Hello again! I hope everyone has had a simply splendid week? Mine's been absolutely topping.
...sorry. I re-read the "Chalet School" books over half-term. Like Enid Blyton, but set in Switzerland, and about four times as nauseatingly 1940s English. They actually say 'gumswizzled' without cracking up into hysterical laughter. I'm so tempted to write an Alex Rider story where he's transported into some such school. (dreamy trance)
Quick, someone smack me before I actually write something like that.
Right. I'm really sorry that the update is late this week - my dear friend and update buddy xaritomene was out of school at Nottingham yesterday, and I couldn't face updating without her.
...well, it was more the prospect of going into town on my own without a library card for the town library, but... details.
I'm afraid that updates for all my other fics will be sporadic over the next few weeks, because I have to get four courseworks in for next week, learn an entire page of a Grade 8 piano piece, learn three LAMDA scripts and take part in a Songs of Praises thing this weekend. Oh, and then go to Winchester on Monday for some ethics lecture competition thing I misguidedly took part in last term.
Life is hectic, and I'm afraid that fanfiction has taken a back seat - but thank you to all of you for understanding, and thanks to all my lovely reviewers: you've all been incredibly kind, and I'm thrilled that you're all enjoying the story so much!
Special thanks as always to Von for her unending support, and xaritomene for her unfailing ability to kick me when I'm down. Sorry! I mean, when I need to be kicked.
DISCLAIMER: Always look on the bright side of life - if I owned Alex Rider, it would have been slash.
Alex took nearly three weeks to get even a semblance of order in the tatty little office; by 'order' he meant more that he'd managed to organise the paper into some form of a system – bills, clients, legalities. He'd spent a lot of his first week there going through the garage and trying to find all the different pieces of paper work that should have been filed in the office. In all honesty, he was frankly shocked that Don had managed to stay afloat for as long as he had, given how disorganised he was with all his paperwork.
Alex brought in boxes, and stacked the papers, and folders, and brochures in them, in their different categories, a task which took a shocking amount of time. He'd applied to Don for the man to buy some files, or file boxes, and to put up some shelves in the office, and the man had eventually given Alex a key to the garage, after a couple of weeks, so that he could lock up behind him; Alex, genuinely scared of being fired, worked overtime most nights.
The files arrived from the bulk supplier a week later – a week which Alex had spent absent-mindedly cleaning out the filthy, oil-stained little office, and working on Don to spring for a new desk to replace the rickety old table, and frankly dangerous chair – and Alex, with very little knowledge of how to organise a filing system, simply winged it. The newly put up shelves were all carefully and clearly labelled in Alex's neat, precise writing, with the same blanket terms that he'd used for the boxes: bills, clients, and legalities.
From there, he'd started with one box of paper, and organised them into different sub-sections, a file for each one, and then painstakingly went through each sub-section, putting the paper into date order before finally filing them.
The entire process took far longer than Alex had been expecting, but it was definitely worth it when Derek – with whom Alex had set up a tentative friendship, after the rather rough start they'd got off to – popped into the office to ask him, as he always did, whether he wanted to come with everyone else for lunch, looked round, whistled once, and said,
"Bloody hell, kid. When did you do all this!?"
Alex smiled a little at that – the first genuine smile in what felt like far too long – ducked his head, and muttered something about it being 'nothing much'.
"No, seriously, this is fuckin' amazing!" Derek was openly staring now. "I didn't even know the walls were this colour!" he looked suspiciously up at the light bulb, still bare, but now working. "How d'you get the light to work, anyway? S'been broken for years."
"The switch'd gone." Alex shrugged, turning back to the desk. "Just needed a bit of re-wiring…"
"And you did that?" Derek looked frankly sceptical. "I thought you couldn't…" he trailed off. "Never mind." He said, rather gruffly, and reached out, patting Alex gently on the shoulder, aware of the still-present bruises, and unhealed arm. "You – you done a good job, kid."
"Thanks." Alex said, with another little smile, and Derek cleared his throat, awkwardly.
"You, um… you want to join us for lunch?" he asked, casually, looking over at the computer. "To celebrate the end of your job?"
Alex's eyes widened, though he was almost certain that that wasn't what Derek had meant. The man caught his mistake almost immediately, correcting himself, quickly, "I mean, of this part of it! That was a big thing you took on, right? I meant, did you want to celebrate – finishing it?"
Alex shook his head, rather slowly. "No. No, it's OK, thanks." He said, still feeling the aftershocks of a surprisingly strong adrenaline surge. "I'm, er… I'm just going to – keep going."
Derek frowned suspiciously, at that. "You have got something to eat, right, kid?" he asked, quietly, and Alex nodded, vigorously.
"Yeah! Yeah, of course. I just want to crack on, you know?"
Derek nodded, looking rather doubtful, but headed out to join the rest of the mechanics.
Alex switched on the computer for just the second time in the three weeks he'd been working there, and took a few minutes just to familiarise himself with it. Luckily, the software was all what he'd been used to, and he was relieved to find that it had internet access. Quickly bringing up the Amazon homepage, he typed in 'mechanics for dummies' and eyed the price carefully, doing the calculation in his head. He could probably afford it.
His monetary situation was a confusing one at the moment; MI6 were still paying his house bills, probably because that didn't require them to shell anything out, as it was all coming out of his Uncle's money; but the money in his bank account had stopped. While it meant that Alex didn't have to worry about electricity bills, or rates, or water bills, he did have to worry about all other expenses – food, clothes, travel. He was earning just over two hundred pounds a week, but, as a sixteen year old boy, he was pretty certain he could spend all of that on food and still be hungry. He had to be careful what he spent money on, and, since he wanted to put some aside so he didn't end up in the same position as last time when MI6 finally picked up on him again, he always saved as much as he could, often half that weeks salary. Between food and travel – the two regular expenses, since he rarely needed new clothes now that he'd all but finished his growth spurt – that didn't leave him with a lot of spare cash.
