Scorpia Rising

metalwork. The noise was loud enough to make the two soldiers jump. At once, they dropped their cigarettes and hurried forward to see what had happened. Alex watched them go past, then darted over to the door. He didn’t need to be careful anymore. Julius Grief would be well ahead of him by now. The real worry was that he might already be too late.
    And now he understood why no one had shown any interest in the open door. It led into a narrow service room, hardly more than a corridor, illuminated by two bare lightbulbs dangling on wires. There were a couple of metal buckets and a mop, some empty crates, and, about five yards away, a brick wall with a row of hooks and a pair of dirty overalls hanging above the floor. Some old furniture—folding chairs and filing cabinets—had been stored on one side. A row of very old, dusty fuse boxes lined the other. It was nothing more than a dead end. The corridor went nowhere.
    Alex would have moved on. He would have thought he’d made a mistake. But he recognized the room. He had seen it in one of the photographs in Gunter’s desk. He stepped inside. Julius Grief had definitely come in here—but how could he possibly have disappeared? Alex had watched him come in here. He had been watching the entrance ever since. There were no other doors; there was no other way out. If Julius had slipped back out again, Alex would have seen him.
    The hooks.
    It seemed like years ago that Alex had been in the office at Cairo College. Razim had boasted that he had manipulated Alex from the start—but breaking in had surely been the one thing that he couldn’t have foreseen. Razim had arranged for him to come to the school. The fake telephone call had led him to the House of Gold. But nobody could have guessed that he would use one of Smithers’s gadgets to get into the office. And so it surely followed that whatever he had found in the secret drawer must actually mean something. It hadn’t been left there for him to find.
    The newspaper—the Washington Post —must have been reporting the visit of the secretary of state. The pictures of the Assembly Hall . . . that was where her speech was taking place. This room. And the photograph of a hook shaped like a swan’s neck. It was identical to the ones he was looking at now.
    Alex had moved forward even before he had arrived at the end of his thought process. He reached out and grabbed one of the hooks, then another. He was expecting them to twist and turn, but in fact the third one pulled down like an oversized switch. He heard a click and a section of the wall swung open, revealing a metal staircase constructed between two solid concrete walls, so narrow that he would have to turn sideways to climb it.
    At once he understood the cleverness of Scorpia’s plan. How do you put an assassin inside a building that will be surrounded, searched from top to bottom, kept under constant surveillance, and locked up for twenty-four hours? Answer—you build a secret passage weeks or months before your target arrives. Alex had no doubt at all that the sniper rifle had been concealed here, ready for Julius Grief to find and to carry up with him. No wonder he had been empty-handed when he had gone in. All he had to do was pick it up, climb to a good vantage point, and fire. He wouldn’t even have to leave if he didn’t want to. He could stay completely hidden for days.
    Alex was already climbing the staircase, which had been built between the inner and outer shell of the Assembly Hall in a space that might have been used for pipework or perhaps to help with the circulation of cool air. There were no lights, and after about ten steps away from the secret opening, he was plunged into blackness. Presumably Julius had brought a flashlight. But Alex didn’t need to see. The staircase was made out of metal slabs, each one placed at a regular interval so that provided he kept the same rhythm, moving his feet the same distance, he wouldn’t stumble or fall. The walls on either side helped too, keeping him wedged in place. He was completely blind, but it didn’t matter. He knew where he was going and what he had to do.
    He continued up, knowing from the ache in his legs that the staircase was taking him all the way to the top of the Assembly Hall. He felt himself curving around and guessed that he was inside the dome. He hadn’t been counting but he knew he must have climbed at least two hundred steps. How much time had it taken? That didn’t matter,