Crocodile Tears

he was with a school party. It was quite different. I don’t quite know what’s going on here, but it may not be quite as cut and dried as it seems.”
    “ Even so …”

    McCain held a hand up for silence. “We are not canceling Poison Dawn,” he said. “And certainly not yet. It seems to me that we have to meet with this Alex Rider and have a little talk.”
    “ You think he’ll just walk in here?”
    “ I have something else in mind.” McCain stood up. “We are about to make an unimaginable amount of money,” he said. “Two hundred million dollars. Maybe more. But that means we have to take risks.
    More than that, we have to make sure that we move one step ahead of the opposition. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
    He reached forward and grabbed Harry Bulman by the front of his shirt. The journalist had never been a small man, and now he had become, in every sense, a dead weight. Even so, McCain pulled him effortlessly to his feet and dragged him over to the door. Still holding him, he stepped outside. A mechanical digger had started up while he was talking with Straik and it was waiting for him on the other side of the door with its metal arm raised. There was a driver sitting behind the window, smoking.
    McCain threw down the body and the driver revved up the engine and trundled forward. There was a crunch of machinery as the arm was lowered and the dead man was picked up. Then the digger reversed, carrying Bulman toward the muddy excavation that would soon be his grave.
    McCain watched him go. “Well, it looks as if Mr. Bulman finally got what every journalist wants,” he said.
    Straik glanced at him.
    “ A scoop.”
    McCain had made his decision. He set off, avoiding the puddles so that he wouldn’t get his shoes dirty as he made his way toward his car.

    “ So what exactly do you think is going on?”
    Even as Alan Blunt posed the question, a waiter approached his table with the main course: steak and kidney pie for him, a tuna salad for Mrs. Jones. The two of them preferred not to talk as the plates were positioned and the wine was poured. They were having lunch at Blunt’s club, the Mandarin, in Whitehall. And although all the waiters had received security clearance, the two of them preferred not to talk while there was any chance of being overheard. A great many members of the Mandarin were either politicians or intelligence chiefs, and it was said to be the most unfriendly place in London.
    Nobody trusted anybody. Members very rarely spoke to each other at all.
    That morning, Blunt and his deputy had been given a full briefing by the chief science officer at MI6, a fiercely intelligent woman called Redwing. She had analyzed the liquid that had seeped into Alex Rider’s jacket after the test tube he had stolen had smashed. Her report—she was always thorough—
    had begun with wool, polyester, and apple juice. The first two, of course, were the materials of the jacket itself. The third had perhaps been a spill during school lunch.

    But the rest of the ingredients had been more interesting. According to Redwing, the test tube had contained something that she called bitrites infestans . This was essentially a biological soup that seemed to have been developed from a variety of different mushrooms. It was too soon to say which mushrooms exactly had been used, but preliminary tests were surprising. The liquid was completely harmless. It even had a nutritional value. Although it would taste disgusting, it could be consumed by humans or animals with no side effects. Redwing had eaten once or twice at the Mandarin, so she had concluded by saying, “They could serve it at your club, Mr. Blunt, and you might not even send it back.
    Why they’re making so much of it is a little puzzling. A thousand gallons? Is that what your agent said?
    Well, I can’t tell you what they’re going to do with it, but I can assure you that the worst it would give you is indigestion… .”
    Alex had told Jack what had happened at Greenfields, and she had in turn informed MI6. The appearance of Desmond McCain, the chase through the complex, the Poison Dome, the escape from the roof … they knew all of this. But, like Alex, they still had no clear idea what exactly was going on.
    The waiter retreated and Mrs. Jones tried to answer Blunt’s question. “I’m not at all surprised that McCain is up to no good,” she said. “He has a criminal record, after all.”
    “ Didn’t he convert to