London appeared.
Suddenly the clouds rolled back and the midday sun brought the whole city, shining, into view. There was Battersea Power Station, standing proud with its four great chimneys still intact, even though much of its roof had long ago been eaten away. Behind it, Battersea Park appeared as a square of dense green bushes and trees that were making a last stand, fighting back the urban spread. In the far distance, the Millennium Wheel perched like a fabulous silver coin, balancing effortlessly on its rim. And all around it, London crouched; gas towers and apartment blocks, endless rows of shops and houses, roads, railways and bridges stretching away on both sides, separated only by the bright silver crack in the landscape that was the River Thames.
Alex saw all this with a clenched stomach, looking out through the open door of the aircraft. He’d had fifty minutes to think about what he had to do. Fifty minutes while the plane droned over Cornwall and Devon, then Somerset and the Salisbury Plains before reaching the North Downs and flying on towards Windsor and London.
When he had got into the plane, Alex had intended to use its radio to call the police or anyone else who might be listening. But seeing Mr Grin at the controls had changed all that. He remembered how fast the man had been both outside his bedroom and throwing the knife when Alex was handcuffed to the chair. He knew he was safe enough in the cargo area, with Mr Grin strapped into the pilot’s seat at the front of the plane. But he didn’t dare get any closer. Even with the gun it would be too dangerous.
He had thought of forcing Mr Grin to land the plane at Heathrow. The radio had started squawking the moment they’d entered London airspace and had only stopped when Mr Grin turned it off. But that would never have worked. By the time they’d reached the airport, touched down and coasted to a halt, it would have been far too late.
And then, sitting hunched up in the cargo area, Alex had recognized
the two bundles lying on the floor next to him. They had told him exactly what he had to do.
“Eeerg!” Mr Grin said. He twisted round in his seat and for the last time Alex saw the hideous smile that the circus knife had torn through his cheeks.
“Thanks for the ride,” Alex said, and jumped out of the open door.
The bundles were parachutes. Alex had checked them out and strapped one on to his back when they were still over Reading. He was glad that he’d spent a day on parachute training with the SAS, although this flight had been even worse than the one he’d endured over the Welsh valleys. This time there was no static line. There was no one to reassure him that his parachute was properly packed. If he could have thought of any other way to reach the Science Museum in the seven minutes he had left, he would have taken it. There was no other way. He knew that. So he had jumped.
Once he stepped over the threshold, it wasn’t so bad. A moment of dizzying confusion washed over him as the wind hit again. He closed his eyes and counted to three, forcing himself to stay calm. Pull too early, and the parachute could snag on the plane’s tail. Yet, with his hand clenched tight, he barely finished the word “three” before yanking with all his might. The parachute bloomed open above him, yanking him back upward as the harness dug into his armpits and sides.
They had been flying at four thousand feet. When Alex opened his eyes, he was surprised by how calm he felt. He hung suspended beneath a reassuring canopy of white silk, feeling almost as if he weren’t moving at all. Now that he had left the plane, the city seemed even more distant and surreal. It was just him, the sky, and London. He found himself almost enjoying the experience.
Then he heard the plane returning.
It was already a couple of kilometers away, but he watched as it banked sharply to the right, making a swift turn. The engines roared, and it leveled out, heading straight for him. Mr. Grin wasn’t about to let him escape so easily. As the plane drew closer, Alex could almost see that never-ending smile behind the cockpit window. Mr. Grin seemed intent on steering the plane right into him, ready to shred him in mid-air.
But Alex had been prepared.
He reached down and pulled out the Game Boy. This time, there was no game cartridge inside. While on the plane, he had removed Bomber Boy and slid it across the floor. That’s where it was now—just behind Mr. Grin’s seat.
He pressed the START button three times.
Inside the plane, the cartridge exploded, releasing a billowing cloud of acrid yellow smoke. The smoke surged through the hold, curling around the windows and trailing out the open door. Mr. Grin vanished, engulfed in the thick haze. The plane wobbled violently before it plunged downward.
