Alex Rider--Secret Weapon

by Anthony Horowitz

  “Good afternoon, Alex,” the doctor said. When he spoke, he revealed slab-like teeth that might have been false. His voice was soft, slithering over his lips. “I’m Dr. Raymond Feng, and it’s a great pleasure to meet you.” He pointed at his dark glasses. “You’ll forgive me for not taking these off. I don’t mean to be rude, but the truth is I have a slight problem. I suffer from photophobia. It means that my eyes do not like the light. My father had the same trouble with his right eye. My mother, as it happened, suffered with her left eye.” He spread his hands. “When I was born, it was soon discovered that I was afflicted in both.”

  Nurse Wendy and Ivan had both left the room. Alex heard the door close behind him. He and the doctor were alone.

  “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, Alex,” the doctor went on. “The trouble is, you’ve taken a nasty blow to the head. Your car hit a traffic light and you were thrown forward in your seat. It’s lucky you had your seat belt fastened.”

  “Wait a minute!” There was something the doctor had just said that didn’t add up. Alex’s brain still wasn’t working properly and he had to struggle to work out what it was, but at last it came. “How could we have hit a traffic light?” he asked. “The nurse said we were on a motorway, and there are no traffic lights on motorways!”

  “Did I say traffic light?” The doctor stroked his beard. There was a solid gold signet ring on his fourth finger. “Maybe it was a road sign or another car. To be honest with you, I haven’t been given all the details. All I know is that you have a concussion and that’s confused you. You may be having issues with your memory. Please don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine. You just need a little time.”

  “Where’s my phone?” Alex asked. “Why won’t you let me call Jack?”

  “Surely Miss McDarling—Nurse Wendy—told you. Your phone was damaged in the accident. In fact, it was completely smashed.”

  Alex tried to work out how that might have happened. Surely, if it had been in his pocket, he would have been badly bruised too. He could only assume that it had somehow fallen out at the moment of impact.

  “You have to trust us,” the doctor went on. “Jack will come and visit you as soon as I think you’re well enough. Right now, you have to rest. We also have to work out how badly you’ve been hurt.”

  “I don’t feel as if I’ve been hurt at all.”

  “That’s often the way with head injuries. The brain, of course, feels no pain. You can hurt it without knowing you’ve done so and it’s actually very difficult to know how badly damaged it is. Do you remember what happened yesterday?”

  “No.” Alex hated having to admit it.

  “You don’t remember coming in the car from the airport?”

  An airport! A soon as Feng spoke the word, Alex had a flash of memory. For a brief moment, he heard the sound of a plane touching down, the roar as the engines were put into reverse thrust. He had been abroad. He had just arrived home. And there was somebody waiting for him, standing beside a car on the runway. Alex thought he recognized him. But then the image was gone, snatched away before he had time to work out who it was.

  “There were three of you in the car,” Dr. Feng added. “The driver and the other passenger were both quite badly hurt . . . worse than you, as a matter of fact.”

  “Where were we going? Where had I been?”

  “I want you to tell me that, Alex . . . when you’re ready.” The doctor picked a bit of fluff off his sleeve. “Over the next few days, you and I are going to have several sessions together. You see, I’m not just a doctor of medicine. I also specialize in the mind. My job is to piece your memory back together again. You’re going to tell me everything you can remember about yourself and the missions you’ve been sent on. I want you to talk to me about your friends at MI6, the people you work for. It’s important you tell me everything you know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it will help me make you better. As soon as I feel that you’re on the road to recovery, I’ll arrange for Jack to visit you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.” The word fell heavily from his lips, as if he had been hypnotized. Alex wasn’t sure if he was awake or asleep. He felt trapped between the two. Everything he was seeing and hearing could have been real or could have been some sort of dream. “I’m not meant to talk about my work,” he added.

  “I know. But you can talk to me. You and I are on the same side!”

  Dr. Feng pressed a button on his desk. “I’ll ask Ivan to take you back to your room. I’m also putting you on a course of vitamins to help you regain your strength. They will be given to you in your apple juice so there won’t be an unpleasant taste. Just make sure you drink it with every meal.”

  An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Alex didn’t know why the old saying suddenly popped into his head. He said nothing.

  “You and I will have our first session tomorrow,” Dr. Feng went on. Alex was clearly going nowhere. “We’ll start with how you joined MI6—when you were just fourteen years old! I have to say, Alex, I’ve heard a lot about you and I’m delighted to finally meet you.”

  The door opened and Nurse Wendy came back in with Ivan, who took hold of the wheelchair. The doctor smiled, flashing his heavy white teeth.

  “You can take him back to his room, thank you, Ivan,” the doctor said. He turned to Nurse Wendy. “I’ll see him tomorrow at nine o’clock, Miss McDarling. Straight after breakfast. We have a lot of work to do!”

  “Yes, Dr. Feng.”

  As Alex was wheeled out, two thoughts went through his head. The first was that it was odd that the doctor had referred to Nurse Wendy as “Miss McDarling.” Shouldn’t he have called her “Nurse”? The second thing concerned Ivan: the nurse had said that he didn’t speak a word of English, but the doctor had just addressed him in exactly that language and Ivan had seemed to understand.

