Scorpia

by Anthony Horowitz

  Mrs Jones had protested about all these arrangements. It was one of the very few times she had ever argued with her superior.

  “For heaven’s sake, Alan! We’re talking about Alex Rider.”

  “No, Mrs Jones. We’re talking about Scorpia.”

  There had been no more discussion after that.

  At half past eleven that night, just hours after the deaths at Heathrow Airport, two agents were sitting behind the front desk. Both were in their twenties, dressed in the uniform of security guards. One was plump, with short, fair hair and a childish face that looked as if it would never need a shave. His name was Lloyd. He had been thrilled to get into MI6 straight from university, but he was fast becoming disappointed. This sort of work, for example. It wasn’t what he had expected. The other man was dark and looked foreign; he could have been mistaken for a Brazilian footballer. He was smoking a cigarette, even though it wasn’t allowed in the building, and this annoyed Lloyd. His name was Ramirez. The two men had started their night shift a few hours ago. They would be there until seven the next morning, when Mrs Jones left.

  They were bored. As far as they were concerned, there was no chance of anyone getting anywhere near their boss on the ninth floor. And as if to add insult to injury, they had been told to look out for a fourteen-year-old boy. They had been given a photograph of Alex Rider, and they both agreed that it was crazy. Why would a schoolboy be gunning for the deputy head of Special Operations?

  “Maybe she’s his aunt,” Lloyd mused. “Maybe she’s forgotten his birthday and he’s out for revenge.”

  Ramirez blew a smoke ring. “You really believe that?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I don’t care. It’s just a waste of time.”

  They had been talking about the events at Heathrow. Even though they were part of MI6, they were too junior to be told what had really happened to the football squad. According to the radio, the players had picked up a rare disease in Nigeria. Quite how they had all managed to die at the same moment hadn’t so far been explained.

  “It was probably malaria,” Lloyd guessed. “They’ve got these new mosquitoes out there.”

  “Mosquitoes?”

  “Super-mosquitoes. Genetically modified.”

  “Yeah. Sure!”

  Just then the front doors swung open and a young black man swaggered into the reception area, dressed in motorbike leathers, a helmet in one hand and a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. There was a logo on his chest, repeated on the bag:

  The agents ran their eyes over him. About seventeen or eighteen years old. Short, frizzy hair and a wispy beard. A gold tooth. And lots of attitude. He was smiling crookedly as if he wasn’t just delivering fast food to a fancy flat. As if he lived here.

  Lloyd stopped him. “Who are you delivering to?”

  The delivery man looked taken aback. He dug into his top pocket and pulled out a grubby sheet of paper. “Foster,” he said. “A pizza wanted on the sixth floor.”

  Ramirez was also taking an interest. It was going to be a long night. Nobody had come in or out yet. “We’re going to have to take a look in that bag,” he said.

  The delivery man rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding me, man? It’s just a ham and cheese pizza, that’s all. What is this place? Fort Knox or something?”

  “We need to take a look inside,” Lloyd informed him.

  “Yeah. OK. Jesus!”

  The delivery man opened the bag and took out a litre bottle of Coca-Cola which he set upright on the desk.

  “I thought you said you only had a pizza,” Lloyd complained.

  “One pizza. One bottle of Coke. You want to call my office?”

  The two agents exchanged glances. “What else have you got in there?” Lloyd asked.

  “You want to see everything?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, we do.”

  “OK! OK!”

  The delivery man put down his helmet next to the bottle. He produced a handful of drinking straws, still in their paper wrappers. Next out was a rectangular card, about fifteen centimetres long.

  Lloyd took it. “What’s this?”

  “What does it look like?” The delivery man sighed. “I’m meant to leave it behind. It’s like … a promotion. Can’t you read?”

  “You want to come into this place, you mind your manners.”

  “It’s a promotion. We leave them all over town.”

  Lloyd examined the card. There were pictures of pizzas on both sides and a series of special offers. Family-sized pizza, Coke and garlic bread for just nine pounds fifty. Order before seven and get a pound off.

