Point Blanc (20 page)

An alarm bell
exploded behind him. Lights came on throughout the academy. Alex pushed forward
and set off, picking up speed with every second. The decision had been made for
him. Now, whatever happened, there could be no going back.

Dr. Grief,
wearing a long silver dressing gown, stood beside the open window in
Alex's room. Mrs. Stellenbosch was also wearing a dressing gown.
Hers was pink silk and looked strangely hideous, hanging off her lumpy body.
Three guards stood watching them, waiting for instructions.

"Who
searched the boy?" Dr. Grief asked. He had already been shown the cell
door with the circular hole burned into the lock.

None of the
guards answered, but their faces had gone pale.

"This
is a question to be answered in the morning," Dr. Grief continued.
"For now, all that matters is that we find him and kill him."

"He
must be walking down the mountainside," Mrs. Stellenbosch said.
"He has no skis. He won't make it. We can wait until morning and
pick him up in the helicopter."

"I
think the boy may be more inventive than we believe."

Dr. Grief
picked up the remains of the ironing board. "You see? He has improvised
some sort of sleigh or toboggan. All right..." He had come to a
decision. Mrs. Stellenbosch was glad to see the certainty return to his
eyes. "I want two men on snowmobiles, following him down. Now!" One
of the guards hurried out of the room.

"What
about the unit at the foot of the mountain?" Mrs. Stellenbosch said.

"Indeed."
Dr. Grief smiled. He had always kept a man and a driver at the end of the last
valley in case anybody ever tried to leave the academy on skis. It was a
precaution that was about to pay off. "Alex Rider will have to arrive in
La Vallee de Fer. Whatever he's using to get down, he'll be unable
to cross the railway line. We can have a machine gun set up, waiting for him.
Assuming he does manage to get that far, he'll be a sitting duck."

"Excellent,"
Mrs. Stellenbosch purred.

"I
would have liked to watch him die. But, yes. The Rider boy has no hope at all.
And we can return to bed."

Alex was on
the edge of space, seemingly falling to his certain death. In snowboarding
language, he was catching air, meaning that he had shot away from the ground.
With every foot he went forward, the mountainside disappeared another five feet
downward. He felt the world spin around him. Wind whipped into his face. Then
somehow he had brought himself in line with the next section of the slope and
shot down, steering the ironing board ever farther from Point Blanc. He was
moving at a terrifying speed, trees and rock formations passing in a luminous
green blur across his night-vision goggles. In some ways, the steeper slopes
made it easier. Once, he had tried to make a landing on a flat part of the
mountain--a tabletop--to slow himself down. He had hit the ground
with such a bone-shattering crash that he had almost blacked out and had taken
the next twenty yards almost totally blind.

The ironing
board was shuddering and shaking crazily, and it took all his strength to make
the turns. He was trying to follow the natural fall line of the mountain, but
there were too many obstacles in the way. What he most dreaded was melted snow.
If the board landed on a patch of mud at this speed, he would be thrown and
killed. And he knew that the farther down he went, the greater the danger would
become.

But he had
been traveling for several minutes and so far he had fallen only
twice--both times into thick banks of snow that had protected him. How far
down could it be? He tried to remember what James Sprintz had told him, but
thinking was impossible at this speed. He was having to use every ounce of his
conscious thought simply to stay upright.

He reached a
small lip where the surface was level and drove the edge of the board into the
snow, bringing himself to a skidding halt. Ahead of him, the ground fell away
again alarmingly. He hardly dared look down. There were thick clumps of trees
to the left and to the right. In the distance there was just a green blur. The
goggles could see only so far.

And then he
heard the sound coming up behind him.

The scream of
at least two--maybe more--engines. Alex looked back over his
shoulder. For a moment there was nothing. But then he saw them, black flies
swimming into his field of vision. There were two of them, heading his way.

Grief's
men were riding specially adapted Yamaha Mountain Max snowmobiles equipped with
700 cc triplecylinder engines. The bikes were flying over the ice on their
141-inch tracks, effortlessly moving five times faster than Alex. The 300-watt
headlights had already picked him up. Now the men sped toward him, halving the
distance between them with almost every second that passed.

Alex leapt
forward, diving into the next slope. At the same time, there was a sudden
chatter, a series of distant cracks, and the snow flew up all around him.
Grief's men had machine guns built into their snowmobiles! Alex yelled as
he swooped down the mountainside, barely able to control the sheet of metal
under his feet. The makeshift binding was tearing at his ankles. The whole
thing was vibrating crazily. He couldn't see. He could only hang on,
trying to keep his balance, hoping that the way ahead was clear.

The
headlights of the nearest Yamaha shot out, and Alex saw his own shadow,
stretching ahead of him on the snow. There was another chatter from the machine
gun and Alex ducked, almost feeling the fan of bullets spray over his head. The
second bike screamed up, coming parallel with him. He had to get off the
mountainside. Otherwise he would be shot or run over. Or both.

He forced the
board onto its edge, making a turn. He had seen a gap in the trees and he made
for it. Now he was racing through the forest, with branches and trunks whipping
past like crazy animations in a computer game. Could the snowmobiles follow him
through here? The question was answered by another burst from the machine gun,
ripping through the leaves and branches. Alex searched for a narrower path. The
board shuddered, and he was almost thrown headfirst. The snow was getting
thinner! He edged and turned, heading for two of the thickest trees. He passed
between them with inches to spare.

The Yamaha
snowmobile had no choice. The rider had run out of paths, and was traveling too
fast to stop. He tried to follow Alex between the trees, but the snowmobile was
too wide. Alex heard the collision. There was a terrible crunch, then a scream,
then an explosion. A ball of orange flame leapt over the trees, sending the
black shadows in a crazy dance. Ahead of him, Alex saw another hillock and
beyond it, a gap in the trees. It was time to leave the forest.

