Wow, I have a view already, thank you very much!

I'm sorry if the explanation in this is a bore, but it's got to be done and I actually quite like those bits in the Alex Rider book; always some weird and wonderful characters around!

Disclaimer: I dont own Alex Rider. If I did, things like this would happen...


Chapter 2

The radio was playing Backstreet Boys, and Alex Rider was in such a good mood he couldn't even get irritated by it it. His housekeeper and guardian Jack Starbright was nodding her head to the music, despite her complaints that she couldn't bear boy bands. The lowering sun was sending sheets of butter-coloured light into the kitchen of the West-London house, and Jack was cooking their dinner. They had considered getting a takeaway, but Alex was still a little suspicious of the Vietnamese Jack wanted to use ever since he caught food poisoning from their roast pork belly.

Alex was reading the sports pages, catching up on the Chelsea match he had missed the night before, and for a moment he couldn't help but smile. Today, he felt completely normal. It wasn't often fifteen year old Alex Rider felt like this. Alex had been used a spy by MI6 ever since it was revealed to him that his uncle and his father had both been in the same profession. Alex was still searching for answers as to the death of his father John Rider, who had died with his mother when he was a baby. His Ian Rider's death was more recent, and it still sat at the back of his mind like an unpleasant black cloud.

Alex still sometimes thought he might turn a corner and see his uncle. Standing at the fridge, stealing the last of Jack's favourite apple juice before she could have it for breakfast. On the sofa, in a rare moment of relaxation. Coming out of the bathroom, hair wet and sticking up like he'd been electrocuted, complaining about Alex and Jack taking all the hot water. Working behind his locked office door, telling an inquisitive young Alex that his work was too boring to explain to him.

When he slowed down like this, Alex realised something that he knew he'd been carrying around with him deep down ever since that fateful day nearly two years ago now.

He missed him.

His uncle had died and before it had even begun to sink in, he had been thrown into a world of spies, assassins and destructive madmen. So in the quieter moments of his life, he found the mourning catching up with him.

Currently, Alex was two weeks away from his summer break and was enjoying every minute of the blistering sun, anxious to get through the next fortnight and away from school. Unfortunately, being on missions across the globe for MI6 did not allow much time for school work, and he was scheduled to have a tutor for most of the summer. But he was thankful he didn't have to sweat in the concrete prison that was Brooklands Comprehensive.

"You alright, Alex?"

Jack's hand touched the back of his hair, a moment of worry and affection all at once. Alex nodded, moving away with a smile, "I'm fine, Jack, just thinking."

"Well, don't think too hard, you never know what might happen."
"I might pass my exams, according to my teachers," Alex said ruefully, nabbing the orange and pushing the newspaper aside.

"You've just got to knuckle down Alex. And hope to God they don't come for you again."

Jack had taken to not flatter MI6 by referring to their real name. But when she did say it, it came out with venom and frustration.
"I'm not working for them again. I won't let myself be manipulated into it."

As he finished his sentence, there was a light rap on the door. His stomach squeezed tight. It couldn't be. That would be just too much of a coincidence. It would be ridiculous. Jack seemed to have a suspicion too though. She had a knife in her hand from peeling the vegetables, and kept it clenched in her fist as she went to the door. Alex sighed. Even if it was MI6 come to drag him into another mess, the knife was a little extreme on Jack's part.

"Oh," he heard, once Jack had rattled the door open, "Can I help you?"
"Does Alex Rider live here?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Can you give him this?"
"Uh, sure. Who are you?"
"Ray. But it's not from me, there was some guy standing at the end of the road and he told me to bring it here, and give it to Alex Rider. Sorry."
"No, that's fine. Thank you. Um...bye."
Jack moved back into the kitchen holding the knife in one hand, and a letter in the other. She gave Alex a curious look, "This sounds like something they'd pull," she said, voice laden with suspicion. He handed the letter over, "It was a confused twelve year old. Did you hear what he said?"
"Yeah. Some guy gave it to him."

Alex turned the letter in his hand. It wasn't pristine by any means, it looked like it had been worn by fingers clutching it and turning it. His name was written in simple print on the front, no flourish or pomp. Even MI6 enjoyed a little style. This certainly wasn't style.

"Is it them?"
"I haven't even opened it Jack."
Jack sighed and put down the knife, folding her arms in a grand gesture of impatience, "Well go on then."

Alex held back a chuckle, and slipped his finger under the lip of the envelope. It opened easily; a bog-standard envelope with a poor seal that looked to have been closed one or more times.

The letter was written on a plain piece of paper folded with odd angles into the envelope. The writing was careful, like the writer had taken plenty of time over it.

Alex.

You don't know me yet, but you soon will do. I won't tell you my name as we need to seem as surprised as possible when we see each other. We're being partnered up together by MI6 and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. I doubt you'll be too happy about being brought back into this again, and neither am I. But there's something that we can both get out of this. However much you don't want be involved with MI6 again, you'll find answers to a lot of questions you have about your family.

