Eagle Strike (10 page)

He followed Cray into the building and found himself crossing the white marble floor of what was nothing more than a huge glass box. Above him he could see the night sky with the three windmills looming in the distance. The building contained nothing. But there was a single round hole in one corner of the floor and a staircase leading down.

Alex heard voices.

He crept down the stairs, which led directly into a large underground room. Crouching on the bottom step, concealed behind wide steel banisters, he watched.

The room was open-plan, with a white marble floor and corridors leading off in several directions. The architecture made him think of a vault in an ultra-modern bank. But the gorgeous rugs, the fireplace, the Italian furniture and the dazzling white Bechstein grand piano could have come out of a palace. To one side was a curving desk with a bank of telephones and computer screens. All the lighting was at floor level, giving the room a bizarre, unsettling atmosphere, with all the shadows going the wrong way. A portrait of Damian Cray holding a white poodle covered an entire wall.

The man himself was sitting on a sofa, sipping a bright yellow drink. He had a cherry on a cocktail stick and Alex watched him pick it off with his perfect white teeth and slowly eat it. The three men from the square were with him, and Alex knew at once that he had been right all along – that Cray was indeed at the centre of the web.

One of the men was Yassen Gregorovich. Wearing jeans and a polo neck, he was sitting on the piano stool, his legs crossed. The second man stood near him, leaning against the piano. He was older, with silver hair and a sagging, pockmarked face. He was wearing a blue blazer with a striped tie that made him look like a minor official in a bank or a cricket club. He had large spectacles that had sunk into his face as if it were damp clay. He looked nervous, the eyes behind the glass circles blinking frequently. The third man was darkly handsome, in his late forties, with black hair, grey eyes and a jawline that was square and serious. He was casually dressed in a leather jacket and an open-necked shirt and seemed to be enjoying himself.

Cray was talking to him. “I’m very grateful to you, Mr Roper. Thanks to you, Eagle Strike can now proceed on schedule.”

Roper! This was the man Cray had met in Paris. Alex had a sense that everything had come full circle. He strained to hear what the two men were saying.

“Hey – please. Call me Charlie.” The man spoke with an American accent. “And there’s no need to thank me, Damian. I’ve enjoyed doing business with you.”

“I do have a few questions,” Cray murmured, and Alex saw him pick up an object from a coffee table next to the sofa. It was a metallic capsule, about the same shape and size as a mobile phone. “As I understand it, the gold codes change daily. Presumably the flash drive is currently programmed with today’s codes. But if Eagle Strike were to take place two days from now…”

“Just plug it in. The flash drive will update itself,” Roper explained. He had an easy, lazy smile. “That’s the beauty of it. First it will burrow through the security systems. Then it will pick up the new codes … like taking candy from a baby. The moment you have the codes, you transmit them back through Milstar and you’re set. The only problem you have, like I told you, is the little matter of the finger on the button.”

“Well, we’ve already solved that,” Cray said.

“Then I might as well move out of here.”

“Just give me a couple more minutes of your valuable time, Mr Roper … Charlie…” Cray said. He sipped his cocktail, licked his lips and set the glass down. “How can I be sure that the flash drive will actually work?”

“You have my word on it,” Roper said. “And you’re certainly paying me enough.”

“Indeed so. Half a million dollars in advance. And two million dollars now. However…” Cray paused and pursed his lips. “I still have one small worry on my mind.”

Alex’s leg had gone to sleep as he crouched, watching the scene from the stairs. Slowly he straightened it out. He wished he understood more of what they were saying. He knew that a flash drive was a type of storage device used in computer technology. But who or what was Mil-star? And what was Eagle Strike?

“What’s the problem?” Roper asked casually.

“I’m afraid
you
are, Mr Roper.” The green eyes in Cray’s round, babyish face were suddenly hard. “You are not as reliable as I had hoped. When you came to Paris, you were followed.”

“That’s not true.”

“An English journalist found out about your gambling habit. He and a photographer followed you to la Tour d’Argent.” Cray held up a hand to stop Roper interrupting. “I have dealt with them both. But you have disappointed me, Mr Roper. I wonder if I can still trust you.”

“Now you listen to me, Damian.” Roper spoke angrily. “We had a deal. I worked here with your technical boys. I gave them the information they needed to load the flash drive, and that’s my part of it over. How you’re going to get to the VIP lounge and how you’ll actually activate the system … that’s your business. But you owe me two million dollars, and this journalist – whoever he was – doesn’t make any difference at all.”

