Okay, this chapter is a bit longer because it contains a lot of flashbacks and quotes from the original books. I only possess 'Scorpia Rising' in English (I couldn't wait for the translation) and therefore I could directly quote it (italic letters). Unfortunately, I only have got 'Eagle Strike' in German and had to translate it by myselfe (indirect quotes, also italic letters).
I do not own anything.
By the way, I already ask myself why I write this time American English although the book is British. However, you may complain about my English, style, grammar, use of vocabulary or whatever, I'm not native speaker, I am German and I know my English isn't great. I'm sorry. But nobody hear reads German stories and I hope for some reviews. So please comment my story, my writing, my language or whatever. You would make me smile :)
Chapter 3
It was the start of a new year and Alex found out that he was in the same class as Sasha. She was a cute girl, long blonde and a bit curly hair, pale skin, deep-blue eyes, she was nearly as tall as Alex and very muscular for being a girl.
She was two months younger than him although she already seemed to be much older. Alex nearly spoke and she didn't ask any unpleasing questions which could embarrass Alex. He liked her, she was quiet, friendly and always listened although he barely said anything. She smiled when he needed a smiled and she didn't say anything when she knew that he needed silence.
They're first day went by and they figured out that they had every subject together except for Japanese which she had elected instead of French. On the way home he found out that she spoke quite good French anyway and a bit of Japanese, fluently English, Spanish and Russian. Her father told her that, she explained, before he gave her away.
She had been in an orphanage in New York for about half a year since her father had disappeared all of sudden and when the orphanage closed because of money problems, she was transferred to Washington.
Alex also got to know the other kids, they were around twenty-five on four floors and each of them had one's tiny own room, where you could barely walk three steps. It was enough and he was glad to have time on his own to stare at the ceiling. That's how he spent most of his time, thinking about what he could have done better, how he could have saved Jack's life.
Her first mission and her last one, he should have argued more when she had wanted to join him in Cairo. He still saw the car exploding on the screen, it had been too simple, an escape plan never had to be that easy, it had been so obvious that it was a trap.
He turned around in his bed. He couldn't sleep. He could barely sleep and wasn't tired at day, either. His alert system pushed adrenaline into his body, he always felt like being followed and expected a foreign spy at every corner. He was at wits end, he couldn't talk with anybody and he wasn't sure if he wanted to talk at all.
Nobody could understand what he had been through, all the time, he saw dead corpses everywhere. The danger, so often he had risked his life and never thought about it. He hadn't had any time the last year, so adventurous it had been.
But now, spending the rest of his life hiding, he had enough time to think about his mistakes and about what he could have changed.
"Okay! Okay!" Cray muttered frustrated. "Actually I have the orders here, but it seems as if I had to do everything by myself."
Cry took the pistol. Alex stood up.
"No!" Sabina screamed.
Cray shot.
But he neither has targeted Alex nor Sabina. The bullet hit Yassen in his chest and threw him away from the door. "I am truly sorry, Mr. Gregorovich" Cray sighed. "But you're fired."
He turned around to Alex.
"Now it's your turn" he said. And fired again.
"What's up with Cray?" Yassen asked with a weak voice. "Is he dead?"
"Yes."
Yassen nodded, obviously pleased. "I knew it was a mistake, this contract", he said with toil. "I knew it." He tried to breath and his eyes nearly closed. "I need to tell you something, Alex […] I could have never shot you" Yassen Gregorovich said. "Never. Because…you know, Alex…I knew your father."
[…]
"Search Scorpia, there'll you find your destiny…"
Yassen closed his eyes and Alex knew that he'd never open them again.
Unfortunately, he was wrong. Sabina had found the red button and pressed it. The rockets had exploded and without moving, Alex lay next to Yassen. His eyes closed and he slowly lost unconsciousness.
The plane stood still and Sabina walked back to where she found Alex. But Yassen wasn't there anymore. He had crawled to the seat, trying to stand up.
His wound was deep, but he had been only hit one times. He stood up and with all his power he slowly he staggered to the open door. He heard the sirens of the nearer coming vehicles. He walked on, to the next to which led out on the other side of the plane. He opened it and looked down, four meters down.
He knew that it was close to impossible but without thinking much about it, he jumped down and rolled on the floor to increase the area of pressure. He had learnt this during his training and he managed to stand up shortly after it. All parts of his body hurt and he felt like fainting every second.