He swooped up
the hillock and out, once again catching air. As he left the trees behind him,
six feet in the air, he saw the second snowmobile. It had caught up with him.
For a moment, the two of them were side by side. Alex doubled forward and
grabbed the nose of his board. Still in midair, he twisted the tip of the
board, bringing the tail swinging around. He had timed it perfectly. The tail
slammed into the second rider's head, almost throwing him out of his
seat. Alex fought for balance. The rider yelled and lost control. His
snowmobile jerked sideways as if trying to make an impossibly tight turn. Then
it left the ground, cartwheeling over and over. The rider was thrown off, then
screamed as the snowmobile completed its final turn and landed on top of him.
Man and machine bounced across the surface of the snow and lay still.
Meanwhile, Alex had slammed into the snow and skidded to a halt, his breath
clouding, green, in front of his eyes.

A minute
later, he pushed off again. Ahead of him, he could see that all the trails were
leading into a single valley. This must be the bottleneck called La Vallee de
Fer. He'd actually done it! He'd reached the bottom of the
mountain. But now he was trapped. There was no other way around. He could see
lights in the distance. A city. Safety. But he could also see the railway line
stretching right across the valley, from the left to the right, protected on both
sides by an embankment and a barbed-wire fence. The glow from the city
illuminated everything. On one side the track came out of the mouth of a
tunnel. It ran for about a hundred yards in a straight line before a sharp bend
carried it around the other side of the valley and it disappeared from sight.

The two men
in the gray van saw Alex snowboarding toward them. They were parked on a road
on the other side of the railway line and had been waiting only a few minutes.
They hadn't seen the explosion and wondered what had happened to the two
men on their snowmobiles. But that wasn't their concern. Their orders
were to kill the boy. And there he was, right out in the open, expertly
managing the last slope down through the valley. Every second brought him closer
to them. There was nowhere for him to hide.

The machine
gun was a Belgian FN MAG and would cut him in half.

Alex saw the
van. He saw the machine gun aimed at him. He couldn't stop. It was too
late to change direction. He had come this far, but now he was finished. He
felt the strength draining out of him. Where was MI6? Why did he have to die,
out here, on his own?

And then
there was a sudden blast as a train exploded out of the tunnel. It was a
freight train, traveling about twenty miles an hour. It had at least thirty
train cars being pulled by a diesel engine, and it formed a moving wall between
Alex and the gun, protecting him. But it would be there only a few seconds. He
had to move fast.

Barely
knowing what he was doing, Alex found a last mound of snow and, using it as a
launch pad, swept up into the air. Now he was level with the train ... now
above it. He shifted his weight and came down onto the roof of one of the cars.
The surface was covered in ice, and for a moment he thought he would fall off
the other side, but he managed to swing around so that he was snowboarding
along the roofs of the cars, jumping from one to another while being swept
along the track--away from the gun--in a blast of freezing air.

He had done
it! He had gotten away! He was still sliding forward, the train adding its
speed to his own. No snowboarder had ever moved so fast. But then the train
reached the bend in the track. The board had nothing to keep it from sliding on
the icy surface. As the train sped around to the left, centrifugal force threw
Alex to the right. Once again he soared into the air. But he had finally run
out of snow.

Alex hit the
ground like a rag doll. The snowboard was torn off his feet. He bounced twice,
then hit a wire fence and came to rest with blood spreading around a deep gash
in his head. His eyes were closed.

The train
plowed on through the night. Alex lay still.

THE
GREEN-AND-WHITE ambulance raced down the Avenue Maquis de Gresivaudan in the
north of Grenoble, heading toward the river. It was five o'clock in the
morning and there was no traffic yet, no need for the siren. just before the
river it turned off into a compound of ugly, modern buildings. This was the
second-biggest hospital in the city. The ambulance pulled up outside SERVICE
DES URGENCES--the emergency room. Paramedics ran toward it as the back
doors flew open.

Mrs. Jones
got out of her taxi and watched as the limp, unmoving body of a boy was lowered
on a stretcher, transferred to a gurney, and rushed in through the double
doors. There was already a saline drip attached to his arm, and an oxygen mask
covered his face. It had been snowing up in the mountains, but down here there
was only a dull drizzle sweeping across the pavements. A doctor in a white coat
was bending over the stretcher. He sighed and shook his head. Mrs. Jones
had seen this. She crossed the road and followed the stretcher in.

A thin man
with close-cropped hair wearing a black sweater and vest had also been watching
the hospital. He saw Mrs. Jones without knowing who she was. He had also
seen Alex. He took out a cell phone and made a call. Dr. Grief would want to
know...

Three hours
later, the sun had risen over the city. Grenoble is largely modern, and even
with its perfect mountain setting, it still struggles to be attractive. On this
damp, cloudy day it was clearly failing. Outside the hospital, another car drew
up and Eva Stellenbosch got out. She was wearing a silver-and-white-checked
suit with a hat perched on her ginger hair. She carried a leather handbag, and
for once she had put on makeup. She wanted to look elegant. She looked like a
man in drag.

She walked
into the hospital and found the main reception desk. A young nurse sat behind a
bank of telephones and computer screens. Mrs. Stellenbosch addressed her
in fluent French.

"Excuse
me," she said. "I understand that a young boy was brought here this
morning. His name is Alex Friend."

"One
moment, please." The nurse entered the name in her computer. She read the
information on the screen and her face became serious. "May I ask who you
are?"

"I am
the assistant director of the Academy at Point Blanc. He is one of our
students."

"Are
you aware of the extent of his injuries, madame?"