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Alex took very little time to cycle to Brooklands. It was a route he'd been cycling for years now – ever since his uncle deemed him old enough to ride on the roads. Even the dark and the slippery drizzle couldn't put him off. This was a routine thing he could have done blindfolded, and still have arrived in time for school.

Dressed all in black, he was hardly noticeable as he slipped across the playground and into the main building. It had taken him twenty minutes to make the journey, and the clock on top of the main building was standing at a quarter past twelve. Dimly, Alex could hear Big Ben chiming in the distance. It meant that, if he was supposed to be getting up at seven o'clock for an eight o'clock school day, he had to leave at about six thirty. He had just over six hours to search for hidden cameras – without being caught.

Using a few of the things his time with Scorpia had taught him, he managed to bypass the school alarm without disabling it – which would have raised alarms of its own in the morning – and ran silently up to his English classroom. With six lessons a week, he spent the most time in there, and if there was someone watching the school because of him, there were bound to be cameras in there somewhere.

He had no way of knowing that the entire school had been thoroughly rigged, and that, even now, there was a night-watcher gazing at him with puzzled intensity.

Up in his English classroom, he examined all of the places he imagined a camera could be held; the lights, which he left off, in favour of using his torch; the back of the teachers desk, which faced the class; the four corners of the room; the door-handle. It was when he was examining the door handle that he saw the thin white wire that he didn't recognise, running along the edge of the skirting-board. It disappeared under the fire extinguisher, and seemed to feed itself into the door frame – or, more specifically, the building putty that was put around the edge of the door-frame to seal it in place. Rejuvenated by success, Alex searched the door-frame, and found a tiny, perfectly round piece of black glass. It had to be a camera, because why else would there be something like that embedded in the door-frame?

Searching the frame, Alex found two others, which gave whoever it was who had installed them a full view of the entire room. He rummaged in the bag he had brought, taking out a screwdriver and a pair of wire cutters. He toyed with the idea of stabbing the piece of glass, thus breaking the camera, but then decided against it. The wire couldn't be anything else, it had to be the electricity for those cameras. He held the wire cutters to the wire, then froze.

Somewhere in the building, a door had clicked shut. Normally, such a tiny sound would be completely inaudible among the general daytime noise of a busy comprehensive school. But it was a quarter to one in the morning, and the whole place was almost dead silent. Quickly, Alex cut the wire, turned off his torch and ran.

He made a bee-line for the DT Centre, where there would be supplies available to use as weapons, and the large supply cupboard was big enough to hide in comfortably - but he had no way of knowing that there was no hope of hiding in the school itself. To hide, he'd have to leave the school buildings, which he had no intention of doing. The man Scorpia had employed had left his night-watcher observing the cameras, and he was in constant contact with him. Even in the dark, he knew where Alex was.

He stalked the boy carefully, until he came to the cupboard where Alex had hidden himself.

"Alex," he called mockingly, taunting him. "Come out, come out wherever you are."

Although Scorpia had employed him (and paid him well) to watch Alex Rider, they had given no specifics, and he hadn't asked for any. He had assumed that Alex Rider must be the son of a wealthy man, on whom Scorpia wanted blackmail material - maybe Alex Rider smoked weed, or was sleeping with his girlfriend or boyfriend, something embarrassing, but nothing particularly hardcore. He might be the son of Katherine Rider, the novelist, or Edward Rider, the oil tycoon. Rider was a common enough name, and there were endless possibilities as to whose spoilt son Alex might be. But because he was expecting a scared, spoilt child, in school at night on a dare, or maybe for some casual vandalism, he wasn't expecting the door to fly open in his face, sending him reeling backwards.

A slim, fair-haired boy dressed in black shot past him, and he only just managed to grab him by the ankle, tripping him up. Alex's forehead crashed into one of the desks as he went down, and he cried out, scrambling up, only to find himself faced with a man several inches taller than him, nearly a stone heavier, and with a lot of hurt pride.

He had no other choice. Biting his lip nervously, he took the guard position.

You see, Mike, some calm, sarcastic part of his mind said, this is why I don't like sparring. My opponents are always bigger than me, and they're always trying to hurt me.

The man lashed out with his foot, and though Alex dodged, he still caught the boy on his leg. He wasn't a martial-arts expert – certainly nothing like Nile, the last man he had fought all out with – but he had experience, height and weight on his side. Alex had speed, desperation and the hope that his opponent would underestimate him, but he never knew whether that would be enough.

He went through the motions of a classic jab-and-kick move, and managed to get a good kick into to the man's midriff, when he realised that he was going to lose.

The man grabbed his foot, moving faster than Alex would have thought possible, twisting him, and sending Alex flying. "So you think you can beat me, huh?" he panted, putting a foot on Alex's back, and pressing down.

Alex shook his head. The man gave a triumphant grunt, and that was when Alex moved. He rolled away from him, and even though the sole of the shoe gave him rubber burn, he had the satisfaction of hearing the man stumble headfirst into one of the desks, tipping it over. Alex made a break for the door, but just as he was half-way out, a hand closed on his hair, pulling him backwards. Alex yelled.

