Scorpia

by Anthony Horowitz

  “Of course they’d have had injections,” the permanent secretary snapped, and Alex saw that he was no longer able to hide his anger. He wasn’t even trying. “They were in Nigeria. They wouldn’t have been allowed into the country without being inoculated.”

  “Yes!” The medical officer couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. “They’d have been inoculated against yellow fever.”

  “A month ago!” Kellner insisted.

  “Then the question isn’t how did they administer the poison,” Sir Graham said; “the question is – how do they prevent it working until a time of their choosing? That’s the secret of Invisible Sword.”

  “What else can you tell us, Alex?” Blunt asked.

  “You were talking about remote control,” Alex said. “Well, Mrs Rothman kept a Siberian tiger in her office. It attacked me and I thought I was going to be killed—”

  “Are you seriously asking us to believe this?” Kellner enquired.

  Alex ignored him. “But then someone came in and pressed a button on what looked like a remote control device. You know, for a TV. The tiger just lay down and went back to sleep.”

  “Nanoshells.”

  The young woman who was sitting in a corner and who had been examining Alex earlier had spoken the single word. She obviously hadn’t been considered important enough to be given a place at the table, but now she stood up and walked forward. She looked about thirty – after Alex, the youngest person in the room – slim and pale, wearing a suit with a white shirt and a silver chain around her neck.

  “What the hell are nanoshells?” the deputy prime minister demanded. “And, for that matter, who are you?”

  “This is Dr Rachel Stephenson,” the medical officer said. “She’s a writer and a researcher … a specialist in the field of nanotechnology.”

  “Oh, so now we’re moving into science fiction,” Kellner complained.

  “There’s no fiction about it,” Dr Stephenson replied, refusing to be intimidated. “Nanotechnology is about manipulating matter at the atomic level and it’s already out there in more ways than you would believe. Universities, food companies, drug agencies and, of course, the military are all spending billions of pounds a year on development programmes and they all agree. In less time than you think, the life of every human being on this planet is going to change for ever. There are some amazing breakthroughs on the way and if you don’t believe that, it’s time you woke up.”

  Kellner took this as a personal insult. “I don’t see—” he began.

  “Tell us about nanoshells,” the prime minister said, and it occurred to Alex that it was a while since he had spoken.

  “Yes, sir.” Dr Stephenson collected her thoughts. “I was already thinking about nanoshells when I heard about the gold particles, but Alex has made it all clear. It’s quite complicated and I know we don’t have a lot of time, but I’ll try to make it as simple as I can.

  “Injections must be the answer. What these people have done is to inject first the football players and then goodness knows how many children with gold-coated nanoshells.” She paused. “What we’re talking about here are tiny bullets – and by tiny I mean about a hundred nanometres across. Just so you know, one nanometre is a billionth of a metre. Or to put it another way, a single hair on your head is about one hundred thousand nanometres wide. So each one of these bullets is a thousand times smaller than the tip of a human hair.”

  She leant forward, resting her hands on the table. Nobody moved. Alex couldn’t hear anyone so much as breathe.

  “What might these bullets consist of?” Dr Stephenson continued. “Well, it’s anyone’s guess. But if you imagine a Malteser, it would be a bit like that. The inside would be what we call a polymer bead and might be made of something not very different to a supermarket carrier bag. Don’t forget, though, I’m only talking about a few molecules. The polymer would hold everything together and it would be quite easy to mix in the cyanide. When the polymer and the cyanide are released, the person dies.

  “And what stops it being released? Well, that’s the chocolate on the outside of the Malteser – except what we’re talking about here is gold. A solid gold shell, but so tiny you could never see it. All of this would have been done by Dr Liebermann, the man who was killed, using highly advanced colloidal chemistry.” She stopped again. “I’m sorry. I’m probably making it sound more complicated than it really is. Basically, what you’ve got is a bullet with the poison inside, and after that you fix a protein onto the outside, onto the shell.”

  “What does the protein do?” someone asked.

  “It guides the whole thing, a bit like a heat-seeking missile. It would take too long to explain how it works, but proteins can find their way around the human body. They know exactly where to go. And once the nanoshell was injected, the right protein would direct it straight to the heart.”

  “How many of these nanoshells would you need to inject?” Blunt asked.

  “That’s impossible to answer,” Dr Stephenson replied. “They’d be sitting right inside the heart. Once the poison was released, it would act almost immediately and you wouldn’t need very much of it. As a matter of fact, we’ve studied the effect of nanoshells on the human body, developing them as a cure for cancer. Of course, this is rather different because Scorpia are only interested in killing, but let me see…” She thought for a moment. “There’s not very much liquid in a BCG injection. Only about a fiftieth of a teaspoon. At a guess, I’d say you’d only need to add one part cyanide for every one hundred parts of the actual vaccine.” She worked it out and nodded. “That adds up to about one billion nanoshells,” she said. “Just enough to cover the head of a pin.”

  “But you said that the poison is safe. It’s protected by the gold.”