  Whichever way he looked at it, nothing made any sense to Alex. What exactly was going on at Bellhanger Abbey, and why was he here?

  He intended to find out.

  4

  THE CLOWN

  LATER, SOMETIME IN THE middle of the night, Alex woke up. He knew at once that something was wrong. The room was pitch-black. There was no light at all. And yet he could see. There was something strange about the silence too. When he called out for help, he couldn’t hear his own voice.

  There was a figure standing in the room at the foot of the bed. Alex hadn’t heard him come in. He could have been there all the time.

  A clown.

  He had a bald head, tufts of green hair, a grotesque white-painted grin, and a red rubber ball for a nose. He was wearing ballooning black-and-white trousers, a multicolored jacket with handkerchiefs trailing out of the pockets, and a spinning bow tie. There was an umbrella hooked over his arm. Alex couldn’t see his feet but guessed he would have elongated shoes.

  Alex had always hated clowns. Jack had taken him to the circus once, shortly after she had come to the house in Chelsea where he lived with his uncle. He would have been only seven years old. He still remembered the big tent, the trapeze artists, the jugglers, the contortionists, the fire eaters. But even then he had found the clowns creepy and almost painfully unfunny. They threw cakes at each other. They squirted soda siphons. They slipped on banana peels. And they drove silly cars. But they never made him laugh.

  This clown wasn’t even trying to do that. He was just standing there in the weird darkness that wasn’t dark, gazing at Alex with eyes that, behind the gaudy makeup, blazed with hatred.

  Somehow, without moving, the clown came closer. Alex felt himself being drawn toward him. The clown was growing larger and larger in his vision. Now Alex could see nothing else.

  “Who are you? Who are you working for?” The clown had asked the two questions without moving its lips and, stranger still, Alex was certain he recognized the voice. He heard a
roaring sound. Something flashed past—but so fast that he couldn’t see it.

  He just had time to realize that none of this was happening. That it was all a bad dream.

  Then he woke up.

  It was the morning of the next day.

  Dr. Feng’s Office: 9:05 A.M. (Session 1)

  DR. FENG: Good morning, Alex. Did you sleep well?

  ALEX: I slept okay.

  DR. FENG: And you’ve had breakfast?

  ALEX: Yes.

  DR. FENG: I hope you drank your apple juice.

  Subject failed to reply.

  DR. FENG: Well, let’s get started, shall we? What do you remember about your uncle, Ian Rider?

  Silence. Subject appears uncomfortable.

  ALEX: I don’t like talking about this.

  DR. FENG: It’s completely confidential, Alex. You have to let me into your mind. Trust me.

  ALEX: No.

  DR. FENG: You have to, Alex. You have no choice.

  A long silence. Finally, subject begins.

  ALEX: Okay. It’s strange, really. I was so close to him. I mean, he was my closest relative. But I never really knew him. My mom and dad died when I was very small, and Ian brought me up. That’s what I always called him, by the way. He hated being called “Uncle Ian.” He said it made him sound Victorian.

  He was always there for me when I was young. He took me on vacations with him, but they weren’t really vacations . . . like when you go to a hotel or sit on a beach. We went camping in the Sahara Desert, canoeing down the Mekong River in Vietnam. He took me skiing, scuba diving, climbing . . . and he was always making me learn new things. When I was eight years old, it was survival techniques in the Amazon jungle! He showed me how to collect water by making a still. It was a hole in the ground with a bowl in it and a sheet over the top. I knew what to do if I got bitten by a snake. Stuff like that. When we went climbing, he taught me how to survive an avalanche. What to do if I got lost. How to make a fire without matches. He always made it sound like a game, but at the same time he was deadly serious. I mean, this was the man who took me to Everest base camp when I was eleven. He wasn’t just having a laugh.

  And he was the same when we were together in London. He always wanted me to push myself. I never felt he was bullying me or forcing me to do things I didn’t want to do. I wanted to please him. And in many ways I was like every other kid. I watched TV. I played computer games. I hung out with my friends. It’s just that I was also going down to the gym twice a week. I was learning different sorts of martial arts. Ian encouraged me to speak foreign languages. I spent the whole of one summer in Paris and another in Madrid, and in that whole time I wasn’t allowed to speak or read a word of English. I wasn’t much looking forward to it, but I was staying with great families. I loved the cities. And in the end I could speak French and Spanish . . . as simple as that.

  DR. FENG: You were too afraid to argue?

  ALEX: I told you. I was never afraid of Ian. I respected him. And I did argue with him. The only trouble was, he made me do it in Japanese.

  DR. FENG: Why do you say you didn’t know him?

  ALEX: Because it’s true. I didn’t see him a lot of the time. He was always away on business. I thought he worked in a bank . . . That was what he told me, and why shouldn’t I have believed him? I was looked after by a sort of housekeeper he found. I suppose you could say she was like a nanny, except she wasn’t. Actually, she was an American student. She’d come to London to study, but she moved in with us. She got free rent and a bit of money in return for looking after me.

