Anthony Horowitz - Point Blank

‚Stomach-bag?'

‚Mrs. Stellenbosch. That’s my name for her.'

‚What do the other boys call her?'

‚They call her Mrs. Stellenbosch.' James sighed. ‚I’m telling you—this is a deeply weird place, Alex. I’ve been to a lot of schools because I’ve been thrown out of a lot of schools. But this one is the pits. I’ve been here for six weeks now and I’ve hardly had any lessons. They have music evenings and discussion evenings and they try to get me to read. But otherwise, I’ve been left on my own.'

‚They want you to assimilate,' Alex said, remembering what Dr. Grief had said.

‚That’s their word for it. But this place … they may call it a school, but it’s more like being in prison. You’ve seen the guards. '

‚I thought they were here to protect us.'

‚If you think that, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought. Think about it! There are about thirty of them. Thirty armed guards for seven kids? That’s not protection. That’s intimidation.' James paused by the door. He examined Alex for a second time. ‚It would be nice to think that someone has finally arrived who I can relate to,' he said,

‚Maybe you can,' Alex said.

‚Yeah. But for how long?'

James left, closing the door behind him.

Alex began to unpack. The bulletproof ski suit and infrared goggles were at the top of the first suitcase. It didn’t look as if he would be needing them. It wasn’t as if he even had any skis.

Then came the Discman. He remembered the instructions Smithers had given him. ‚If you’re in real trouble, just press Fast Forward three times .' He was almost tempted to do it now. There was something unsettling about the academy. He could feel it even now, in his room. He was like a goldfish in a bowl. Looking up, he almost expected to see a pair of huge eyes looming over him, and he knew that they would be wearing red-tinted glasses. He weighed the Discman in his hand. He couldn’t hit the panic button—yet. He had nothing to report back to MI6. There was nothing to connect the school with the deaths of the two men in New York and the Black Sea.

But if there was anything, he knew where he would find it. Why were two whole floors of the building out of bounds? It made no sense at all. Presumably the guards slept up there, but even though Dr. Grief seemed to employ a small army, that would still leave a lot of empty rooms. The third and fourth floors. If something was going on at the academy, it had to be going on up there.

A bell sounded downstairs. Alex shut his suitcase, left his room, and walked down the corridor. He saw another couple of boys walking ahead of him, talking quietly together. Like the boys he had seen in the library, they were clean and well dressed with hair cut short and neatly groomed. Really creepy, James had said. Even on first sight, Alex had to agree.

He reached the main staircase. The two boys had gone down. Alex glanced in their direction, then went up. The staircase turned a corner and stopped. Ahead of him was a sheet of metal that rose up from the floor to the ceiling and all the way across, blocking off the view. The wall had been added recently, like the helipad. Someone had carefully and deliberately cut the building in two.

There was a door set in the metal wall and beside it a keypad with nine buttons demanding a code. Alex reached for the door handle, his hand closing around it. He didn’t expect the door to open—nor did he expect what happened next. The moment his fingers came into contact with the handle, an alarm went off, a shrieking siren that echoed throughout the building. A few seconds later, he heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to find two guards facing him, their guns half raised.

Neither of them spoke. One of them ran past him and punched a code into the keypad. The alarm stopped. And then Mrs. Stellenbosch was there, hurrying forward on her short, muscular legs.

‚Alex!' she exclaimed. Her eyes were filled with suspicion. ‚What are you doing here? The director told you that the upper floors are forbidden.'

‚Yeah … well, I forgot.' Alex looked straight at her. ‚I heard the bell go and I was on my way to the dining room.'

‚The dining room is downstairs.'

‚Right.'

Alex walked past the two guards, who stepped aside to let him pass. He felt Mrs. Stellenbosch watching him while he went. Metal doors, alarms, and guards with machine guns. What were they trying to hide? And then he remembered something else. The Gemini Project. Those were the words he had heard when he was listening at Dr. Grief’s door. Gemini.

The twins. One of the twelve star signs. But what did it mean? Turning the question over his mind, Alex went down to meet the rest of the students.

THINGS THAT GO CLICK IN THE NIGHT

AT THE END OF HIS FIRST week at Point Blanc, Alex drew up a list of the six boys with whom he shared the school. It was midafternoon, and he was alone in his room. A notepad was open in front of him. It had taken him about half an hour to put together the names and the few details that he had. He only wished he had more.

HUGO VRIES (14) Dutch. Lives in Amsterdam. Brown hair, green eyes. Father’s name, Rudi. Owns diamond mines. Speaks little English. Reads and plays guitar. Very solitary. Sent to PB for major shoplifting and arson.

TOM MCMORIN (14) Canadian. From Vancouver. Parents divorced. Mother runs media empire (newspapers, TV). Reddish hair, blue eyes. Well built, chess player. Car thefts and drunken driving … sent to PB.

NICOLAS MARC (14) French … from Bordeaux? Expelled from private school in Paris, cause unknown. Drugs? Brown hair, brown eyes, very fit all around. Tattoo of devil on left shoulder. Good at sports. Father = Anthony Marc. Airlines, pop music, hotels. Never mentions his mother.

CASSIAN JAMES (14) American. Fair hair, brown eyes. Mother = Jill … studio chief in Hollywood. Parents divorced. Writes poetry, plays jazz piano. Expelled from six schools.

Various drugs offenses. Sent to PB after smuggling arrest. Tells jokes. Seems popular.

JOE CANTERBURY (14) American. Spends much of his time with Cassian. Brown hair, blue eyes. Mother (name unknown) New York senator. Father something major at the Pentagon.

Vandalism, truancy, shoplifting. Claims to have own motorbike and three girlfriends (!) in Los Angeles.

JAMES SPRINTZ (14) German. Father = Dieter Sprintz, banker, well-known financier (the hundred-million-dollar man). Mother living in England. Brown hair, dark blue eyes, pale. Lives in Dusseldorf. Expelled for wounding a teacher with an air pistol. Closest I’ve got to a friend at PB—the only one who really hates it here.

Lying on his bed, Alex studied the list. What did it tell him? Not a great deal.

First, all the boys were the same age: fourteen, the same age as him. At least three of them, and possibly four, had parents who were either divorced or separated. They all came from hugely wealthy backgrounds. Blunt had already told him that was the case, but Alex was surprised by just how diverse the parents were. Airlines, diamonds, politics, and movies.

France, Holland, Canada, and America. Each one of them was at the top of his or her field, and those fields covered just about every human activity. He himself was supposed to be the son of a supermarket king. Food. That was another world industry he could check off.

At least two of the boys had been arrested for shoplifting. Two had been involved with drugs. But Alex knew that the list somehow hid more than it revealed. With the exception of James, it was hard to pin down what made the boys at Point Blanc different. In a strange way, they all looked the same.

Their eyes and hair were different colors. They wore different clothes. All the faces were different: Tom handsome and confident, Joe quiet and watchful. And of course they spoke not only with different voices but also in several languages. James had talked about brains being sucked out with straws, and he had a point. It was as if the same consciousness had somehow invaded them all. They had become puppets, dancing on the same string.