Alex saw it the moment he opened his eyes. It would have been obvious to anyone who slept in the bed, but of course nobody had slept there since Ian Rider had been killed. It was a triangle of white slipped into a fold in the canopy above the four-poster bed. You had
to be lying on your back to see it – like Alex was now.
It was out of his reach. He had to balance a chair on the mattress and then stand on the chair to reach it. Wobbling, almost falling, he finally managed to trap it between his fingers and pull it out.
In fact it was a square of paper, folded twice. Someone had drawn on it, a strange design with what looked like a reference number beneath it.
 |
There wasn’t very much of it, but Alex recognized Ian Rider’s handwriting. But what did it mean? He pulled on some clothes, went over to the table and took out a sheet of plain paper. Quickly, he wrote a brief message in block capitals.
 |
Then he found his Game Boy, inserted the Nemesis cartridge into the back, turned it on and passed the screen over the two sheets of paper, scanning first his message and then the design. Instantaneously, he knew, a machine would click on in Mrs Jones’s office in London and a copy of the two pages would scroll out of the back. Maybe she could work it out. She was, after all, meant to work for Intelligence.
Finally, Alex turned off the Game Boy then removed the back and
hid the folded paper in the battery compartment. The diagram had to be important. Ian Rider had hidden it. Maybe it was what had cost him his life.
There was a knock at the door. Alex went over and opened it. Mr Grin was standing outside, still wearing his butler’s uniform.
“Good morning,” Alex said.
“Geurgh!” Mr Grin gestured and Alex followed him back down the corridor and out of the house. He felt relieved to be out in the air, away from all the artwork. As they paused in front of the fountain there was a sudden roar and a propeller-driven cargo plane dipped down over the roof of the house and landed on the runway.
“If gring gly,” Mr Grin explained. “Just as I thought,” Alex said.
They reached the first of the modern buildings and Mr Grin pressed his hand against a glass plate next to the door. There was a green glow as his fingerprints were read, and a moment later the door slid soundlessly open.
Everything was different on the other side of the door. From the art and elegance of the main house, Alex could have stepped into the next century. Long white corridors with metallic floors. Halogen lights. The unnatural chill of air-conditioning. Another world.
A woman was waiting for them, broad-shouldered and severe, her blonde hair twisted into the tightest of buns. She had a strangely blank, moon-shaped face, wire-framed spectacles and no make-up apart from a smear of yellow lipstick. She wore a white coat with a name tag pinned to the top pocket. It read: VOLE.
“You must be Felix,” she said. “Or is it now, I understand, Alex? Yes! Allow me to introduce myself. I am Fräulein Vole.” She had a thick German accent. “You may call me Nadia.” She glanced at Mr Grin. “I will take him from here.”
Mr Grin nodded and left the building.
“This way.” Vole began to walk. “We have four blocks here. Block A where we are now, is Administration and Recreation. Block B is Software Development. Block C is Research and Storage. Block D is where the main Stormbreaker assembly line is found.”
“Where’s breakfast?” Alex asked.
“You have not eaten? I will send you a sandwich. Herr Sayle is very keen for you to begin at once with the experience.”
She walked like a soldier – back straight, her feet, in black leather shoes, rapping against the floor. Alex followed her through a door and into a bare, square room with a chair and a desk and, on the desk, the first actual Stormbreaker he had ever seen.
It was a beautiful machine. The iMac might have been the first computer with a real sense of design, but the Stormbreaker had far surpassed it. It was black apart from the white lightning bolt down one side – and the screen could have been a porthole into outer space. Alex sat behind the desk and turned it on. The computer booted itself instantly. A fork of animated lightning sliced across the screen, there was a swirl of clouds, and then in burning red the letters SE, the logo of Sayle Enterprises, formed itself. Seconds later, the desktop appeared, with icons for maths, science, French – every subject – ready to be accessed. Even in those brief seconds, Alex could feel the speed and the power of the computer. And Herod Sayle was going to put one in every school in the country! He had to admire the man. It was an incredible gift.
“I leave you here,” Fräulein Vole said. “It is better for you, I think, to explore the Stormbreaker on your own. Tonight you will have dinner with Herr Sayle and you will tell him your feeling.”
“Yeah – I’ll tell him my feeling.”
“I will have the sandwich sent in to you. But I must ask you to please not leave the room. There is, you understand, the security.”
“Whatever you say, Mrs Vole,” Alex said.
The woman left. Alex opened one of the programs and for the next three hours lost himself in the state-of-the-art software of the Stormbreaker. Even when his sandwich arrived, he ignored it, letting it curl on the plate. He would never have said that school-work was fun, but he had to admit that the computer made it lively. The history program brought the battle of Port Stanley to life with music and video clips. How to extract oxygen from water? The science program did it in front of his eyes. The Stormbreaker even managed to make geometry almost bearable, which was more than Mr Donovan at Brookland had ever done.
The next time Alex looked at his watch it was one o’clock. He had been in the room for over four hours. He stretched and stood up.
Nadia Vole had told him not to leave, but if there were any secrets to be found at Sayle Enterprises, he wasn’t going to find them here. He walked over to the door and was surprised to find that it opened as he approached. He went out into the corridor. There was nobody in sight. Time to move.