“Blood money,” Cray said.

“What?”

“That’s what they call money paid to traitors.”

“I’m no traitor!” Roper growled. “I needed the money, that’s all. I haven’t betrayed my country. So quit talking like this, pay me what you owe me and let me walk out of here.”

“Of course I’m going to pay you what I owe you.” Cray smiled. “You’ll have to forgive me, Charlie. I was just thinking aloud.” He gestured, his hand falling limply back. The American glanced round and Alex saw that there was an alcove to one side of the room. It was shaped like a giant bottle, with a curved wall behind and a curving glass door in front. Inside was a table, and on the table a leather attaché case.

“Your money is in there,” Cray said.

“Thank you.”

Neither Yassen Gregorovich nor the man with the spectacles had spoken throughout all this, but they watched intently as the American approached the alcove. There must have been some sort of sensor built into the door because it slid open automatically. Roper went up to the table and opened the case. Alex heard the two locks click up.

Then Roper turned round. “I hope this isn’t your idea of a joke,” he said. “This is empty.”

Cray smiled at him from the sofa. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll fill it.” He reached out and pressed a button on the coffee table in front of him. There was a hiss and the door of the alcove slid shut.

“Hey!” Roper shouted.

Cray pressed the button a second time.

For an instant nothing happened. Alex realized he was no longer breathing. His heart was beating at twice its normal rate. Then something bright and silver dropped down from somewhere high up inside the closed-off room, landing inside the case. Roper reached in and held up a small coin. It was a quarter – a twenty-five cent piece.

“Cray! What are you playing at?” he demanded.

More coins began to fall into the case. Alex couldn’t see exactly what was happening but he guessed that the room really was like a bottle, totally sealed apart from a hole somewhere above. The coins were falling through the hole, the trickle rapidly turning into a cascade. In seconds the attaché case was full, and still the coins came, tumbling onto the pile, spreading out over the table and onto the floor.

Perhaps Charlie Roper had an inkling of what was about to happen. He forced his way through the shower of coins and pounded on the glass door. “Stop this!” he shouted. “Let me out of here!”

“But I haven’t paid you all your money, Mr Roper,” Cray replied. “I thought you said I owed you two million dollars.”

Suddenly the cascade became a torrent. Thousands and thousands of coins poured into the room. Roper cried out, bending an arm over his head, trying to protect himself. Alex quickly worked out the mathematics. Two million dollars, twenty-five cents at a time. The payment was being made in just about the smallest of small change. How many coins would there be? Already they filled all the available floor space, rising up to the American’s knees. The torrent intensified. Now the rush of coins was solid and Roper’s screams were almost drowned out by the clatter of metal against metal. Alex wanted to look away but he found himself fixated, his eyes wide with horror.

He could barely see the man any more. The coins thundered down. Roper was trying to swat them away, as if they were a swarm of bees. His arms and hands were vaguely visible but his face and body had disappeared. He lashed out with a fist and Alex saw a smear of blood appear on the door – but the toughened glass wouldn’t break. The coins oozed forward, filling every inch of space. They rose up higher and higher. Roper was invisible now, sealed into the glittering mass. If he was still screaming, nothing more could be heard.

And then, suddenly, it was over. The last coins fell. A grave of eight million quarters. Alex shuddered, trying to imagine what it must have been like to have been trapped inside. How had the American died? Had he been suffocated by the falling coins or crushed by their weight? Alex had no doubt that the man inside was dead. Blood money! Cray’s sick joke couldn’t have been more true.

Cray laughed.

“That was fun!” he said.

“Why did you kill him?” The man in the spectacles had spoken for the first time. He had a Dutch accent. His voice was trembling.

“Because he was careless, Henryk,” Cray replied. “We can’t make mistakes, not at this late stage. And it’s not as if I broke any promises. I said I’d pay him two million dollars, and if you want to open the door and count it, two million dollars is exactly what you’ll find.”

“Don’t open the door!” the man called Henryk gasped.

“No. I think it would be a bit messy.” Cray smiled. “Well, we’ve taken care of Roper. We’ve got the flash drive. We’re all set to go. So why don’t we have another drink?”

Still crouching at the bottom of the stairs, Alex gritted his teeth, forcing himself not to panic. Every instinct told him to get up and run, but he knew he had to take care. What he had seen was almost beyond belief – but at least his mission was now clear. He had to get out of the compound, out of Sloterdijk, and back to England. Like it or not, he had to go back to MI6.

