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their reputation for decades to come. No countries would do business with them. The Americans would turn their backs on them. The European community already hates them, but this would be the final straw. Nobody would trust them. Suddenly, Great Britain would be a very small and lonely island indeed. Imagine all that, my friends, and ask yourselves what the British government would do to avoid it. Do you think, perhaps, they would agree to empty one room in a stupid museum in the middle of London? Would they cheerfully send a collection of old statues back to their rightful owners? I think they would. I really think they would.”
    Razim longed for a cigarette. He could feel the pack pressing inside his jacket pocket—for today he was wearing European dress—but he dared not reach for it. It wasn’t that smoking was forbidden. It was just that it might be considered a weakness.
    “I have already put into operation a plan that will achieve all this,” he said. “It is the sort of exercise that carries the unmistakable stamp and authority of Scorpia. And from what I have been told, I think it will give everyone around this table a great deal of personal satisfaction because, gentlemen, what I have in mind involves a young boy . . .”
    He paused for effect.
    “The boy’s name is Alex Rider.”
    There was a moment of perfect silence. Even the engines seemed to have stopped. The last two words seemed to have had a paralyzing effect on at least half the people in the cabin.
    “Alex Rider?” Sitting next to Kroll, the Japanese man called Mr. Mikato raised a thumb to his lips and bit at the nail. As he did so, he exposed the diamond set in his front tooth. Mikato was a member of the criminal organization known as the Yakuza and had tattooed the names of every man he had killed across his body. Unfortunately, he had run out of space. “We have encountered this boy twice,” he began. “We even tried to kill him with a bullet fired into his heart. The sniper that we hired had never failed—”
    “Please, hear me out,” Razim interrupted. “I have given the matter a great deal of thought.” Suddenly he decided—to hell with it. He took out his pack of Black Devils and lit one with a solid gold lighter. Smoke curled in front of his face, reflected in the two circles of his glasses.
    “I am perfectly aware that Alex Rider has, incredibly, gotten the better of this organization on two occasions,” he said. “There was a fairly simple affair involving the creation of a tsunami to strike the coast of Australia. And before that, the late Mrs. Rothman was responsible for the operation called Invisible Sword. This was a secret weapon using nanoshells with a cyanide core. The plan was to poison every child in Britain.”
    “We do not need to discuss these matters!” There was a Frenchman at the table, a man with a neat gray beard and the long, slender fingers of a pianist. He was rolling his knuckles across the wooden surface, a sign of his irritation.
    “But we do need to discuss them, Monsieur Duval,” Razim replied. “How can we understand our one weakness if we don’t examine it?” He waved a hand. “There is absolutely nothing special about this child except that he is a child. That’s the reason why he has been so useful to MI6. Oh yes, he received some training from his uncle, who was a spy himself before he was killed. But do you really think a basic knowledge of karate and the ability to speak a few foreign languages were the reasons he managed to defeat you?
    “That’s nonsense! Alex Rider won because you underestimated him. Winston Yu should have shot him when he had the chance. And Mrs. Rothman too. Maybe they hesitated because he was so young, but that was his strength. He was the world’s most unlikely spy. It didn’t matter if it was the island of Skeleton Key or Sayle Enterprises in Cornwall, nobody looked at him twice. That was their mistake.”
    “And our mistake . . . ,” Kroll began. He had