Point Blank

image, a few yards above him. But a man getting into an elevator on his way to lunch does not look up. The Gentleman had known this. And he was never wrong.
    At 12:35, the chauffeur called up to say that Mr. Roscoe hadn’t arrived at the car. Ten minutes later, Helen Bosworth alerted security, who began to search around the foyer of the building. At one o’clock, they called the restaurant. The senator was there, waiting for his lunch guest. But Roscoe hadn’t shown up.
    In fact, his body wasn’t discovered until the next day, by which time the multimillionaire’s disappearance had become the lead story on the news. A bizarre accident—that’s what it looked like. Nobody could work out what had happened. Because by that time, of course, The Gentleman had reprogrammed the computer, removed the projector, and left everything as it should have been before quietly leaving the building.
    Two days later, a man who looked nothing like a maintenance engineer walked into JFK
    International Airport. He was about to board a flight for Switzerland. But first, he visited a flower shop and ordered a dozen black tulips to be sent to a certain address. The man paid with cash. He didn’t leave a name.

BLUE SHADOW

    THE WORST TIME TO FEEL alone is when you’re in a crowd. Alex Rider was walking across the school yard, surrounded by hundreds of boys and girls his own age. They were all heading in the same direction, all wearing the same blue and gray uniform, all of them thinking probably much the same thoughts. The last lesson of the day had just ended. Homework, supper, and television would fill the remaining hours until bed. Another school day. So why did he feel so out of it, as if he were watching the last weeks of the spring term from the other side of a giant glass screen?
    Alex jerked his backpack over one shoulder and continued toward the bike shed. The bag was heavy. As usual, it contained double homework … French and history. He had missed three weeks of school and was working hard to catch up. His teachers had not been sympathetic. Nobody had said as much, but when he had finally returned with a doctor’s letter (‚a bad dose of flu with complications‛) they had nodded and smiled and secretly thought him a little bit pampered and spoiled. On the other hand, they had to make allowances. They all knew that Alex had no parents, that he had been living with an uncle who had died in some sort of car accident. But even so. Three weeks in bed! Even his closest friends had to admit that was a bit much.
    And he couldn’t tell them the truth. He wasn’t allowed to tell anyone what had really happened. That was the hell of it.
    Alex looked around him at the children streaming through the school gates, some dribbling soccer balls, some on their cell phones. He looked at the teachers, curling themselves into their secondhand cars. At first, he had thought the whole school had somehow changed while he was away. But he knew now that what had happened was worse. Everything was the same. He was the one who had changed.
    Alex was fourteen years old, an ordinary schoolboy in an ordinary West London school. Or he had been. Three weeks before, he had discovered that his uncle was a secret agent, working for MI6. The uncle—Ian Rider—had been murdered, and MI6 had forced Alex to take his place.
    They had given him a crash course in Special Air Service survival techniques and sent him on a lunatic mission on the South Coast. He had been chased, shot at, and almost killed. And at the end of it he had been packed off and sent back to school as if nothing had happened. But first they had made him sign the Official Secrets Act. Alex smiled at the memory of it. He didn’t need to sign anything. Who would have believed him anyway?
    But it was the secrecy that was getting to him now. Whenever anyone asked him what he had been doing in the weeks he had been away, he had been forced to tell them that he had been in bed, reading, slouching around the house, whatever. Alex didn’t want to boast about what he’d done, but he hated having to deceive his friends. It made him angry. MI6 hadn’t just put him in danger. They’d locked his whole life in a filing cabinet and thrown away the key.
    He had reached the bike shed. Somebody muttered a ‚goodbye‛ in his direction and he nodded, then reached up to brush away the single strand of fair hair that had fallen over his eye. Sometimes he wished that the whole business with MI6 had