Stormbreaker

sometime recently it must have leaked because the curators constructed a second roof of plastic sheeting over the top.
    This was the orange roof that Alex had seen.
    He crashed into it with both feet at about thirty miles per hour. The roof shattered. He continued straight through, into an inner chamber, just missing a network of steel girders and maintenance ladders. He barely had time to register what looked like a brown carpet, stretched out over the curving surface below. Then he hit it and tore through that too. It was no more than a thin cover, designed to keep the light and dust off the glass that it covered. With a yell, Alex smashed through the glass. At last his parachute caught on a beam.
    He jerked to a halt, swinging in midair inside the East Hall.
    This was what he saw.
    Far below him, all around him, three hundred people had stopped and were staring up at him in shock.
    There were more people sitting on chairs directly underneath him and some of them had been hit. There was blood and broken glass. A bridge made of green glass slats stretched across the hall. There was a futuristic information desk and in front of it, at the very center of everything, was a makeshift stage. He saw the Stormbreaker first. Then, with a sense of disbelief, he recognized the prime minister standing, slack jawed, next to Herod Sayle.
    Alex hung in the air, dangling at the end of the parachute. As the last pieces of glass fell and disintegrated on the terra-cotta floor, movement and sound returned to the East Hall in an ever-widening wave.
    The security men were the first to react. Anonymous and invisible when they needed to be, they were suddenly everywhere, appearing from behind colonnades, from underneath the television towers, running across the green bridge, guns in hands that had been empty a second before. Alex had also drawn his own gun, pulling it out from the waistband of his trousers. Maybe he could explain why he was here before Sayle or the prime minister activated the Stormbreakers. But he doubted it. Shoot first and ask questions later was a line from a bad film. But even bad films are sometimes right.
    He emptied the gun.
    The bullets echoed around the room, surprisingly loud. Now people were screaming, the journalists punching and pushing as they fought for cover. The first bullet smashed into the information desk. The second hit the prime minister in the hand, his finger less than an inch away from the mouse. The third hit the mouse, blowing it into fragments. The fourth hit an electrical connection, disintegrating the plug and short-circuiting it. Sayle had dived forward, determined to click on the mouse himself. The fifth and the sixth bullets hit him.
    As soon as Alex had fired the last bullet, he dropped the gun, letting it clatter to the floor below, and held up the palms of his hands. He felt ridiculous, hanging there from the ceiling, his arms outstretched. But there were already a dozen guns pointing at him and he had to show them that he was no longer armed, that they didn’t need to shoot. Even so, he braced himself, waiting for the security men to open fire. He could almost imagine the hail of bullets tearing into him. As far as they were concerned, he was some sort of crazy terrorist who had just parachuted into the Science Museum and taken six shots at the prime minister. It was their job to kill him. It was what they’d been trained for.
    But the bullets never came. All the security men were equipped with radio microphones, and in the front row, Mrs. Jones had control. The moment she had recognized Alex she had been speaking urgently into her brooch.
    “Don’t shoot! Repeat—don’t shoot! Await my command!”
    On the podium, a plume of gray smoke rose out of the side of the broken, useless Stormbreaker. Two security men had rushed to the prime minister, who was clutching his wrist, blood dripping out of his hand. The photographers and journalists had begun to shout questions. Their cameras were flashing and the television cameras too had been swung around to focus in on the figure swaying high above. More security men were moving to seal off the exits, following orders from Mrs. Jones, while Alan Blunt looked on, for once in his life out of his depth.
    But there was no sign of Herod Sayle. The head of Sayle Enterprises had been shot twice, but somehow he had disappeared.

YASSEN

    YOU SLIGHTLY SPOILED things by shooting the prime minister,” Alan Blunt said. “But all in all you’re to