Scorpia Rising

turned to Redwing, as if noticing her for the first time. “Your thoughts, Redwing?”
    “I just have a couple of things to add, sir,” Redwing said. “I have no argument with anything that Mrs. Jones has said, but it does seem a little odd that Kroll would have flown into Heathrow Airport and then traveled all the way across London to Woolwich, if that really was where he was killed. Why didn’t he just fly into City Airport? It would have been much closer.”
    Blunt was pleased. It was exactly the same thought that had already occurred to him. “There are no direct flights from Cairo,” he said. “But for that matter, why didn’t he use a private jet?”
    “What really puzzles me is the medical report. First of all, from the contents of the dead man’s stomach, we know that the last meal he ate included snails, roast pork, potatoes, and some sort of dessert made with Grand Marnier. It’s the sort of meal you might eat in Paris or London, but it’s not exactly what you’d expect from a man who’d just flown in from Cairo.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, even in first class, he wouldn’t have been served snails on the plane. And pork is an unusual choice in a Muslim country. For that matter we found no Egyptian spices or herbs of any sort. No rice or falafel. Of course, he could have been staying in an international hotel. He may hate Egyptian food. But it still feels strange.”
    “And there’s something else?”
    “Yes, sir. When we examined the body, we found a tiny fragment of glass buried in the back of the neck. It had been driven in by the impact of the bullet.” Redwing paused. “It’s certainly possible that Kroll was shot in London, somewhere close to the River Thames. He could have been standing on one of the banks or perhaps on a bridge. He was shot and fell into the water.
    “But the fragment of glass tells another story. He was inside, on the other side of a window. In which case the body was then taken and dumped in the river. But if that was what happened, what was the point? Is it possible that the body was meant to be found?”
    “And you’re suggesting that the note was planted?” Blunt considered. “But why would Scorpia want us to know what they were doing?”
    “It doesn’t make any sense to me, sir,” Redwing admitted.
    There was a long silence. Blunt made his decision.
    “We’ll go ahead and put someone in the school,” he said. “It may be a complete waste of time, but I can’t see that it will do any harm. Still, it’s a shame to waste the resources of an active agent.”
    Mrs. Jones glanced at him. Once again, she saw what was going through his mind. Alex Rider would already be on his way to Cairo if Blunt had his way.
    But it wasn’t going to happen. Alex Rider was history. Mrs. Jones had never said as much to him, but she had promised it to herself, and no matter what her own future was within MI6, it was one promise she was determined not to break.

PART TWO

    ALEX

7

    ANGLE OF ATTACK

    “ALEX! YOU’VE OVERSLEPT AGAIN. Get yourself out of bed!”
    Jack Starbright was standing in the doorway of Alex’s bedroom on the first floor of the house they shared near the King’s Road in Chelsea. It was seven forty-five in the morning and he should have been up and getting dressed, but all she could see was the back of his head with a clump of messy light brown hair poking out from underneath the duvet and the curve of his body beneath.
    “Alex . . .,” she said again.
    A hand appeared, clutched hold of the pillow, and dragged it down. “What day is it, Jack?” The voice came from nowhere, muffled beneath the bedclothes.
    “It’s Friday. It’s a school day.”
    “I don’t want to go to school.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “What’s for breakfast?”
    “You’ll find out when you’ve had your shower.”
    Jack closed the bedroom door and a few seconds later Alex emerged from bed, wrinkling his eyes against the morning light. He threw back the covers and rolled into a sitting position, looking around the wreck that was his room. There were crumpled clothes on the floor, school-books and folders everywhere, DVDs and games stacked up beside his computer, posters peeling off the walls. He and Jack had actually had one of their very rare arguments a few weeks before. It wasn’t that she wanted him to tidy the room. That wasn’t the problem. In fact, it was the other way around. He had insisted that she stop tidying it for him—as she had done