He knew now that he had been right all along and that Damian Cray was both mad and evil. All his posturing – his many charities and his speeches against violence – was precisely that; a facade. He was planning something that he called Eagle Strike, and whatever it was would take place in two days’ time. It involved a security system and a VIP lounge. Was he going to break into an embassy? It didn’t matter. Somehow he would make Alan Blunt and Mrs Jones believe him. There was a dead man called Charlie Roper. A connection with the National Security Agency of America. Surely Alex had enough information to persuade them to make an arrest.

But first he had to get out.

He turned just in time to see the figure looming above him. It was a guard, coming down the stairs. Alex started to react, but he was too late. The guard had seen him. He was carrying a gun. Slowly Alex raised his hands. The guard gestured and Alex stood up, rising above the stair rail. On the other side of the room, Damian Cray saw him. His face lit up with delight.

“Alex Rider!” he exclaimed. “I was hoping to see
you
again. What a lovely surprise! Come on over and have a drink – and let me tell you how you’re going to die.”

PAIN SYNTHESIS

“Y
assen has told me all about you,” Cray said. “Apparently you worked for MI6. I have to say, that’s a very novel idea. Are you still working for them now? Did they send you after me?”

Alex said nothing.

“If you don’t answer my questions, I may have to start thinking about doing nasty things to you. Or getting Yassen to do them. That’s what I pay him for. Pins and needles … that sort of thing.”

“MI6 don’t know anything,” Yassen said.

He and Cray were alone in the room with Alex. The guard and the man called Henryk had gone. Alex was sitting on the sofa with a glass of chocolate milk that Cray had insisted on pouring for him. Cray was now perched on the piano stool. His legs were crossed and he seemed completely relaxed as he sipped another cocktail.

“There’s no way the intelligence services could know anything about us,” Yassen went on. “And if they did, they wouldn’t have sent Alex.”

“Then why was he at the Pleasure Dome? Why is he here?” Cray turned to Alex. “I don’t suppose you’ve come all this way to get my autograph. As a matter of fact, Alex, I’m rather pleased to see you. I was planning to come and find you one day anyway. You completely spoilt the launch of my Gameslayer. Much too clever by half! I was very cross with you, and although I’m rather busy at the moment, I was going to arrange a little accident…”

“Like you did for that woman in Hyde Park?” Alex asked.

“She was a nuisance. She asked impertinent questions. I hate journalists, and I hate smart-arse kids too. As I say, I’m very glad you managed to find your way here. It makes my life a lot easier.”

“You can’t do anything to me,” Alex said. “MI6 know I’m here. They know all about Eagle Strike. You may have the codes, but you’ll never be able to use them. And if I don’t report in this evening, this whole place will be surrounded before tomorrow and you’ll be in jail…”

Cray glanced at Yassen. The Russian shook his head. “He’s lying. He must have heard us talking from the stairs. He knows nothing.”

Cray licked his lips. Alex realized that he was enjoying himself. He could see now just how crazy Cray was. The man didn’t connect with the real world and Alex knew that whatever he was planning, it was going to be on a big scale – and probably lethal.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Cray said. “Eagle Strike will have taken place in less than forty-eight hours from now. I agree with you, Yassen. This boy knows nothing. He’s irrelevant. I can kill him and it won’t make any difference at all.”

“You don’t have to kill him,” Yassen said. Alex was surprised. The Russian had killed Ian Rider. He was Alex’s worst enemy. But this was the second time Yassen had tried to protect him. “You can just lock him up until it’s all over.”

“You’re right,” Cray said. “I don’t have to kill him. But I want to. It’s something I want to do very much.” He pushed himself off the piano stool and came over to Alex. “Do you remember I told you about pain synthesis?” he said. “In London. The demonstration… Pain synthesis allows game players to experience the hero’s emotions – all his emotions, particularly those associated with pain and death. You may wonder how I programmed it into the software. The answer, my dear Alex, is by the use of volunteers such as yourself.”

“I didn’t volunteer,” Alex muttered.

“Nor did the others. But they still helped me. Just as you will help me. And your reward will be an end to the pain. The comfort and the quiet of death…” Cray looked away. “You can take him,” he said.

Two guards had come into the room. Alex hadn’t heard them approach, but now they stepped out of the shadows and grabbed hold of him. He tried to fight back, but they were too strong for him. They pulled him off the sofa and away, down one of the passages leading from the room.

