Point Blanc (13 page)

"When I
was told about this place, they said all the kids had problems. I thought it
was going to be wild. Do you have a cigarette?"

"I
don't smoke."

"Great,
another one... I get here and it's like a museum or a monastery or ...
I don't know what. It looks like Dr. Grief's been busy.
Everyone's quiet, hardworking, boring. God knows how he did it. Sucked
their brains out with a straw or something. A couple of weeks ago I got into a
fight with a couple of them, just for the hell of it." He pointed to his
face. "They beat the crap out of me and then went back to their studies.
Really creepy!"

They went
into the games room, which contained table tennis, darts, a wide-screen TV, and
a snooker table. "Don't try playing snooker," James said.
"The room's on a slant and all the balls roll the wrong way."

Then they
went upstairs, where the boys had their study-bedrooms. Each one contained a
bed, an armchair, a television ("It shows only the programs Dr. Grief
wants you to see," James said), a bureau, and a desk. A second door led
into a small bathroom with a toilet and shower. None of the rooms was locked.

"We're
not allowed to lock them," James explained. "We're all stuck
here with nowhere to go, so nobody bothers to steal anything. I heard that Hugo
Vries--the boy in the library--used to steal anything he could get
his hands on. He was arrested for shoplifting in Amsterdam."

"But
not anymore?"

"He's
another success story. He's flying home next week. His father owns diamond
mines. Why bother shoplifting when you can afford to buy the whole shop?"

Alex's
study was at the end of the corridor, with views over the ski jump. His
suitcases had already been carried up and were waiting for him on the bed.
Everything felt very bare, but according to James, the study-bedrooms were the
only part of the school the boys were allowed to decorate themselves. They
could choose their own bedspreads and cover the walls with their own posters.

"They
say it's important that you express yourself," James said.
"If you haven't brought anything with you, Miss Stomach-bag will
take you into Grenoble."

"Stomach-bag?"

"Mrs. Stellenbosch.
That's my name for her."

"What
do the other boys call her?"

"They
call her Mrs. Stellenbosch." James sighed. "I'm telling
you--this is a deeply weird place, Alex. I've been to a lot of
schools because I've been thrown out of a lot of schools. But this one is
the pits. I've been here for six weeks now and I've hardly had any
lessons. They have music evenings and discussion evenings and they try to get
me to read. But otherwise, I've been left on my own."

"They
want you to assimilate," Alex said, remembering what Dr. Grief had said.

"That's
their word for it. But this place ... they may call it a school, but
it's more like being in prison. You've seen the guards. "

"I
thought they were here to protect us."

"If you
think that, you're a bigger idiot than I thought. Think about it! There
are about thirty of them. Thirty armed guards for seven kids? That's not
protection. That's intimidation." James paused by the door. He
examined Alex for a second time. "It would be nice to think that someone
has finally arrived who I can relate to," he said,

"Maybe
you can," Alex said.

"Yeah.
But for how long?"

James left,
closing the door behind him.

Alex began to
unpack. The bulletproof ski suit and infrared goggles were at the top of the
first suitcase. It didn't look as if he would be needing them. It
wasn't as if he even had any skis. Then came the Discman. He remembered
the instructions Smithers had given him. "If
you're in real trouble, just press Fast Forward
three times
." He was almost tempted to do it now. There was
something unsettling about the academy. He could feel it even now, in his room.
He was like a goldfish in a bowl. Looking up, he almost expected to see a pair
of huge eyes looming over him, and he knew that they would be wearing
red-tinted glasses. He weighed the Discman in his hand. He couldn't hit
the panic button--yet. He had nothing to report back to MI6. There was nothing
to connect the school with the deaths of the two men in New York and the Black
Sea.

But if there
was anything, he knew where he would find it. Why were two whole floors of the
building out of bounds? It made no sense at all. Presumably the guards slept up
there, but even though Dr. Grief seemed to employ a small army, that would
still leave a lot of empty rooms. The third and fourth floors. If something was
going on at the academy, it had to be going on up there.

A bell
sounded downstairs. Alex shut his suitcase, left his room, and walked down the
corridor. He saw another couple of boys walking ahead of him, talking quietly
together. Like the boys he had seen in the library, they were clean and well
dressed with hair cut short and neatly groomed. Really creepy, James had said.
Even on first sight, Alex had to agree.

He reached
the main staircase. The two boys had gone down. Alex glanced in their
direction, then went up. The staircase turned a corner and stopped. Ahead of
him was a sheet of metal that rose up from the floor to the ceiling and all the
way across, blocking off the view. The wall had been added recently, like the
helipad. Someone had carefully and deliberately cut the building in two.

There was a
door set in the metal wall and beside it a keypad with nine buttons demanding a
code. Alex reached for the door handle, his hand closing around it. He
didn't expect the door to open--nor did he expect what happened
next. The moment his fingers came into contact with the handle, an alarm went
off, a shrieking siren that echoed throughout the building. A few seconds
later, he heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to find two guards facing
him, their guns half raised.

Neither of
them spoke. One of them ran past him and punched a code into the keypad. The
alarm stopped. And then Mrs. Stellenbosch was there, hurrying forward on
her short, muscular legs.

"Alex!"
she exclaimed. Her eyes were filled with suspicion. "What are you doing
here? The director told you that the upper floors are forbidden."

"Yeah
... well, I forgot." Alex looked straight at her. "I heard the
bell go and I was on my way to the dining room."

"The
dining room is downstairs."

"Right."

Alex walked
past the two guards, who stepped aside to let him pass. He felt
Mrs. Stellenbosch watching him while he went. Metal doors, alarms, and
guards with machine guns. What were they trying to hide? And then he remembered
something else. The Gemini Project. Those were the words he had heard when he
was listening at Dr. Grief's door. Gemini. The twins. One of the twelve
star signs. But what did it mean? Turning the question over his mind, Alex went
down to meet the rest of the students.

