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“Who do you work for?” Stripes asked. Carelessly, he nudged the corpse of Alex’s partner, turning her body over, revealing the front of an unbranded uniform. And her face. He’d caught her unaware; her features fixed forever in a final placid stare.
Alex had liked Alice. She had carried herself with a blithe confidence which reminded Alex of Ian in his better moments, when he taught Alex his supposedly random survival tricks and encouraged Alex to face his fears. “Fresh out of training?” Alice had asked when they’d first met. Then she’d offered him her hand, shook it firmly, and thanked him for his sacrifice. Together, he and Alice had forded the river and scaled the canyon face in under a day’s travel. Alex would have enjoyed working with her again.
It wouldn’t happen now.
They’d been ambushed. By at least a team of three, although there could be more. Stripes – a stocky, well-built man outfitted in multicam survival gear, a thick swipe of camouflage paint obvious across each cheek – had been the first, and so far only, assailant to enter the one-room lodge. Stripes had shot Alice and turned his gun on Alex before he could make a move for his own. Alex could hear others outside, moving with the stealth of professional soldiers, ones experienced enough to balance their weight as they walked.
This group was professional.
Alex and Alice had been alone before the ambush, waiting in a decrepit, run down lodge along the rocky riverbed for their Chilean allies to pick them up under the cover of night. Cloudcover had rolled in while they waited, hiding the waning gibbous moon, disappearing the moonlight which had previously cast a dulcet silver shade onto the bank, leaving the darkness too unlit for comfort. But Alex had thought they were safe. Down the river, nothing but water had seemed to move. Opposite the abandoned hunting lodge a solid rock wall rose a hundred feet above them, a treacherous climb for the most experienced climbers, and one which would necessitate headlamps at that hour. And the thick forest to the lodge’s rear appeared impermeable and still. They’d relaxed their guard. Alice stood at attention by the entrance, but more out of respect for training than real attention to rigor. The attack had come as a surprise—one Alice wouldn’t live to regret.
The professionals who had hunted them down must have tracked the two of them here through the night. The militia’s men? Whoever they were, they shot first and asked questions later. They were dangerous.
The man holding a gun at Alex certainly was. Alex had met people like this before – impatient, angry, wielding dangerous weapons. It proved best not to tempt their tempers. At least, while their gun aimed so unerringly at his chest. He refrained from a coarse utterance. Instead, he aimed for a voice as level as he could muster. “Who do you work for?” he asked in response.
Stripes maintained eye contact. His grip on his pistol remained steady. He shifted so Alex could better make out the embroidered symbol on his uniform and with his free hand he reached up and tapped the familiar iconography.
The lamp set up in the corner, its light set to the dimmest setting, barely illuminated fine detail. Alex didn’t need to see each line of stitchery to make out, at once, both the symbol and the danger he’d found himself in.
A lone scorpion, tail extended, ready to sting.
“Don’t tell me,” Stripes said. “This is your training run.”
Hardly. But Stripes had seen Alex’s face and had clearly read into Alex’s youth. His verdict? Here’s a fresh recruit. Well, better perhaps if Alex played up his age. He’d long ago learned to take every advantage he could get. “Not exactly,” he said, allowing a slight waver to catch on his last word, implying the opposite to any listener with a brain.
Against Scorpia’s men, Alex would need the help. The mission report had guessed outside men were propping up Calado’s security forces. The scorpion on Stripes’ uniform proved the theory. Alex would need to tell MI6 as soon as he got out of his current entanglement.
“All clear out there?” Stripes called, loudly, to the creeping figures outside.
“There’s no one else,” a stranger responded.
Behind Stripes, two figures cloaked in nighttime shadow stepped inside, one after the other. Not such shadows that Alex couldn’t recognize Yassen on sight. The close-cropped blond hair, the gait of a dancer, the deadly grace of a killer: Yassen would be recognizable anywhere.
He would recognize Alex anywhere, in turn. Alex, the child-turned-spy, the son of Yassen’s old mentor. The nephew of a spy Yassen had killed.
Alex yearned to reach for the holstered weapon at his belt.
If he did, if Stripes thought Alex moved a single centimeter at the wrong moment, Yassen would be identifying Alex’s corpse.
The second figure spun the lamp’s settings wheel, allowing the full light possible into the cabin. Alex stared at Yassen, waiting to be revealed, watching uneasily familiar crystalline eyes inspect him in turn.
Scorpia’s executive board would have a field day if they caught Alex Rider alive. Yassen could do anything with that information. If Yassen wanted Alex dead, he would have plenty of choices. It wasn’t often Alex had to choose between such twisted priorities: do his best to stay alive, knowing that if he didn’t escape a terrible death awaited, or risk a fight in the hope things would end quickly.
