Far below, she was already developing her theme.
“The theme of my talk this evening is friendship. Who are the long-term partners, who can we still trust in a rapidly changing world?”
Her voice rang out, echoing around the great Assembly Hall. The words scrolled, line by line, up the Plexiglas teleprompter. Another page of general introduction. Then she would read the word that would spell out her death.
Alex Rider watched as Julius Grief crept around the side of the building, doing his best to keep out of sight on the other side of the parked cars and OBUs. The other boy was close enough for him to make out the light brown hair, the pale skin, and even his intense, cold-blooded gaze. But Julius hadn’t noticed him. He was in too much of a hurry, making up for lost time, and his attention was fixed on the way ahead, stepping over the cables that were strewn along the tarmac. Alex followed. He could feel the heat of the night bearing down on him. It was as if he were carrying the whole weight of the world on his shoulders, as if the coming storm were trying to pound him down.
On the other side of the wall, a major international speech was being delivered by the second-most powerful politician from the United States. Her words were about to cause a political firestorm. And here, out in the darkness, two identical twins were stalking each other, one of them with murder on his mind. What would a security guard have made of it? But there were no closed-circuit TV cameras back here, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around apart from the television crews, locked up in their steel boxes. Why should there have been? There was surely only one way into the Assembly Hall and that was around at the front.
And yet . . .
Alex saw the open door even as Julius began to make his way toward it. That was insanity. The whole place was crawling with police and security men. After all the preparation and with the speech meaning so much, were the authorities just going to let anyone stroll in?
Julius disappeared through the doorway. Alex allowed a few seconds to pass, but before he could sprint across the open space and go in himself, the worst happened and two armed soldiers suddenly appeared, walking around the corner, talking together. Alex ducked behind one of the parked cars, waiting for them to move on. But they didn’t seem to be in any hurry. They were standing right outside the door—it didn’t seem to bother them that it was open—and had chosen this moment to have a cigarette. Alex saw one of them produce a pack and offer it to the other. Both of them lit up. Alex was so close that he even caught a whiff of the burning tobacco cutting through the heavy air.
What should he do? Julius Grief would be well on his way to his position, wherever that might be. Eleven minutes—that was what Gunter had said—and at least six of them must have already passed. Alex was tempted to make himself known, to raise the alarm. But he knew it would do no good. The soldiers would probably speak little or no English. Even if they did, it was unlikely they would believe a fifteen-year-old boy. He would be arrested and dragged out of the area and by the time he had spoken to someone in authority, the American secretary of state would be dead.
Of course, Scorpia’s plan would still have failed. Alex would be able to prove that he hadn’t been involved and the so-called Horseman file would be useless. But that wasn’t enough. In the confusion, after the shot had been fired, Julius Grief might escape. Razim had already said that he was planning to slip away to another country. Alex had already decided. That wasn’t going to happen.
He looked around him, searching for a stone, a brick, anything heavy. It was hard to see in the darkness, but he noticed a shard of light glinting off a steel nut that must have come unscrewed from a piece of equipment. Alex reached out and took it, balancing it in the palm of his hand. Yes. It would do. He twisted around and threw it with all his strength. The nut arced through the darkness and hit the side of a car, denting the metalwork. The noise was loud enough to make the two soldiers jump. At once, they dropped their cigarettes and hurried forward to see what had happened. Alex watched them go past, then darted over to the door. He didn’t need to be careful anymore. Julius Grief would be well ahead of him by now. The real worry was that he might already be too late.
And now he understood why no one had shown any interest in the open door. It led into a narrow service room, hardly more than a corridor, illuminated by two bare lightbulbs dangling on wires. There were a couple of metal buckets and a mop, some empty crates, and, about five yards away, a brick wall with a row of hooks and a pair of dirty overalls hanging above the floor. Some old furniture—folding chairs and filing cabinets—had been stored on one side. A row of very old, dusty fuse boxes lined the other. It was nothing more than a dead end. The corridor went nowhere.
Alex would have moved on. He would have thought he’d made a mistake. But he recognized the room. He had seen it in one of the photographs in Gunter’s desk. He stepped inside. Julius Grief had definitely come in here—but how could he possibly have disappeared? Alex had watched him come in here. He had been watching the entrance ever since. There were no other doors; there was no other way out. If Julius had slipped back out again, Alex would have seen him.
The hooks.
It seemed like years ago that Alex had been in the office at Cairo College. Razim had boasted that he had manipulated Alex from the start—but breaking in had surely been the one thing that he couldn’t have foreseen. Razim had arranged for him to come to the school. The fake telephone call had led him to the House of Gold. But nobody could have guessed that he would use one of Smithers’s gadgets to get into the office. And so it surely followed that whatever he had found in the secret drawer must actually mean something. It hadn’t been left there for him to find.
The newspaper—the
Washington Post
—must have been reporting the visit of the secretary of state. The pictures of the Assembly Hall . . . that was where her speech was taking place. This room. And the photograph of a hook shaped like a swan’s neck. It was identical to the ones he was looking at now.
Alex had moved forward even before he had arrived at the end of his thought process. He reached out and grabbed one of the hooks, then another. He was expecting them to twist and turn, but in fact the third one pulled down like an oversized switch. He heard a click and a section of the wall swung open, revealing a metal staircase constructed between two solid concrete walls, so narrow that he would have to turn sideways to climb it.
At once he understood the cleverness of Scorpia’s plan. How do you put an assassin inside a building that will be surrounded, searched from top to bottom, kept under constant surveillance, and locked up for twenty-four hours? Answer—you build a secret passage weeks or months before your target arrives. Alex had no doubt at all that the sniper rifle had been concealed here, ready for Julius Grief to find and to carry up with him. No wonder he had been empty-handed when he had gone in. All he had to do was pick it up, climb to a good vantage point, and fire. He wouldn’t even have to leave if he didn’t want to. He could stay completely hidden for days.