  “You want to order pizza?” the delivery man asked.

  He was rubbing the two agents up the wrong way. “No,” Lloyd said. “But we want to see the pizza you’re delivering.”

  “You can’t do that, man! That’s not hygienic.”

  “We don’t see it; you don’t deliver it.”

  “OK. Whatever you say. You know, I’ve been delivering all over London and I’ve never had this before.”

  With a scowl he took out a cardboard box, warm to the touch, and laid it on the reception desk. Lloyd lifted the lid and there was the pizza – a four seasons, with ham, cheese, tomato and black olives. The smell of melted mozzarella wafted upwards.

  “You want to taste it too?” the delivery man asked sarcastically.

  “No. What else have you got in there?”

  “There is nothing else. It’s empty.” The delivery man yanked open the canvas bag to show them. “You know, if you’re so worried about security, why don’t you deliver it yourself?”

  Lloyd closed the box. He knew he should do just that. But he was a secret agent, not a pizza boy! And anyway, the pizza was only going as far as the sixth floor. He could see the lift from where he was standing. There was a steel panel next to the door, marked with the letter G and then the numbers from one to nine. Each number lit up as the lift travelled and if the pizza delivery man tried to go any further, he would see. As for the stairs between the floors, they had been equipped with pressure pads and security cameras. Even the air-conditioning ducts running through the building had been alarmed.

  It was safe.

  “OK,” he decided. “You can take it up. You go straight to floor number six. You do not go anywhere else. Do you understand that?”

  “Why should I want to go anywhere else? I’ve got pizza for someone called Foster and she’s on the sixth floor.”

  The delivery man reloaded the bag and walked away.

  “You go through the metal detector,” Ramirez ordered.

  “You got a metal detector? I thought this was a block of flats, not Heathrow Airport.”

  The delivery man handed his helmet to Ramirez and, with the canvas bag over his shoulder, walked through the metal frame. The machine was silent.

  “There you are!” he said. “I’m clean. Now can I deliver the pizza?”

  “Wait a minute!” The fair-haired agent sounded threatening. “You forgot the Coke – and your promotions card.” He picked the two items up from the reception desk and handed them over.

  “Yeah. Thanks.” The delivery man began to walk towards the lift.

  He had known he would be stopped.

  Behind the wig and the black latex mask, Alex Rider heaved a sigh of relief. The disguise had worked. Nile had told him it would and he’d had no reason to doubt it. He had been careful to make his voice sound older, with an authentic accent. The motorbike leathers had thickened out his build and he was wearing special shoes that had added three centimetres to his height. He hadn’t been worried about his bag being searched. The moment he’d set eyes on them Alex had known that Lloyd and Ramirez were new to the game, with little field experience.

  If they had taken him up on his offer and demanded to call the pizza company, Alex would have given them a business card with the phone number. But it would have been Scorpia who answered. If they had been smart, the two agents might ha
ve telephoned up to the sixth floor. But Sarah Foster – the owner of the flat – was away. Her line had been switched from outside. The call would be redirected … again to Scorpia.

  Everything had gone exactly as planned.

  Alex had been taken from Malagosto to Rome, where he had boarded a flight with two Scorpia people he had never seen before. They had been with him at Heathrow, accompanying him through passport control to ensure there was no problem. How could there have been? Alex was in disguise; he had a false passport. And there seemed to be some sort of security alert at the airport – everyone was running around in circles. Doubtless it had been engineered by Scorpia.

  From Heathrow he had been taken to a house in the middle of London, catching only a glimpse of the front door and the quiet, leafy road before he was whisked inside. Nile had been waiting for him there, sitting on an antique chair with his legs crossed.

  “Federico!” He greeted Alex by the name on his fake passport.

  Alex said little. Nile swiftly briefed him. He was given another disguise – the pizza delivery man costume – as well as everything he needed to break into Mrs Jones’s flat and kill her. How he got out again would be his problem.