"Well? What does it say? Is it MI6?"
"No. Not quite."


Alex lay awake that night, fretting about the letter. What exactly did it mean? He got up a number of times, flipping on his bedside light and reading it again, hopefully some deeper meaning would appear.

How did the writer of the letter know that Alex even had any questions about his family's past? And how would MI6 go about trying to convince him to work for them again? Would they claim that they had answers to some of his questions? They had done it before.

Obviously it was important to his new mystery partner that Alex agreed or he wouldn't have taken the trouble to write to him and convince him.

The rest of the night he wandered what a spy from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. He guessed he would have worked for them for awhile then retired; maybe he would roughly his uncle's age. He may have thought he could go into retirement but was then dragged back. And what would this guy get out of this?

Answers to his own questions?

But how could one mission help both Alex and a random stranger he had never met before?

He drifted off to sleep at about three o' clock in the morning, the sun straining behind the horizon and ready to rise in another summer's day glory. As his brain started to shut down, he found an idea nagging at the back of his mind: the Russian Secret Service. Maybe it was insignificant, only related to the mission itself and not to what Alex may get out of it. But it was disconcerting.

Because there was only one connection he had to Russia, and he thought he had seen the last of that on a half-destroyed Air Force One jet months ago...


"Alex Rider. Thank you for coming."
Alex sat down stiffly in the chair in front of Alan Blunt's desk. He would have preferred to watching TV at home, or playing football in the park with his friends, or even doing his homework. His stomach sank a little at the realisation that MI6 had well and truly caught up with him again.
"Alex, I know that we are the last people you would like to see right now."

Blunt was looking particularly funeral director-ish today, skin pale and grey despite the sun outside.

Alex nodded. There was no point lying.

"But we need your help, Alex. This is a joint request, both from us and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. They didn't specifically ask for you, Alex; thank goodness that that particular foreign agency hasn't caught wind of you yet. But they requested someone appropriate for this joint effort, and you would suit it perfectly. Now, do you know anything about the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service?"
"Are they are a Russian MI6?" Alex asked, not entirely seriously.
"Yes, of sorts. They perform the same sorts of duties as us. Spies, espionage, and such. But they can get away with a little bit more than we certainly can; their political climate allows them to. Their background is the KGB; they have a certain way of doing things. We need to be careful with them Alex; both countries will benefit if this mission is successful but I am sure Russia will try to get as much as they can to sweeten the pot. You will have to make sure that their spy will not try to getting more than the mission requires."
"You're acting as though I've already decided to say yes," Alex said, annoyed that the MI6 director thought it so obvious he was going to agree to be used again.

"The mission will be one close to your heart, Alex. It's to put an end to the suffering of a lot of people; a lot of children, more accurately. Boys and girls who are your age or even younger. Have you ever heard of the Beckett Circle, Alex?"
"No."
"No, it's very doubtful that you would have. We only learnt that such an organisation existed a year or so ago ourselves."

A buzzer trilled on Blunt's desk and he pressed it quickly, keeping his eyes on Alex as though the interruption might have scared him off, "Yes?"
"They're here Mr Blunt."
"Send them in."

Blunt stood, gesturing towards as the door as it clicked open, "This, Alex, will be your partner for the mission...if you choose to accept, of course."
He had been imagining who the figure walking into the room would have looked like all of the previous night. He had imagined a grizzled, retired spy looking tired and angry at being drawn back into the game.

But the boy who had entered could have only been a year or so older than Alex. His hair was dark where Alex's was light, eyes a dark, mellow brown. He fixed Alex with a narrow-eyed look of confusion, then glanced over his shoulder at his companion. The man wasn't much taller than the teenager, but distinctly older. His face was starting to sag over his bone structure, and had turned the pale of rancid cheese. Mrs Jones followed behind, and Alex swore he could smell the peppermint even from a distance. She shut the door behind them and the stooped man shuffled over to the desk, beckoning the boy to follow.
"Kai," he said, his voice laden heavily with his Russian accent, "This is Mr Blunt of MI6. And this, Alan, is the boy I was talking to you about. This is Kai Rayazanov."

Alan Blunt extended a hand, and the boy took it reluctantly.

"Alex," Blunt said, dropping the boy's hand quickly, "This is Dmitri Yeskey, he is a coordinator for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. And Kai, this is Alex Rider. I gather that the SRV(1) didn't tell you how old exactly your partner for this mission would be."
"No," Kai said, simply, not sounding too thrilled.
"I haven't even agreed to this," Alex said, feeling slightly cheated. All his theories about what the letter had meant seemed to be slipping away, "I don't even know what it is you want me to do. Why should I work for you again, why can't you just leave me alone?"

He felt Kai's eyes fix on him, and the hairs on the back of his neck burnt. He hoped the hot flush could be interrupted at anger, but actually the look made him feel very uncomfortable. If Kai was the one to write the letter then the sudden look sent his way made sense; this boy wanted to get something out of this mission and if Alex said no he would be lost.