But he couldn't stop and forced his body to move on as fast as he could. It was only a matter of time until they'd notice his body missing and start searching for him. He still didn't know how he managed to flee from the airport ground without being noticed by the special forces or MI5 but when he woke up again, he found himself somewhere in the woods, far away from everything.
He removed his pullover and tied it around the wound. It was still bleeding a bit and he didn't know how long he had been unconscious but he knew that the blood loss had been great.
He walked on, staggering, and came to a silent street with a few cars per minute. He was able to stop one of them and the shocked loving couple drove him to the hospital without asking too many questions.
There it was cared about Yassen and his shot wound was stitched. He swallowed a few pain killers and in the middle of the night, he ran away before MI5 could find out his whereabouts. He grabbed the cell phone of another patient and dialed a number while he was running out of the building.
Someone took along the call after a few seconds. 'Yes?' a female voice answered.
'Aleksandra! Listen, something went wrong, I've got shot and managed to get cared at hospital. I'm leaving it now and I try to come back as soon as possible. Just don't worry, okay?' he moaned out of breath.
'Dad?' a female voice just asked. 'Is everything okay?'
'Ya, I'm fine, I'm fine. Stay where you are, I'll catch the next flight to Moscow, I need to leave the country and hide for a while again' he said in Russian. 'I need to hung up.'
'Okay, dad. Good luck, I love you. See you here, soon' Aleksandra answered and Yassen ended the phone call and threw the cell into the bushes.
His wound hurt like hell although he had already taken more pain killers than he should have. He walked through the night of the city, stole some cash, enough to get new clothes and the next ticket out of Great Britain. With stopovers in Düsseldorf and Minsk (Belarus) he managed to arrive in Moscow about two days later.
Although his body hasn't been found, he had watched German news in which a speaker of MI5 declared him dead officially. He wasn't sure if it just was a trap by Alan Blunt to continue the search inofficially but now, nearly one year later, he was sure that Mr. Blunt wasn't seeking him anymore.
He was sitting in his little apartment in Pskov, West Russia, and waited for instructions from Keith Collins, Zeljan Kurst's son who only was driven by revenge for his father.
Yassen looked up from his book, he was still trying to learn Japanese and was making quite effort, when Julius entered the room.
'Sasha called this morning. She managed to become friends with Alex but he seems to have very serious problems' the hit man informed. Yassen always called his daughter Sasha when talking English and Aleksandra when speaking Russian, as Sasha was the shorter and more English nick name of the Russian Aleksandra.
Julius nodded without any emotional reaction in his face. He sat down next to him. 'When will we interact?'
'She called Keith but we need to wait for his orders. He wants to be on the safe side this time, all previous plans concerning Alex Rider have failed the last nine times, whoever made them.'
'This time not' Julius said satisfied and smiled. Yeah, he really looked forward to the revenge on Alex Rider, who had tried to kill his own identical twin, his own 'brother'.
They were on their own now.
"Are you going to kill me?", Julius screamed. He didn't sound afraid. His voice was on the edge of hysteria. "Are you going to shoot me?"
Alex said nothing. The Tokarev was at his side, pointing down.
Julius drew a breath. It seemed to Alex that he couldn't have stood up even if he'd wanted to.
"What happened to Gunter?" he asked. "Don't tell me he let you go!"
"Gunter is dead," Alex said.
"And you think you've won? You've saved the boring secretary of state and everyone is going to be all over you? 'Good old Alex has done it again!' But it's not like that, is it?" Julius writhed on the grass. His shoulder might have been dislocated. There was a lot of blood, mixing with the rain.
"You won't shoot me," he sniggered. "You can't shoot me. You don't have it in you. You're just a goody-goody. Alex Rider, the reluctant spy. And I'll tell you what's going to happen. Very soon the police will come and they'll send me back to prison but – you know? – prison isn't that bad. It's just like being at school. And they can't keep me there for ever. They'll wait five year or ten years and then they'll set me free.
[…] "And look at you know! I can see how much you hate me…"
"You're wrong," Alex said. "You're nothing to me."
The rain was a mask, hiding his face. His eyes were dark and empty. In his sodden clothes he was almost a skeleton of himself. He turned and began to walk away.
He didn't notice she shadow moving in the corner of his eye, it was too dark and raining to much to see the person watching them. The person came closer but didn't want to intervene, not yet.
That was when Julius went for the gun, his hand scrabbling through the wet grass. He lifted it and aimed.
