The bank rang the following day.
“This is John Crawley. Do you remember me? Personnel Manager at the Royal & General. We were wondering if you could come in.”
“Come in?” Alex was half-dressed, already late for school.
“This afternoon. We found some papers of your uncle’s. We need to talk to you … about your own position.”
Was there something faintly threatening in the man’s voice? “What time this afternoon?” Alex asked.
“Could you manage half-past four? We’re on Liverpool Street. We can send a cab—”
“I’ll be there,” Alex said. “And I’ll take the tube.” He hung up.
“Who was that?” Jack called out from the kitchen. She was cooking breakfast for the two of them, although how long she could remain with Alex was a growing worry. Her wages hadn’t been paid. She had only her own money to buy food and pay for the running of the house. Worse still, her visa was about to expire. Soon she wouldn’t even be allowed to stay in the country.
“That was the bank.” Alex came into the room, wearing his spare uniform. He hadn’t told her what had happened at the breaker’s yard. He hadn’t even told her about the empty office. Jack had enough on her mind. “I’m going there this afternoon,” he said.
“Do you want me to come?” “No. I’ll be fine.”
He came out of Liverpool Street tube station just after four-fifteen that afternoon, still wearing his school uniform: dark blue jacket, grey trousers, striped tie. He found the bank easily enough. The Royal & General occupied a tall, antique-looking building with a Union Jack fluttering from a pole about fifteen floors up. There was a brass name-
plate next to the main door and a security camera swivelling slowly over the pavement.
Alex stopped in front of it. For a moment he wondered if he was making a mistake going in. If the bank had been responsible in some way for Ian Rider’s death, maybe they had asked him here to arrange his own. No. The bank wouldn’t kill him. He didn’t even have an account there. He went in.
In an office on the seventeenth floor, the image on the security monitor flickered and changed as Street Camera #1 smoothly cut across to Reception Cameras #2 and #3 and Alex passed from the brightness outside to the cool shadows of the interior. A man sitting behind a desk reached out and pressed a button and the camera zoomed in until Alex’s face filled the screen.
“So he came,” the chairman of the bank muttered.
“That’s the boy?” The speaker was a middle-aged woman. She had a strange, potato-shaped head and her black hair looked as if it had been cut using a pair of blunt scissors and an upturned bowl. Her eyes were almost black too. She was dressed in a severe grey suit and she was sucking a peppermint. “Are you sure about this, Alan?” she asked.
Alan Blunt nodded. “Oh yes. Quite sure. You know what to do?”
This last question was addressed to his driver, who was standing uncomfortably, slightly hunched over. His face was a chalky white. He had been like that ever since he had tried to stop Alex in the breaker’s yard. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Then do it,” Blunt said. His eyes never left the screen.
In Reception, Alex had asked for John Crawley and was sitting on a leather sofa, vaguely wondering why so few people were going in or out. The reception area was wide and airy, with a brown marble floor, three elevators to one side and, above the desk, a row of clocks showing the time in every major world city. But it could have been the entrance to anywhere. A hospital. A concert hall. Even a cruise liner. The place had no identity of its own.
One of the lifts pinged open and Crawley appeared in his usual suit, but with a different tie. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Alex,” he said. “Have you come straight from school?”
Alex stood up but said nothing, allowing his uniform to answer the man’s question.
“Let’s go up to my office,” Crawley said. He gestured. “We’ll take the lift.”
Alex didn’t notice the fourth camera inside the lift, but then it was concealed on the other side of the two-way mirror that covered the back wall. Nor did he see the thermal intensifier next to the camera. But this second machine both looked at him and through him as he stood there, turning him into a pulsating mass of different colours, none of which translated into the cold steel of a hidden gun or knife. In less than the time it took Alex to blink, the machine had passed its information down to a computer which had instantly evaluated it and then sent its own signal back to the circuits that controlled the elevator. It’s OK. He’s unarmed. Continue to the fifteenth floor.
“Here we are!” Crawley smiled and ushered Alex out into a long corridor with an uncarpeted, wooden floor and modern lighting. A series of doors was punctuated by framed paintings, brightly coloured abstracts. “My office is just along here.” Crawley pointed the way.
They had passed three doors when Alex stopped. Each door had a name-plate and this one he recognized – 1504: Ian Rider. White letters on black plastic.
Crawley nodded sadly. “Yes. This was where your uncle worked.
He’ll be much missed.”
“Can I go inside?” Alex asked.
Crawley seemed surprised. “Why do you want to do that?” “I’d be interested to see where he worked.”
“I’m sorry.” Crawley sighed. “The door will have been locked and I don’t have the key. Another time perhaps.” He gestured again. He used his hands like a magician, as if he was about to produce a fan of cards. “I have the office next door. Just here.”
They went into 1505. It was a large, square room with three windows looking out over the station. There was a flutter of red and blue outside and Alex remembered the flag he had seen. The flagpole was right next to Crawley’s office. Inside there was a desk and chair, a couple of sofas, in the corner a fridge, on the wall a couple of prints. A boring executive office. Perfect for a boring executive.
“Please, Alex. Sit down,” Crawley said. He went over to the fridge. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Do you have Coke?”
“Yes.” Crawley opened a can and filled a glass, then handed it to Alex. “Ice?”