Alex managed to look back one last time. Cray had already forgotten him. He was holding the flash drive, admiring it. But Yassen was watching him and he looked worried. Then an automatic door shot down with a hiss of compressed air and Alex was dragged away, his feet sliding uselessly behind him, following the passageway to whatever it was that Damian Cray had arranged.

The cell was at the end of another underground corridor. The two guards threw Alex in, then waited as he turned round to face them. The one who had found him on the stairs spoke a few words with a heavy Dutch accent.

“The door closes and it stays closed. You find the way out. Or you starve.”

That was it. The door slammed and Alex heard two bolts being drawn across. He heard the guards’ footsteps fade into the distance. Suddenly everything was silent. He was on his own.

He looked around him. The cell was a bare metal box about five metres long and two metres wide with a single bunk, no water and no window. The door had closed flush to the wall. There was no crack round the side, not so much as a keyhole. He knew he had never been in worse trouble. Cray hadn’t believed his story; he had barely even considered it. Whether Alex was with MI6 or not seemed to make no difference to him … and the truth was that this time Alex really had got himself caught up in something without MI6 there to back him up. For once he had no gadgets to help him break out of the cell. He had brought the bicycle that Smithers had given him from London to Paris and then to Amsterdam. But right now it was parked outside Central Station in the city and would stay there until it was stolen or rusted away. Jack knew he had planned to break into the compound, but even if she did raise the alarm, how would anyone ever find him? Despair weighed down on him. He no longer had the strength to fight it.

And still he knew almost nothing. Why had Cray invested so much time and money in the game system he called Gameslayer? Why did he need the flash drive? What was the plane doing in the middle of the compound? Above all, what was Cray planning? Eagle Strike would take place in two days – but where, and what would it entail?

Alex forced himself to take control. He’d been locked up before. The important thing was to fight back – not to admit defeat. Cray had already made mistakes. Even speaking his own name on the phone when Alex called him from Saint-Pierre had been an error of judgement. He might have power, fame and enormous resources. He was certainly planning a huge operation. But he wasn’t as clever as he thought. Alex could still beat him.

But how to begin? Cray had put him into this cell to experience what he called pain synthesis. Alex didn’t like the sound of that. And what had the guard said? Find the way out – or starve. But there
was
no way out. Alex ran his hands across the walls. They were solid steel. He went over and examined the door a second time. Nothing. It was tightly sealed. He glanced at the ceiling, at the single bulb burning behind a thick pane of glass. That only left the bunk…

He found the trapdoor underneath, built into the wall. It was like a cat flap, just big enough to take a human body. Gingerly, wondering if it might be booby-trapped, Alex reached out and pushed it. The metal flap swung inwards. There was some sort of tunnel on the other side, but he couldn’t see anything. If he crawled into it, he would be entering a narrow space with no light at all – and he couldn’t even be sure that the tunnel actually went anywhere. Did he have the courage to go in?

There was no alternative. Alex examined the cell one last time, knelt down and pushed himself forward. The metal flap swung open in front of him, then travelled down his back as he crawled into the tunnel. He felt it hit the back of his heels and there was a soft click. What was that? He couldn’t see anything. He lifted a hand and waved it in front of his face. It was as if it wasn’t there. He reached out in front of him and felt a solid wall. God! He had walked – crawled rather – into a trap. This wasn’t the way out after all.

He pushed himself back the way he had come, and that was when he discovered the flap was now locked. He kicked out with his feet but it wouldn’t move. Panic, total and uncontrollable, overwhelmed him. He was buried alive, in total darkness, with no air. This was what Cray had meant by pain synthesis: a death too hideous to imagine.

Alex went mad.

Unable to control himself, he screamed out, his fists lashing against the walls of this metal coffin. He was suffocating.

His flailing hand hit a section of the wall and he felt it give way. There was a second flap! Gasping for air, he twisted round and into a second tunnel, as black and as chilling as the first. But at least there was some faint flicker of hope burning in his consciousness. There was a way through. If he could just keep a grip on himself, he might yet find his way back into the light.

The second tunnel was longer. Alex slithered forward, feeling the sheet metal under his hands. He forced himself to slow down. He was still completely blind. If there was a hole ahead of him, he would plunge into it before he knew what had happened. As he went, he tapped against the walls, searching for other passageways. His head knocked into something and he swore. The bad language helped him. It was good to direct his hatred against Damian Cray. And hearing his own voice reminded him he was still alive.