He wasn’t at that place yet. And he wouldn’t let it become a place he arrived at anytime soon. He’d gotten out of worse binds before, outnumbered by more than three to one. Once Yassen reacted, Alex would figure out how to respond. For the moment, he’d follow along.
Stripes’s gun kept Alex still, pinned in place through unstated but ever-present threat, while the second stranger inspected him.
The second stranger was missing two fingers on his left hand: his ring finger and pinky. “Did you just learn how to throw grenades?” Alex asked as his weapons and equipment were taken, tossed and placed on the ground with varying amounts of care.
Pinky didn’t laugh.
Stripes did. “Funny,” he chuckled. “We found one with a sense of humor.”
“My partner had a sense of humor too,” Alex said. “You should have heard her favorite joke. It was a real killer.”
“Maybe it was me,” Stripes suggested.
Exactly the sort of distasteful commentary Alex expected from Scorpia’s combat teams. Alex set his expression stoically, refusing to give Stripes the joy of a grimace.
Yassen studied him, his blue eyes an expressionless ice.
Pinky chucked Alex’s locator beacon into the corner. “He’s clear,” he reported, moving to ruffle through the backpacks on the ground.
“Any idea who he works for?”
“MI6.” Referring to Alice’s body, Yassen said, “I’ve seen that woman before.”
“What about him?” Stripes asked.
“Him?” Yassen surveyed Alex afresh. “No.”
Yassen was playing some sort of mind game, there was no doubt in Alex’s mind. They’d recognized each other—only, Yassen had decided to lie. Alex wished he understood why.
“Not much in their gear,” Pinky reported. “They could work for anyone.”
Stripes jerked his weapon’s barrel at Alex. “I’ll ask you again. Who do you work for? A name, a country, an organization. Give me one.”
“Your parents. They wanted me to deliver a message: call them more often.”
“Is that so?” Stripes asked. “How funny. Again. Our mistake. And here we were thinking you might be with special operations. But maybe we’ll stick with our guess.” He smiled, a wide grin which bared his teeth. “We’re not in a rush, are we? This one’s new to this. Why don’t we make a game out of him—see how much we can get.”
Pinky kicked Alex’s knife so it skittered away on the rough-hewn surface of the granite floor. “You have something in mind?”
“I might.” Stripes picked up one of Alex’s discarded possessions, a pocket compass. He tilted the metal casing. “Think you could see this gleam in the moonlight?”
Pinky assessed. “Probably,” he concluded.
“Let’s go and find out.”
Stripes gave Alex directions, walking him outside at gunpoint to the side of the river. Pinky came with them, his headlight activated, illuminating the way. After lingering a moment by himself in the lodge, Yassen joined, trailing behind the group as if he were not quite a part of the proceedings.
“Ready to answer some questions?” Stripes asked Alex.
Suddenly Alex felt sure that Stripes wanted nothing more than for Alex to refuse to play along. Anything so Stripes could illustrate how deadly whatever game he had in mind could be.
“Answer his questions and we’ll let you go,” Yassen said, unexpectedly, surprising Alex. And, apparently, his colleagues.
“Sure,” Stripes grinned. “Why not.”
“Why not,” Yassen echoed. “He’s no one important. We’ve taken his things. If you want to have fun with him, send him in a direction with a five minute head start.”
Alex’s stomach flipped. Was that what Yassen got up to in his free time—hunting people for sport? Had he only not identified Alex so he could deal with him personally, aside from the board? “I didn’t sign up to play the Most Dangerous Game, thanks,” Alex refuted. He wouldn’t trust Scorpia to give him ten seconds of head start, either; they would shoot him as soon as he turned his back. Whatever contrivance Stripes had planned would be better. The Chileans’ boat should arrive soon—Alex would run to his weapons then, in the commotion. It would be a better chance to gain the upper hand than the reference to English lit Yassen was thinking up. He needed to stall.
“Is that a good idea?” Pinky questioned.
Yassen seemed to give his answer no thought. “Where could he go?”
“It might be fun,” Stripes allowed. “But this one will work as well.” He placed Alex’s compass on his head then stepped back, giving several feet of distance between them. “Keep the compass on your head and step into the river.”
“Why?”
“Because the water’s cold and it will help you think,” Stripes said. “Or because it will make it harder for you to run. Or how about this: I have a gun pointed at you and I said to step into the water.”
Alex took in the three of them, Stripes, Pinky, Yassen.
It would be the three of them — armed, brutish, cruel — against Alex.
Weaponless.
Gadget-less.
And soon, likely, dead.
He would play along with them because he had to, or else they’d grow bored of their game. They all understood what would happen then.
