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incidents--younger children being forced to bring in money for
older ones. The stuff Skoda was selling seemed to get more expensive the more
you bought of it, and it hadn't been cheap at the start.
    Alex watched as a heavy-shouldered boy with dark eyes
and serious acne lumbered over to the car, paused by the open window, and then
continued on his way. He felt a sudden spurt of pure loathing. The boy's
name was Colin, and a year before, he had been hardworking and popular. These
days, he was just avoided. Alex had never thought much about drugs, apart from
knowing that he would never take them himself. But he could see that the man in
the white car wasn't poisoning just a handful of dumb kids. He was
poisoning the whole school.
    A policeman on foot patrol appeared, walking toward
the gate. A moment later, the white car was gone, black smut bubbling from a
faulty exhaust. Alex was on his bike before he knew what he was doing, pedaling
fast out of the yard and swerving around the school secretary, who also was on
her way home.
    "Not too fast, Alex!" she called out,
sighing when he ignored her. Miss Bedfordshire had always had a soft spot for
Alex without knowing quite why. And she alone in the school had wondered if
there hadn't been more to his absence than the doctor's note had
suggested.
    The white Skoda accelerated down the road, turning
left and then right, and Alex thought he was going to lose it. But then it
twisted through the maze of back streets that led up to the King's Road
and hit the inevitable four o'clock traffic jam, coming to a halt about
two hundred yards ahead.
    The average speed of traffic in London is--at the
start of the twenty-first century--slower than it was in Victorian times.
During normal working hours, any bicycle will beat any car on just about any
journey at all. And Alex wasn't riding just any bike. He still had his
Condor Junior Roadracer, handbuilt for him in the workshop that had been open
for business on the same street in Holborn for more than fifty years.
He'd recently had it upgraded with an integrated brake and gear lever
system fitted to the handlebar, and he only had to flick his thumb to feel the
bike click up a gear, the lightweight titanium sprockets spinning smoothly
beneath him.
    He caught up with the car just as it turned the corner
and joined the rest of the traffic on the King's Road. He would just have
to hope that Skoda was going to stay in the city, but somehow Alex didn't
think it likely that he would travel too far. The drug dealer hadn't
chosen Brookland Comprehensive as a target simply because he'd been
there. It had to be somewhere in his general neighborhood--not too close
to home but not too far either.
    The lights changed and the white car jerked forward, heading
west. Alex pedaled slowly, keeping a few cars behind, just in case Skoda
happened to glance in his mirror. They reached the corner known as
World's End, and suddenly the road was clear and Alex had to switch gears
again and pedal hard to keep up. The car drove on, through Parson's Green
and down toward Putney. Alex twisted from one lane to another, cutting in front
of a taxi and receiving the blast of a horn as his reward. It was a warm day,
and he could feel his French and history homework dragging down his back. How
much farther were they going? And what would he do when they got there? Alex
was beginning to wonder whether this had been a good idea when the car turned
off and he realized they had arrived.
    Skoda had pulled into a rough tarmac area, a temporary
parking lot next to the River Thames, not far from Putney Bridge. Alex stayed
on the bridge, allowing the traffic to roll past, and watched as the dealer got
out of his car and began to walk. The area was being redeveloped, another block
of prestigious apartments rising up to bruise the London skyline. Right now the
building was no more than an ugly skeleton of steel girders and prefabricated
concrete slabs. It was surrounded by a swarm of men in hard