Point Blanc Read Free

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 never happened. But at the same
time--he had to admit it--part of him wanted it all to happen again.
Sometimes he felt that he no longer belonged in the safe, comfortable world of
Brookland Comprehensive. Too much had changed. And at the end of the day,
anything was better than double homework.
    He lifted his bike out of the shed, unlocked it,
pulled the backpack over his shoulders, and prepared to ride away. That was
when he saw the beaten-up white car. Back outside the school gates for the
second time that week.
    Everyone knew about the man in the white car.
    He was in his twenties, bald-headed with two broken
stumps where his front teeth should have been and five metal studs in his ear.
He didn't advertise his name. When people talked about him, they called
him Skoda, after the make of his car. But some said that his name was Jake and
that he had once been to Brookland. If so, he had come back like an unwelcome
ghost; here one minute, vanishing the next ... somehow always a few seconds
ahead of any passing police car or overly inquisitive teacher.
    Skoda sold drugs. He sold soft drugs, like pot and
cigarettes, to the younger kids, and harder stuff to any of the older ones
stupid enough to buy it. It seemed incredible to Alex that Skoda could get away
with it so easily, dealing his little packets in broad daylight. But of course,
there was a code of honor in the school. No one turned anyone in to the police,
not even a rat like Skoda. And there was always the fear that if Skoda went
down, some of the people he supplied--friends, classmates--might go
with him.
    Drugs had never been a huge problem at Brookland, but
recently that had begun to change. A clutch of seventeen-year-olds had started
buying Skoda's goods, and like a stone dropped into a pool, the ripples
had rapidly spread. There had been a spate of thefts, as well as one or two nasty
bullying