He stepped into the river, cautiously, using a hand to keep his compass steady. The water was cold. Biting, almost. A steady stream of chilled river soaking through his boots and causing him to shiver.
“You can stop there,” Stripes said, when Alex had waded in so the water went to just above his ankles. “Put your hand down. You finished basic, you can stand still. Pretend it’s a drill.”
Alex had never finished more than two weeks of military training. He had dealt with a host of malicious malcontents—more than he could count on two hands. This was not the moment to be smart.
Yassen folded his arms, watching expressionlessly.
“We’re going to ask you some questions,” Stripes began.
A fish jumped to the right of Alex. He froze automatically, preventing himself from flinching.
“If you tell the truth, nothing happens. If not, my friend and I are going to see which of us can knock the compass off your head first. Sound fair?”
“Not for you,” Alex said. “I have terrible balance.”
“Then you should tell the truth.” The moon emerged again as Yassen talked, illuminating the men on shore. “They have terrible aim.”
“Just so. And you’ll want to play fair. If you can’t stand still, I’ll strangle you to death.” And then Stripes smiled, faintly, amused at the proposition. “Why did you break into the outpost? What were you hoping to find?”
“That’s two questions,” Alex pointed out, stalling for time. He felt the compass shift and immediately adjusted his body, counter-balancing the shifting weight.
“Answer both.”
“Honestly,” Yassen said, sharply. There was an edge to his tone which made Alex start. Did Yassen want him to answer because they were interrogating him, or for some other reason?
Alex still hadn’t figured out why Yassen had lied. What was the Russian thinking?
Alex stood, unmoving, uncertain. Then he made a choice. “We uploaded the coordinates of the camp,” he answered, telling the truth. “And we inventoried the supplies.”
“You didn’t take anything with you?”
They’d brought cryogenically-frozen bugs and infested the food supplies. They’d put tracking bugs inside equipment. But no, they hadn’t taken anything. “You saw what we had.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No, we didn’t take anything.”
“Just the two of you?” Pinky asked.
The Scorpia men had tracked Alex and Alice; they must have seen their trail, despite Alice’s hurried attempts to disguise the path they’d taken. “We were a two person team.”
“And one of them still had their training wheels.” Stripes peered back over the others, his weapon lowering as he did. “Do you believe him?”
“Sounds like the truth to me,” Pinky said. “Ask him why they stopped here. What were they waiting for?”
“Daylight. We were going to move at dawn.”
“Or someone to pick them up,” Stripes assessed.
Pinky nodded. “Might be. We should move soon, get away from here.”
“Not without a bit of competition,” Stripes said. His teeth shone in the moonlight. “We can still settle my wager. Me first.” He took a step back, finding a place even with Pinky.
Goosebumps prickled on Alex’s arms, his stomach cold, as he watched the man take aim. He needed to stall, to say something to distract them—anything!
“Enough of that,” Yassen interrupted. “He played your game. Time to try mine.”
A shot rang out, the sound caroming into the cliff. Alex recoiled from the noise. The compass fell and was gone, disappeared into the water. He couldn’t see the case under the coursing stream.
Stripes lowered his gun. “Alright,” he said. “Why not. Your turn.”
Yassen moved forward impatiently, beckoning Alex out of the river.
A gleam under the water caught Alex’s eye. He leaned down and brushed his fingers against the water. “Are you sure? It feels nice in here.”
“Get out,” Pinky snapped.
“If you say so.” Alex bent down and fumbled the compass into his hand. Then he tread out of the river, water slogging out of boots as he moved. He felt hyper-aware of his surroundings. The dusky shore, the looming trees. The persistent thrum of beetles in the bushes and birds in the canopy. The forebodingly solid wall across the pitch-black river.
“He’s going to fight us with a rock,” Stripes observed with amusement. “Inventive.”
Stripes had seen him pick something up, but not what, Alex realized. He clutched the compass, attempting to obscure the case.
“What’s the bet?” Pinky asked. “First to find him gets the kill?”
“First to kill him gets the kill,” Stripes countered.
Cooly, Yassen put a hand on Alex’s shoulder and turned him to face the woods. He pushed him forward to the edge of the undergrowth. “He’ll have a ten minute start.”
“You said five.” Although Pinky didn’t sound particularly put out by the change.
“Ten makes it a challenge,” Yassen said.
A hard object was pressed into Alex’s free hand and his fist closed around it, reflexively. He snuck a surreptitious glance.
A locator beacon.
His locator beacon.
Yassen had retrieved it from the lodge.
“Better run,” Stripes chuckled. “Even if we miss you, you have a long way to go.”
Yassen stepped away, leaving Alex alone at the end of the forest, a compass in one hand, a satellite beacon in the other.
“Go,” Stripes taunted.
Alex ran.