Snakehead

  Snakehead

  Snakehead

  ANTHONY HOROWITZ

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.). Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England. Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd). Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd). Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India. Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.). Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2007 by Anthony Horowitz. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Published simultaneously in Canada.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Horowitz, Anthony, 1955-

  Snakehead / Anthony Horowitz. -1st American ed. p. cm.

  Summary: While working with the Australian Secret Service on a dangerous mission, teenaged spy Alex Rider uncovers information about his parents.

  [1. Spies-Fiction. 2. Orphans-Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers-Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H7875Sn 2007 [Fic]-dc22 2007020505

  ISBN: 1-101-15825-5

  To B&CD.

  CONTENTS

  1 DOWN TO EARTH

  2 “DEATH IS NOT THE END”

  3 VISA PROBLEMS

  4 NO PICNIC

  5 ON THE ROCKS

  6 CITY OF ANGELS?

  7 FATHER AND SON

  8 FIRST CONTACT

  9 ONCE BITTEN…

  10 WAT HO

  11 ARMED AND DANGEROUS

  12 THE SILENT STREETS

  13 UNWIN TOYS

  14 THE LIBERIAN STAR

  15 HIDE-AND-SEEK

  16 MADE IN BRITAIN

  17 SPARE PARTS

  18 DEAD OF NIGHT

  19 WHITE WATER

  20 BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED

  21 ATTACK FORCE

  22 DRAGON NINE

  23 DINNER FOR THREE

  ALSO BY ANTHONY HOROWITZ

  THE ALEX RIDER ADVENTURES:

  Stormbreaker

  Point Blank

  Skeleton Key

  Eagle Strike

  Scorpia

  Ark Angel

  THE DIAMOND BROTHERS MYSTERIES:

  The Falcon’s Malteser

  Public Enemy Number Two

  Three of Diamonds

  South by Southeast

  Horowitz Horror

  More Horowitz Horror

  The Devil and His Boy

  Snakehead

  1

  DOWN TO EARTH

  SPLASHDOWN.

  Alex Rider would never forget the moment of impact, the first shock as the parachute opened and the second—more jolting still—as the module that had carried him back from outer space crashed into the sea. Was it his imagination, or was there steam rising up all around him? Maybe it was sea spray. It didn’t matter. He was back. That was all he cared about. He had made it. He was still alive.

  He was still lying on his back, crammed into the tiny space with his knees tucked into his chest. Half closing his eyes, Alex experienced a moment of extraordinary stillness. He was completely still. His fists were clenched. He wasn’t breathing. Was it really true? Already he found it impossible to believe that the events that had led to his journey into outer space had really taken place. He tried to imagine himself hurtling around the earth at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. It couldn’t have happened. It had surely all been part of some incredible dream.

  Slowly he forced himself to unwind. He lifted an arm. It rose normally. He could feel the muscle connecting. Just minutes before he had been in zero gravity. But as he rested, trying to collect his thoughts, he realized that once again his body belonged to him.

  Alex wasn’t sure how long he was left on his own, floating on the water somewhere…it could have been anywhere in the world. But when things happened, they did so very quickly. First there was the hammering of helicopter blades. Then the whoop of some sort of siren. He could see very little out the window—just the rise and fall of the ocean—but suddenly a man was there, a scuba diver, a palm slamming against the glass. A few seconds later, the capsule was opened from outside. Fresh air came rushing in, and to Alex it smelled delicious. At the same time, a man loomed over him, his body wrapped in neoprene, his eyes behind a mask.

  “Are you okay?”

  Alex could hardly make out the words, there was so much noise outside. Did the diver have an American accent? “I’m fine,” he managed to shout back. But it wasn’t true. He was beginning to feel sick. There was a shooting pain behind his eyes.

  “Don’t worry! We’ll soon have you out of there…”

  It took them a while. Alex had only been in space a short time, but he’d never had any physical training for it, and now his muscles were turning against him, reluctant to start pulling their own weight. He had to be manhandled out of the capsule, into the blinding sun of a Pacific afternoon. Everything was chaotic. There was a helicopter overhead, the blades beating at the ocean, forming patterns that rippled and vibrated. Alex turned his head and saw—impossibly—an aircraft carrier, as big as a mountain, looming out of the water less than a quarter of a mile away. It was flying the Stars and Stripes. So he had been right about the diver. He must have landed somewhere off the coast of America.

  There were two more divers in the water, bobbing up and down next to the capsule, and Alex could see a third man leaning out of the helicopter directly above him. He knew what was going to happen, and he didn’t resist. First a loop of cable was passed around his chest and connected. He felt it tighten under his arms. And then he was rising into the air, still in his space suit, dangling like a silver puppet as he was winched up.

