Snakehead

1  DOWN TO EARTH

2  “DEATH IS NOT THE END”

3  VISA PROBLEMS

4  NO PICNIC

5  ON THE ROCKS

6  CITY OF ANGELS?

7  FATHER AND SON

8  FIRST CONTACT

9  ONCE BITTEN…

10  WAT HO

11  ARMED AND DANGEROUS

12  THE SILENT STREETS

13  UNWIN TOYS

14  THE
LIBERIAN STAR

15  HIDE-AND-SEEK

16  MADE IN BRITAIN

17  SPARE PARTS

18  DEAD OF NIGHT

19  WHITE WATER

20  BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED

21  ATTACK FORCE

22  DRAGON NINE

23  DINNER FOR THREE

S
PLASHDOWN
.

Alex Rider would never forget the moment of impact, the first shock as the parachute opened and the second—more jolting still—as the module that had carried him back from outer space crashed into the sea. Was it his imagination, or was there steam rising up all around him? Maybe it was sea spray. It didn't matter. He was back. That was all he cared about. He had made it. He was still alive.

He was still lying on his back, crammed into the tiny space with his knees tucked into his chest. Half closing his eyes, Alex experienced a moment of extraordinary stillness. He was completely still. His fists were clenched. He wasn't breathing. Was it really true? Already he found it impossible to believe that the events that had led to his journey into outer space had really taken place. He tried to imagine himself hurtling around the earth at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. It couldn't have happened. It had surely all been part of some incredible dream.

Slowly he forced himself to unwind. He lifted an arm. It rose normally. He could feel the muscle connecting. Just minutes before he had been in zero gravity. But as he rested, trying to collect his thoughts, he realized that once again his body belonged to him.

Alex wasn't sure how long he was left on his own, floating on the water somewhere…it could have been anywhere in the world. But when things happened, they did so very quickly. First there was the hammering of helicopter blades. Then the whoop of some sort of siren. He could see very little out the window—just the rise and fall of the ocean—but suddenly a man was there, a scuba diver, a palm slamming against the glass. A few seconds later, the capsule was opened from outside. Fresh air came rushing in, and to Alex it smelled delicious. At the same time, a man loomed over him, his body wrapped in neoprene, his eyes behind a mask.

“Are you okay?”

Alex could hardly make out the words, there was so much noise outside. Did the diver have an American accent? “I'm fine,” he managed to shout back. But it wasn't true. He was beginning to feel sick. There was a shooting pain behind his eyes.

“Don't worry! We'll soon have you out of there…”

It took them a while. Alex had only been in space a short time, but he'd never had any physical training for it, and now his muscles were turning against him, reluctant to start pulling their own weight. He had to be manhandled out of the capsule, into the blinding sun of a Pacific afternoon. Everything was chaotic. There was a helicopter overhead, the blades beating at the ocean, forming patterns that rippled and vibrated. Alex turned his head and saw—impossibly—an aircraft carrier, as big as a mountain, looming out of the water less than a quarter of a mile away. It was flying the Stars and Stripes. So he had been right about the diver. He must have landed somewhere off the coast of America.

There were two more divers in the water, bobbing up and down next to the capsule, and Alex could see a third man leaning out of the helicopter directly above him. He knew what was going to happen, and he didn't resist. First a loop of cable was passed around his chest and connected. He felt it tighten under his arms. And then he was rising into the air, still in his space suit, dangling like a silver puppet as he was winched up.

And already they knew. He had glimpsed it in the eyes of the diver who had spoken to him. The disbelief. These men—the helicopter, the aircraft carrier—had been rushed out to rendezvous with a module that had just reentered the earth's atmosphere. And inside, they had found a boy. A fourteen-year-old had just plummeted a hundred miles from outer space. These men would be sworn to secrecy, of course. MI6 would see to that. They would never talk about what had happened. Nor would they forget it.

There was a medical officer waiting for him on board the USS
Kitty Hawk—
which was the name of the ship that had been diverted to pick him up. His name was Josh Cook, and he was forty years old, black with wire-frame glasses and a pleasant, soft-spoken manner. He helped Alex out of the space suit and stayed in the room when Alex finally did throw up. It turned out that he'd dealt with astronauts before.

“They're all sick when they come down,” he explained. “It goes with the territory. Or maybe I should say terra firma. That's Latin for ‘down to earth.' You'll be fine by the morning.”

“Where am I?” Alex asked.

“You're about ninety miles off the coast of Australia. We were on a training exercise when we got a red alert that you were on your way down.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now you have a shower and get some sleep. You're in luck. We've got a mattress made out of memory foam. It was actually developed by NASA. It'll give your muscles a chance to get used to being back in full gravity.”