Alex heard him. Some tiny movement. Some instinct. He spun round.
Julius fired a single shot.
But Alex fired first.
He turned around again. He let the gun drop into the grass and heard the dump sound when the rain started to pour down on it and made it sink into the ground. He walked away without looking back which was, as he didn't know at that moment, a big mistake. Because he didn't see the person rushing past, but out of the view of his eyes.
She kneed down next to Julius. He had serious wounds, Alex had shot him in his belly. He moaned from pain and had difficulties with leaving his eyes open.
'Hey, Julius!' the girl muttered and touched his cheek. 'I'll get you out of here' she promised and doffed her black pullover. She tied it strongly around the most heavily bleeding shot wound.
'Sasha' he murmured weakly and looked into her beautiful blue eyes that he always compared to the wide, wide ocean. She helped him up, he could barely stand alone and on his own and nearly broke down.
She looked around. Nobody watched them and she saw the shillhouette of Alex Ride walking away. She backed Julius and carried him to the street. The traffic jam had cleared meanwhile and a black BMW was standing on the parking lot aside of the street.
She opened the door and put Julius on the backseat. He was close to losing consciousness. 'Hang in there' she muttered silently in Russian and closed the door behind her.
'Go' she ordered the man on the driver's seat who started to join the traffic.
Sasha pressed the pullover harder on his wounds and tore apart his shirt to examine the wounds. 'Perilous blood loss' she talked to herself while tying Julius' former 'school uniform' around his body to stop the blood flow.
'Sasha…' he muttered again, trying to keep looking at her.
'It's all gonna be okay, right, Julius? Just hang in there and we'll drive you to a hospital as fast as we can' she said and looked up.
The traffic was still too slow after her fancy. It took far too long until they arrived at the old building called hospital and she carried Julius to the emergency hospitalization. Doctors took him over and put him on a rolling bed to directly bring him into the operating room.
They didn't ask much and she was glad when he was in the OR. She returned to the emergency hospitalization where the driver still waited. She ordered him to drive to the parking lot near-by where she killed him with Julius' gun. She put the gun into her jeans and returned to the corridor in front of the OR.
She sat down and pulled out her cell. She needed to call Zeljan Kurst and tell him what happened. After that, she called her father to explain that Alex had once more managed to ruin a Scorpia operation. He wasn't big surprised as he already knew the fifteen year old boy. About twenty minutes later a doctor came by and gave Sasha the bloody pullover back.
'His situation is stable but he has lost much blood. The operation will take about one more hour and after that he'll have to rest unconsciously for at least three hours still. We need to keep him here for the next few days' the doc explained and Sasha nodded knowingly that Julius would never stay that long.
She waited and not even an hour later, Julius was brought into a patient room. Sasha was asked many questions and she answered them lying perfectly. False identity, false reason for the wounds and the appearing and she told that she was trying to call their father (she said Julius was his brother) but she couldn't reach him.
She waited until Julius woke up again. It was deep night already and the rain was pouring down and against the window whose sound kept her away from dozing off.
Suddenly, Sasha had been close to closing her eyes again, Julius started to blink.
'Julius?' she asked carefully and bent forward.
Julius opened his eyes and turned toward her. 'What…What happened?' he asked and in the same moment he grimaced with pain.
'Everything is okay, you're safe.'
'The mission?'
'Failed, unfortunately. Zeljan called me and told that Razim has been killed. They are hunting down the last members of Scorpia.'
'Alex' Julius moaned in disgust and sat up.
'He escaped. Julius, it is not your fault. It's not the end yet.'
Julius turned his head and looked at the young girl. His eyes were full of hatred and evilness. 'I want to kill him' he hissed with all the badness he had.
'Not now. It will take its time. Scorpia is down again, they presumably believe you dead, we can take advantage out of this. But we need to get out of here first. When they don't find your body, they'll worry.'
'Then let's go' he said and pushed away the quilt.
'You're too weak' Sasha said in surprise.
'I'm not. I'm full with pain killers. Where's our driver?'
'I killed him in order of Zeljan. But I have the keys for the car.'
'Then come one, there's no time to waste' he said and stood up.
She smiled when she backed him and helped him walking. 'My father said he'd arrange us a flight to Russia' she proposed and he nodded, still she could see the toil and pain in his face. He would need his time to recover.
Nearly a month Julius had needed to grow back to old strength. And now he was even fitter and more motivated than ever before and ready for vengeance. Still, his greatest defect was his impatience and it drove him mad that Keith Collins wanted to spy on Alex first.
