was playing snooker when Alex was shown back into the room with the jellyfish. It was hard to say quite where the heavy wooden snooker table had come from, and Alex couldn’t avoid thinking that the little man looked slightly ridiculous, almost lost at the far end of the green baize. Mr Grin was with him, carrying a footstool which Sayle stood on for each shot. Otherwise he would barely have been able to reach over the edge.
“Ah … good evening, Felix. Or, of course, I mean Alex!” Sayle exclaimed. “Do you play snooker?”
“Occasionally.”
“How would you like to play against me? There are only two reds left – then the colours. But I’m willing to bet that you don’t manage to score a single point.”
“How much?”
“Ha ha!” Sayle laughed. “Suppose I was to bet you ten pounds a point?”
“As much as that?” Alex looked surprised.
“To a man like myself, ten pounds is nothing. Nothing! Why, I could quite happily bet you a hundred pounds a point!”
“Then why don’t you?” The words were softly spoken but they were still a direct challenge. Sayle gazed thoughtfully at Alex. “Very well,” he said. “A hundred pounds a point. Why not? I like a gamble. My father was a gambling man.”
“I thought he was a hairdresser.”
“Who told you that?”
Silently, Alex cursed himself. Why was he never more careful when he was with this man? “I read it in a paper,” he said. “My dad got me some stuff to read about you when I won the competition.”
“A hundred pounds a point, then. But don’t expect to get rich.” Sayle hit the white, sending one of the reds straight into the middle pocket. The jellyfish floated past as if watching the game from its tank. Mr Grin picked up the footstool and moved it round the table. Sayle laughed briefly and followed the butler round, already sizing up the next shot, a fairly tricky black into the corner. “So what does your father do?” he asked.
“He’s an architect,” Alex said.
“Oh yes? What has he designed?” The question was casual, but Alex wondered if he was being tested.
“He’s been working on an office in Soho,” Alex said. “Before that he did an art gallery in Aberdeen.”
“Yes.” Sayle climbed on to the footstool and aimed. The black missed the corner pocket by a fraction of a millimetre, spinning back into the centre. Sayle frowned. “That was your bliddy fault,” he snapped at Mr Grin.
“Warg?”
“Your shadow was on the table. Never mind, never mind!” He turned to Alex. “You’ve been unlucky. None of the balls will go in. You won’t make any money this time.”
Alex pulled a cue out of the rack and glanced at the table. Sayle was right. The last red was too close to the cushion. But in snooker there are other ways to win points, as Alex knew only too well. It was one of the many games he had played with Ian Rider. The two of them had even belonged to a club in Chelsea and Alex had represented the junior team. This was something he hadn’t mentioned to Sayle. He carefully aimed at the red, then hit. Perfect.
“Nowhere near!” Sayle was back at the table before the balls had even stopped rolling. But he had spoken too soon. He stared as the white ball hit the cushion and rolled behind the pink. He’d been snookered. For about twenty seconds he measured up the angles, breathing through his nose. “You’ve had a bit of bliddy luck!” he said. “You seem to have accidentally snookered me. Now, let me see…” He concentrated, then hit the white, trying to curve it round the pink. But once again he was out by about a millimetre. There was an audible click as it touched the pink.
“Foul shot,” Alex said. “Six points to me. Does that mean I get six hundred pounds?”
“What?”
“The foul is worth six points to me. At a hundred pounds a point—”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Saliva flecked Sayle’s lips. He was staring at the table as if he couldn’t believe what had happened.
His shot had exposed the red ball. It was an easy shot into the top corner and Alex took it without hesitating. “And another hundred makes seven hundred,” he said. He moved down the table, brushing past Mr Grin. Quickly he judged the angles. Yes…
He got a perfect kiss on the black, sending it into the corner with the white spinning back for a good angle on the yellow. One thousand four hundred pounds plus another two hundred when he dropped the yellow immediately afterwards. Sayle could only watch in disbelief as Alex pocketed the green, the brown, the blue and the pink in that order and then, down the full length of the table, the black.
“I make that four thousand, one hundred pounds,” Alex said. He put down the cue. “Thank you very much.”
Sayle’s face had gone the colour of the last ball. “Four thousand…! I wouldn’t have gambled if I’d known you were this bliddy good,” he said. He went over to the wall and pressed a button. Part of the floor slid back and the entire billiard-table disappea
red into it, carried down by a hydraulic lift. When the floor slid back, there was no sign that it had ever been there. It was a neat trick. The toy of a man with money to burn.
But Sayle was no longer in the mood for games. He threw his billiard-cue over to Mr Grin, hurling it almost like a javelin. The butler’s hand flicked out and caught it. “Let’s eat,” Sayle said.
* * *
The two of them sat at opposite ends of a long glass table in the room next door while Mr Grin served smoked salmon, then some sort of stew. Alex drank water. Sayle, who had cheered up once again, had a glass of vintage red wine.
“You spent some time with the Stormbreaker today?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And…?”
“It’s great,” Alex said, and meant it. He still found it hard to believe that this ridiculous man could have created anything so sleek and powerful.
“So which programs did you use?”
“History. Science. Maths. It’s hard to believe, but I actually enjoyed them!”
“Do you have any criticisms?”
Alex thought for a moment. “I was surprised it didn’t have 3D acceleration.”
“The Stormbreaker is not intended for games.”
“Did you consider a headset and integrated microphone?”
“No.” Sayle nodded. “It’s a good idea. I’m sorry you’ve only come here for such a short time, Alex. Tomorrow we’ll have to get you on to the Internet. The Stormbreakers are all connected to a master network. That’s controlled from here. It means they have free twenty-four-hour access.”
“That’s cool.”
“It’s more than cool.” Sayle’s eyes were far away, the grey irises small, dancing. “Tomorrow we start shipping the computers out,” he said. “They’ll go by plane, by lorry and by boat. It will take just one day for them to reach every point of the country. And the day after, at twelve o’clock noon exactly, the Prime Minister will honour me by pressing the START button which will bring every one of my Stormbreakers on-line. At that moment, all the schools will be united. Think of it, Alex! Thousands of schoolchildren – hundreds of thousands – sitting in front of the screens, suddenly together. North, south, east and west. One school. One family. And then they will know me for what I am!”
Stormbreaker Page 7