  “It’ll be easy,” Nile said. “You’ll just walk out the way you came in. And if there is any trouble, I’m sure you’ll cope, Alex. I have every faith in you.”

  Scorpia had already reconnoitred the flat. Nile showed him the plans. They knew where the cameras were, how many pressure pads had been installed, how many agents had been commandeered. And everything had been worked out, right down to the Coke bottle which Alex had deliberately left on the reception desk and which had been handed back to him without being passed through the metal detector frame. It was simple psychology. A plastic bottle filled with liquid. How could it possibly contain anything metallic?

  Alex reached the lift and stopped. This was the vital moment.

  He had his back to the two agents. He was standing between them and the lift, blocking their line of vision. He had already slipped the special offers card out of the canvas bag as he walked, and he was holding it in both hands. In fact, one side of the card peeled off to reveal a thin silver plate engraved with the letter G and the numbers one to nine. It was identical to the plate beside the lift. The other side was magnetic. Casually, Alex leant forward and placed the fake panel over the real one. It was held in place immediately. Sticking it there had also activated it. Now it was just a matter of timing.

  The lift doors opened and he entered. As he turned round, he saw the two agents watching him. He reached out and pressed the button for the ninth floor. The lift doors slid shut, cutting off his view. A second later, the lift jerked and moved up.

  The two agents saw the numbers changing beside the lift door. Ground … one … two… What they didn’t realize was that they weren’t following the real progress of the lift. A tiny chip and a watch battery inside the silver plate were illuminating the fake numbers. The real numbers were blocked out behind.

  Alex arrived at the ninth floor.

  The silver panel showed he had stopped at floor six.

  It had taken him thirty seconds to travel up from the ground floor. In that time, Alex had discarded the motorbike leathers to reveal, underneath, clothes that were loose, light-wearing and black: the uniform of the ninja assassin. He tugged off his wig and grabbed hold of the latex covering his face. It came off almost in one piece. Finally, he removed the gold tooth. The doors slid open. Once again he was himself.

  He had already been shown a floor plan of the entire building. Mrs Jones’s flat was to the right – and there were two unforgivable lapses of security. Although there were closed-circuit television cameras in the fire escapes, there were none in the corridor. And the agent standing in front of the door could see all the way from one end to the other, but he couldn’t see into the lift. Two blind spots. Alex was about to take advantage of them both.

  The agent on the ninth floor had heard the lift arrive. Like Lloyd and Ramirez downstairs, he was new to the job. He wondered why they had sent the lift up. Perhaps he should radio down and find out. Before he could make any decision, a boy with fair hair and death in his eyes stepped out. Alex Rider was holding one of the drinking straws that the two agents had seen but not examined. He had unwrapped it, and it was already between his lips. He blew.

  The fukidake – or blowgun – was another lethal weapon used by the ninjas. A needle-sharp dart fired into a major artery could kill instantly. But there were also darts that had been hollowed out and filled with poison. A ninja could hit a man over a distance of twenty metres or more without making any sound at all. Alex was much closer than that. Fortunately for the agent, the dart that he fired out of the straw contained only a sleeping draught. It hit the side of his cheek. The agent opened his mouth to cry out, stared stupidly at Alex, then collapsed.

  Alex knew he had to move quickly. The two agents downstairs would allow him a couple of minutes but then they would expect him to return. He grabbed the Coke bottle and opened it – not turning the lid but the bottle itself. The bottle came apart in half. Dark brown liquid poured out, soaking into the carpet. Inside the bottle was a package, wrapped in brown plastic, the same colour as the Coke. With the label covering most of it, the package had been completely invisible. Alex tore it open. There was a gun inside.

  It was a Kahr P9, double-action semi-automatic, manufactured in America. It was six inches long and, with its stainless steel and polymer construction, it weighed just eighteen ounces, making it one of the smallest, lightest pistols in the world. The in-line magazine could have held seven bullets; to keep the weight down, Scorpia had provided just one. It was all Alex would need.