  And already they knew. He had glimpsed it in the eyes of the diver who had spoken to him. The disbelief. These men—the helicopter, the aircraft carrier—had been rushed out to rendezvous with a module that had just reentered the earth’s atmosphere. And inside, they had found a boy. A fourteen-year-old had just plummeted a hundred miles from outer space. These men would be sworn to secrecy, of course. MI6 would see to that. They would never talk about what had happened. Nor would they forget it.

  There was a medical officer waiting for him on board the USS Kitty Hawk—which was the name of the ship that had been diverted to pick him up. His name was Josh Cook, and he was forty years old, black with wire-frame glasses and a pleasant, soft-spoken manner. He helped Alex out of the space suit and stayed in the room when Alex finally did throw up. It turned out that he’d dealt with astronauts before.

  “They’re all sick when they
come down,” he explained. “It goes with the territory. Or maybe I should say terra firma. That’s Latin for ‘down to earth.’ You’ll be fine by the morning.”

  “Where am I?” Alex asked.

  “You’re about ninety miles off the coast of Australia. We were on a training exercise when we got a red alert that you were on your way down.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now you have a shower and get some sleep. You’re in luck. We’ve got a mattress made out of memory foam. It was actually developed by NASA. It’ll give your muscles a chance to get used to being back in full gravity.”

  Alex had been given a private cabin in the medical department of the Kitty Hawk—in fact, a fully equipped “hospital at sea” with sixty-five beds, an operating room, a pharmacy, and everything else that 5,500 sailors might need. It wasn’t huge, but he suspected that nobody else on the Kitty Hawk would have this much space. Cook went over to the corner and pulled back a plastic curtain to reveal a shower cubicle.

  “You may find it difficult to walk,” he explained. “You’re going to be unsteady on your feet for at least twenty-four hours. If you like, I can wait in the room until you’ve showered.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Alex said.

  “All right.” Cook smiled and opened the main door. But before he left, he looked back at Alex. “You know—every man and woman on this ship is talking about you,” he said. “There are a whole pile of questions I’d like to ask you, but I’m under strict orders from the captain to keep my mouth shut. Even so, I want you to know that I’ve been at sea for a long, long time and I’ve never encountered anything like this. A kid in outer space!” He nodded one last time. “I hope you have a good rest. There’s a call button beside the bed if there’s anything you need.”

  Cook left.

  It took Alex ten minutes to get into the shower. He had completely lost his sense of balance, and the roll of the ship didn’t help. He turned the temperature up as high as he could bear and stood under the steaming water, enjoying the rush of it over his shoulders and through his hair. Then he dried himself and got into bed. The memory foam was only a couple of inches thick, but it seemed to mold itself to the shape of his body exactly. He fell almost instantly into a deep but troubled sleep.

  He didn’t dream about the Ark Angel space station or his knife fight with Kaspar, the bald ecoterrorist who had been determined to kill him even though it was clear that all was lost. Nor did he dream about Nikolei Drevin, the billionaire who had been behind it all.

  But it did seem to him that, sometime in the middle of the night, he heard the whisper of voices that he didn’t recognize but that, somehow, he still knew. Old friends. Or old enemies. It didn’t matter which because he couldn’t make out what they were saying, and anyway, a moment later they were swept away down the dark river of his sleep.

  Perhaps it was a premonition.

  Because three weeks before, seven men had met in a room in London to discuss an operation that would make them many millions of dollars and would change the shape of the world. And although Alex had never met any of them, he certainly knew them.

  Scorpia was back again.

  2

  “DEATH IS NOT THE END”

  IT WAS THE SORT of building you could walk past without noticing: three stories high, painted white with ivy, perfectly trimmed, climbing up to the roof. It stood about halfway down Sloane Street in Belgravia, just around the corner from Harrods, surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in London. On one side there was a jewelry shop and on the other an Italian fashion boutique—but the customers who came here would no longer be needing either. A single step led up to a door painted black, and there was a window that contained an urn, a vase of fresh flowers, and nothing else. The name of the place was written in discreet gold letters. It read: Reed and Kelly, Funeral Directors. And beneath that, a brief motto: Death is not the End.

  At ten thirty on a bright October morning, exactly three weeks before Alex landed in the Pacific Ocean, a black Lexus LS 430 four-door sedan drew up outside the front door. The car had been chosen carefully. It was a luxury model, but there was nothing too special about it, nothing to attract the eye. The arrival had also been exactly timed. In the past fifteen minutes, three other vehicles and a taxi had briefly pulled up and their passengers, either singly or in pairs, had exited, crossed the pavement, and entered the parlor. If anyone had been watching, they would have assumed that a large family had gathered to make the final arrangements for someone who had recently departed.

