The banker lowered the gun. “Well, that’s that,” he said. He didn’t sound too happy, but then he had no reason to be. The police boats were drawing closer. In just a few minutes, he would be under arrest once again.
“Why did you do it?” Alex asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“You saved me.”
“That man was going to strangle you.”
“Yes. But didn’t you want him to? He was helping you get away.”
“Is that what you think?” The banker smiled. Alex got the impression that it was something he didn’t do very often. “You think these men were working for me?”
“Weren’t they?”
“They kidnapped me. I had never seen them before in my life. At first, I thought you were genuine paramedics. That’s why I went with you. But the Colonel told me the moment I came out of my cell. They were going to force me to give them my money. They would have tortured me to find out where it was. So actually, I was quite glad to shoot him.”
Alex looked around him—at Charlie, stretched out on the deck. Sykes wasn’t moving. He might be dead. Khyber and Gareth were both whimpering, gasping for breath. Two police launches had reached the boat and he saw Danny sitting in one of them, soaking wet and handcuffed. And finally there was Sir Frederick Meadows in his expensive suit, blinking behind his glasses, still holding the gun.
“Did you really take it?” Alex asked. “The money.”
“Yes, I did. A hundred and twenty million pounds. More money than you can begin to imagine.”
“What were you going to do with it?”
“Well, you probably won’t believe me, but I wanted to give it all to charity.”
“Really?” Alex was amazed.
“Absolutely. The fun of it was actually stealing it, doing it under everyone’s noses without getting caught. I didn’t particularly want it for myself.” Meadows smiled again, a little sadly this time. “Of course, that won’t make any difference. They’ll still put me in prison—but it won’t be so bad. I was at boarding school for ten years, so I know what it’s like.”
The first of the policemen climbed on board, followed by several others. Alex watched as the gang was arrested and Sir Frederick was led away. One of the officers came over to him. “You’re Alex Rider?”
“Yes.”
The policeman shook his head in disbelief. “We were told you might be on board. We’re to take you back downriver. You have an urgent meeting.”
“With MI6.”
“No. With a dentist.”
So there was to be no escape after all. Alex climbed down into the police launch and a moment later they were skimming across the water, heading back the way they had come.
SECRET WEAPON
1
THE MAN WITH THE two missing teeth had thought a great deal about killing Alex Rider. He had imagined it. He had planned it. And quite soon he was going to do it. There was just one problem. At the moment he was locked up in a maximum-security prison in South Yorkshire. He had only been there for three months. He had been sentenced to twenty years.
That would make him forty-eight when he came out. Middle-aged!
His name was Jake Edwards, although it had been a long time since anyone had called him that. Right now he was prisoner A8793WS. His skin had already gone pale from the amount of time he had spent inside: twenty hours a day locked up in a cell with two bunks and a toilet, which left just four hours divided between the prison workshop, the education center, and the exercise yard. The prison food hadn’t helped either. He had been thin and unhealthy-looking when he went in, but now his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. Not that she would have anyway. She had walked out when he was three years old.
Jake had been fostered and brought up in the housing projects in Dagenham, east of London. His new parents had done their best for him, but it was as if there was some sort of infection in his blood. At school he had been difficult and disruptive. Though small for his age—smoking hadn’t helped—he knew how to use his fists, and the other children were careful to keep their distance. By the time he was ten, he had become the head of a gang of bullies and misfits who enjoyed hurting anyone unlucky enough to get in their way. He had stopped even pretending to do any work. Why did he need school? He had been excluded from two of them and knew that there were plenty of ways to earn a living that didn’t involve math or science or reading or any of the dreary things that were thrown at him in class.
He was eleven years old when he first became involved in drugs. There was a gang—a real gang—in the neighborhood where he lived, and Jake was thrilled when he was asked to join them. A small, sickly boy was exactly what they needed. This was how it worked. The customer would draw up in his car and hand over the money to the dealer, paying for a “twenty bag” or a “forty bag” or however many grams he needed. Once the dealer had the money, he would signal to Jake, who was waiting at a corner, usually smoking. The dealer would walk away and only then would Jake come forward with the product. That way, the dealer was protected if there was a police ambush, and because Jake was underage, there was a limit to the amount of time he could spend in jail.
Jake sold drugs. He took drugs. As far as he was concerned, it would have been stupid not to. By the time he reached his teens, his two front teeth had rotted away, his eyes had gone a strange shade of yellow, and he had lost most of his hair. As if to make up for the collapse in his appearance, he had become interested in body piercing. He had five studs in his ear and others on his tongue, the side of his nose, and his nipples. He really liked this new image even though to everyone else, including his horrified foster parents, it simply looked as if his body was falling to pieces and he had made a desperate attempt to pin it back together again. He started seeing a girl called Lucy and had LOOSIE tattooed on his arm. It was a shame that he had never learned to spell.