  DR. FENG: Her name was Jack Starbright.

  ALEX: Yes. I don’t want to talk about her. Not with you. Not with anyone. The point is that Ian was lying to her. In fact, he was lying to both of us. He didn’t work in a bank.

  DR. FENG: He was a spy. He worked for the Special Operations Division of MI6.

  ALEX: Yes.

  DR. FENG: And he wanted you to be a spy too.

  ALEX: I only realized that later. All the time we’d spent together, all the trips abroad, all the stuff he’d made me learn . . . He was preparing me. He wanted me to be like him.

  DR. FENG: How do you feel about that?

  ALEX: I wish he’d talked to me. I know he couldn’t tell me about his work, but after he died, after I found out the truth . . . it made me sad. We’d had all these great times together. Sometimes, when he took me away with him, I thought I was the luckiest boy in the world. But in fact he was manipulating me. Why did he get to decide what I was going to be? I suppose all adults—moms and dads—have dreams for their kids. But that doesn’t mean they have to trick them and lie to them and hide things from them. I don’t even know what Ian really felt about me. Did he like me or did he just want to use me?

  Subject breaks off. He seems upset by what he has just said.

  DR. FENG: Are you all right, Alex? Do you want to continue?

  Subject nods.

  DR. FENG: Tell me about the night he died.

  ALEX: Do I have to?

  DR. FENG: It’s important for your therapy. You got a telephone call, didn’t you. It was early in the morning.

  ALEX: No. I’m not going to talk about that now. Why do I have to stay here? Why won’t you let me call Jack?

  DR. FENG: You’re tired, Alex. You’re upset. I’m going to ask Miss McDarling to take you back to your room. We’ll talk more in a few days.

  Session terminated: 9:40 A.M.

  5

  THE CROW

  ALEX WAS STILL CONFUSED. He had told Dr. Feng much more than he intended to, but for some reason he had been unable to stop himself from talking. The words had fallen out of his mouth as if they were trying to escape on their own and he couldn’t hold them back.

  He was also sleeping far too much—more than was healthy—but at least he had managed to recover his strength. He was able to get out of bed and he was allowed to get dressed, though not in his own clothes. Nurse Wendy brought him a gray tracksuit and a pair of sneakers. It was the sort of outfit he might have worn in a soccer training camp, Alex thought. Or a prison.

  But slowly, he was getting better—he was certain of it—and sure enough, the following day, he was told that he could leave his room—not in a wheelchair but on his own two feet. The nurse had changed the bandage on his head, assuring him that his wound seemed to be healing nicely. Now she gave him a tour of the abbey, at the same time explaining the rules in her strange Scottish teacher’s voice.

  “Bellhanger Abbey is a top secret establishment,” she said. “It was a real abbey once. It was founded in the twelfth century and it was inhabited by Cistercian monks until the time of Henry the Eighth and the dissolution of the monasteries. I’m sure you learned about that at school, Alex.”

  “Yes.”

  Brookland School in Chelsea. His best friend, Tom Harris. Playing soccer for the first team. One by one, the images flashed through Alex’s mind, but somehow they seemed far away. It was as if they were memories that belonged to someone else.

  “MI6 took it over and turned it into a rest home for agents who had been injured in action,” Nurse Wendy continued. She was walking briskly in her white, overstarched uniform, her arms folded across her chest as if she wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. “As a matter of fact, your uncle stayed here once—although that was before my time. I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here. And the important thing is to get well as soon as possible.”

  Alex’s room was on the second floor—the same floor as Dr. Feng’s office. Once again, he went past Room 6, but as before, the door was closed.

  “Who else is here?” Alex asked.

  “I told you. I’m not allowed to say.”

  “You said there was another patient.”

  “There were three of you in that car, Alex.” Her little black eyes blinked rapidly. “I c
an’t give you any names, but I’m sure you’ll all meet in time.”

  They reached the staircase that Alex had seen earlier. The area at the bottom was actually an entrance hall with a heavy oak door leading out. The floor was made out of flagstones with a couple of thick sheepskin rugs. Two huge candlesticks stood on an antique wooden table to one side. As they walked down together, Alex almost felt that he was entering the world of Harry Potter. Add some talking portraits in frames and a few messenger owls and the picture would be complete.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to go outside?” Nurse Wendy asked.

  “Yes.” Alex was pleased. If they let him out of the building, he might get a better idea of where he was. It might also help him find a way to escape.

  The door was unlocked. It led out to the front of the abbey with the neatly trimmed hedges and the fountain that Alex had already seen from Dr. Feng’s office, and a bell tower looming overhead. Alex was glad to be outside, breathing in the fresh air with the sun on his face, but he knew that he was still a prisoner. He was standing in front of a fence that was fifteen feet high, with searchlights mounted on several of the posts, facing both toward and away from the abbey. The woodland on the other side of the fence looked dark and uninviting—even if he had been able to reach it.

  There were two guards standing beside the main gate, both of them dressed in army fatigues with rifles slung over their shoulders. One of them had an enormous dog, a German shepherd, on a lead. Seeing Alex, it pricked up its ears and growled.