But that was no reason for Alex to start throwing himself in front of danger once again, like a worm on a hook.

"Explain to me about the Beckett Circle. What is it?"

Blunt nodded and sat back down in his seat, gesturing for the two new guests to do the same, "Well, seeing as you are both there, I'll explain to you who they are.

"In 1860, there was a man named Mr Beckett . He lived in Rotherham, where everybody was a coal miner or a factory worker, but he was unable to do either due to a severe club foot. He made money, however, through a small group that he called the Beckett Circle. It consisted on a group of orphan boys and his wife. He would send them out every day to pick pockets, steal scrap meat from the butchers, lumps of coal that had fallen off the stacks around the mine; a more northern Fagan, if you will.

After a number of years, he moved to London to pursue a similar sort of business. This time, he trained his boys to break into houses to steal money, how to racketeer it afterwards, and awarded them with a place to stay. As harmless s as it may sound, this group started to become somewhat of a London pest. The group of children, now girls too, were starting to get their hands into every piece of business and Beckett was raking in the profits: prostitution, selling opium, stealing, chimney sweep businesses.

Beckett used children because they were easy to replace if they were caught or killed; he appeared to not have any paternal instincts. He married at 45 and his wife bore him a son, but he was killed not soon after, and so I suppose we will never know if he would come to see children as more than just a tool. His wife carried on his legacy, and after that his son.

The group was starting to expand; they created a hierarchy of chain and command. Teenage boys were often Lieutenants, the teenage girls often in charge of the smaller children, and the more respect you earned the better job you could get within the group. Three generations down the line from the original Mr Beckett, and a great grandchild of his had two sons. One disappeared to Russia when he was twenty. Some years later, a similar group to the one in London started to appear in Moscow's streets. Now the authorities wouldn't give in to the idea of a vast group of small children running around and disrupting their city, so it was a largely ignored problem.

Except that sometime in the 60s, the real mafia in Moscow, and the gangs who controlled London at the time, all started to cotton on to the Beckett Circle idea. The Circle spread far and wide, with different subgroups cropping up in cities all across Russia and England. A pest paralleled in two different countries.

This is where we need you boys. Recently, the Beckett Circle have been getting their army of young children into all sorts of mess. They have been at the centre of terror attacks in Chechnya; who would suspect a small child would be strapped with explosives? They have snuck into some of the most top secret government buildings, just like I know you have Alex. They have pick-pocketed documents that were never meant to leave certain buildings. Older kids have been let loose on villages in some of the most unstable parts of Eastern Europe and disrupted the most delicate peace process. Just like in the 1800s, there were plenty of children to replace one who may do and the children were young enough to be made to do whatever the Beckett Circle wanted.

We believe that there is still a descendant of the first Mr Beckett still in charge. We want to find out who and where he is, and bring down the Beckett Circle. The media are starting to pick up on what is going on, and Russian and British government do not want t be humiliated by a group of children. Nor do they want to be seen as allowing such abuse of power over children to have happened. Not only that, but there are hundreds of children who are being killed in the Beckett Circle, or worse.

We need your help boys, to bring the Circle down, by infiltrating its highest rank and becoming Beckett Boys yourself."

Alan Blunt folded his hands on the table in front of him. Mrs Jones' peppermint clacked against her back teeth.

"So, Alex?"

Inside, Alex as debating. He was tempted to tell them that they had little right to be so morally outraged, seeing as they had sent Alex -a fourteen year old boy himself - into unspeakable danger for their own benefit. But he knew he wouldn't win that argument.

And he couldn't go back to school knowing that kids his age were being used like this in the Beckett Circle, that he had turned an opportunity to shut that down.

But he was more confused now that he had been when he first received the letter. Whatever connection this had to him and what happened to his family was not obvious to MI6. If they had any idea that Alex may gain some answers about his past from the mission, they would have used that as their selling point.

So Alex had to wonder; what did his Russian partner know that MI6 didn't know?

"As you know Alan," the suited man with the drooping face said with a heavy voice, "Kai has already given his agreement on the mission. We are just waiting on your Rider to give an answer."

Alex didn't need to look around to feel Kai Razaynov's gaze on him again.

It would be strange working with a partner; he still hadn't got over the fact that there were other young spies out there, like him. But would he really put himself through the danger and mentally draining experience that was working for MI6?

He raised his head, catching Kai's eye, "Ok, fine. I'll do it."

Blunt nodded his head, and Mrs Jones pushed her peppermint to the side of her mind, "Very well. Mrs Jones, can you take Kai and Alex to see Smithers? After you boys have been given the appropriate equipment, you'll receive further instructions and be given a bit of time to get to know each other."

As they left, he saw Yeskey lean over and speak quietly in Kai's ear in Russian. Kai nodded reluctantly, and Yeskey disappeared behind the partitioning wall, heading down another wall with a new, confident stride.

Kai turned to Alex, looking ready to say something, when Mrs Jones interrupted, "Come on boys, I'll show you to Smithers."


(1) SRV - the anagram of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (of his its Russian name)