Alex watched the plane dive. He could imagine Mr Grin blinded, fighting for control. The plane began to twist, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The engines whined. Now it was heading straight for the ground, howling through the sky. Yellow smoke trailed in its wake. At the last minute, Mr Grin managed to bring the nose up again. But it was much too late. The plane smashed into what looked like a deserted piece of dockland near the river and disappeared in a ball of flame.
Alex looked at his watch. Three minutes to twelve. He was still a thousand feet in the air and unless he landed on the very doorstep of the Science Museum, he wasn’t going to make it. Grabbing hold of the cords, using them to steer himself, he tried to work out the fastest way down.
Inside the East Hall of the Science Museum, Herod Sayle was coming to the end of his speech. The entire chamber had been transformed for the great moment when the Stormbreakers would be brought on-line.
The room was caught between old and new, between stone colonnades and stainless steel floors, between the very latest in high- tech and old curiosities from the Industrial Revolution.
A podium had been set up in the centre for Sayle, the Prime Minister, the Press Secretary and the Minister of State for Education. In front of it were twelve rows of chairs – for journalists, teachers, invited friends. Alan Blunt was in the front row, as emotionless as ever. Mrs Jones, dressed in black with a large brooch on her lapel, was next to him. On either side of the hall, television towers had been constructed, with cameras focusing in as Sayle spoke. The speech was
being broadcast live to schools throughout the country and it would also be shown on the evening news. The hall was packed with another two or three hundred people standing on first and second-floor galleries, looking down on the podium from all sides. As Sayle spoke, tape recorders turned and cameras flashed. Never before had a private individual made so generous a gift to the nation. This was an event. History in the making.
“…it is the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister alone, who is responsible for what is about to happen,” Sayle was saying. “And I hope that tonight, when he reflects on what has happened today throughout this country, he will remember our days together at school, and everything he did at that time. I think tonight the country will know him for the man he is. One thing is sure. This is a day you will never forget.”
He bowed. There was a scatter of applause. The Prime Minister glanced at his Press Secretary, puzzled. The Press Secretary shrugged with barely concealed rudeness. The Prime Minister took his place in front of the microphone.
“I’m not quite sure how to respond to that,” he joked, and all the journalists laughed. The Government had such a large majority that they knew it was in their best interests to laugh at the Prime Minister’s jokes. “I’m glad Mr Sayle has such happy memories of our school-days together and I’m glad that the two of us, together, today, can make such a vital difference to our schools.”
Herod Sayle pointed at a table slightly to one side of the podium. On the table was a Stormbreaker computer and next to it, a mouse. “This is the master control,” he said. “Click on the mouse and all the computers will come on-line.”
“Right.” The Prime Minister lifted his finger and adjusted his position so that the cameras could get his best profile. Somewhere outside the museum, a clock began to strike.
Alex heard the clock from about three hundred feet, with the roof of the Science Museum rushing towards him.
He had seen the building just after the plane had crashed. It hadn’t been easy finding it, with the city spread out like a three-dimensional map right underneath him. On the other hand, he had lived his whole
life in west London and had visited the museum often enough. First he had seen the Victorian jelly mould that was the Albert Hall. Directly south of that was a tall white tower surmounted by a green dome: Imperial College. As Alex dropped, he seemed to be moving faster. The whole city had become a fantastic jigsaw puzzle and he knew he only had seconds to piece it together. A wide, extravagant building with church-like towers and windows. That had to be the Natural History Museum. The Natural History Museum was on Cromwell Road. How did you get from there to the Science Museum? Of course, turn left at the lights up Exhibition Road.
And there it was. Alex pulled at the parachute, guiding himself towards it. How small it looked compared to the other landmarks, a rectangular building with a flat grey roof, jutting in from the main road. Part of the roof consisted of a series of arches, the sort of thing you might see on a railway station or perhaps on an enormous conservatory. They were a dull orange in colour, curving one after the other. It looked as if they were made of glass. Alex could land on the flat part. Then all he would have to do was look through the curved windows. He still had the gun he had taken from the guard. He could use it to warn the Prime Minister. If he had to, he could use it to shoot Herod Sayle.