  The last person to arrive was a powerfully built man with massive shoulders and a shaved head. There was something quite brutal about his face: the small, squashed-up nose, thick lips, and muddy brown eyes. But his clothes were immaculate. He wore a tailored silk shirt, a dark suit, and a cashmere coat, hanging loose. There was a large platinum ring on his fourth finger. He had been smoking a cigar, but as he stepped from the car, he dropped it and ground it out with a brilliantly polished shoe. Without looking left or right, he crossed the pavement and entered the building. An old-fashioned bell on a spring jangled as the door opened and closed.

  He found himself in a wood-paneled reception room where an elderly, gray-haired man, also wearing a suit, sat with his hands folded behind a narrow desk. He looked at the new arrival with a mixture of sympathy and politeness.

  “Good morning,” he said. “How can we be of service?”

  “I have come about a death,” the visitor replied.

  “Someone close to you?”

  “My brother. But I hadn’t seen him for some years.”

  “You have my condolences.”

  The same words had been spoken seven times that morning. If even one syllable had been changed, the bald man would have turned around and left. But he knew now that the building was secure. He hadn’t been followed. The meeting that had been arranged just twenty-four hours earlier could go ahead.

  The older man leaned forward and pressed a button concealed underneath the desk. At once, a section of the wooden paneling clicked open to reveal a staircase, leading up to the second floor.

  Reed and Kelly was a real business. There once had been a Jonathan Reed and a Sebastian Kelly, and for more than fifty years they had arranged funerals and cremations until, at last, the time had come to arrange their own. After that, the undertaker’s had been purchased by a perfectly legitimate company and registered in Zurich, and it had continued to provide a first-class service for anyone who lived—or rather, had lived—in the area. But that was no longer the only purpose of the building in Sloane Street. It had also become the London headquarters of the international criminal organization that went by the name of Scorpia.

  The name stood for “sabotage, corruption, intelligence, and assassination,” which were its four main activities. The organization had been formed some thirty years before in Paris, its members being spies from different intelligence networks around the world who had decided to go into business for themselves. There had been twelve of them at first. Then one had died of illness and two had been killed in the field. The other nine had congratulated themselves on surviving so long with so few casualties.

  But quite recently, things had taken a turn for the worse. The oldest member of the organization had made the foolish and inexplicable decision to retire, which had, of course, led to his being murdered immediately. Soon afterward, his successor, a woman called Julia Rothman, had also been killed. That had been at the end of an operation—Invisible Sword—that had gone catastrophically wrong. In many ways this was the lowest point in Scorpia’s history, and there were many who thought that the organization would never recover. After all, the agent who had beaten them, destroyed the operation, and caused the death of Mrs. Rothman had been fourteen years old.

  However, Scorpia had not given in. They had taken swift revenge on the boy and gone straight back to work. Invisible Sword was just one of many projects needing their attention, for they were in constant demand from gov
ernments, terrorist groups, big business…in fact, anyone who could pay. And now they were active once again. They had come to this address in London to discuss a relatively small assignment but one that would net them ten million dollars, to be paid in uncut diamonds…easier to carry and harder to trace than banknotes.

  The stairs led to a short corridor on the first floor with a single door at the end. One television camera had watched the bald man on his way up. A second followed him as he stepped onto a strange metal platform in front of the door and looked into a glass panel set in the wall. Behind the glass, there was a biometric scanner that took an instant image of the unique pattern of blood vessels on the retina behind his eye and matched them against a computer at the reception desk below. If an enemy agent had tried to gain access to the room, he would have triggered a ten-thousand-volt electric charge through the metal floor plate, incinerating him instantly. But this was no enemy. The man’s name was Zeljan Kurst, and he had been with Scorpia almost from the beginning. The door slid open, and he went in.

  He found himself in a long, narrow room with three windows covered by blinds and plain, white walls with no decoration of any kind. There was a glass table surrounded by leather chairs and no sign of any pens, paper, or printed documents. Nothing was ever written down at these meetings. Nor was anything recorded. Six men were waiting for him as he took his place at the head of the table. Following the disaster of Invisible Sword, now just the seven of them were left.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Kurst began. He spoke with a strange, mid-European accent. The last word had sounded like “chintlemen.” All the men at the table were equal partners, but he was currently the acting head. A new chief executive was chosen as fresh projects arrived.