  Carrying the canvas bag with the pizza, he went past the sleeping agent and over to Mrs Jones’s door. It had three locks, as he had been told. He lifted the pizza box lid and removed three of the black olives from the top, squeezing each one against a lock. The canvas bag had a false bottom. He opened it and trailed out three wires which he connected to the olives. A plastic box and a button were built into the bottom of the bag. Crouching down, Alex pressed it. The olives – which weren’t olives at all – exploded silently, each one a brilliant flare, burning into the locks. The sharp smell of molten metal rose in the air. The door swung open.

  Holding the gun tightly, Alex walked into a large room with grey curtains draped along the far wall, a dining table with four chairs, and a suite of leather sofas. It was lit by a soft yellow glow radiating from a single lamp. The room was modern and sparsely furnished; there was little in it that told him any more about Mrs Jones than he already knew. Even the pictures on the walls were abstracts, blobs of colour that gave nothing away. But there were clues. He saw a photograph on a shelf, a younger Mrs Jones – actually smiling – with two children, a boy and a girl aged about six and four. A nephew and a niece? They looked a lot like her.

  Mrs Jones read books; she had an expensive television and a DVD player; and there was a chessboard. She was halfway through a game. But who with? Alex wondered. Nile had told him she lived alone. He heard a soft purring and noticed a Siamese cat stretched out on one of the sofas. That was a surprise. He hadn’t expected the deputy head of MI6 Special Operations to need companionship of any sort.

  The purring grew louder. It was as if the cat were trying to warn its owner that he was there; and, sure enough, a door opened on the other side of the room.

  “What is it, Q?”

  Mrs Jones walked in. Approaching the cat, she suddenly saw Alex and stopped.

  “Alex!”

  “Mrs Jones.”

  She was wearing a grey silk dressing gown. Alex suddenly saw a snapshot of her life and the emptiness at the heart of it. She came home from work, had a shower, ate dinner on her own. Then there was the chess game … maybe she was playing over the Internet. News at Ten on the television. And the cat.

  She paused in the middle of the room. She didn’t seem alarmed. There was nothing she could d
o – certainly no panic button or alarm she could reach. Her hair was still wet from the shower; Alex noticed her bare feet. He raised his hand and she saw the gun.

  “Did Scorpia send you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “To kill me.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded as if she understood why this should be so. “They told you about your father,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Alex.”

  “Sorry you killed him?”

  “Sorry I didn’t tell you myself.”

  She didn’t try to move; she simply stood there, facing him. Alex knew he didn’t have much time. Any moment now the lift might return to the ground floor. As soon as the agents saw he wasn’t in it, they would raise the alarm. They might already be on their way up.

  “What happened to Winters?” she asked. Alex didn’t know whom she meant. “He was outside the door,” she explained.

  Winters was the third agent.

  “I knocked him out.”

  “So you got past the two downstairs. You came up here. And you broke in.” Mrs Jones shrugged. “Scorpia have trained you well.”

  “It wasn’t Scorpia who trained me, Mrs Jones: it was you.”

  “But now you’ve joined Scorpia.”

  Alex nodded.

  “I can’t quite picture you as an assassin, Alex. I realize you don’t like me – or Alan Blunt. I can understand that. But I know you. I don’t think you have any idea what you’ve got yourself into. I bet Scorpia were all smiles; I’m sure they were delighted to see you. But they’ve been lying to you—”

  “Stop it!” Alex’s finger tightened on the trigger. He knew that she was trying to make it difficult for him. He had been warned that this was what she would do. By talking to him, by using his first name, she was reminding him that she wasn’t just a paper cut-out, a target. She was sowing doubts in his mind. And, of course, she was playing for time.

  Nile had told him to do it quickly, the instant they met. Alex realized that this was already going wrong; she had already gained the upper hand – even though he was the one with the gun. He reminded himself of what Mrs Rothman had shown him in Positano. Albert Bridge. The death of his father. He was facing the woman who had given the order to shoot.