  “Yes. But I’m afraid that’s where these people have been so very clever. The polymer and poison mix is contained in the gold. It’s sitting inside the heart and it’s not doing anyone any harm. If you leave it alone, it’ll just pass out of the system in a little while and nobody will be any the wiser.

  “But Scorpia can break up the gold. And they can do it, like Alex said, by remote control. Have you ever put an egg in a microwave? After a few moments, it explodes. It’s exactly the same here. It could be microwave technology that they’re planning to use.” Stephenson shook her head, her long hair swaying. “No. Microwaves would be too low frequency. I’m sorry. I’m not really an expert on plasmon resonance.” She hesitated. “A terahertz beam might be the answer.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr Stephenson,” the foreign secretary said, “but you’re losing me. What are terahertz beams?”

  “They’re not much used yet. They sit between the infrared and the microwave bands of the electromagnetic spectrum and they’re being developed for medical imaging and satellite communications.”

  “So you’re saying that Scorpia could send out a signal using a satellite and it would break up the gold, releasing the poison…”

  “Yes, sir. Except they wouldn’t actually need to use a satellite. In fact, they couldn’t. The beams wouldn’t be strong enough. If you ask me, when those poor men got off the plane at Heathrow, there must have been some sort of satellite dish erected. It was probably put there a long time ago, on one of the buildings or perhaps up a mast, and they’ll have taken it down by now. But all they had to do was throw a switch, the terahertz beams would have broken down the gold and … well, you know the result.”

  “Is there any chance that the nanoshells could be broken up accidentally?” Sir Graham Adair asked.

  “No. That’s what’s so brilliant about the whole thing. You’d need to know the exact thickness of the gold. That tells you what frequency to use. It’s just like when you shatter a glass by singing the right note. If you ask me, Alex saw that same technology at work with that tiger. The animal must have had some sort of sedative in its bloodstream. They just had to press a button and it fell asleep.”

  “So if they’re not using a satellite,
what are we looking for?”

  “A saucer. It would look much the same as a satellite TV dish, only bigger. They’ve said they’re targeting London kids, so it will have to be somewhere in London. Probably mounted on the side of an office building. They may call it Invisible Sword, but I’d say it’s more like invisible arrows being fired out of satellite dishes. They shoot out in a straight line.”

  “And how long will it take for the gold to break up once the switch is thrown?”

  “A few minutes. Maybe less. Once the gold breaks, the children will die.”

  Dr Stephenson backed away from the table and sat down again. She had nothing more to say. Immediately everyone began to speak at once. Alex noticed some of the civil servants talking into mobile phones. The two women in black and white were typing furiously, trying to keep up with the babble of conversation. Meanwhile, the permanent secretary had leant across Alex, talking quickly and quietly to Alan Blunt. Alex saw the spy chief nod. Then the prime minister held up a hand for silence.

  It took a few moments for the clamour to die down.

  The prime minister glanced at his director of communications, who was looking down, biting his nails. Everyone was waiting for him to speak.

  “All right,” Kellner said. “We know what we’re up against. We know about Invisible Sword. The question is – what are we going to do?”

  DECISION TIME

  “You have to evacuate London.”

  It was Sir Graham Adair who made the suggestion. This was the result of his swift conversation with Alan Blunt. His voice was soft and measured, but Alex could sense the tension. The permanent secretary was as brittle as ice.

  “Scorpia has planned this at exactly the right moment. Four o’clock. Thousands of children will be out of school – on their way home. We have no way of knowing how far these terahertz beams can reach. There may be several dishes, mounted on buildings throughout the capital … near schools, near tube stations. No child in London will be safe. But as Dr Stephenson has just told us, provided they don’t come into contact with the beams, the poison will pass out of their systems eventually. We can keep them out of the city for as long as it takes.”

  “An evacuation on that scale?” The police chief shook his head. “Do you have any idea how much organization that will take? All of this is meant to be happening at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. We couldn’t possibly arrange everything in time.”

  “You could try…”

  “Forgive me, Sir Graham. But what reason, exactly, are you going to give? You’ll be closing down every school in the capital. Whole families will have to move. Where are they going to go? What are you going to tell them?”

  “We’ll tell them the truth.”

  “I don’t think so.” Alex wasn’t surprised that the director of communications had chosen this moment to re-enter the conversation. “You tell the British public that their kiddies have all been injected with some sort of nanoparticles, you’ll start a panic that will turn into a mass stampede,” he said.

  “Better that than the streets filled with corpses,” Blunt muttered.

  “And how do you know that Scorpia won’t throw the switch anyway?” Kellner continued. “If you go on television and announce you’re evacuating the capital, maybe they’ll decide to go ahead with their threat a few hours early.”

  “There is no alternative,” Sir Graham said. “We can’t leave the children in danger. If we do nothing…” He shook his head. “The nation would never forgive us.”

  Alex glanced at the prime minister sitting at the far end of the table. He seemed to have shrunk in the last few minutes. There was even less colour in his face than there had been when the meeting started. The deputy prime minister was chewing furiously; the foreign secretary was polishing his glasses. Everyone was waiting for the three men to make a decision, but they looked completely out of their depth. The prime minister glanced from Kellner to Adair.

