Ark Angel (3 page)

He put on a pair of slippers and went out. The lights had been dimmed, casting no more than a discreet glow outside his room. There was a computer screen gleaming behind the nurses’ station but no sign of Diana Meacher or anyone else. Alex took a step forward. There are few places more silent than a hospital in the middle of the night and he felt almost afraid to move, as if he was breaking some sort of unwritten law between the healthy and the sick. But he knew he would just lie awake for hours if he stayed in bed. He had nothing to worry about. Mrs Jones was certain that Scorpia was no longer a threat. He was almost tempted to leave the hospital and catch the night bus home.

Of course, that was out of the question. He couldn’t go that far. But he was still determined to reach the main reception with its sliding glass doors and—just beyond—a real street with people and cars and noise and dirt. By day, three receptionists answered the phones and dealt with enquiries. After eight o’clock there was just one. Alex had already met him—a cheerful Irishman called Conor Hackett. The two of them had quickly become friends.

Conor was sixty-five and had spent most of his life in Dublin. He’d taken this job to help support his nine grandchildren. After they’d talked a while, Alex had persuaded Conor to let him go outside, and he had spent a happy fifteen minutes on the pavement in front of the main entrance, watching the passing traffic and breathing in the night air. He would do the same again now. Maybe he could stretch it to half an hour.

Conor would complain; he would threaten to call the nurse. But Alex was sure he would let him have his way.

He avoided the lift, afraid that the noise of the bell as it arrived would give him away. He walked down the stairs to the first floor, and continued along a corridor. From here he could look down on the polished floor of reception and the glass entrance doors. He could see Conor sitting behind his desk, reading a magazine.

Even down here the lights were dimmed. It was as if the hospital wanted to remind visitors where they were the moment they came in.

Conor turned a page. Alex was about to walk down the last few stairs, when suddenly the front doors slid open.

Alex was both startled and a little embarrassed. He didn’t want to be caught here in his dressing gown and pyjamas. At the same time, he wondered who could possibly be visiting St Dominic’s at this time of night.

He took a step back, disappearing into the shadows. Now he could watch everything that was happening, unobserved.

Four men came in. They were in their late twenties, and all looked fit. The leader was wearing a combat jacket and a Che Guevara T-shirt. The others were dressed in jeans, hooded sweatshirts and trainers. From where he was hiding, Alex couldn’t make out their faces very clearly, but already he knew there was something strange about them. The way they moved was somehow too fast, too energetic. People move more cautiously when they come into a hospital. After all, nobody actually wants to be there.

“Hey—how are you doing?” the first man asked. The words cut through the gloom. He had a cheerful, cultivated voice.

“How can I help you?” the receptionist asked. He sounded as puzzled as Alex felt.

“We’d like to visit one of your patients,” the man explained. “I wonder if you can tell us where he is.”

“I’m very sorry.” Alex couldn’t see Conor’s face, but he could imagine the smile in his voice. “You can’t visit anyone now. It’s almost one o’clock! You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“I don’t think you understand.”

Alex felt the first stirrings of nervousness. A note of menace had crept into the man’s voice. And there was something sinister about the way the other three men were positioned. They were spread out between the receptionist and the main entrance. It was as if they didn’t want him to leave. Or anyone else to enter.

“We want to see Paul Drevin.” Alex heard the name with a shiver of disbelief. The boy in the room next to his! Why would these men want to see him so late at night? “What room is he in?” the man in the combat jacket asked.

Conor shook his head. “I can’t give you that information,” he protested. “Come back tomorrow and someone will be happy to help you then.”

“We want to know now,” the man insisted. He reached into his jacket and Alex felt the floor sway beneath him as the man produced a gun. It was equipped with a silencer. And it was pointing at the receptionist’s head.

“What are you…?” Conor had gone rigid; his voice had risen to a high-pitched squeak. “I can’t tell you!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“We want the room number of Paul Drevin. If you don’t give it to me in the next three seconds, I will pull the trigger and the only part of this hospital you’ll ever need again will be the morgue.”

“Wait!”

“One…”

“I don’t know where he is!”