Somehow he managed to manoeuvre himself over the museum. But it was only as he fell the last two hundred feet, as he heard the clock strike twelve, that he realized two things. He was falling much too fast. And he had missed the flat roof.
In fact the Science Museum has two roofs. The original is Georgian and made of wired glass. But sometime in the recent past it must have leaked, because the curators have constructed a second roof of plastic sheeting over the top. This was the orange roof that Alex had seen.
He crashed into it feet-first. The roof shattered. He continued straight through, into an inner chamber, just missing a network of steel girders and maintenance ladders. He barely had time to register what looked like a brown carpet, stretched out over the curving surface below. Then he hit it and tore through that too. It was no more than a thin cover, designed to keep the light and dust off the glass underneath. With a yell, Alex smashed through the glass. At last his parachute caught on a beam. He jerked to a halt, swinging in mid- air inside the East Hall.
This was what he saw.
Far below him, all around him, three hundred people had stopped and were staring up at him in shock. There were more people sitting on chairs directly underneath him and some of them had been hit. There was blood and broken glass. A bridge made of green glass slats stretched across the hall. There was a futuristic information desk and in front of it, at the very centre of everything, was a makeshift stage. He saw the Stormbreaker first. Then, with a sense of disbelief, he recognized the Prime Minister standing, slack-jawed, next to Herod Sayle.
Alex hung in the air, dangling at the end of the parachute. As the last pieces of glass fell and disintegrated on the terracotta floor, movement and sound returned to the East Hall in an ever-widening wave.
The security men were the first to react. Anonymous and invisible when they needed to be, they were suddenly everywhere, appearing from behind colonnades, from underneath the television towers, running across the green bridge, guns in hands that had been empty a second before. Alex had also drawn his gun, pulling it out from the waistband of his combats. Maybe he could explain why he was here before Sayle or the Prime Minister activated the Stormbreakers. But he doubted it. Shoot first and ask questions later was a line from a bad film. But even bad films are sometimes right.
He emptied the gun.
The bullets echoed around the room, surprisingly loud. Now people were screaming, the journalists punching and pushing as they fought for cover. The first bullet went nowhere. The second hit the Prime Minister in the hand, his finger less than a centimetre away from the mouse. The third hit the mouse, blowing it into fragments. The fourth hit an electrical connection, smashing the plug and short-circuiting it. Sayle had dived forward, determined to click on the mouse himself. The fifth and sixth bullets hit him.
As soon as Alex had fired the last bullet, he dropped the gun, letting it clatter to the floor below, and held up the palms of his hands. He felt ridiculous, hanging there from the roof, his arms outstretched. But there were already a dozen guns pointing at him and he had to show them he was no longer armed, that they didn’t need to shoot. Even so, he braced himself, waiting for the security men to open fire. He could
almost imagine the hail of bullets tearing into him. As far as they were concerned, he was some sort of crazy terrorist who had just parachuted into the Science Museum and taken six shots at the Prime Minister. It was their job to kill him. It was what they’d been trained for.
But the bullets never came. All the security men were equipped with radio headsets and, in the front row, Mrs Jones had control. The moment she had recognized Alex she had spoken urgently into her brooch. Don’t shoot! Repeat – don’t shoot! Await my command!
On the podium, a plume of grey smoke rose out of the back of the broken, useless Stormbreaker. Two security men had rushed to the Prime Minister, who was clutching his wrist, blood dripping from his hand. Journalists had begun to shout questions. Photographers’ cameras were flashing and the television cameras, too, had been swung round to focus in on the figure swaying high above. More security men were moving to seal off the exits, following orders from Mrs Jones, while Alan Blunt looked on, for once in his life out of his depth.
But there was no sign of Herod Sayle. The head of Sayle Enterprises had been shot twice – but somehow he had disappeared.
