Hey, everyone! Here's chapter one, read and enjoy, and review! Please?
BTW, sorry about making her sound depressed. She's really not.
A file landed on Alan Blunt's desk with a gentle thud, distracting him from his work. He glanced up at his secretary.
"Yes?" he asked quietly.
"Sir ... we've gotten another report from our agent," Susan Carpenter said, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Alan Blunt always unnerved her. He was always so calm and quiet and gray. It made one wonder if he was actually human, or if he was merely a very humanoid machine.
Alan flipped through the file. On the verge of a breakthrough ... This meant one thing. They needed to send someone in. Now. Unfortunately, their best man wasn't a man at all. And he'd sworn off MI6 permanently.
Alex Rider.
Well, this was an emergency. He would understand. He was a reasonable child. Almost a man, by now. You don't see what Alex Rider had seen and remain a child. Unless you're a very odd child.
"Contact agent Rider, Miss Carpenter."
"Ian Rider, sir?" Susan asked, confused. "But he's ..." Blunt sighed. Some people still didn't know about Alex, and sometimes he had to tell them. He disliked telling people things. It was one of the reasons he'd kept his job for so long.
"I know, Ian Rider is dead. Contact his nephew, Alex. Same information." With a nod, Susan turned to go.
"Oh, and Ms. Carpenter?" Susan turned and looked back at Alan Blunt. He seemed almost nervous.
"Don't tell Mrs. Jones."
--
I picked up the heavy wooden pole, weighing it in my hands. Christy, my combat instructor, was watching me, and I smiled at her.
"A quarterstaff? Aren't these things a bit ... outdated? I mean, come on. Robin Hood fought with these things in Medieval England," Christy said. I frowned at her.
"Culture reference! You know I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about! And besides, don't you know better by now than to ever rule anything out?" I asked. Christy groaned and picked up the staff, admitting defeat.
"Fine. We'll fight with quarterstaffs today. But if I start talking like I belong in the fifth century, or quoting Robin Hood, it's your own fault." I hefted the staff in my hands and slipped into ready position.
"MEREDITH, CADEN WANTS YOU IN HIS OFFICE"
I dropped the staff and grabbed my track jacket.
"Wonder what he wants? I hope it's not another one of those specialists," I said as I walked out the door.
--
"Why do you want our help?" Frank Caden asked. Mrs. Jones smiled.
"Because we have proof that one of your agents faked his death and went rogue. You have as much of a reason to act now as we do." She pressed a button, and a security tape playback began playing on the televison screen. A man who looked to be in about his early thirties was walking down a street in a foreign country.
"Valencia," Mrs. Jones clarified. But Mr. Caden was more interested in the tape than the woman sitting in his office. The man had stopped at a street corner, and was talking to another man.
"And that's the other reason you're here," Caden said. Mrs. Jones. She nodded.
"He came to our agency, but we turned him away. You accepted him as a double agent? Don't you know how dangerous that is?" He raised his eyebrows.
"Are you advising intelligence agencies now?"
"Of course not!" she snapped, irritated. "But maybe you don't quite realize who that is."
"I know exactly who that is."
"Are you aware of his record?"
"Police or intelligence?"
"Both."
"Yes."
"Then you should have been more wary of employing him. He might still be working for Scorpia." Caden abruptly turned off the television and turned back to Mrs. Jones.
"I've seen all I need to see. I'll send her on a covert ops mission with you, that means no red tape. She's on her way now."
Mrs. Jones steeled herself for another bitter, sarcastic teenager. She wouldn't blame this girl if she hated all of them. After all, what kind of life could she have, working for the CIA for so long?
--
"Where's Shultz?" I asked Caden as soon as I walked in the door. Shultz was always there when I was getting another one of those diagnostic tests. Which I hated.
"You're not here for another test, you're here to be briefed on your next mission," the woman sitting in Shultz' chair said, and I smiled at her. She had a definite English accent, most likely somewhere in Chelsea. Her hair was cut in a rather choppy bob, she was dressed in a nondescript, tan lady's business suit. She was sucking on a peppermint. Tulip Jones. It had to be.