“Two…”

Alex felt his chest hurting. He realized he was holding his breath.

“All right! All right! Let me find it for you.”

The receptionist began to tap hurriedly at the keyboard hidden below the top of his desk. Alex heard the clatter of the keys.

“He’s on the second floor! Room eight.”

“Thank you,” the man said, and shot him.

Alex heard the angry cough of the bullet as it was spat out by the silencer. He saw a black spray in front of the receptionist’s forehead. Conor was thrown backwards, his hands raised briefly.

Nobody moved.

“Room eight. Second floor,” one of the men muttered.

“I told you he was in room eight,” the first man said.

“Then why did you ask?”

“I just wanted to be sure.”

One of them sniggered.

“Let’s go and get him,” another said.

Alex was frozen to the spot. He could feel his wound throbbing angrily. This couldn’t be happening, could it? But it was happening. He had seen it for himself.

The four men moved.

Alex turned and ran.

Alex took the stairs two at a time, a hundred different thoughts tumbling through his mind. Who were the four men and why were they here? What did they want with Paul? The name Drevin meant something to him, but this wasn’t the time to work out what it was. What could he do to stop them?

He came to a fire alarm in a red box on the wall and stopped beside it. For a few, precious seconds his fist hovered over the glass. But he knew that setting off the alarm would do no good. For the moment, surprise was all he had on his side. The fire alarm would only tell the men that they had been seen, and then they would go about their work all the faster, killing or kidnapping the boy long before the police or fire brigade arrived.

Alex didn’t want to confront the four men on his own. He was desperately tempted to call for help. But he knew it would come too late.

He continued up the stairs, one small piece of knowledge spurring him on. The men had shown themselves to be single-minded and ruthless. But they had already made one mistake.

When they had set off, they had been moving in the direction of the lift, and Alex knew something they didn’t. The lifts at St Dominic’s were the original bed lifts, almost twenty years old. They were designed to carry patients up from the operating theatres on the first floor and had to stop without even the slightest shudder. For this reason they were very, very slow. It would take Alex less than twenty seconds to reach the second floor; it would take the men almost two minutes. That gave him one minute and forty seconds to do something. But what?

He burst through the doors and into the nurses’ area in front of his room. There was still nobody around, which was strange. Perhaps the four men had created some sort of diversion. That would make sense. They could have got rid of the nurse with a single phone call and right now she could be anywhere in the hospital. Alex stood panting in the half-light, trying to get his brain to work. He could imagine the lift making its way inch by inch towards him.

He was painfully aware of the unevenness of the competition. The men were professional killers. Alex would have known that even if he hadn’t seen them murder the night receptionist. It was obvious from their body language, the way they smiled, the conversation he’d overheard. Killing was second nature to them. Alex couldn’t possibly fight them. He was unarmed. Worse, he was in pyjamas and slippers with a chest wound held together by stitches and bandages. He had never been more helpless. Once he was seen, he would be finished. He didn’t stand a chance.

And yet he had to do something. He thought about the strange, lonely boy in the room next to his. Paul Drevin was only just fourteen—eight months younger than Alex. These men had come for him. Alex couldn’t let them take him.

He looked at the open door of his own room—number nine. It was exactly opposite the lift, and was the first thing the men would see when they stepped out. Paul Drevin was asleep in the next room. His door was closed. Their names were visible in the half-light: ALEX RIDER and PAUL DREVIN. They were printed on plastic strips that fitted into a slot on each door. Underneath, also on strips, were the room numbers.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a plan started to form in Alex’s mind. Wondering if he had left himself enough time, he darted forward and snatched a teaspoon from a cup and saucer a nurse had left on the desk. Using the spoon handle, he prised his name and room number out of their slots, then did the same to the next door. It took another few seconds to snap the plastic strips back into place. Now it was Alex Rider who was asleep in room nine. The door to room eight was open and Paul Drevin wasn’t there.