He had bumped into a ladder. He took hold of it with both hands and felt for the opening that must be above his shoulders. He was lying flat on his stomach, but slowly he manipulated himself round and began to climb up, feeling his way in case there was a ceiling overhead. His hand came into contact with something and he pushed. To his huge relief, light flooded in. He had opened some sort of trapdoor with a large, brightly lit room on the other side. Gratefully he climbed the last rungs and passed through.

The air was warm. Alex sucked it into his lungs, allowing his feelings of panic and claustrophobia to fade away. Then he looked up.

He was kneeling on a straw-covered floor in a room that was bathed in yellow light. Three of the walls seemed to have been built with huge blocks of stone. Blazing torches slanted in towards him, fixed to metal brackets. Gates at least ten metres high stood in front of him. They were made out of wood, with iron fastenings and a huge face carved into the surface. Some sort of Mexican god with saucer eyes and solid, block-like teeth. Alex had seen the face before but it took him a few moments to work out where. And then he knew exactly what lay ahead of him. He knew how Cray had programmed pain synthesis into his game.

The gates had appeared at the start of Feathered Serpent, the game that Alex had played in the Pleasure Dome in Hyde Park. Then it had been a computerized image, projected onto a screen – and Alex had been represented by an avatar, a two-dimensional version of himself. But Cray had also built an actual physical version of the game. Alex reached out and touched one of the walls. Sure enough, they weren’t really stone but some sort of toughened plastic. The whole thing was like one of those walk-throughs at Disneyland … an ancient world reproduced with high-tech modern construction. There had been a time when Alex wouldn’t have believed it possible, but he knew with a sick certainty that once the gates opened, he would find himself in a perfect reconstruction of the game – and that meant he would be facing the same challenges. Only this time it would be for real: real flames, real acid, real spears and – if he made a mistake – real death.

Cray had told him that he had used other “volunteers”. Presumably they had been filmed fighting their way through the various challenges; and all the time their emotions had been recorded and then somehow digitally transferred and programmed into the Gameslayer system. It was sick. Alex realized that the darkness of the underground passages hadn’t even been part of the real challenge. That began now.

He didn’t move. He needed time to think, to remember as much as he could about the game he had played at the Pleasure Dome. There had been five zones. First some sort of temple, with a crossbow and a sword concealed in the walls. Would Cray provide him with weapons in this reconstruction? He would have to wait and see. What came after the temple? There had been a pit with a flying creature: half butterfly, half dragon. After that Alex had run down a corridor – spears shooting out of the walls – and into a jungle, the home of the metallic snakes. Then there had been a mirror maze guarded by Aztec gods and finally a pool of fire, his exit to the next level.

A pool of fire. If that was reproduced here, it would kill him. Alex remembered what Cray had said.
The comfort and the quiet of death
. There was no way out of this madhouse. If he did manage to survive the five zones, he would be allowed to finish it by throwing himself into the flames.

Alex felt hatred well up inside him. He could actually taste it. Damian Cray was beyond evil.

What could he do? There would be no way back through the tunnels and Alex wasn’t sure he had the nerve even to try. He had only one choice, and that was to continue. He had almost beaten the game once. That at least gave him a little hope. On the other hand, there was a world of difference between manipulating a controller and actually attempting the action himself. He couldn’t move or react with the speed of an electronic figure. Nor would he be given extra lives. If he was killed once, he would stay dead.

He stood up. At once the gates swung silently open, and there ahead of him was the temple that he had last seen in the game. He wondered if his progress was being monitored. Could he at least rely on an element of surprise?

He walked through the gates. The temple was exactly how he remembered it from the screen at the Pleasure Dome: a vast space with stone walls covered in strange carvings and pillars, statues crouching at their base, stretching far above him. Even the stained-glass windows had been reproduced with images of UFOs hovering over fields of golden corn. And there too were the cameras, swivelling to follow him and, presumably, to record whatever progress he made. Organ music, modern rather than religious, throbbed all around him. Alex shivered, barely able to accept that this was really happening.

He walked further into the temple, every sense alert, waiting for an attack that he knew could come from any direction. He wished now that he had played Feathered Serpent more carefully. He had raced through the zones at such speed that he had probably missed half of the ambushes. His feet rang out on the silver floor. Ahead of him, rusting staircases that reminded him of a submarine or a submerged ship twisted upwards. He thought of trying one of them. But he hadn’t gone that way when he was playing the game and preferred not to now. It was better to stick with what he knew.