"Hello, Mrs. Jones. I'm Meredith. What's my mission? Where am I going? What's my cover?" I asked, grinning. Okay, I was a little overeager. But it was my first mission in two years, okay? Do you have any idea how long two years is when you've got nothing to do but train, do tests, and get yelled at by Caden for trying to sneak out? A long time.
It's worse when you're grounded.
Yes, I had no cell phone, no friends to call if I did, no computer, and no TV, and it still sucked to be grounded.
"You'll be going under cover."
"Obviously," I interrupted, with an admittedly unladylike snort. She didn't skip a beat, just kept right on talking.
"You'll be going to London, staying there as an exchage student, with a civilian." I stared at her.
"For six months." My eyes bugged out of my head, an uncharacteristic reaction.
Meaning, I reacted.
"Six months? What's my identity? When am I leaving?" The lady checked her watch.
"In about ... an hour and twenty minutes."
Well.
"An hour and twenty minutes?" I repeated in disbelief, mainly because nothing where I grew up ever took that long. Everything is so efficient that if you sneeze they have to scurry to make up for lost time.
"Your name is Emily Blake, you're from Whiteville, North Carolina. You have three sisters, Anne, Kate, and Lizzy. No brothers. You like to keep to yourself. Your father is a blue-collar worker, and you stay at home during the summer. You're on this trip because of a scholarship. You attend the local public high school, and you've got a 4.0 grade point average. You prefer soccer to football. I think we can leave the rest of it up to her imagination, don't you, Mr. Caden?"
"I'll be fine," I said shortly. "If that's all, then I suppose I'll go and pack my things. It won't take me long; will we be leaving early if I'm ready before the allotted time is up?" Mrs. Jones shook her head. I would pe packed in ten minutes. What would I do for the next hour?
"You'll need to alter your appearance, for your safety. Also, we'll need to take you shopping, and you'll have to get your gadgets." I grimaced. Shopping?
This would not be fun.
--
"Hi, Starr. I need some gadgets. Then they're taking me shopping. Can't they just say I lost all my clothes in a fire, or something?" I had an innate dread of shopping. All those people, especially in malls. No security worth mentioning, all the places to hide destructive things. It's fun to people-watch, though.
"Yes, I heard they're sending you out again. About time. I'm bored to death making gadgets for grownups." Starr smiled at me from behind her desk. She was about twenty-five, with short black hair, and blue eyes. When she took care of herself, she was quite pretty. At the moment, though, the black hair was in disarray all around her face, and the blue eyes were almost glazed over, and distracted. Ms. Kelsey Starr had obviously lost something. Again.
"I just finished testing that one. Where on earth did I put it? It's got to be here somewhere ..." She trailed off and began pacing, muttering to herself. I smiled and looked at the items on her desk. An iPhone, a digital camera, a pack of gum, a supersized tube of toothpaste (?) and a pair of sunglasses. Interesting. Some of it looked like regular junk, but with Starr, you never know.
"Can I have a piece?" I asked hopefully, picking up the gum. I wasn't allowed to have gum. Caden said it was 'unhealthy, low-class, and atrociously bad manners'. But it's yummy. It's also like cigarettes. Universal currency.
"Sure," Starr said absently, then turned and snatched the piece right out of my hands.
"No! That's what I've been looking for!" Disappointed, I set down the package. Dang.
"It's a pack of gum, Starr. What am I supposed to do, chew my way out of any life-threatening situations?" She stared at me, horrified. Too late, I realized that I'd broken the cardinal rule: Never judge something by it's appearance.
Oops.
"Never, under any circumstances, chew this gum!" she yelled.
Say what? I just judged a book by its cover, assumed that something was what it seemed, and she was yelling at me, but she wasn't chewing me out (npi! :D) she was telling me to never chew this gum. Is that wierd to anyone else, or just to me?
Okay, probably just to me.
"Um ... okay. Can you explain why, or is that all the information I'll be getting?" She rolled her eyes.