He worked it out in his head, and figured that he could always take it out of his food money. It would mean that he might have to go without lunch once or twice, but that was no great sacrifice. It was one he'd made regularly over the last few weeks, and while he knew he was losing weight, there was very little he could do about it. He wasn't losing much in muscle tone – because he was beginning to realise that if he became useless to MI6, they wouldn't pay any part of his household expenses, and he needed the money, so he had done what he could, with still-healing ribs and a broken arm, to keep his level of fitness high. But he was beginning to look almost unhealthily thin, and the worst thing was, he was next to helpless to stop it.
With a sigh, he clicked 'place your order', and bought the book. After all, he couldn't afford to lose this job any more than he could afford to lose the dubious protection MI6 gave him.
In the meantime, he opened an Excel spreadsheet, grabbed the file which held the monthly expenses, and started entering the information into the computer.
Wolf's first idea, once they'd found out that Cub had disappeared from the hospital, was to check the Public Records Office; it figured that they should find out what they could about the kid, if they were going to try and do anything about it. Eagle had been the lucky one to go, and he reported back to their impromptu Headquarters – Wolf's flat – with a worried frown.
"According to the records," he said, handing over the photocopies he'd scored from the secretary he'd flirted with, "There have been seventeen Alex Riders living around this central-mid London in the last twenty years – it's a pretty common name, I guess. Nine of them are over twenty, so I doubt Cub's any of those; he'd be about our age by now if he were. Out of the eight left, two are disabled in some way, three are under ten, and one is only twelve. That leaves us with two who are round about the right age."
"Then, let's go and check them out." Fox said, stretching tiredly. "Then we can relegate Cub to the tender loving care of his guardian, and stop worrying about him." The red-head had been just as shocked and concerned as the rest of them, but both he and Eagle were inclined to take this much less seriously then Wolf or Snake.
Or Eagle had been, up until right now.
"That's the thing, though." Eagle said, quietly. "We knew, from the Sergeant up at the Beacons, that Cub was an orphan, right?"
Wolf shook his head. "Found that out at Point Blanc." He corrected, ever a stickler for the facts. "The woman from MI6, she told us, when you asked about parental consent, Dave." Snake frowned, thinking back. "When Cub was injured."
Eagle waved one hand, impatiently. "Doesn't matter. We knew Cub was an orphan, either way. And neither of the two Alex Riders left in the area are orphans."
"MI6 could have made a mistake?" Fox suggested, but it was half-hearted. They both knew that MI6 never made mistakes like that. If they said Alex Rider was an orphan, he was an orphan. It was entirely possible that they'd made him one.
"I don't think so." Eagle said, slowly. "I checked the records for 'Rider' generally, and I found one name that sounded familiar – John Rider."
Snake frowned. "I recognise it." He said, slowly. "Officer of some kind, right? Dishonourable discharge, maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago now? Tactician … received the George Cross for his actions in the Falklands." He grinned. "He's mentioned briefly in 'The History of the SAS: Volume II'."
"What would we do without our walking encyclopaedia?" Fox asked, without real bite. Snake ignored him.
Eagle nodded. "Yeah. And there was a newspaper article about him; with a photo."
He put the photocopy on to table, and Snake bit his lip.
The man in the black-and-white newspaper photo, standing rigid in his dress uniform, face slightly shadowed under his peaked cap, could easily have been Cub in a few years time. There was no doubting the relationship.
Wolf cleared his throat. "Right. Well, now we know who his father is, couldn't you just get their files, find out where they lived? Cub's probably still living there."
"I did." Eagle replied, a little sharply. "Rider married a woman called Helen Mortimer, and they died, fifteen years ago, in a plane crash. No children. So I checked Rider's younger brother, Ian; never married, no children, died three years ago. And no address listed."
There were a few minutes of silence after that.
"So…" Fox said, finally. "What do we do now?"
Eagle shrugged, folding the piece of paper up, and slipping it back into the clear folder with all the other photocopies he'd got. "Well, Cub obviously exists." He said, trying to frame his thoughts into words with some degree of coherence. "Probably either Ian or John Rider's kid, and my bet is on John. I think MI6 just erased him from the records, to cover themselves, maybe."
"Maybe the kid gave you a fake name, James?" Snake suggested, tentatively.
"I think he'd probably want his own name written on his tombstone, don't you?" Wolf returned, rather sarcastically. "And there's that photograph; his surname, at least, is definitely Rider. No, I think Neal's right. But god knows what we're going to do now."
Fox considered it, dispassionately. "I guess we're going to have to see whether MI6 have any records on him." He said, slowly. "And if we still can't find him, I vote we see if we can get the high-ups in on it. I mean, technically, since he trained with us, he's a member of our team, right? And until a couple of months ago, we were still getting updates on his status, so apparently he still is. And that makes him SAS; so technically, command can make MI6 give them any information."
"Have you known anyone ever be able to make MI6 hand something over?" Wolf asked, rather darkly.
"Oh, come on." Fox replied, a little irritated. "This is Britain, not… not, Stalin's Russia. Everyone's bound by a degree of legality, and what MI6 are doing at the moment with that kid doesn't exactly have the 'full legal flavour', does it? Something's off, and you're the one who was so insistent that we do something about it. And that's the best way of going about it; so get on with it!"
"He's right, you know, James." Eagle backed the other man up, calmly. "It's as good a plan as we're going to come up with, for the moment."
"Ok." Wolf nodded, rather grudgingly. "Then, I guess… let's get started."
And, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you all on Wednesday as usual next week!
-amitai xxx