Alex had been given a private cabin in the medical department of the
Kitty Hawk—
in fact, a fully equipped “hospital at sea” with sixty-five beds, an operating room, a pharmacy, and everything else that 5,500 sailors might need. It wasn't huge, but he suspected that nobody else on the
Kitty Hawk
would have this much space. Cook went over to the corner and pulled back a plastic curtain to reveal a shower cubicle.

“You may find it difficult to walk,” he explained. “You're going to be unsteady on your feet for at least twenty-four hours. If you like, I can wait in the room until you've showered.”

“I'll be okay,” Alex said.

“All right.” Cook smiled and opened the main door. But before he left, he looked back at Alex. “You know—every man and woman on this ship is talking about you,” he said. “There are a whole pile of questions I'd like to ask you, but I'm under strict orders from the captain to keep my mouth shut. Even so, I want you to know that I've been at sea for a long, long time and I've never encountered anything like this. A kid in outer space!” He nodded one last time. “I hope you have a good rest. There's a call button beside the bed if there's anything you need.”

Cook left.

It took Alex ten minutes to get into the shower. He had completely lost his sense of balance, and the roll of the ship didn't help. He turned the temperature up as high as he could bear and stood under the steaming water, enjoying the rush of it over his shoulders and through his hair. Then he dried himself and got into bed. The memory foam was only a couple of inches thick, but it seemed to mold itself to the shape of his body exactly. He fell almost instantly into a deep but troubled sleep.

He didn't dream about the Ark Angel space station or his knife fight with Kaspar, the bald ecoterrorist who had been determined to kill him even though it was clear that all was lost. Nor did he dream about Nikolei Drevin, the billionaire who had been behind it all.

But it did seem to him that, sometime in the middle of the night, he heard the whisper of voices that he didn't recognize but that, somehow, he still knew. Old friends. Or old enemies. It didn't matter which because he couldn't make out what they were saying, and anyway, a moment later they were swept away down the dark river of his sleep.

Perhaps it was a premonition.

Because three weeks before, seven men had met in a room in London to discuss an operation that would make them many millions of dollars and would change the shape of the world. And although Alex had never met any of them, he certainly knew them.

Scorpia was back again.

I
T WAS THE SORT
of building you could walk past without noticing: three stories high, painted white with ivy, perfectly trimmed, climbing up to the roof. It stood about halfway down Sloane Street in Belgravia, just around the corner from Harrods, surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in London. On one side there was a jewelry shop and on the other an Italian fashion boutique—but the customers who came here would no longer be needing either. A single step led up to a door painted black, and there was a window that contained an urn, a vase of fresh flowers, and nothing else. The name of the place was written in discreet gold letters. It read: Reed and Kelly, Funeral Directors. And beneath that, a brief motto: Death is not the End.

At ten thirty on a bright October morning, exactly three weeks before Alex landed in the Pacific Ocean, a black Lexus LS 430 four-door sedan drew up outside the front door. The car had been chosen carefully. It was a luxury model, but there was nothing too special about it, nothing to attract the eye. The arrival had also been exactly timed. In the past fifteen minutes, three other vehicles and a taxi had briefly pulled up and their passengers, either singly or in pairs, had exited, crossed the pavement, and entered the parlor. If anyone had been watching, they would have assumed that a large family had gathered to make the final arrangements for someone who had recently departed.

The last person to arrive was a powerfully built man with massive shoulders and a shaved head. There was something quite brutal about his face: the small, squashed-up nose, thick lips, and muddy brown eyes. But his clothes were immaculate. He wore a tailored silk shirt, a dark suit, and a cashmere coat, hanging loose. There was a large platinum ring on his fourth finger. He had been smoking a cigar, but as he stepped from the car, he dropped it and ground it out with a brilliantly polished shoe. Without looking left or right, he crossed the pavement and entered the building. An old-fashioned bell on a spring jangled as the door opened and closed.

He found himself in a wood-paneled reception room where an elderly, gray-haired man, also wearing a suit, sat with his hands folded behind a narrow desk. He looked at the new arrival with a mixture of sympathy and politeness.

“Good morning,” he said. “How can we be of service?”

“I have come about a death,” the visitor replied.

“Someone close to you?”

“My brother. But I hadn't seen him for some years.”

“You have my condolences.”

The same words had been spoken seven times that morning. If even one syllable had been changed, the bald man would have turned around and left. But he knew now that the building was secure. He hadn't been followed. The meeting that had been arranged just twenty-four hours earlier could go ahead.