The man threw him down, and advanced on him. Alex got to his feet as quickly as he could, but by the time he was upright, the man had a solid guard up, and Alex knew that he had no way of getting out of this. He couldn't run away anymore, and he couldn't win this fight. Either way, he was screwed.

He lashed out at the man's knee with one foot, and caught him a glancing blow – the man, abandoning finesse, threw him into a desk. He slid across the classroom, and felt the hollow metal legs of the desk buckle slightly as he hit the opposite wall. When he pushed himself away from the desk, he saw that he'd hit the white-board, and cracked it.

The man – whoever he was – was already on him, and if Alex had been any other fourteen year old boy, he would have been begging him to stop, and he certainly wouldn't still have been fight. But Alex wasn't any other fourteen year old boy.

He threw himself at the man, missed, rolled, and ran for it. For the first time in his life, he was blinded by real panic. This was his school, things like this weren't supposed to happen here! Even in Constanto, when he'd thought Nile was going to kill him, he hadn't felt this scared. Nile had been an assassin, straight down and simple, but Alex had known that, and he'd been able to judge his actions accordingly. But he didn't know this man, and he didn't know why he was here, or why he was here for him, or why he knew his name. Scorpia would have been his first bet – but they had made a deal with MI6, and they were truthful to a certain extent… weren't they?

Alex ran until he found himself in a dead end, in another of the classrooms. Surely the man wouldn't find him here, would he?

As it turned out, he did. He was already there by the time Alex turned round, and he threw a chair at him. Alex dodged it, and almost smiled – he couldn't expect to beat a much more agile fourteen year old like that. The chair cracked as it hit a desk, which toppled over with a crash, putting a hole in the linoleum. Alex stared sickly at it, knowing that any strangeness at Brooklands would always point the finger of blame at him. He'd come here trying to save his school-mates the same prickling fear that he'd gone through at Point Blanc, but it look like the only thing he was going to do was destroy even more of their school.

He did the only thing he could think of, and took the offensive approach. As long as the man kept him on defence, he couldn't win, no matter what he did. He barrelled his full weight into him, and sent him stumbling backwards. Their combined weights put a dent in the plaster, and all Alex got for it was a fist to the face. His mouth began to take on the coppery taste of blood, as blood from his bitten tongue and lip spread. He knew he had present an odd picture – a bruise forming around his eye; a blood on his lips; one arm dangling, practically useless, from where he'd hit the desk; dressed in black, like some wannabe assassin. Fitting, Alex thought grimly, and concentrated on the fight at hand.

He had to dodge another chair, which went flying through one of the windows. They were on the second floor, and it hit the ground with a hell of a crash. It also triggered the school alarm system, and the man grabbed the front of Alex's long sleeved T-shirt.

"Maybe next time, Alex Rider, you'll leave well enough alone."

Alex paused for a beat, frowning. "You have no idea who I am, do you?" he said, more than a little surprised. He'd assumed the man was after him, but if he didn't know who Alex worked for - either the plot wasn't aimed at Alex, or this man was just a cat's-paw.

The man laughed in his face. "I know everything about you. Do I need to worry about 'who you are'?"

"Maybe you should," Alex said, and grinned deliberately wide - he could taste the blood on his teeth.

The man stopped laughing abruptly. "Did you work for Scorpia?" he asked, eyeing Alex warily.

"I don't know what you mean," Alex said tightly.

"I'm not getting paid enough for this," the man said, and disappeared just as the police arrived. Alex was trapped between a window he couldn't jump from and a door he couldn't get to. They took one look at Alex, dressed in black, and standing in the middle of a practically destroyed classroom, put two and two together, and came up with eight.

Alex spent the rest of the night in a cell.


He woke up with cold bright light filtering through the grimy, barred window. Last night, they had shoved him in there, and locked the door, forgoing any medical attention on the grounds that he was a 'dangerous criminal'. Now, as he woke, he could feel the dull ache from his eye, and the throbbing pain in his shoulder. He also seemed to have done something to his leg, because when he stood, fiery bolts of pain shot through his calf and knee. Rolling up his trouser leg, he saw a mess of congealed blood just below his knee – probably caused by hitting the edge of the table, but Alex couldn't sort out his confused, blurring memories enough to be certain.

He was in the cell for over two hours – though it felt longer – before a cardboard-faced police woman came and escorted him out. Alex knew better than to try and gain any sympathy from her. She'd tell her superiors that he'd tried to play her, and it would just land him in even more trouble. To people like her, an attempt to gain sympathy was as good as an admission of guilt. Alex was getting good at reading people, and people who worked for a system were never difficult to understand.

To his surprise, he was taken to Brooklands, and escorted firmly up to Mr. Bray's office. His one-man police escort left him at the door, and he knocked, wincing as the rough wood bit against scraped knuckles.