“No thanks.” Alex took a sip. It wasn’t Coke. It wasn’t even Pepsi. He recognized the over-sweet, slightly cloying taste of supermarket cola and wished he’d asked for water. “So what do you want to talk to me about?”
“Your uncle’s will—”
The telephone rang and with another hand-sign, this one for “excuse me,” Crawley answered it. He spoke for a few moments then hung up again. “I’m very sorry, Alex. I have to go back down to Reception. Do you mind?”
“Go ahead.” Alex settled himself on the sofa.
“I’ll be about five minutes.” With a final nod of apology, Crawley left.
Alex waited a few seconds. Then he poured the cola into a potted plant and stood up. He went over to the door and back into the corridor. At the far end, a woman carrying a pile of papers appeared and then disappeared through a door. There was no sign of Crawley. Quickly, Alex moved back to the door of 1504 and tried the handle. But Crawley had been telling the truth. It was locked.
Alex went back into Crawley’s office. He would have given anything to spend a few minutes alone in Ian Rider’s office. Somebody thought the dead man’s work was important enough to keep hidden from him. They had broken into his house and cleaned out everything they’d found in the office there. Perhaps the next-door room might tell him why. What exactly had Ian Rider been involved in? And was it the reason why he had been killed?
The flag fluttered again and, seeing it, Alex went over to the window. The pole jutted out of the building exactly halfway between rooms 1504 and 1505. If he could somehow reach it, he should be able to jump on to the ledge that ran along the side of the building outside room 1504. Of course, he was fifteen floors up. If he jumped and missed there would be about seventy metres to fall. It was a stupid idea. It wasn’t even worth thinking about.
Alex opened the window and climbed out. It was better not to think about it at all. He would just do it. After all, if this had been the ground floor, or a climbing-frame in the school yard, it would have
been child’s play. It was only the sheer brick wall stretching down to the pavement, the cars and buses moving like toys so far below and the blast of the wind against his face that made it terrifying. Don’t think about it. Do it.
Alex lowered himself on to the ledge outside Crawley’s office. His hands were behind him, clutching on to the window-sill. He took a deep breath. And jumped.
A camera located in an office across the road caught Alex as he launched himself into space. Two floors above, Alan Blunt was still sitting in front of the screen. He chuckled. It was a humourless sound. “I told you,” he said. “The boy’s extraordinary.” “The boy’s quite mad,” the woman retorted. “Well, maybe that’s what we need.” “You’re just going to sit here and watch him kill himself?” “I’m going to sit here and hope he survives.” Alex had miscalculated the jump. He had missed the flagpole by a centimetre and would have plunged down to the pavement if his hands hadn’t caught hold of the Union Jack itself. He was hanging now with his feet in mid-air. Slowly, with huge effort, he pulled himself up, his fingers hooking into the material. Somehow he managed to climb back up on to the pole. He still didn’t look down. He just hoped that no passerby would look up.
It was easier after that. He squatted on the pole, then threw himself across to the ledge outside Ian Rider’s office. He had to be careful. Too far to the left and he would crash into the side of the building, but too far the other way and he would fall. In fact he landed perfectly, grabbing hold of the ledge with both hands and then pulling himself up until he was level with the window. It was only then that he wondered if the window would be locked. If so, he’d just have to go back.
It wasn’t. Alex slid the window open and hoisted himself into the second office, which was in many ways a carbon copy of the first. It had the same furniture, the same carpet, even a similar print on the wall. He went over to the desk and sat down. The first thing he saw was a photograph of himself, taken the summer before on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where he had gone diving. There was a second picture tucked into the corner of the frame. Alex aged five or six. He was surprised by the photographs. He had never thought of Ian Rider as a sentimental man.
Alex glanced at his watch. About three minutes had passed since
Crawley had left the office, and he had said he would be back in five. If he was going to find anything here, he had to find it quickly. He pulled open a drawer of the desk. It contained five or six thick files. Alex took them and opened them. He saw at once that they had nothing to do with banking.
The first was marked: NERVE POISONS – NEW METHODS OF CONCEALMENT AND DISSEMINATION. Alex put it aside and looked at the second. ASSASSINATIONS – FOUR CASE STUDIES. Growing ever more puzzled, he quickly flicked through the rest of the files, which covered counter-terrorism, the movement of uranium across Europe and interrogation techniques. The last file was simply labelled: STORMBREAKER.
Alex was about to read it when the door suddenly opened and two men walked in. One of them was Crawley. The other was the driver from the breaker’s yard. Alex knew there was no point trying to explain what he was doing. He was sitting behind the desk with the Stormbreaker file open in his hands. But at the same time he realized that the two men weren’t surprised to see him there. From the way they had come into the room, they had expected to find him.
“This isn’t a bank,” Alex said. “Who are you? Was my uncle working for you? Did you kill him?”
“So many questions,” Crawley muttered. “But I’m afraid we’re not authorized to give you the answers.”
The other man lifted his hand and Alex saw that he was holding a gun. He stood up behind the desk, holding the file as if to protect himself. “No—” he began.
The man fired. There was no explosion. The gun spat at Alex and he felt something slam into his heart. His hand opened and the file tumbled to the ground. Then his legs buckled, the room twisted and he fell back into nothing.