The older man leaned forward and pressed a button concealed underneath the desk. At once, a section of the wooden paneling clicked open to reveal a staircase, leading up to the second floor.

Reed and Kelly was a real business. There once had been a Jonathan Reed and a Sebastian Kelly, and for more than fifty years they had arranged funerals and cremations until, at last, the time had come to arrange their own. After that, the undertaker's had been purchased by a perfectly legitimate company and registered in Zurich, and it had continued to provide a first-class service for anyone who lived—or rather,
had
lived—in the area. But that was no longer the only purpose of the building in Sloane Street. It had also become the London headquarters of the international criminal organization that went by the name of Scorpia.

The name stood for “sabotage, corruption, intelligence, and assassination,” which were its four main activities. The organization had been formed some thirty years before in Paris, its members being spies from different intelligence networks around the world who had decided to go into business for themselves. There had been twelve of them at first. Then one had died of illness and two had been killed in the field. The other nine had congratulated themselves on surviving so long with so few casualties.

But quite recently, things had taken a turn for the worse. The oldest member of the organization had made the foolish and inexplicable decision to retire, which had, of course, led to his being murdered immediately. Soon afterward, his successor, a woman called Julia Rothman, had also been killed. That had been at the end of an operation—Invisible Sword—that had gone catastrophically wrong. In many ways this was the lowest point in Scorpia's history, and there were many who thought that the organization would never recover. After all, the agent who had beaten them, destroyed the operation, and caused the death of Mrs. Rothman had been fourteen years old.

However, Scorpia had not given in. They had taken swift revenge on the boy and gone straight back to work. Invisible Sword was just one of many projects needing their attention, for they were in constant demand from governments, terrorist groups, big business…in fact, anyone who could pay. And now they were active once again. They had come to this address in London to discuss a relatively small assignment but one that would net them ten million dollars, to be paid in uncut diamonds…easier to carry and harder to trace than banknotes.

The stairs led to a short corridor on the first floor with a single door at the end. One television camera had watched the bald man on his way up. A second followed him as he stepped onto a strange metal platform in front of the door and looked into a glass panel set in the wall. Behind the glass, there was a biometric scanner that took an instant image of the unique pattern of blood vessels on the retina behind his eye and matched them against a computer at the reception desk below. If an enemy agent had tried to gain access to the room, he would have triggered a ten-thousand-volt electric charge through the metal floor plate, incinerating him instantly. But this was no enemy. The man's name was Zeljan Kurst, and he had been with Scorpia almost from the beginning. The door slid open, and he went in.

He found himself in a long, narrow room with three windows covered by blinds and plain, white walls with no decoration of any kind. There was a glass table surrounded by leather chairs and no sign of any pens, paper, or printed documents. Nothing was ever written down at these meetings. Nor was anything recorded. Six men were waiting for him as he took his place at the head of the table. Following the disaster of Invisible Sword, now just the seven of them were left.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Kurst began. He spoke with a strange, mid-European accent. The last word had sounded like “chintlemen.” All the men at the table were equal partners, but he was currently the acting head. A new chief executive was chosen as fresh projects arrived.

Nobody replied. These people were not friends. They had nothing to say to each other outside the work at hand.

“We have been given a most interesting and challenging assignment,” Kurst went on. “I need hardly remind you that our reputation was quite seriously damaged earlier this year. In addition to providing us with a much-needed financial injection following the heavy losses we sustained on ‘Invisible Sword,' this new project will put us back on the map. Our task is this. We are to assassinate eight extremely wealthy and influential people exactly one month from now. They will all be in one place at one time, which provides us with the ideal opportunity. It has been left to us to decide on the method.”

Zeljan Kurst had been the head of the police force in Yugoslavia during the 1980s and had been famous for his love of classical music—particularly Mozart—and extreme violence. It was said that he would interrogate prisoners with either an opera or a symphony playing in the background and that those who survived the ordeal would never be able to listen to that piece of music again. But he had seen the breakup of his country on the horizon and had decided to quit before he was out of a job. And so he had changed sides. He had no family, no friends, and nowhere he could call home. He needed work, and he knew that Scorpia would pay him extremely well.

His eyes flickered around the table, waiting for a response. “You will have read in the newspapers,” he continued, “that the G8 summit is taking place in Rome this November. This is a meeting of the eight most powerful heads of government, and as usual they will talk a great deal, have their photographs taken, consume a lot of expensive food and wine…and do absolutely nothing. They are of no interest to us. They are, in effect, irrelevant.