Alex was already climbing the staircase, which had been built between the inner and outer shell of the Assembly Hall in a space that might have been used for pipework or perhaps to help with the circulation of cool air. There were no lights, and after about ten steps away from the secret opening, he was plunged into blackness. Presumably Julius had brought a flashlight. But Alex didn’t need to see. The staircase was made out of metal slabs, each one placed at a regular interval so that provided he kept the same rhythm, moving his feet the same distance, he wouldn’t stumble or fall. The walls on either side helped too, keeping him wedged in place. He was completely blind, but it didn’t matter. He knew where he was going and what he had to do.
He continued up, knowing from the ache in his legs that the staircase was taking him all the way to the top of the Assembly Hall. He felt himself curving around and guessed that he was inside the dome. He hadn’t been counting but he knew he must have climbed at least two hundred steps. How much time had it taken? That didn’t matter, provided he wasn’t already too late.
He saw light at the same time as he heard a voice—a woman speaking in an American accent, a long way away, as if on the other side of a curtain.
“. . . the United States has always valued its special relationships with countries all over the world. However, I believe that with the shift in global power, we have to look at those relationships again . . .”
Alex reached into his waistband and drew out the Tokarev TT-33 that he had taken from Gunter. Clutching it in his hand, he edged forward. Part of him was screaming at him to hurry. But at the same time he knew he could make no noise. He was moving toward an entrance . . . not a door but a jagged opening cut into the brickwork, barely big enough to crawl through. The light was flickering, as if projected from a television screen.
“One country in particular has, in my view, failed to move forward with the times . . .”
Alex looked through the doorway and saw Julius Grief lying on his stomach with the sniper rifle that Alex himself had once handled pressed against his shoulder, the tip of the barrel resting on a narrow, slitlike window at floor level. Julius was wearing latex gloves . . . He wouldn’t leave his own fingerprints on the stock or the trigger.
“That country is our friend and will remain our friend. But I think it is time to recognize that it no longer has very much influence on international affairs . . .”
The control room was completely circular, like an upturned bowl, and looked as if it hadn’t actually been used for years. It had a shabby gray carpet, banks of old machinery, pulleys and wheels, electric generators, and tin boxes that might contain air-conditioning units. All of these were connected by a tangle of pipes and cables. Julius was lying with his feet toward Alex. Looking over his shoulder, out the window, Alex saw what he was aiming at: a huge head, a smart-looking woman with silver hair. No. That was the television screen. The actual target was much smaller, standing in front of it, leaning on a lectern. The secretary of state. He could imagine the crosshairs in the scope centering on her head.
“We all know which country I’m referring to . . .”
Alex saw Julius tighten his grip on the rifle and knew that the moment had come and that he had to act.
“Julius!” he shouted.
On the stage, the woman heard the shout. It had broken through the silence of the auditorium. She paused and looked up.
Julius Grief reacted with incredible speed. He had been about to fire at his target, but instead he whipped around like an injured snake, turning the gun on Alex. Alex ducked back into the darkness as Julius fired, the sound of the bullet explosive in the small space. The gunshot was incredibly loud—purposefully so. It had always been part of Scorpia’s plan to cause panic, to help Julius and Gunter to make their escape.
The secretary of state never uttered the word
Britain
. Her security men were already on the stage, rushing toward her, forming a protective human shield, covering every angle. In an instant, she had disappeared from sight. It took the audience a few more seconds to realize what had happened. The people in the front seats were the first to get to their feet, pushing sideways, fighting with each other in their hurry to get out. Panic spread like some incredible virus, rippling in every direction, transforming the crowd which seconds before had been seated and silent into a seething, surging mass.
Grief’s first bullet had missed Alex, smashing into the brickwork above his head even as he had pulled back. Instantly, he reloaded. Alex had misjudged his own movement. Either a piece of broken pipe or a part of the wall—it was impossible to tell in the darkness—had jabbed into his right arm, sending a bolt of pain all the way up to his shoulder, numbing him. He was forced to waste precious seconds recovering, then lunged back into the control room, knowing that the narrow entrance would slow him down and that Julius would have the advantage over him.
Sure enough, as he reentered the circular chamber, he saw that Julius had already reloaded and that the gun was aimed directly at him, no more than a few feet away. At this range, it would be impossible to miss. He saw death in the other boy’s eyes.
And then the door—the real door to the room—flew open and the CIA man who had been standing guard burst in. He was young, in his twenties, with the same clean-cut, boyish looks that all the agents seemed to share. There was a gun clasped in his hands. He had taken up a stance with his legs apart, ready to fire.
For two or maybe three seconds, nobody did anything. Julius and Alex had been aiming at each other. The agent was right between them. He had a gun in his hand but didn’t know which way to turn it. It was obvious to him that there had been a major security breach, but what he was seeing didn’t make any sense. He was looking at two boys, identically dressed in some sort of school uniform, identical to each other in every way. All his training and years of experience in the field hadn’t prepared him for anything like this.
It was the weapon that decided him. Someone had just taken a shot at the secretary of state, and although one of these kids had a pistol, the other was holding a rifle. He must be the enemy. The agent brought his gun around. Julius did the same and he was the first to fire. The bullet smashed into the man’s chest, throwing him back toward Alex. The two of them fell backward. The dead man was on top of him, pinning him down but at the same time shielding him from any further shots. Julius realized he had run out of time. He had to leave. He threw the rifle down and ran out the door that the agent had opened. Alex clambered to his feet and went after him.