Two weeks stakeout duty following the Limey teenager in San Francisco at Christmas had fallen to two newly trained agents. They noted their mark open the door to the courier and sign for the package. The third delivery that day. Later Alex Rider would go to Karate and then Baseball practice. The boy never did anything beyond his set routine. Tomorrow they would tail him to his therapy session. This was boring in the extreme. There were no active Scorpia cells in the US or their neighbours Mexico or Canada. They had read the kid's profile. He had survived multiple assassination attempts including a sniper attack in London. Funny, there had been not a single out of the ordinary occurrence during his stay in California. The two agents sat and drank coffee, filling in their contact logs, photographing all and sundry. The NSA listened in and recorded all incoming and outgoing phone calls and emails. No part of Alex Rider's life was not under scrutiny.
The package Alex signed for looked like any other boring work item for Edward except it was addressed to A RIDER . No one else was home to notice Alex take the package to his room and carefully open it. A card and a phone dropped onto Alex's bed. Alex read the card it stated this was a complimentary gift phone from Datacore Industries. The phone rang. Deja vu, Alex thought of The Matrix, was he about to go down the rabbit hole.
Unknown to Alex every other member of his soccer team also received complimentary top of the range phones. Alex's gift was slightly different. His mobile had a state of the art scrambler fitted. No one would be able to listen in to his conversations with the CEO of Datacore Industries Inc.
The reclusive and enigmatic Stephan Mikhailovich Kelenkov was a multi-billionaire. Alex Rider had become known to the man who lived beyond governments concerns and petty politics. He may have been a Swiss citizen but he owned thousands of separate pieces of real estate, from buildings in New York, Paris, Sydney, London and Moscow to islands all over the world. He had a virtual fortress near Geneva, as well as owning two airlines, a business jet manufacturer, two computer companies, an international cell phone network, three shipping lines, several major newspapers and jointly owned a satellite and cable company which was currently expanding across the globe. His grandfather had left Russia in 1919 with a suitcase and enough money to survive for a month in Paris. Vladimir Kelenkov had worked from door to door salesman to owning a small haberdashery store in the outskirts of Paris by 1937. He had married a fellow exile and had two sons. His youngest son left home at sixteen and had joined the resistance after the German Occupation in 1940. There the boy had seized the opportunity to play spy, becoming a triple agent, working for the British, Russians and Germans. He sold information and became a successful black marketeer. By 1945, the man had a network of information gatherers and could buy and sell anything to anybody. The young Mikhail Kelenkov emerged from the war an orphan. His parents and brother long dead, imprisoned and worked to death as enemy aliens. He was a consummate capitalist without the boundaries of a conscience. Morals got you nowhere. He had been told to make his own way in the world by his father after leaving school with no qualifications. In 1950, Mikhail had earned his first million in American Dollars. By 1970, Mikhail Kelenkov had an empire both legitimate and in the grey areas of business. He had married another orphan of the war, a young bitter fellow survivor. Marta Kelenkov nee Swenson was a fine business woman in her own right. He settled in Geneva with his family. The Kelenkov's were affiliated to Scorpia but never became board members. It was a symbiotic relationship, the businessman did not dirty his own hands with the less than savoury aspects of being a completely ruthless. It was to this empire Stephan was born and raised.
Tragedy had struck when Mikhail and Marta had been targeted by kidnappers. A group of young marxist terrorists had snatched them, killing their two bodyguards. Stephan still at the Sorbonne was unable to liquidate the family assets to pay the ransom. The board members of his father's various companies ignored the boy. In 1973, his parents had been brutally murdered and then he slowly gained control of his father's empire. He had initially retreated into a clinic for grief therapy to help with his overwhelming feelings of powerlessness as both the authorities and his father's business associates had failed to save his parents. There at the exclusive hospital in Switzerland he met and later married an Argentinian heiress. He knew he had to father an heir, and so ruthlessly repressing his own homosexuality.
After ten tears he contracted Scorpia for some cleaning work. He began to destroy his enemies by reputation or he arranged that they met with tragic accidents. The he bought out their interests for his own gain. Stephan was hands on in his dealings with Scorpia. He met and became friends with the two assassins Scorpia had sent to work for him. Hunter and Cossack began to liquidate those who had failed young Stephan or they gathered information to blackmail and ruin others. He noted the two men were partners in all things. They had a professional and sexual relationship. Stephan began a relationship as casual lover with a young Yassen Gregorovich that would last twenty years.
