Scorpia Rising

security at the Cairo International College of Arts and Education, which is in Sheikh Fayed City in the outskirts of Cairo. That seemed like quite a coincidence, so we contacted the school. And we discovered something rather interesting. They need a new security chief because their last one was run over and killed as he was arriving for work. His name, as it happens, was Mohammed Shafik. The driver didn’t stop. The accident—if it was an accident—took place two months ago on the fourth of March.”
    Blunt stared at the page. “The fourth of the third,” he muttered. “Four three. It’s the same numbers.”
    “Exactly.”
    “So we can assume that’s why Zeljan Kurst was in London,” Blunt murmured. “If this school is recruiting a new security man . . . Scorpia could be trying to get someone inside.” Blunt quickly read the advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement. A recruitment office in London was handling the appointment, but it was nowhere near Woolwich, the place where Kroll might have been killed. “Has this agency recruited anyone to take Mr. Shafik’s place?” he asked.
    “Yes. They have. The new man is named Erik Gunter. Scottish mother, German father. He was brought up in Glasgow and spent time with the First Batallion Scots Guards before he was wounded in Afghanistan. He received the Queen’s Medal for courage. I have his file here.”
    She passed it across. Blunt scanned it briefly. Gunter had come under fire while he was on patrol in Helmund Province. According to the report, he had almost certainly saved the lives of his entire platoon, but he had taken four bullets himself and had been invalided home.
    “What about this business with the vicar?” Blunt asked. “Does the school have a chaplain?”
    “No.” Mrs. Jones glanced at the science officer, who had been sitting silently through all this. “The reference to the vicar wasted a great deal of time,” she said. “It didn’t seem to be at all relevant. At first, we assumed it must be a code name. You’ll remember that some years ago we dealt with an assassin who was known only as ‘the Priest.’ But in the end, Redwing worked it out.”
    “It’s a mistake,” Redwing explained. “If you take the initial letters of the Cairo International College of Arts and Education—CICAE—and type them into an Apple iPhone, the machine auto-corrects them and you get the word vicar .”
    “It’s the final confirmation,” Mrs. Jones added. “Scorpia’s operation has to involve this school. But just to make sure, I checked out the electronic key. I sent Crawley out to Cairo and he reported back this morning. The school is guarded, fenced in, and monitored twenty-four hours a day. But there’s been a security leak. The key opens a door into the kitchen.”
    Blunt sat in silence. Outside, an ambulance raced along Liverpool Street, the scream of its siren hanging in the air. And what would it find at the end of its journey? Another life or another death? “Tell me about the school,” he said.
    Mrs. Jones was ready for this. She wouldn’t have come to Blunt’s office without being fully briefed. “The CICAE makes an interesting Scorpia target,” she said. Target. That was the other word that had been retrieved from the phone. “The school maintains a very large security staff—and with good reason. It has about four hundred children from countries all over the world, and if you look down the names, it’s like a who’s who of the rich and famous. They’ve got parents who are oil millionaires, politicians, diplomats, sheikhs, princes, and even pop stars. The Syrian president has a son there. The British ambassador has a daughter. The chairman of Texas Oil—one of the biggest oil companies in America—has no fewer than three children at the CICAE. Can you imagine if one of them was kidnapped—or worse still, killed? Suppose Scorpia was planning to take over the whole school? They could threaten hundreds of the most powerful parents on the planet. They’d have enough leverage to start a world war.”
    “We can’t be sure that’s what they’re intending,” Blunt said. For a brief moment, something entirely different flickered across his consciousness. Seventeen years as head of MI6 Special Operations had turned his brain into a computer that never stopped functioning. Always there were connections, connections . . . What was it? Oh yes. A report that had crossed his desk a week before. The death of that boy