Point Blanc (23 page)

The explosion
lit up the entire mountain. The helicopter disappeared in a huge fireball, then
plunged down. it was still burning when it hit the ground.

Behind him,
Alex became aware that the shooting had stopped. The battle was over. He walked
slowly back to the academy, shivering suddenly in the cold night air. As he
approached, a man appeared at the broken window and waved. It was Wolf,
propping himself against the wall, but still very much alive. Alex went over to
him.

"What
happened to Grief?" he asked.

"It
looks like I 'sleighed' him," Alex replied.

On the
slopes, the wreckage of the helicopter flickered and burned as the morning sun
began to rise.

A
FEW DAYS LATER, ALEX found himself sitting opposite Alan Blunt in the faceless
office on Liverpool Street, with Mrs. Jones twisting another peppermint
between her fingers. It was May 1, a bank holiday in England, but somehow he
knew that holidays never came to the building that called itself the Royal
& General Bank. Even the spring seemed to have stopped at the window.
Outside, the sun was shining. Inside, there were only shadows.

"It
seems that once again we owe you a debt of thanks," Blunt was saying.

"You
don't owe me anything," Alex said.

Blunt looked
genuinely puzzled. "You have quite possibly changed the future of this
planet," he said. "Of course, Grief's plan was monstrous,
crazy. But the fact remains that his..." He searched for a word to
describe the test-tube creations that had been sent out of Point Blanc.
"...his offspring could have caused a great many problems. At the
very least they would have had money. God knows what they would have done had
they remained undiscovered."

"What's
happened to them?" Alex asked.

"We've
traced all fifteen of them, and we have them under lock and key,"
Mrs. Jones answered. "They were quietly arrested by the intelligence
services of each country where they lived. We'll take care of
them."

Alex
shivered. He had a feeling he knew what Mrs. Jones had meant by those last
words. And he was certain that nobody would ever see the fifteen Grief replicas
again.

"Once
again, we've had to hush this up," Blunt continued. "This
whole business of ... cloning. It causes a great deal of public disquiet.
Sheep are one thing--but human beings!" He coughed. "The
families involved in this business have no desire for publicity, so they
won't be talking. They're just glad to have had their real sons
returned to them. The same, of course, goes for you, Alex. You've already
signed the Official Secrets Act. I'm sure we can trust you to be
discreet."

There was a
moment's pause. Mrs. Jones looked carefully at Alex. She had to
admit that she was worried about him. She knew everything that had happened at
Point Blanc, how close he had come to a horrible death, only to be sent back
into the academy for a second time. The boy who had come back from the French
Alps was different from the one who had left. There was a coldness about him,
as tangible as the mountain snow.

"You
did very well, Alex," she said.

"How is
Wolf?" Alex asked.

"He's
fine. He's still in the hospital, but the doctors say he'll make a
complete recovery. We hope to have him back on operations in a few
weeks."

"That's
good."

"We had
only one fatality in the raid on Point Blanc. That was the man you saw falling
from the roof. Wolf and another man were injured. Otherwise, it was a complete
success." She paused. "Is there anything else you want to
know?"

"No."
Alex shook his head. He stood up. "You left me in there," he said.
"I called for help and you didn't come. Grief was going to kill me,
but you didn't care."

"That's
not true, Alex." Mrs. Jones glanced at Blunt for support, but he
didn't meet her eyes. "There were difficulties..."

"It
doesn't matter. I just want you to know that I've had enough. I
don't want to be a spy anymore, and if you ask me again, I'll
refuse. I know you think you can blackmail me. But I know too much about you
now, so that won't work anymore." He walked over to the door.
"I used to think that being a spy would be exciting and special, like in
the films. But you just used me. In a way, the two of you are as bad as Grief. You'll
do anything to get what you want. Well, I want to go back to school. Next time,
you can do it without me."

There was a
long silence after Alex had left. At last Blunt spoke. "He'll be
back," he said.

Mrs. Jones
raised an eyebrow. "You really think so?"

"He's
too good at what he does--too good at the job. And it's in his
blood." He stood up. "It's rather odd," he said.
"Most schoolboys dream of being a spy. With Alex, we have a spy who
dreams of being a schoolboy."

"Will
you really use him again?" Mrs. Jones asked.

"Of course.
There was a file that came in only this morning. An interesting case. Right up
his alley." He smiled. "We'll give him a few days to settle
down and then we'll call him."

"He
won't answer."

"We'll
see," Blunt said.

Alex walked
home from the bus stop and let himself into the elegant Chelsea house that he
shared with his housekeeper and closest friend, Jack Starbright. Jack knew
where Alex had been and what he had been doing. But the two of them had made an
agreement never to discuss his involvement with MI6. She didn't like it,
and she worried about him. But ultimately, they both knew, there was nothing
more to be said.

She seemed
surprised to see him. "I thought you'd just gone out," she
said.

"No."

"Did
you get the message by the phone?"

"What
message?"

"Mr. Bray
wants to see you this afternoon. Three o'clock at the school."

Henry Bray
was the principal at Brookland. Alex wasn't surprised by the summons.
Bray was the sort of principal who managed to run a busy school and still find
time to take a personal interest in every pupil there. He had been worried by
Alex's long absence at the start of spring term. The fact that Alex had
also missed the last two weeks of the same term had worried him more. So he had
called a meeting.

"Do you
want lunch?" Jack asked.

"No,
thanks." Alex knew that he would have to pretend he had been ill again.
Doubtless MI6 would produce another doctor's note in due course. But the
thought of lying to his principal had spoiled his appetite.