“However, at the same time, another meeting will be taking place on the other side of the world. It has been arranged in direct competition with the G8 summit, and you might say that the timing is something of a publicity stunt. Nonetheless, it has already attracted much more attention than G8. Indeed, the politicians have almost been forgotten. Instead, the eyes of the world are on Reef Island, just off the coast of northwest Australia in the Timor Sea.

“The press have given this alternative summit a name: Reef Encounter. A group of eight people will be coming together, and their names will be known to you. One of them is a pop singer named Rob Goldman. He has apparently raised millions for charity with concerts all over the world. One is a billionaire, among the top-ten richest men on the planet. He created a huge property empire, but he is now giving his fortune away to developing countries. There is an ex-president of the United States. A famous Hollywood actress—Eve Taylor. She actually owns the island. And so on.” Kurst didn't even try to keep the contempt out of his voice. “They are amateurs, do-gooders…but they are also powerful and popular, which makes them dangerous.

“Their aim, as they put it, is ‘to make poverty history.' In order to achieve this, they have made certain demands, including the cancellation of world debt. They want millions of dollars to be sent to Africa to fight AIDS and malaria. They have called for an end to war in the Middle East. It will come as no surprise to those of us in this room that there are many governments and business interests who do not agree with these aims. After all, it is not possible to give to the poor without taking from the rich, and anyway, poverty has its uses. It keeps people in their place. It also helps to hold prices down.

“A representative of one of the governments has been in contact with us. He has decided that the Reef Encounter should end the moment it begins—certainly before any of these meddlers begin to address the television cameras of the world—and that is our assignment. Disrupting the conference is not enough. All eight of them are to be killed. The fact that they will all be in one place at one time makes it easier for us. Not one of them must leave Reef Island alive.”

One of the other men leaned forward. His name was Levi Kroll. He was an Israeli and about fifty years old. Very little of his face could be seen. Most of it was covered by a beard, and there was a patch covering the eye that he had once, by accident, shot out. “It is a simple matter,” he rasped. “I could go out this afternoon and hire an Apache helicopter gunship. Let us say two thousand rounds of 30-millimeter cannon fire and a few Hellfire air-to-ground laser-guided missiles and this conference would no longer exist.”

“Unfortunately, it isn't quite as straightforward as that,” Kurst replied. “As I said in my opening remarks, this is a particularly challenging assignment. Why? Because our client does not wish the Reef Island eight to become martyrs. If they were seen to be assassinated, it would only add weight to their cause. And so he has specified that the deaths must seem accidental. In fact, this is critical. There cannot be even the tiniest amount of doubt or suspicion.”

There was a soft murmur around the table as the other members of Scorpia took this new information on board. To kill one person in a way that would arouse no suspicion was simple. But to do the same for eight people on a remote island that would doubtless have a tight security system…that was quite another matter.

“There are certain chemical nerve agents…,” someone muttered. He was French, exquisitely dressed with a black silk handkerchief poking out of his top pocket. His voice was matter-of-fact.

“How about R-5?” Mr. Mikato suggested. He was a Japanese man with a diamond set in his tooth and—it was rumored—Yakuza tattoos all over his body. “It's the virus that we supplied to Herod Sayle. Perhaps we could feed it into the island's water supply…”

“Gentlemen, both of these methods would be effective but still might show up in the subsequent investigation.” Kurst shook his head. “What we require is a natural disaster, but one that we control. We need to eliminate the entire island with everybody on it, but in such a way that no questions will ever be asked.”

He paused, then turned to the man sitting at the end of the table opposite him. “Major Yu?” he asked. “Have you given the matter your consideration?”

“Absolutely…”

Major Winston Yu was at least sixty years old, and although he still had a full head of hair, it had turned completely white. The hair looked artificial, cut in the style of a schoolboy with a straight line above the eyes and the whole thing perched on top of a head that was yellow and waxy and that had shrunk like an overripe fruit. He was the least impressive person in the room, with circular glasses, thin lips, and hands that would have been small on a child. Everything about him was somehow delicate. He had been sitting very still at the table as if he was afraid he might break. An ornamental walking stick with a silver scorpion entwined around the handle rested against his chair. He wore a white suit and pale gray gloves.

“I have taken a very careful look at this operation,” he continued. He had a perfect English accent. “And I am happy to report that although on the face of it this seems to be a rather difficult business, we have been blessed with three very fortunate circumstances. First, this island, Reef Island, is in exactly the right place. Second, December 2, just a few weeks from now, will be exactly the right time. And third, the weapon that we require just happens to be here in England, in fact, less than thirty miles from where we are sitting now.”