Point Blanc (2 page)

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
had
happened, that he didn't even cry out. He simply fell into the blackness
of the elevator shaft, bounced twice off the walls, then crashed into the solid
concrete of the basement, five hundred yards below.

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.

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 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.