  At last he spoke. “I think Mark is right.”

  “Prime Minister…” Sir Graham began.

  “If we had more time, maybe we could do something. But we have just over twenty-four hours. And it’s true. If we go public, we’ll terrify people. We’ll also alert Scorpia. Thanks to—” – the prime minister nodded briefly in Alex’s direction but seemed unwilling to mention his name – “we know what this weapon is that we’re fighting. Invisible Sword. That’s the only advantage we have. We can’t risk losing that by going on TV.”

  “So what are we going to do?” the deputy prime minister demanded.

  Mark Kellner turned to Dr Stephenson. There was a dull light in his eyes, magnified by his round, wire-framed glasses. Alex knew his mind was already made up. “Satellite dishes,” he said.

  “Yes.” Dr Stephenson nodded.

  “You said they would be quite big. Would we be able to recognize them?”

  Dr Stephenson thought briefly. “I suppose they could be disguised,” she said slowly. “Lots of buildings in London have satellite dishes for one reason or another. But I’m sure it would be possible to find out if they weren’t meant to be there.”

  “And you think they’d have to be high up.”

  “Yes, probably. I’d say about one hundred metres. But that’s only a rough guess.”

  “That would make it easier.” Kellner had forgotten that only a few minutes ago he had doubted the very existence of Invisible Sword. Once again he was in control. “If you’re right, we’re looking for unauthorized satellite dishes that have been mounted on any tall structures in the last two or three months,” he announced. “All we have to do is find them and disconnect them. At the same time, we can find out exactly who received inoculations developed by Consanto. Every single name and address. That may also give us a clue as to where these dishes are located – which areas of London.”

  “Forgive me, Prime Minister.” Sir Graham was exasperated. “You say it would be difficult to evacuate London. But what’s being suggested here – it’s impossible. A vast game of hide-and-seek, and we have no idea how many we’re looking for. If even one of these dishes remains undetected, children will still die.”

  “We have no alternative,” Kellner insisted. “If we go public with this, the children will die anyway.”

  “I can have twenty thousand officers working around the clock,” the police chief said. “The Metropolitan Police. The Home Counties. I can bring in every man and woman in the south of England.”

  “We can supply troops.” This was a soldier’s contribution.

  “And you think the sight of all these people climbing up and down buildings won’t panic people?” Sir Graham exclaimed.

  The prime minister raised his hands for silence. “We’ll start the search at once,” he ordered. “We’ll keep it low-key; we can say it’s a terrorist alert. It doesn’t matter what we say. No one has to know.”

  “They won’t be hard to find,” Kellner muttered. “There can’t be that many tall buildings in London. All we’re looking for is a dish stuck on the side.”

  “And there is one other possibility,” the prime minister added. He glanced at Blunt. “This woman, Julia Rothman. She knows where the dishes are located. Can you find her?”

  Blunt showed no emotion at all. He didn’t look at anyone in the room. His eyes were empty slits. “It is possible,” he said. “We can try.”

  “Then I suggest you get on to it straight away.”

  “Very well, Prime Minister.”

  Blunt got to his feet. Sir Graham nodded and Alex stood up too. He was suddenly feeling very tired, as if he had been in this room for days.

  “It’s been very good to finally meet you, Alex,” the prime minister said. “Thank you for all you’ve done.”

  He could have been thanking Alex for serving tea and biscuits. A moment later Alex was forgotten. He and Blunt left the room.

  Alex knew what they would want him to do.

  He said nothing as he and Blunt were driven back to Liverpool Street. Blunt didn’t
speak either, apart from once, just as they were pulling out of Downing Street.

  “You did very well in there, Alex,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  It was the first time the head of MI6 Special Operations had ever complimented him.

  And finally they entered the room on the sixteenth floor, the office Alex knew all too well. Mrs Jones was waiting for them. It was the first time Alex had seen her since he had tried to kill her. She looked exactly the same as he always remembered her. It was as if nothing had happened between them. She was dressed in black, her legs crossed. She was even sucking one of her peppermint sweets.

  There was a brief silence as Alex came in.

  “Hello, Alex,” she said.

  “Mrs Jones.” Alex felt uncomfortable, unsure what to say. “I’m sorry about what happened,” he muttered.

  “I think there’s something you should know, Alex. It’s important.” She glanced at Blunt. “Did you tell him?”

  “No.”

  She sighed and turned back to Alex. “I know you think you took a shot at me, but you didn’t. We’ve worked out the angles. The bullet wouldn’t have come close. You were less than two metres away from me and there was no way you could have missed accidentally, so – as far as I can see – something stopped you at the last second. As much as you hate me – and I suppose you’ve every right to – you weren’t able to shoot me in cold blood.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Alex said. It was true. He felt nothing.

  “Well, you don’t need to hate yourself either. Whatever Scorpia may have told you, you’re not one of them.”

  “Shall we get down to business?”