He set off an
hour later, taking his bicycle, which had been returned to the house by the
Putney police. He cycled slowly. It was good to be back in London, to be
surrounded by normal life. He turned off the King's Road and pedaled down
the side road where--it felt like a month ago--he had followed the
man in the white Skoda. The school loomed up ahead of him. It was empty now and
would remain so until the summer term.

But as Alex
arrived, he saw a figure walking across the yard to the school gates and
recognized Mr. Lee, the elderly school caretaker.

"You
again!"

"Hello,
Bernie," Alex said. That was what everyone called him.

"On
your way to see Mr. Bray?"

"Yeah."

The caretaker
shook his head. "He never told me he was going to be here today. But he
never tells me anything! I'm just going down to the shops. I'll be
back at five to lock up, so make sure you're out by then."

"Right,
Bernie."

There was
nobody in the school yard. It felt strange, walking across the tarmac on his
own. The school seemed bigger with nobody there, the yard stretching out too far
between the redbrick buildings with the sun beating down, reflecting off the
windows. Alex was dazzled. He had never seen the place so empty and so quiet.
The grass on the playing fields looked almost too green. Any school without
schoolchildren has its own peculiar atmosphere, and Brookland was no exception.

Mr. Bray
had an office in D block, which was next to the science building. Alex reached
the swinging doors and opened them. The walls here would normally be covered in
posters, but they had all been taken down at the end of the term. Everything
was blank, off-white. There was another door open to one side. Bernie had been
cleaning the main laboratory. He had rested his mop and bucket to one side when
he had gone to the shops--to pick up cigarettes, Alex presumed. The man
had been a chain smoker all his life, and Alex knew he'd die with a
cigarette between his lips.

Alex climbed
up the stairs, his heels rapping against the stone surface. He reached a
corridor--left for biology, right for physics--and continued straight
ahead. A second corridor, with full-length windows on both sides, led into D
block. Bray's study was directly ahead of him. He stopped at the door,
vaguely wondering if he should have dressed up for the meeting. Bray was always
snapping at boys with their shirts hanging out or crooked ties. Alex was
wearing a Gortex jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and Nike sneakers--the same
clothes he had worn that morning at MI6. His hair was still too short for his
liking, although it had begun to grow back. All in all, he still looked like a
juvenile delinquent--but it was too late now. And anyway, Bray
didn't want to see him to discuss his appearance. His nonappearance at
school was more to the point.

He knocked on
the door.

"Come
in!" a voice called.

Alex opened the
door and walked into the principal's study, a cluttered room with views
over the school yard. There was a desk, piled high with papers, and a black
leather chair with its back toward the door. A cabinet full of trophies stood
against one wall. The others were mainly lined with books.

"You
wanted to see me," Alex said.

The chair
turned slowly around.

Alex froze.

It
wasn't Henry Bray sitting behind the desk.

It was
himself.

He was
looking at a fourteen-year-old boy with fair hair cut very short, brown eyes,
and a slim, pale face. The boy was even dressed identically to him. It took
Alex what felt like an eternity to accept what he was seeing. He was standing
in a room looking at himself sitting in a chair. The boy was him.

With just one
difference. The boy was holding a gun.

"Come
in," he said.

Alex
didn't move. He knew what he was facing and he was angry with himself for
not having expected it. When he had been handcuffed at the academy, Dr. Grief
had boasted to him that he had cloned himself sixteen times. But that morning
Mrs. Jones had traced "all fifteen of them." That left one
spare--one boy waiting to take his place in the family of Sir David
Friend. Alex had glimpsed him while he was at the academy. Now he remembered
the figure with the white mask, watching him from a window as he walked over to
the ski jump. The white mask had been bandages. The new Alex had been spying on
him as he recovered from the plastic surgery that had made the two of them
identical.

And even
today there had been clues. Perhaps it had been the heat of the sun, or the
fallout from his visit to MI6. But he had been too wrapped up in his own
thoughts to see them.

Jack, when he
got home. "
I thought
you'd just gone out
.

Bernie, at
the gate. "
You again
!"

They had both
thought they'd seen him. And in a sense, they had. They had seen the boy
sitting opposite him. The boy who was now aiming a gun at his heart.

"I've
been looking forward to this," the other boy said, and despite the hatred
in his voice, Alex couldn't help marveling. The voice wasn't the
same as his. The boy hadn't had enough time to get it right. But
otherwise he was a dead ringer.

"What
are you doing here?" Alex said. "It's all over. The Gemini
Project is finished. You might as well turn yourself in. You need help."

"I need
just one thing," the second Alex sneered. "I need to see you dead.
I'm going to shoot you. I'm going to do it now. You killed my
father!"

"Your
father was a test tube," Alex said. "You never had a mother or a
father. You're a freak. Handmade in the French Alps, like a cuckoo clock.
What are you going to do when you've killed me? Take my place? You
wouldn't last a week. You may look like me, but too many people know what
Grief was trying to do. And I'm sorry, but you've got 'fake'
written all over you."

"We
would have had everything! We would have had the whole world!" The
replica Alex almost screamed the words, and for a moment Alex thought he heard
Dr. Grief somewhere in there, blaming him from beyond the grave. But then the
creature in front of him
was
Dr. Grief ... or part of him. "I don't care what happens to
me," he went on, "just so long as you're dead."

The hand with
the gun stretched out. The barrel was pointing at him. Alex looked the boy
straight in the eyes.