Scorpia Rising

move, but his eye slid briefly toward the twins and then back again.
    “You’re not going to kill me, Zeljan. As you can see, I’ve been prepared for this moment. You think Scorpia is getting stronger? It’s not. It’s finished and the foolishness I’ve heard today proves it. Well, I’m going to be the first to walk out.”
    Nobody reacted. It was unheard of for a gun to be produced in the middle of an executive meeting. But they were all confident. Kurst must have known. He must surely have the situation under control.
    “You are going to order the captain to bring this boat to the nearest bank and then I am going to leave,” Kroll continued. “You don’t need to worry about me. I have no interest in you anymore. But if any of you ever come after me, I will have stories to tell that will have all of you in jail for longer than any of you can possibly live. Do you understand me?”
    Zeljan Kurst’s hands were under the table. Kroll didn’t see his right hand stretch out and press a button in the side of his chair.
    “I said . . . do you understand me?”
    “I completely understand you,” Kurst replied.
    There was the soft tinkle of glass breaking. A hole had appeared in the window just behind Kroll’s head.
    Kroll jerked slightly but remained standing. A look of puzzlement spread across his face.
    There was a moment’s silence. Then Kurst spoke. “You have been shot in the back of the neck, just above the cervical curve,” he explained. “I’m afraid your spine has been severed and you are, effectively, already dead.”
    With an enormous effort, as if knowing this would be the last movement he ever made, Kroll opened his mouth. His hand, with the gun, remained frozen.
    “At this moment we are passing the Paris Mint.” Kurst glanced out the window. Sure enough, there was a handsome building with arches and columns stretching for some distance along the waterfront. “I knew of course that you were carrying a gun and suspected you might be foolish enough to try and use it. So I took the precaution of placing a sniper on the roof. Can you still hear me? I would like to think that you have the consolation of knowing that your death will not be wasted.”
    Kroll’s legs gave way and he crashed down into his chair, his head and shoulders slumping forward onto the table. The hole in the back of his head was surprisingly small.
    “We will have to put Levi in the refrigerator until the time comes to use him,” Kurst went on. “We do not want to give away the time of his death. And whatever clue it is that we place in his pocket, it will have to be something very ingenious. We want to make MI6 work. The more clever they think they are, the more easily they will fall into our trap.” He glanced again at Razim. “There is something else?”
    “Yes.” Like everyone else in the room, Razim seemed completely uninterested in the murder that he had just witnessed. It was as if nothing had happened at all. “We can manipulate MI6. And we can ensure that Alex Rider is brought back into service. Once he is in our hands, it will be a simple matter to kill him, although”—he smiled to himself—“I hope you will allow me a little time with him first. There is an experiment that I would like to try.”
    “Just be careful,” the Frenchman said.
    “Of course. But there is something else that we need and that I didn’t have time to mention before our unfortunate interruption.” He glanced briefly at the dead man, sprawled forward over the table. “Although I have said that we cannot forge the evidence, we nonetheless have to be careful. We live in an age of disinformation. That is to say, there isn’t a document or a report that anyone trusts. People need to see things with their own eyes. We are going to need to capture Alex Rider on film. I want to be able to show him live on TV before he is discovered, as it were, dead on TV. I want the whole world to be able to see him in action.”
    “And how will you manage that?” Dr. Three asked.
    Razim took out a second cigarette. Nobody was going to ask him to stop smoking. Not now. “Actually, it will be very simple,” he drawled. “But it will require the assistance of someone very special . . . someone quite unique. Fortunately, I was able to track this person down and I have already been in communication with him. He has every reason to wish harm to Alex Rider. In fact, he hates Rider more than any of us here.
    “I have not yet been able to speak