Block A was Administration and Recreation. Alex passed a number of offices, then a blank, white-tiled cafeteria. There were about forty men and women, all in white coats and identity tags, sitting and talking animatedly over their lunches. He had chosen a good time. Nobody passed him as he continued through a Plexiglas walkway into Block B. There were computer screens everywhere, glowing in cramped offices piled high with papers and printouts. Software Development. Through to Block C – Research – past a library with endless shelves of books and CD-ROMs. Alex ducked in behind a shelf as two technicians walked past, talking together. He was out of bounds, on his own, snooping around without any idea of what he was looking for. Trouble, probably. What else could there be to find?
He walked softly, casually, down the corridor, heading for the last block. A murmur of voices reached him and he quickly stepped into an alcove, squatting down beside a drinking fountain as two men and a woman walked past, all wearing white coats, arguing about Web servers. Overhead, he noticed a security camera swivelling towards him. In another five seconds it would be on him, but he still had to wait until the three technicians had gone before he could sprint forward, just ahead of the wide-angle lens.
Had it seen him? Alex couldn’t be sure. But he did know one thing: he was running out of time. Maybe the Vole woman would have checked up on him already. Maybe someone would have brought lunch to the empty room. If he was going to find anything, it would have to be soon…
He started along the glass passage that joined Blocks C and D, and here at last there was something different. The corridor was split in half, with a metal staircase leading down into what must have been some sort of basement. And although every building and every door he had seen so far had been labelled, this staircase was blank. The light stopped about halfway down. It was almost as if the stairs were trying not to get themselves noticed.
The clang of feet on metal. Alex shrank back and a moment later Mr
Grin appeared, rising out of the floor like a vampire on a bad day. As the sun hit his dead, white face, his scars twitched and he blinked several times before walking off into Block D.
What had he been doing? Where did the stairs go? Alex hurried down them. It was like stepping into a morgue. The air-conditioning was so strong that he could feel it on his forehead and on the palms of his hands, fast-freezing his sweat.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He was in another long passageway, stretching back under the complex, the way he had come. It led to a single metal door. But there was something very strange. The walls of the passage were unfinished; dark brown rock with streaks of what looked like zinc or some other metal. The floor was also rough, and the way was lit by old-fashioned bulbs hanging on wires. It all reminded him of something … something he had seen very recently. But he couldn’t remember what.
Somehow Alex knew that the door at the end of the passage would be locked. It looked as if it had been locked for ever. Like the stairs, it was not labelled. And somehow it seemed too small to be important. But Mr Grin had just come up the stairs. There was only one place he could have come from and that was the other side. The door had to lead somewhere!
He reached it and tried the handle. It wouldn’t move. He pressed his ear against the metal and listened. Nothing, unless … was he imagining it? … a sort of throbbing. A pump or something like it. Alex would have given anything to see through the metal – and suddenly he realized that he could. The Game Boy was in his pocket. He took it out, inserted the Exocet cartridge, turned it on and held it flat against the door.
The screen flickered into life; a tiny window through the metal door. Alex was looking into a large room. There was something tall and barrel-shaped in the middle of it. And there were people. Ghost- like, mere smudges on the screen, they were moving back and forth. Some of them were carrying objects – flat and rectangular. Trays of some sort? There seemed to be a desk to one side, piled with apparatus that he couldn’t make out. Alex pressed the brightness control, trying to zoom in. But the room was too big. Everything was too far away.
He fumbled in his pocket and took out the earphones. Still holding
the Game Boy against the door, he pressed the wire into the socket and slipped the earphones over his head. If he couldn’t see, at least he might be able to hear – and sure enough the voices came through, faint and disconnected, but audible through the powerful speaker system built into the machine.
“…in place. We have twenty-four hours.” “It’s not enough.”
“It’s all we have. They come in tonight. At 0200.”
Alex didn’t recognize any of the voices. Amplified by the tiny machine, they sounded like a telephone call from abroad on a very bad line.
“…Grin … overseeing the delivery.” “It’s still not enough time.”
And then they were gone. Alex tried to piece together what he had heard. Something was being delivered. Two hours after midnight. Mr Grin was arranging the delivery.
But what? Why?
He had just turned off the Game Boy and put it back into his pocket when he heard behind him the squeak of a shoe that told him he was no longer alone. He turned round and found himself facing Nadia Vole. Alex realized that she had tried to sneak up on him. She had known he was down here.
“What are you doing, Alex?” she asked. Her voice was poisoned honey.
“Nothing,” Alex said.
“I asked you to stay in the computer room.”
“Yes. But I’d been there all morning. I needed a break.” “And you came down here?”
“I saw the stairs. I thought they might lead to the toilet.”
There was a long silence. Behind him, Alex could still hear – or feel – the throbbing from the secret room. Then the woman nodded as if she had decided to accept his story. “There is nothing down here,” she said. “This door leads only to the generator room. Please…” She gestured. “I will take you back to the main house, yes? And later you must prepare for the dinner with Herr Sayle. He wishes to know your first impressions of the Stormbreaker.”
Alex walked past her and back towards the stairs. He was certain of two things. The first was that Nadia Vole was lying. This was no generator room. She was hiding something. And she hadn’t believed him either. One of the cameras must have spotted him and she had been sent to find him. So she knew that he was lying to her.
Not a good start.
Alex reached the staircase and climbed up into the light, feeling the woman’s eyes, like daggers, stabbing into his back.