In Julius opinion, he just wanted to go that American school, carry a submachine gun and draw a blood line until there was a man-to-man encounter with Alex. Then he would throw the machine gun on the floor, take out a knife, walk toward Alex Rider and cut open his damned muscular body and at last, cut his neck and watch him bleed out like a pig.
That was Julius greatest dream at night.
He had already thought about different methods of murdering Alex and couldn't decide which one he liked best, torturing, stabbing, shooting, burning, drowning, cooking, crushing, flaying, hanging, sawing or slow slicing, a preferred one, also called Lingchi and it was a Chinese kind of execution, oh man, there were so many possibilities and it made him crazy that he would finally have to decide for one of them.
"Mr Smithers must die. I will have it done tomorrow. From what I have heard, and despite his appearance, he is an extremely effective secret agent. So I think I will send perhaps a dozen men."
"That seems a bit OTT."
"Learn from me, Julius, Maybe one day, when this present operation is concluded, you will join the ranks of Scorpia."
"Really? Do you think they'd have me? I'd love that!"
Sasha entered the living room and quietly took seat on the couch next to Julius. He immediately lay his arm around her shoulder and she cuddled her head at his shoulder.
[…] "We take no risks; we make no mistakes. Tomorrow morning we kill Smithers and tomorrow evening…"
"Alex Rider!"
"That's when it begins."
Razim stood up, smiled at the girl and left the room with no other comment. 'You really think they'll let join me?' he asked and kissed her on her beautiful lips.
'If we succeed and Scorpia still exists, perhaps…But you need to be careful, Julius. I think Razim plans to kill you when this is over' she said and kissed his cheek.
He shortly thought about it and whispered into her ear: 'Shouldn't we go to bed, too?'
She nodded and he took her hand and led her to their common bed room. It wasn't unusual for him anymore to share bed with a girl and she had shown him so many incredible things.
They locked the door and he started to unbutton her black blouse and threw it on the chair. He pushed her down on the bed, Sasha thought she'd still needed to explain him what the words 'softly', 'tender' and 'gentle' mean but she let him do.
He kissed her mouth, her neck, opened her bra and licked her pale and so warm skin. She smiled when she opened his trousers and removed his shirt.
Hang on, Alex. Help is on its way.
She [Jack] pushed the car into first gear and moved off.
[…] There were other cameras outside. Alex saw Jack look into the kitchen, then continue down the passageway, where a third camera picked up the main courtyard with the waiting Land Rover.
"Just one guard," Razim crooned. "We didn't want to make this too easy, did we!"
[…] Alex watched Jack come out of her hiding place and knock out the guard.
Julius giggled. "She thinks she's being so clever!" he exclaimed.
While they were watching the videos of the surveillance cameras, Sasha also did. She watched what they were watching from the observing room in the second basement and she was watching the room were Razim, Julius and Alex stood in, she wanted to see his reaction.
She sighed seeing how childish Julius behaved. The big screen showed Jack driving the Land Rover. This was going to be interesting. She stared down on Alex movement and was glad when he didn't notice that the image changed suddenly.
There were no close-up shots of Jack anymore but only one that fully showed the car. They had a second Land Rover, being driven by an unknowing driver, and her heart was beating twice as fast when Julius pressed the remote control. She saw the car blowing up and on the second screen, she saw it driving further.
[…] Alex slumped forward, his head lolling against his chest. He had blacked out. […] "Wasn't that great!" Julius exclaimed. "Wasn't that cool!"
Sasha stared at the fifteen year old boy. She needed to examine his reactions, she wanted to know him better. She remembered the stories her father had kept telling about Alex and his father. How John Rider had saved his life knowing that Yassen's girlfriend was waiting at home for him, concerned and pregnant.
How similar Alex was to his father and uncle. She had read every file she could get about him and was fascinated by the cruelness of British MI5 to send down an agent. It was no surprise that it ended like this. She looked at the other screen where Jack was still driving the car.
The video rocked as it was filmed by a car chasing the land rover. It didn't take long and it hit the car and both vehicles stopped. Three gunned men ran toward the first car and pulled Jack out of it. They threw her on the ground, tied her up and brought her back to Razim's facility.
[…] Two guards had arrived. They untied Alex and dragged him away. Julius followed them out of the room. […] Out in the desert the flames flickered in the darkness, throwing jagged red shadows across the sand.
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