Jake did well as a criminal—certainly better than he had ever done at school—and he was lucky. One summer, when he was sixteen, all his bosses got wiped out in a gang war, and this left him free to go into business for himself. He started selling drugs on his own behalf, although he was smart enough to keep well clear of his old stomping grounds, moving his operation to the other side of the city. He settled in Putney, in the west of London. His customers were the kids in the local schools, the young men and women on their way to the clubs . . . anyone, actually, who wanted to sniff, smoke, or inject what he had to sell. Nobody knew him as Jake anymore. He was known by the name of the car he drove when he did his rounds.
People called him Skoda.
And Skoda had one remarkable idea that would serve him well for years to come. He needed a base where he could prepare the drugs he was selling. This meant cutting them down. The various white crystals that came into his hands had been smuggled all the way from South America, and once he had them, he added glucose, baking powder, dried milk, even rat poison . . . anything to make them go farther. By this simple method he could double or triple his profits, and what did he care if he was ripping off his customers, threatening their health at the same time?
His brainwave was to buy a boat, a barge called Blue Shadow, that happened to be moored on the River Thames close to Putney Bridge. Working quietly and using suppliers from all over London, he converted it into a floating laboratory with glass flasks, weighing machines, Bunsen burners . . . everything he needed. It was the last place the police would have thought of looking, which was quite ironic, because it was close to a major conference center that they often used. It amused Skoda to think that while they were all gathered there, going on about the “War on Drugs,” he was actually continuing the war right under their noses.
Everything went well for Skoda until the day Alex Rider came along. Even now, Skoda wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He’d been enjoying a glass of gin with a friend of his—Beckett—the two of them measuring out the next bat
ch of drugs, when suddenly, without warning, the barge had begun to rise out of the water. It had been a moment of complete insanity, with cups and plates, jars and test tubes, pipes and burners all tumbling and smashing on the floor. Desperately, the two men had tried to get out onto the deck, only to find that the door was locked. Skoda’s world had been turned upside down—for real. He and Beckett had found themselves tangled together at the bottom of the cabin, screaming in fear as the entire boat was lifted out of the river into the air.
It was only much later, when he was recovering in the hospital, that he found out what had happened. Skoda had been selling drugs at a school in Chelsea, a place called Brookland. It turned out that one of the boys who went there had followed him back to Blue Shadow and somehow hooked it to a crane. The boy had climbed up to the control cabin at the top of the crane, started it up, and lifted the five-ton barge sixty yards into the air. And that wasn’t the end of it. The chain had snapped. The boat had plunged down—through the roof and into the conference center. The next thing Skoda knew, he was lying on his back with a broken arm, a broken leg, and a fractured pelvis, surrounded by about five hundred police officers lining up to arrest him.
All because of a fourteen-year-old boy!
That was the worst of it. Strangely enough, nothing had been written about it in the newspapers, and the kid’s name hadn’t been mentioned at all. But in the next couple of months, as he recovered, Skoda used his contacts on the street to begin making inquiries of his own. Apparently there was a boy at Brookland who had been involved in something strange just a few weeks before, a shoot-out at the Science Museum. Nobody knew who he was, but there was a whisper he was connected in some way to the security service. Skoda pushed a little harder. Someone knew someone who knew someone, and finally a name came up: Alex Rider. Skoda checked. Yes. There was an Alex Rider at Brookland, and he had been absent for a large chunk of the summer term. Skoda managed to get a photograph smuggled into the hospital and found himself examining a good-looking boy with fair hair and dark brown eyes. It was him. Somehow he knew it. And that was the moment he began to plan his revenge.
The story of his humiliation had followed him to HM Prison Doncaster, which was where he was being held. That was how it was in the criminal world. People knew things. It didn’t matter how they found out—they just did, and they never forgot. Skoda was mocked from the day he arrived. He wasn’t the big-deal drug trafficker that he pretended to be. He was the guy in the boat who had allowed himself to be beaten by a kid. Even the guards laughed at him, and at night, lying in his bunk, Skoda would feel hot tears of anger trickling down his cheeks. It wasn’t being in prison that upset him. It was how he’d gotten there.
He also knew how he was going to get out. Skoda wasn’t stupid. After all, the Blue Shadow idea had worked brilliantly until Alex Rider came along. Breaking out of a maximum-security prison wouldn’t be easy—not with steel doors, closed-circuit television cameras, sensors in the walls and the floors, guards patrolling every hour of the day and the night. But he’d worked out a way.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon and Skoda was out in the yard, along with another thirty men, all strolling around in the afternoon air, trying to catch a glimpse of a bird or a plane or anything that might remind them of normal life outside. The walls blocked out any view, and even the blue sky was framed by a twisting coil of razor wire. Armed guards in observation towers looked down on them as they walked aimlessly back and forward with nowhere to go. Prison really was a horrible place, Skoda thought. He would get out even if it killed him.
He glanced up at the nearest tower, then casually reached into his trouser pocket and took out a bright green object about six inches long. It was a makeshift knife—or shiv—that he had created for himself, a horrible-looking thing made up of a toothbrush with the handle melted and the blades from three safety razors embedded in the plastic.
This was going to hurt. But it had to be done. Skoda drew his head back and let out a bloodcurdling scream. Then he drew the knife across his own chest.