"It's my job to explain, Mer. Did you ever see Mission: Impossible?" I shook my head.
"Culturally deprived child here, Starr. No movies, remember? They rot your brain out, according to Caden." She sighed.
"Well, you press the wide edges together, and then run like hell."
"Tell me why I'm running instead of meandering away at a liesurely, inconspicuous pace. I suspect that the gum is explosive," I said shortly. I know, i shouldn't have been so sharp with her, but shopping.
She handed the gum to me with a flourish.
"Correct! There's a four-second fuse, then it explodes with the force of a very small nuclear bomb, without the devastating radiation aftereffects." I slipped the gum in my pocket and examined the iPhone.
"I see nothing extraordinary on the outside, no fantastical special features, and the only thing to keep this from belonging to any bum on the street is the fact that Caden's number is programmed in on speed-dial. His name is Frank?" I popped off the back and removed the battery, then grinned.
"Miniature lock-picking kit. Nice work, Starr. I'm impressed. What about the sunglasses and the camera?" I asked, picking up the camera and turning it on. Starr beamed.
"The sunglasses have a hidden camera in them, and they also record sound. You view the footage on the camera." I nodded, then turned and left with my new, very destructive toys. I still had to pack. And go shopping.
Joy.
--
"Are you certain this will work?" Levi Kroll asked concernedly. He was a plumpish Israeli man of about sixty-five, with black, graying, receding hair, shrewd black eyes, and a lust for power that allowed nothing to stand in its way. Especially rivals. Zerjan Kurst nodded.
"It will work," he said heavily.
"But the last two operations ..." Kroll let the sentence trail off, knowing that Kurst would understand what he meant.
Alex Rider.
The young English boy, who was also a spy for MI6, seemed to have the luck of the devil.
Kurst slammed his fist down on the table, irritated.
"I said it will work!" he snapped. His accent, pronounced under the best of circumstances, made his speech almost unintelligible when angry.
He was angry right now.
Kroll nodded, satisfied for the moment, and flipped through the file. He read quickly, sometimes nodding, and muttering to himself in Yiddish every now and again.
"This is an unusual assignment," Kroll finally murmured, closing the file. Kurst shrugged.
"The client is willing to split all profits fifty percent."
"But what about the Rider child?" another member of the board insisted. It was Josef Asimyonova, a higher-up in the Russian Mafiya. Kurst glared venemously, but Asimyonova held his ground.
"Well," he insisted, "what about him? He destroyed Invisible Sword, as well as Major Yu and the Snakehead, which cut our profits considerably. Another failure could drive us out of business. And," he continued, leaning forward, "he killed Major Sarov. Sarov was my cousin. I want something done about that Rider child!"
The board members shifted uneasily in their seats. No one like the idea of going out of business; and in their business, tools of the trade were not cheap.
Also, any show of emotion except anger unnerved them, as a general rule, and even anger left them wary. Emotions were a sign of weakness, and anger meant someone might be waiting for you in a dark alley with a knife, or a radioactive pellet might be slipped into your food in the near future.
Kroll, however, seemed unperturbed.
"If he does not interfere, we will kill him afterwards. This is far too important to the organization. We can't afford to get sidetracked."
Asimyonova leaned forward menacingly.
"And if he does?" Kurst regarded him impassively.
"We will kill him. Either way, the boy will die. It's merely a question of when."
He sounded so utterly confident that some of the less experienced members were put at ease.
So ... Chapter One!! Well, sorry I took so unbearably long, I've just been super busy this summer. I still haven't finished my summer reading project, and school starts in 5 days!
AAAAHHHHHHHH!!
Sorry. Meltdown over.
BTW, thanx a million and three to:
Eli the anonymous reviewer. I don't know if you have an account or not, but thanks for reviewing!!
xxIanRiderxx Yeah, I could have written more, but I was pressed for time, and it was pretty late, and I was falling asleep on the keyboard. :D
indianaxxjones / Marinaxx YAY!! Sorry for not updating ASAP, but, Scout's Honor (and I really was in Brownies in kindergarten, so this counts) I will update more often now.