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KILL ALEX RIDER

It was what he deserved. Alex had interfered with a Scorpia assignment and he would have cost the organization at least five million pounds… the final payment owed by Herod Sayle. Worse than that, he would have damaged their international reputation. The lesson had to be learnt.

There was a knock at the door. Yassen had ordered room service. It wasn’t just easier to eat inside the hotel, it was safer. Why make himself a target when he didn’t need to?

“Leave it outside,” he called out. He spoke English with no trace of a Russian accent. He spoke French, German and Arabic equally well.

The room was almost dark now. Yassen’s dinner sat on a tray in the corridor, rapidly getting cold. But still he did not move away from the desk and the computer in front of him. He would kill Alex Rider tomorrow morning. There was no question of his disobeying orders. It didn’t matter that the two of them were linked, that they were connected in a way Alex couldn’t possibly know.

John Rider. Alex’s father.

Their code names. Hunter and Cossack.

Yassen couldn’t help himself. He reached into his pocket and took out a car key, the sort that had two remote control buttons to open and close the doors. But this key did not belong to any car. Yassen pressed the OPEN button twice and the CLOSE button three times and a concealed memory stick sprang out onto the palm of his hand. He glanced at it briefly. He knew that it was madness to carry it. He had been tempted to destroy it many times. But every man has his weakness and this was his. He opened the computer again and inserted it.

The file required another password. He keyed it in. And there it was on the screen in front of him, not in English letters but in Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet.

His personal diary. The story of his life.

He sat back and began to read.

ДОМА – HOME

“Yasha! We’ve run out of water. Go to the well!”

I can still hear my mother calling to me and it is strange to think of myself as a fourteen-year-old boy, a single child, growing up in a village six hundred miles from Moscow. I can see myself, stick-thin with long, fair hair and blue eyes that always look a little startled. Everyone tells me that I am small for my age and they urge me to eat more protein… as if I can ever get my hands on anything that resembles fresh meat or fish. I have not yet spent many hundreds of hours working out and my muscles are undeveloped. I am sprawled out in the living room, watching the only television we have in the house. It’s a huge, ugly box with a picture that often wavers and trembles and there are hardly any channels to choose from. To make things worse, the electricity supply is unreliable and you can be fairly sure that the moment you get interested in a film or a news programme, the image will suddenly flicker and die and you’ll be left alone, sitting in the dark. But whenever I can, I tune into a documentary, which I devour. It is my only window onto the outside world.

I am describing Russia – about ten years before the end of the twentieth century. It is not so long ago and yet it is already somewhere that no longer exists. The changes that began in the main cities became a tsunami that engulfed the entire country, although they took their time reaching the village where I lived. There was no running water in any of the houses and so, three times a day, I had to make my way down to the well with a wooden harness over my shoulders and two metal buckets dragging down my arms. I sound like a peasant and a lot of the time I must have looked like one, dressed in a baggy shirt with no collar and a waistcoat. As a matter of fact, I had one pair of American jeans, which had been sent to me as a present from a relative in Moscow, and I can still remember everyone staring at me when I put them on. Jeans! They were like something from a distant planet. And my name was Yasha, not Yassen. Quite by accident, it got changed.

If I am going to explain what happened to me and what I became, then I must begin here, in Estrov. Nobody speaks of it any more. It is not on the map. According to the Russian authorities, it never existed. But I remember it well; a village of about eighty wooden houses surrounded by farmland with a church, a shop, a police station, a bathhouse and a river that was bright blue in the summer but freezing all year round. A single road ran through the middle of the village but it was hardly needed, as there were very few cars. Our neighbour, Mr Vladimov, had a tractor which often rumbled past, billowing oily, black smoke, but I was more used to being woken up by the sound of horses’ hooves. The village was wedged between thick forest in the north and hills to the south and west so that the view never really changed. Sometimes I would see planes flying overhead and I thought of the people inside them, travelling to the other side of the world. If I was working in the garden, I would stand still and watch them – the wings blinking, the sunlight glinting on their metal skin – until they had gone out of sight, leaving only the echo of their engines behind. They reminded of me who and what I was. Estrov was my world and I certainly didn’t need an aeroplane to get from one side to the other.

My own home, where I lived with my parents, was small and simple, made of painted wooden boards with shutters on either side of the windows and a weather vane that squeaked all night if there was too much wind. It was quite close to the church, set back from the main road with similar houses on either side. Flowers and brambles grew right beside the walls and were slowly creeping towards the roof. There were just four rooms. My parents slept upstairs. I had a room at the back but I had to share it whenever anyone came to stay. My grandmother, who lived with us, had the room next to mine but she preferred to sleep in a sort of hole in the wall, above the stove, in the kitchen. She was a very small, dark brown woman and when I was young, I used to think that she had been cooked by the flames.

There was no railway station in Estrov. It was not considered important enough. Nor was there a bus service or anything like that. I went to school in a slightly larger village that liked to think of itself as a town, two miles away down a track that was dusty and full of potholes in the summer, and thick with mud or covered in snow during the winter. The town was called Rosna. I walked there every day, no matter what the weather, and I was beaten if I was late. My school was a big, square, brick building on three floors. All the classrooms were the same size. There were about five hundred children in all, boys and girls. Some of them travelled in by train, pouring out onto the platform with eyes that were still half-closed with sleep. Rosna did have a railway station and they were very proud of it, decking it with flowers on public holidays. But actually it was a mean, run-down little place and nine out of ten trains didn’t even bother to stop there.

We students were all very smart. The girls wore black dresses with green aprons and had their hair tied back with ribbons. The boys looked like little soldiers, with grey uniforms and red scarves tied around our neck, and if we did well with our studies, we were given badges with slogans – “For Active Work”, “School Leader”, that sort of thing. I don’t really remember much of what I learned at school. Who does? History was important… the history of Russia, of course. We were always learning poems by heart and had to recite them, standing to attention beside our desks. There was maths and science. Most of the teachers were women but our headmaster was a man called Lavrov and he had a furious temper. He was short but he had huge shoulders and long arms, and I would often see him pick up a boy by the throat and pin him against the wall.