AT
THE END OF HIS FIRST week at Point Blanc, Alex drew up a list of the six boys
with whom he shared the school. It was midafternoon, and he was alone in his
room. A notepad was open in front of him. It had taken him about half an hour
to put together the names and the few details that he had. He only wished he
had more.

HUGO VRIES
(14) Dutch. Lives in Amsterdam. Brown hair, green eyes. Father's name,
Rudi. Owns diamond mines. Speaks little English. Reads and plays guitar. Very
solitary. Sent to PB for major shoplifting and arson.

TOM MCMORIN
(14) Canadian. From Vancouver. Parents divorced. Mother runs media empire
(newspapers, TV). Reddish hair, blue eyes. Well built, chess player. Car thefts
and drunken driving ... sent to PB.

NICOLAS MARC
(14) French ... from Bordeaux? Expelled from private school in Paris, cause
unknown. Drugs? Brown hair, brown eyes, very fit all around. Tattoo of devil on
left shoulder. Good at sports. Father = Anthony Marc. Airlines, pop music,
hotels. Never mentions his mother.

CASSIAN JAMES
(14) American. Fair hair, brown eyes. Mother = Jill ... studio chief in
Hollywood. Parents divorced. Writes poetry, plays jazz piano. Expelled from six
schools. Various drugs offenses. Sent to PB after smuggling arrest. Tells
jokes. Seems popular.

JOE
CANTERBURY (14) American. Spends much of his time with Cassian. Brown hair,
blue eyes. Mother (name unknown) New York senator. Father something major at
the Pentagon. Vandalism, truancy, shoplifting. Claims to have own motorbike and
three girlfriends (!) in Los Angeles.

JAMES SPRINTZ
(14) German. Father = Dieter Sprintz, banker, well-known financier (the
hundred-million-dollar man). Mother living in England. Brown hair, dark blue
eyes, pale. Lives in Dusseldorf. Expelled for wounding a teacher with an air
pistol. Closest I've got to a friend at PB--the only one who really
hates it here.

Lying on his
bed, Alex studied the list. What did it tell him? Not a great deal.

First, all
the boys were the same age: fourteen, the same age as him. At least three of
them, and possibly four, had parents who were either divorced or separated.
They all came from hugely wealthy backgrounds. Blunt had already told him that
was the case, but Alex was surprised by just how diverse the parents were.
Airlines, diamonds, politics, and movies. France, Holland, Canada, and America.
Each one of them was at the top of his or her field, and those fields covered
just about every human activity. He himself was supposed to be the son of a
supermarket king. Food. That was another world industry he could check off.

At least two
of the boys had been arrested for shoplifting. Two had been involved with
drugs. But Alex knew that the list somehow hid more than it revealed. With the
exception of James, it was hard to pin down what made the boys at Point Blanc
different. In a strange way, they all looked the same.

Their eyes
and hair were different colors. They wore different clothes. All the faces were
different: Tom handsome and confident, Joe quiet and watchful. And of course
they spoke not only with different voices but also in several languages. James
had talked about brains being sucked out with straws, and he had a point. It
was as if the same consciousness had somehow invaded them all. They had become
puppets, dancing on the same string.

The bell rang
downstairs. Alex looked at his watch. It was exactly one
o'clock--lunchtime. That was another thing about the school.
Everything was done to the exact minute. Lessons from nine until twelve. Lunch
from one to two. And so on. James made a point of being late for everything,
and Alex had taken to joining him. It was a tiny rebellion but a satisfying
one. It showed they still had a little control over their own lives. The other
boys, of course, turned up like clockwork. They would be in the dining room
now, waiting quietly for the food to be served.

Alex rolled
over on the bed and reached for a pen. He wrote a single word on the pad,
underneath the names.

BRAINWASHING?

Maybe that
was the answer. According to James, the other boys had arrived at the academy
two months before him. He had been there for just three weeks. That added up to
just eleven weeks in total, and Alex knew that you didn't take a bunch of
delinquents and turn them into perfect students just by giving them good books.
Dr. Grief had to be doing something else. Drugs. Hypnosis. Something.

He waited
five more minutes, then hid the notepad under his mattress and left the room.
He wished he could lock the door. There was no privacy at Point Blanc. Even the
bathrooms had no locks. And Alex still couldn't shake off the feeling
that everything he did, even everything he thought, was somehow being
monitored, noted down. Evidence to be used against him.

It was ten
past one when he reached the dining room, and sure enough, the other boys were
already there, eating their lunch and talking quietly among themselves. Nicolas
and Cassian were at one table. Hugo, Tom, and Joe were at another. Nobody was
flicking peas. Nobody even had their elbows on the table. Tom was talking about
a visit he had made to some museum in Grenoble. Alex had been in the room only
a few seconds, but already his appetite had gone.

James had
arrived just ahead of him and was standing at one of the windows into the
kitchen, helping himself to food. Most of the food arrived precooked, and one
of the guards heated it up. Today it was stew. Alex got his lunch and sat next
to James. The two of them had their own table. They had become friends quite
effortlessly. Everyone else ignored them.

"You
want to go out after lunch?" James asked.

"Sure.
Why not?"

"There's
something I want to talk to you about."

Alex looked
past James at the other boys. There was Tom, at the head of the table, reaching
out for a pitcher of water. He was dressed in a polo shirt and jeans. Next to
him was Joe Canterbury. He was talking to Hugo now, waving a finger to
emphasize a point. Where had Alex seen that movement before? Cassian was just
behind them, round faced, with fine, light brown hair, laughing at a joke.