2
HE HADN’T CUT HIMSELF deeply, although there was a lot of blood. The moment he had screamed, alarms had gone off all over the yard and guards had come running out, herding the prisoners back to their cells. Skoda had collapsed. His hands were crimson. There was a bright stain spreading on his shirt. The knife lay on the tarmac nearby. Several guards came running over to him and soon he was surrounded.
“Help me!” he screamed. “I’ve been attacked! I’m dying! I can’t breathe! Someone tried to kill me!”
“Who was it?” The first guard to reach him was crouching down, examining the wounds. They didn’t look life-threatening at all.
“I didn’t see, sir. I was just walking, minding my own business. The next thing I know . . . they hurt me!” Skoda was weeping. Tears were also oozing out of his nose. He was squirming on the ground.
“You must have seen them!”
“No, sir. Honest! I just felt this terrible pain and then there were these horrible cuts in my chest.”
There is, of course, a code in prison. No matter what happens, nobody tells the guards anything. Nobody snitches. The guards knew that, so they didn’t ask any more questions. They scooped Skoda up and carried him over to the hospital wing.
It was exactly what he wanted. So far, his plan was working.
Two days before, another prisoner had been admitted into the hospital—and this was the man that Skoda wanted to see. His name was Harry Baker, but he was known to everyone as Spider because of the huge tattoo he had on his forehead. Harry had created it himself, using a sharpened paper clip to make the punctures and soot mixed with shampoo for the ink. It was a hideous thing, a great black tarantula that sat between his eyes with the front legs stretching out toward his ears. Harry had killed a policeman during a bank robbery and he was in prison for life, but that life had almost run its course. Only a week before, he’d had a major heart attack and the prison doctor had assured the governor that he would be dead by the end of the week.
Skoda and Spider were not friends. The two men had barely spoken—but as soon as he heard what had happened, Skoda had known what he had to do. He made the shiv out of a toothbrush. He stole a black felt-tip pen from the education center. He bribed a prisoner who worked in the hospital wing to tell him what he needed to know. And now everything was going according to plan.
Skoda was examined by the prison doctor. His cuts were hardly more than scratches that wouldn’t even need stitches, but he was given an injection, just to be on the safe side. His chest was wrapped in bandages. And because he was still in hysterics, it was agreed that he should spend the night in the hospital wing. He was placed in the same ward as Spider. There were six beds but only two patients . . . which was exactly what he had expected. The hospital was still part of a maximum-security prison. The windows were barred and the doors kept locked. But there were fewer guards. The atmosphere was more relaxed. After all, sick and dying men are unlikely to try to escape.
At six o’clock, Skoda was seen by the doctor and given a bowl of soup and some bread. The lights in the ward went off two hours later, although a single bulb was left on. It would glow all night. Skoda settled back. His head nestled against a pillow that was much more comfortable than the one in his cell. There was an ugly smile on his face. His smile was always ugly, thanks to his missing teeth. Slowly, he turned his head and examined the other man, who was lying two beds away. He could hear Spider wheezing. His chest was rising and falling but very slowly, with difficulty. He hadn’t spoken when Skoda arrived. Nor had he had anything to eat or drink. It was obvious that the end was fast approaching, but Skoda was relieved that he wasn’t dead yet. If he had been, it would have been impossible to murder him.
Skoda waited until the night was at its darkest and the silence at its most complete. Then he got out of bed and tiptoed across the ward. He stood looking down at the other man
.
“Cheerio, Spider,” he muttered. “Forgive me, mate. It’s nothing personal.”
He had carried his pillow with him. He took one quick glance at the door, then slammed it down on Spider’s face, holding it there with all his strength. Spider reacted at once, his body jerking, his hands desperately clawing at the fabric. But there was nothing he could do. He was lying on his back. Skoda was much stronger than him. It was all over very quickly. Skoda stepped back. The man in the bed lay still.
There could be no going back now. Skoda went back to his bed, replaced the pillow, then hit the alarm button set in the wall. There was one beside every bed, connected to the medical office just down the corridor. A few minutes later he heard the rattle of a key in a lock, the lights went on, and the door opened. Two men stood there, one a prison guard, the other a young doctor.
“What is it, Skoda?” the guard demanded. He looked suspiciously at the prisoner. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. “I hope you’re not wasting our time,” he added.
“No, sir!” Skoda jerked a thumb. “It’s Spider, sir. Just a moment ago he woke up. He was coughing and spluttering and then he made this horrible gurgling noise and now he’s gone quiet. I went over and had a look at him, but I don’t think he’s breathing . . .”
The doctor hurried over. First he looked into Spider’s eyes, then he felt for a pulse at the side of the neck. He knew at once it was over. “He’s dead,” he muttered.
“Dead?” Skoda’s voice was high-pitched and trembling. “Poor old Spider! He was my mate, sir. I can’t believe it!”
“You don’t need to upset yourself,” the guard muttered. “He didn’t have much time left anyway.”
“You’re not going to leave him in here, are you?” Skoda sounded terrified. “I can’t share a room with a dead man.”
Alex Rider--Secret Weapon Page 11