Alex ran into his room, pulled open the cupboard and grabbed a shirt and a pair of jeans. He knew what he had done wasn’t enough. If the men glanced at the doors more than briefly, they would see the trick that had been played, because the sequence was wrong: six, seven, nine, eight, ten. Alex had to make sure they didn’t have time to examine anything.

He had to make them come after him. He didn’t dare get dressed in sight of the lift. He hurried out with the clothes—past the nurses’ station, away from the two rooms. He came to a corridor leading off at ninety degrees. It ran about twenty metres to a pair of swing doors and another staircase. There was an open store cupboard on one side of the corridor and next to it a trolley with some sort of machine: low and flat with a series of buttons and a narrow, rectangular TV screen that looked like it had been squashed. Alex recognized the machine. There were also two oxygen cylinders. He could feel his heart pounding underneath the bandages. The silence in the hospital was unnerving. How much time had passed since Conor had been killed?

Swiftly he stripped off the pyjamas and pulled on his own clothes. It felt good to be dressed again after ten long days and nights. He was no longer a patient. He was beginning to get his life back.

The lift doors opened, breaking the silence with a metallic rattle. Alex watched the four men walk out.

Quickly he summed them up. Two were black, two white. They moved as a single unit, as if they were used to working together. He gave them names based on their appearances. The man who had shot Conor was the leader. He had a broken nose that seemed to split his face like a crack in a mirror. Alex thought of him as Combat Jacket. The next was thin, with crumpled cheeks and orange-tinted glasses. Spectacles. The third was short and muscular, and obviously spent a serious amount of time at the gym. He had a heavy dull metal watch on his wrist, and that gave him his name: Steel Watch. The last man was unshaven, with straggly black hair. At some point he’d been to a bad dentist, who had left his mark very visibly. He would be Silver Tooth.

All four were moving quickly, impatient after the long wait in the lift. This was the moment of truth.

Combat Jacket registered the open door and the empty bed inside. He read the name. At that moment, Alex appeared, walking down the corridor as if he had just been to the toilet and was returning to his room. He stopped and gave a small gasp of surprise. The men looked at him. And immediately made the assumption that Alex had guessed they would. Even if they knew what their target was supposed to look like, they couldn’t see his face in the soft light. He was Paul Drevin. Who else could he be? “Paul?” Combat Jacket spoke the single word.

Alex nodded.

“We’re not going to hurt you. But you’re going to have to come with us.”

Alex took a step back. Combat Jacket took out a gun. The same gun that he had used to kill the night receptionist. Alex turned and fled.

As his bare feet pounded on the hospital carpet, he was afraid that he had left it too late, that he would feel the white heat of a bullet between his shoulder blades. But the corridor was right in front of him. With a feeling of relief, he threw himself round the corner. Now he was out of sight.

The four men were slow to react. This was the last thing they’d expected. Paul Drevin should have been sound asleep in bed. But he had seen them. He had run away. As one, they surged forward. Their movements seemed clumsy—they didn’t want to make any noise—but they were still making fast progress. They reached the corridor and saw the swing doors ahead. One of the doors was still closing. The boy had obviously passed through seconds before. With Combat Jacket in the lead, they pressed on. None of them noticed the store cupboard on their left. Combat Jacket pushed through the doors; Steel Watch and Spectacles followed. Silver Tooth was left behind—and that was when Alex made his move.

Alex had run the full length of the corridor, flung open the doors, then doubled back to the store cupboard.

That was where he was now. Moving on tiptoe, he slipped out. Now he was behind Silver Tooth. He was holding something in each of his hands, a circular disc, padded, trailing electric wires.

The machine he had seen on the trolley was a Lifepak 300 defibrillator, a standard piece of equipment in most British hospitals. Alex had seen defibrillators often enough in television dramas to know what they did and how they worked. When a patient’s heart stopped, the doctor would press the pads against their chest and use the electric charge to bring them back to life. Alex had conected up this defibrillator in the last seconds before the lift arrived. It was designed to be easy to use and ready in an instant; the batteries were always kept fully charged. Gritting his teeth, he slammed the pads against the neck of the man in front of him and pressed the buttons. Silver Tooth screamed and leapt high in the air as the electric current coursed through him. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.