The following chapter is a summary of certain events of the Alex Rider- novel series by Anthony Horowitz. Also, wikipedia was used as a source. I do not own most of the following information and story events. This is probably now a crossover, however, you do not need to have read the Alex Rider books, this is what this chapter is for: introducing the new plot line.

Chapter 5

Zeljan Kurst was a Yugoslavian business man and police officer during the 1970s and 80s. With the new government coming up he feared to be prosecuted for his many crimes. So instead he fled and scratched a living with several job in Eastern Europe until finally meeting people who had to be on the run like him. Together with Max Grendel, Julia Rothman and Winston Yu he founded an organised crime group called SCORPIA, standing for Sabotage, Corruption, Intelligence and Assassination.

This organisation had grown up to twelve head members in its heyday, until three of their criminal operations were prevented by a fourteen year old schoolboy who had been working for the British secret service. After the arrest of Kurst and the shame that SCORPIA was destroyed by a kid, the organisation was dissolved.

Several years later, in early 2012, a new organisation was founded, also of Italian origin, and it started calling themselves SCORPIA, to re-finding the heritage of the original organisation and to honour it with new criminal attacks, now focusing more on America and the West instead of paid attacks for rich people. After they failed twice as well, due to an NCIS team of Washington DC, the new SCORPIA organisation was dissolved as well, adding up to the shame of the previous members. Many of them had died, and the name SCORPIA was haunted and had become a synonym for failure due to underestimated police officers.

The arrest and prosecution of Zeljan Kurst had been a political nightmare, as several countries claimed that they wanted to conduct court martial. Finally, Kurst had been charged and found guilty and sent to a high security prison, the Southern Prison for cases requiring Intensive Care (SPIC), on a small South American island which unofficially belonged to the United States.

"A modern Alcatraz" it was called and shut off from the main land. Although very automatic, guards were position everywhere in case of power failure. Such a power failure was hardly possible as there were three independent generators as well as an intern gas tank to supply the island with electricity and heat in case of an attack or crisis. Of course, neither the additional gas nor the generators had ever been needed except for one accidental power outage about two years ago.

Only few people had ever been found guilty enough to be brought to this prison and so there were only two hundred international prisoners guarded by fifty watchers day and night. Since these prisoners had all been charged with corruption, arms or human trafficking or organised crime, they were mostly non-violent and there were hardly any fights on daily occurrence.

It was one of the places, like there were more than someone thought of, where no one would return when once sent there. Unfortunately, that was what most politicians and the other people being aware of the existence of this prison thought. Everyone knew that for the right price, everyone could get everything. Of course, prisoners had disappeared, prisoners with enough contact or enough money, but no one had ever broken out.

To break out, someone would need a rescue party from the outside, reaching the island unseen by the naval radar of both the States and Mexico. On the island, there was an electric fence crossing the beach which reached once around the island. Then there would be a seven kilometre walk – as of course there were only very few vehicles at all on the island. Then the wall started, it wasn't as high as expected and not as thick as expected. First reason was that no one was supposed to break in or out anyway, second reason had been a budget cut.

Every single square meter inside this wall was under surveillance by cameras, looked at by two guards at the same time. Of course, this did not sound much – but you couldn't pay more than two guys to play Doodle Jump the whole time. The footage displayed on five TV screens which these two guards stared at switched from camera to camera every ten seconds, covering the whole observed area within two minutes. Inside the huge complex, which contained everything from cells, over training and work areas, a small library and dining hall, there were doors everywhere, opened only automatically with a certain card and as too many movies showed how easy it was to steal the identity card of a watcher, every third door demanded iris scans.

Of course, one could say that a simple hacker could shut down the entire island, although the electricity could be immediately replaced by the generators, but the computer system running the whole facility was developed not by professionals working for the American government, but by students picked all over the world. They hadn't been told what they programmed, no one had programmed anything big. And then another few students matched the program codes together, so that no one knew too much about the project.

A very lot of people had worked on making the computer system secure and only few people were able to control it, so that maintenance was done every 14 days. Once a month by intern security guards, two of them had a professional computing science formation, and once a month by someone extern, who was told to keep silent about whatever he saw inside the prison.

Whatever happened on the island, stayed on the island. And no one ever had the intense desire to find out what happened if this was not the case.