Then I left.
EPILOGUE – THE KILL
King’s Cross, London. Three o’clock in the morning.
The station was closed and silent. The streets were almost empty. A few shops were still open – a kebab restaurant and a minicab office, their plastic signs garishly bright. But there were no customers.
Inside his hotel room, Yassen Gregorovich took out the memory stick and turned off the computer. He had read enough. He was still sitting at the desk. The tray with the dirty dishes from his supper was on the carpet beside him. He looked at the blank screen, then yawned. He needed to sleep. He stripped off his clothes and left them, folded, on a chair. Then he showered, dried himself and went to bed. He was asleep almost immediately. He did not dream. Since that final night in the Silver Forest, he never dreamed.
He woke again at exactly seven o’clock. It was a Saturday and the street was quieter than it had been the day before. The sun was shining but he could see from the flag on the building opposite that there was a certain amount of wind. He quickly scanned the pavements looking for anything out of place, anyone who shouldn’t be there. Everything seemed normal. He showered again, then shaved and got dressed. The computer was where he had left it on the table and he powered it up so that he could check for any new messages. He knew that the order he had received the day before would still be active. Scorpia were not in the habit of changing their minds. The screen told him that he had received a single email and he opened it. As usual, it had been encrypted and sent to an account that could not be traced to him. He read it, considering its contents. He planned the day ahead.
He went downstairs and had breakfast – tea, yoghurt, fresh fruit. There was a gym at the hotel but it was too small and ill-equipped to be worth using, and anyway, he wouldn’t have felt safe in the confined space, down in the basement. It was almost as bad as the lift. After breakfast, he returned to his room, checking the door handle one last time, packed the few items he had brought with him and left.
“Goodbye, Mr Reddy. I hope you enjoyed your stay.”
“Thank you.”
The girl at the checkout desk was Romanian, quite attractive. Yassen had no girlfriend, of course. Any such relationship was out of the question but for a brief moment he felt a twinge of regret. He thought of Colette, the girl who had died in Argentina. At once, he was annoyed with himself. He shouldn’t have spent so much time reading the diary.
He paid the bill using a credit card connected to the same gymnasium where he supposedly worked. He took the receipt but later on he would burn it. A receipt was the beginning of a paper trail. It was the last thing he needed.
As he left the hotel, he noticed a man reading a newspaper. The headlines screamed out at him:
SHOOTING AT SCIENCE MUSEUM
PRIME MINISTER INVOLVED
“NO ONE HURT,” SAYS MI6
It was interesting that there was no mention of either Herod Sayle or Alex Rider. Nobody would want to suggest that a billionaire and major benefactor in the UK had been involved in an assassination attempt. As for Alex Rider, the secret service would have kept him well away from the press. They had recruited a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. That was one story that would never see the light of day.
Yassen passed through the revolving doors and walked round to the car park. He had hired a car, a Renault Clio, charging it to the same company as the hotel room. He put his things in the boot, then drove west, all the way across London and over to a street in Chelsea, not far from the river. He parked close to a handsome terraced house with ivy growing up the wall, a small, square garden at the front and a wrought-iron gate.
So this was where Alex Rider lived. Yassen assumed he would be somewhere inside, perhaps still asleep. There would be no school today, of course, but even if there had been it was unlikely that Alex would have attended. Only the day before, he had hijacked a cargo plane in Cornwall and forced the pilot to fly him to London. He had parachuted into the Science Museum in South Kensington and shot Herod Sayle, wounding him seconds before he could press the button that would activate the Stormbreaker computers. There had been a furore. Just as the newspapers had reported, the Prime Minister had been present. The police, the SAS and MI6 had been involved. Yassen tried to imagine the scene. It must have been chaos.
He sat behind the wheel, still watching the house.
Yes. Alex Rider most certainly deserved a few extra hours in bed.
About an hour later, the front door opened and a young woman came out. She was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting jersey with red hair tumbling down to her shoulders. Yassen had never met her but he knew who she was: Jack Starbright, Alex’s housekeeper. It must have been rather odd the two of them living together but there was no one else. John Rider had died a long time ago. There had been an uncle, Ian Rider, who had become Alex’s guardian, but he was dead too. Yassen knew because he had been personally responsible for that killing. How had he become so tangled up with this family? Would they never leave him alone?
Jack Starbright was carrying a straw bag. She was going shopping. While she was away, Yassen could slip into the house and tiptoe upstairs. If Alex Rider was in bed asleep, it would all be over very quickly. It would be easier for him that way. He simply wouldn’t wake up.
But Yassen had already decided against it. There were too many uncertainties. He hadn’t yet checked out the layout of the house. He didn’t know if there were alarms. The housekeeper could return at any moment. At the same time, he thought about the email that he had received. It presented him with a new priority. The Stormbreaker business wasn’t quite over. Dealing with Alex Rider now might compromise what lay ahead. He reached down and turned the engine back on. It was useful to know where Alex lived, to acquaint himself with the territory. He could return at another time.
He drove off.
Yassen spent the rest of the day doing very little. It was one of the stranger aspects of his work. He’d had to learn how to fill long gaps of inactivity, effectively how to kill time. He had often found himself waiting in hotel rooms for days or even weeks. The secret was to put yourself in neutral gear, to keep yourself alert but without wasting physical or mental energy. There were meditation techniques that he had been taught when he was on Malagosto. He used them now.
Later that afternoon, he drove into the Battersea Heliport, situated between Battersea and Wandsworth bridges. It is the only place in London where businessmen can arrive or leave by helicopter. The machine that he had ordered was waiting for him – a red and yellow Colibri EC-120B, which he liked because it was so remarkably silent. He had received his helicopter pilot’s licence five years ago, finally realizing a dream which he had had as a child, although he had never, after all, worked in air-sea rescue. It was just another skill that was useful for his line of work. He kept moving. He kept adapting. That was how he survived.
He had telephoned ahead. The helicopter was fuelled and ready. All the necessary clearances had been arranged. Taking his case with him, Yassen climbed into the cockpit and a few minutes later he was airborne, following the River Thames east towards the City. The email that he had received had specified a time and a place. He saw that place ahead of him, an office building thirty storeys high with a flat roof and a radio mast. There was a cross, painted bright red, signalling where he should land.
Herod Sayle was there, waiting for him.
It was Sayle who had sent him the email that morning and who had arranged all this, paying an extra one million euros into the special account that Yassen had in Geneva. The police were looking for the billionaire all over Britain. The airports and main railway stations were being watched. There were extra policemen all around the coast. Sayle had paid Yassen to fly him out of the country. They would land outside Paris, where a private jet was waiting for him. From there he would be flown to a hideout in South America.