Scorpia

twelve.
    One of the players, the last to leave the plane, seemed to stumble. Sir Graham saw one of the soldiers turn, alarmed. On the bus Burke suddenly jerked backwards, his shoulders slamming into the glass. Another player, halfway down the stairs, dropped his bag and clutched his chest, his face distorted with pain. He toppled over, knocking into the two men in front of him. But they too appeared to have been gripped by some invisible force…
    One after another the players crumpled. The soldiers were shouting, gesticulating. What was happening was impossible. There was no enemy. Nobody had done anything. But eighteen healthy athletes were collapsing in front of their eyes. Sir Graham saw one of the soldiers speaking frantically into a radio transmitter and a second later a fleet of ambulances appeared, lights blazing, speeding towards the plane. So somebody had been prepared for the worst. Sir Graham glanced at Blunt and knew it had been him.
    The ambulances were already too late. By the time they arrived, Burke was on his back, gasping his last few breaths. Hill-Smith had joined him, dropping to the floor of the bus, his lips mauve, his eyes empty. The steps were strewn with bodies, one or two feebly kicking, the others deadly still. The man with the blond hair was lost in a tangle of bodies. The straw hat had rolled away, blown across the runway by the breeze.
    “What?” Sir Graham rasped. “How?” He couldn’t find the words.
    “Invisible Sword,” Blunt said.

    At that exact moment, a quarter of a mile away in Terminal Two, passengers were just arriving on a flight from Rome. At passport control the officer noticed a mother and a father with their son. The boy was fourteen years old. He was overweight, with black curly hair, thick glasses and terrible skin. There was a slight moustache on his upper lip. He was Italian; his passport gave his name as Federico Casali.
    The passport officer might have looked more closely at the boy. There was some sort of alert out for a fourteen-year-old called Alex Rider. But he knew what was happening out on the main runway. Everyone knew. The whole airport was in a state of panic and right now he was distracted. He didn’t even bother comparing the face in front of him with the picture that had been circulated. What was happening outside was much more important.
    Scorpia had timed it perfectly.
    The boy took his passport and slouched away, through customs and out of the airport.
    Alex Rider had come home.

Chapter 13: PIZZA DELIVERY

    Spies have to be careful where they live.
    An ordinary person will choose a house or a flat because it has nice views, because they like the shape of the rooms, because it feels like home. For spies, the first consideration is security. There’s a comfortable sitting room—but will the window offer a target for a possible sniper’s bullet? A garden is fine—so long as the fence is high enough and there aren’t too many shrubs providing cover for an intruder. The neighbours, of course, will be checked. So will the postman, the milkman, the window cleaner and anyone else who comes to the front door. The front door itself may have as many as five separate locks and there will be alarm systems, night cameras and panic buttons. Someone once said that an Englishman’s home is his castle. For a spy, it can be his prison too.
    Mrs Jones lived in the penthouse flat on the ninth floor of a building in Clerkenwell, not far from the old meat market at Smithfields. There were forty flats altogether and the security check run by MI6 had shown that the majority of the residents were bankers or lawyers, working in the City. Melbourne House was not cheap. Mrs Jones had two thousand square metres and two private balconies on the top floor—a great deal of space, particularly as she lived alone. On the open market it would have cost her in excess of a million pounds when she bought it seven years ago. But as it happened, MI6 had a file on the developer. The developer had seen it and had been glad to do a deal.
    The flat was secure. And from the moment Alan Blunt had decided his second in command might need protection, it had become more so.
    The front doors opened onto a long, rather stark reception area with a desk, two fig trees and a single lift at the far end. There were closed-circuit television cameras above the desk and outside in the street, recording everyone who entered. Melbourne House had porters working twenty-four hours, seven days a