Mr. Bray motioned for him to take a seat, and sat down behind his desk. Alex shifted uncomfortably in the soft leather seat; his headmaster looked like he couldn't decide whether to be disappointed or angry, and Alex knew from experience that both were equally difficult to deal with.

"Against my better judgement, I've decided not to expel you, Alex," Mr Bray said, looking at him sternly. "But I'm taking you back on probation, do you understand?" Alex nodded, feeling rather blank and numb. He was sure he looked as blank as he felt - Mr Bray sighed heavily and shook his head. "Do you know how much trouble you've caused for us, Alex?" he asked rather plaintively. "At least five hundred pounds, to repair the two classrooms you wrecked, detrimental news coverage - that's the only reason we're not pressing charges against you, we can't afford to look even worse. And you have your guardian to thank that we're not expelling you! I was tempted – after that affair with the science schools, and the amount of school you're missing, you wouldn't exactly be a huge loss to us, you know. But he made some excellent points, so we're keeping you on, provided you prove yourself to be a model student for the rest of the year." Alex would be willing to bet that the 'excellent points' his 'guardian' had made came with an equally excellent check, and that all of it had come from MI6. Of course they wouldn't want any attention drawn to him.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said quietly, when it became obvious that Mr Bray was waiting for him to speak.

"You're always sorry, Alex," Mr. Bray sighed. "I understand that you were angry about getting beaten up," Alex's head shot up at that, "but really, why were you out at midnight at all? Your housekeeper was frantic, now she's just furious. Was it really necessary to vandalise two classrooms? And why those two classrooms?"

Alex looked at him for a long moment. This was his chance; he could tell the truth, and maybe, for once in his life, somebody would believe him. But looking at Mr. Bray's care-worn, tired face, he knew that even if he believed him, no one else would. He'd still get the same punishment, and in the end, it might just make more problems for a man who had only ever tried to help him. "I don't know," he shrugged. As Mr. Bray raised an eyebrow, he elaborated, lying through numb lips, "I think I was a bit drunk, sir."

Another tired sigh. "Alright. Well, your guardian said he was going to be picking you up for an urgent appointment somewhere – again – and that you'd be missing the rest of today." He looked at Alex sternly. "Don't expect any leniency from us again, Alex. This is your last warning."

"Yes, sir. Thank you." He stood awkwardly, wishing he could say more - even though Mr Bray had been fed a pack of lies, he was being incredibly lenient for what he thought Alex had done - but there was nothing else he was allowed to say. He turned and left.


Tom cornered him at the school gates, while Alex waited to be picked up - he should have been in class, and from the way he was panting, he'd probably asked for a pass to the loo and run after him. "Alex, everyone's saying that you're the person who trashed Miss Webster's classroom," he said urgently, "and Mr. Sinclair's. It's not true, is it?"

Alex shut his eyes for a long moment. "Yeah," he said finally, "it's true."

"But - god, Alex, why?"

"It's not like I mean to," Alex said miserably. "Come on, Tom, you know I wouldn't do that. There was - I was trying to- I don't even know anymore. I was right, I think, but-"

"Alex, you're not making any sense," Tom said, and Alex looked at him, frustrated, trying to think of the right words. "Oh my god, your eye…" Tom took a step forward, and Alex stepped away from him.

"Don't," he said quickly. "Don't - in fact, just stay away from me, OK? I don't know who's watching, you should - you should stay away from me."

"Stop talking like a James Bond movie!" Tom snapped. "This is our school, Alex, not one of your - your disappearing acts! Aren't you taking this a bit far? Not everything is to do with your crazy double life!"

"Yes it is," Alex hissed, and Tom actually took a step back at the look on his face. "Everything is to do with MI6, they get into everything, OK? They will never leave me alone, this whole thing is never going to end, do you understand that? It's not just something to tell cool stories about, I could die every time I disappear for a few weeks, and now it's come here too. If you spend time with me, Tom, you're going to end up hurt."

"You don't mean it," Tom said weakly, and Alex looked away.

"I really do," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."

"What- what do you want me to do?" Tom asked. He suddenly sounded very young, and Alex was reminded of just how different he and his friend really were these days.

"I don't want you to get hurt," he said simply. "Just - just stay away for the moment, alright? Pretend what you like, but - but don't come near me until this is all over."

"But what is 'this'?" Tom asked plaintively.

Alex shut his eyes again, as if he could shut everything out by sheer force of will. "I don't know," he said finally. "I really don't know."

Tom cleared his throat. "I'll do it," he said finally. "I'll stay away if that'll make you feel better. But - but stay safe, alright? And- just. Let me know you're OK. Somehow."

Alex looked at him stonily for a long moment. "I'll do what I can," he said simply, and Tom nodded.

"I've got to go," he said weakly. "I'll - I'll see you around, OK, Alex? Look after yourself."

He took off at a run back to the school buildings, and Alex watched him go before turning back to look out at the street.

MI6 would arrive soon.


amitai xx