Point Blank

up ahead of him. It was empty now and would remain so until the summer term.
    But as Alex arrived, he saw a figure walking across the yard to the school gates and recognized Mr. Lee, the elderly school caretaker.
    ‚You again!‛
    ‚Hello, Bernie,‛ Alex said. That was what everyone called him.
    ‚On your way to see Mr. Bray?‛
    ‚Yeah.‛
    The caretaker shook his head. ‚He never told me he was going to be here today. But he never tells me anything! I’m just going down to the shops. I’ll be back at five to lock up, so make sure you’re out by then.‛
    ‚Right, Bernie.‛
    There was nobody in the school yard. It felt strange, walking across the tarmac on his own.
    The school seemed bigger with nobody there, the yard stretching out too far between the redbrick buildings with the sun beating down, reflecting off the windows. Alex was dazzled.
    He had never seen the place so empty and so quiet. The grass on the playing fields looked almost too green. Any school without schoolchildren has its own peculiar atmosphere, and Brookland was no exception.
    Mr. Bray had an office in D block, which was next to the science building. Alex reached the swinging doors and opened them. The walls here would normally be covered in posters, but they had all been taken down at the end of the term. Everything was blank, off-white. There was another door open to one side. Bernie had been cleaning the main laboratory. He had rested his mop and bucket to one side when he had gone to the shops—to pick up cigarettes, Alex presumed. The man had been a chain smoker all his life, and Alex knew he’d die with a cigarette between his lips.
    Alex climbed up the stairs, his heels rapping against the stone surface. He reached a corridor—left for biology, right for physics—and continued straight ahead. A second corridor, with full-length windows on both sides, led into D block. Bray’s study was directly ahead of him. He stopped at the door, vaguely wondering if he should have dressed up for the meeting.
    Bray was always snapping at boys with their shirts hanging out or crooked ties. Alex was wearing a Gortex jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and Nike sneakers—the same clothes he had worn that morning at MI6. His hair was still too short for his liking, although it had begun to grow back.
    All in all, he still looked like a juvenile delinquent—but it was too late now. And anyway, Bray didn’t want to see him to discuss his appearance. His nonappearance at school was more to the point.
    He knocked on the door.
    ‚Come in!‛ a voice called.
    Alex opened the door and walked into the principal’s study, a cluttered room with views over the school yard. There was a desk, piled high with papers, and a black leather chair with its back toward the door. A cabinet full of trophies stood against one wall. The others were mainly lined with books.
    ‚You wanted to see me,‛ Alex said.
    The chair turned slowly around.
    Alex froze.
    It wasn’t Henry Bray sitting behind the desk.
    It was himself.
    He was looking at a fourteen-year-old boy with fair hair cut very short, brown eyes, and a slim, pale face. The boy was even dressed identically to him. It took Alex what felt like an eternity to accept what he was seeing. He was standing in a room looking at himself sitting in a chair. The boy was him.
    With just one difference. The boy was holding a gun.
    ‚Come in,‛ he said.
    Alex didn’t move. He knew what he was facing and he was angry with himself for not having expected it. When he had been handcuffed at the academy, Dr. Grief had boasted to him that he had cloned himself sixteen times. But that morning Mrs. Jones had traced ‚all fifteen of them.‛ That left one spare—one boy waiting to take his place in the family of Sir David Friend.
    Alex had glimpsed him while he was at the academy. Now he remembered the figure with the white mask, watching him from a window as he walked over to the ski jump. The white mask had been bandages. The new Alex had been spying on him as he recovered from the plastic surgery that had made the two of them identical.
    And even today there had been clues. Perhaps it had been the heat of the sun, or the fallout from his visit to MI6. But he had been too wrapped up in his own thoughts to see them.
    Jack, when he got home. ‚ I thought you’d just gone out .
    Bernie, at the gate. ‚ You again !‛
    They had both thought they’d seen him. And in a sense, they had. They had seen the boy sitting opposite him.