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  Alex stopped reading. “We have to go,” he said.

  “Do you want your eggs scrambled or boiled?”

  “Jack…”

  “Alex. It’s a ticket-only event. What will we do?”

  “I’ll work something out.”

  Jack scowled. “Are you really sure about this?”

  “I know, Jack. It’s Damian Cray. Everyone loves him. But here’s something they may not have noticed.” He folded the paper and slid it back to her. “The terrorist group that claimed responsibility for the bomb in France was called Camargue Sans Touristes.”

  “I know.”

  “And this new computer game has been developed by Cray Software Technology.”

  “What about it, Alex?”

  “Maybe it’s just another coincidence. But CST… It’s the same letters.”

  Jack nodded. “All right,” she said. “So how do we get in?”

  They took a bus up to Knightsbridge and crossed over into Hyde Park. Before he had even passed through the gates and into the park itself, Alex could see just how much had been invested in the launch. There were hundreds of people streaming along the pavements, getting out of taxies and limousines, milling around in a crowd that seemed to cover every centimetre of grass. Policemen on foot and on horseback stood at every corner, giving directions and trying to form people into orderly lines. Alex was amazed that the horses could remain so calm surrounded by so much chaos.

  And then there was the Pleasure Dome itself. It was as if a fantastic spaceship had landed in the middle of the lake at the centre of Hyde Park. It seemed to float on the surface of the water, a black pod, surrounded by a gleaming aluminium frame, silver rods criss-crossing in a dazzling pattern. Blue and red spotlights swivelled and rocked, the beams flashing even in the daylight. A single metal bridge stretched across from the bank to the entrance but there were more than a dozen security men barring the way. Nobody was allowed to cross the water without showing their ticket. There was no other way in.

  Music blared out of hidden speakers: Cray singing from his last album, White Lines. Alex walked down to the edge of the water. He could hear shouting and, even in the hazy afternoon sun, he was almost blinded by a hundred flashbulbs all exploding at the same time. The mayor of London had just arrived and was waving at the press pack, at least a hundred strong, herded together into a pen next to the bridge. Alex looked around and realized that he knew quite a few of the faces converging on the Pleasure Dome. There were actors, television presenters, models, DJs, politicians … all waving their invitations and queuing up to be let in. This was more than the first appearance of a new game system. It was the most exclusive party London had ever seen.

  And somehow he had to get in.

  He ignored a policeman who was trying to move him out of the way and continued towards the bridge, walking confidently, as if he had been invited. Jack was a few steps away from him and he nodded at her.

  It had been Ian Rider, of course, who had taught him the basics of pickpocketing. At the time it had just been a game, shortly after Alex’s tenth birthday, when the two of them were together in Prague. They were talking about Oliver Twist and his uncle was explaining the techniques of the Artful Dodger, even providing his nephew with a quick demonstration. It was only much later that Alex had discovered that all this had been yet another aspect of his training; that all along his uncle had secretly been turning him into something he had never wanted to be.

  But it would be useful now.

  Alex was close to the bridge. He could see the invitations being checked by the burly men in their security uniforms: silver cards with the Gameslayer logo stamped in black. There was a natural crush here as the crowd arrived at the bottleneck and sorted itself into a single line to cross the bridge. He glanced one last time at Jack. She was ready.

  Alex stopped.

  “Somebody’s stolen my ticket!” he shouted.

  Even with the music pounding out, his voice was loud enough to carry to the crowd in the immediate area. It was a classic pickpocket’s trick. Nobody cared about him, but suddenly they were worried about their own tickets. Alex saw one man pull open his jacket and glance into his inside pocket. Next to him a woman briefly opened and closed her handbag. Several people took their tickets out and clutched them tightly in their hands. A plump, bearded man reached round and tapped his back jeans pocket. Alex smiled. Now he knew where the tickets were.

  He signalled to Jack. The plump man with the beard was going to be the mark – the one he had chosen. He was perfectly placed, just a few steps in front of Alex. And the corner of his ticket was actually visible, just poking out of the back pocket. Jack was going to play the part of the stall; Alex was in position to make the dip. Everything was set.

  Jack walked ahead and seemed to recognize the man with the beard. “Harry!” she exclaimed, and threw her arms around him.

  “I’m not…” the man began.

  At that exact moment, Alex took two steps forward, swerved round a woman he vaguely recognized from a television drama series and slipped the ticket out of the man’s pocket and placed it quickly under his own jacket, holding it in place with the side of his arm. It had taken less than three seconds and Alex hadn’t even been particularly careful. This was the simple truth about pickpocketing. It demanded organization as much as skill. The mark was distracted. All his attention was on Jack, who was still embracing him. Pinch someone on the arm and they won’t notice if, at the same time, you’re touching their leg. That was what Ian Rider had taught Alex all those years ago.

  “Don’t you remember me?” Jack was exclaiming. “We met at the Savoy!”

  “No. I’m sorry. You’ve got the wrong person.”

  Alex was already brushing past, on his way to the bridge. In a few moments the mark would reach for his ticket and find it missing, but even if he grabbed hold of Jack and accused her, there would be no evidence. Alex and the ticket would have disappeared.

  He showed the ticket to a security man and stepped onto the bridge. Part of him felt bad about what he had done and he hoped the man with the beard would still be able to talk his way in. Quietly he cursed Damian Cray for turning him into a thief. But he knew that, from the moment Cray had answered his call in the South of France, there could be no going back.

  He crossed the bridge and gave the ticket up on the other side. Ahead of him was a triangular entrance. Alex stepped forward and went into the dome: a huge area fitted out with high-tech lighting and a raised stage with a giant plasma screen displaying the letters CST. There were already about five hundred guests spread out in front of it, drinking champagne and eating canapés. Waiters were circulating with bottles and trays. A sense of excitement buzzed all around.

  The music stopped. The lighting changed and the screen went blank. Then there was a low hum and clouds of dry ice began to pour onto the stage. A single word – GAMESLAYER – appeared on the screen; the hum grew louder. The Game-slayer letters broke up as an animated figure appeared, a ninja warrior, dressed in black from head to toe, clinging to the screen like a cut-down version of Spiderman. The hum was deafening now, a roaring desert wind with an orchestra somewhere behind. Hidden fans must have been turned on because real wind suddenly blasted through the dome, clearing away the smoke and revealing Damian Cray – in a white suit with a wide, pink and silver striped tie – standing alone on the stage, with his image, hugely magnified, on the screen behind.

  The audience surged towards him, applauding. Cray raised a hand for silence.

  “Welcome, welcome!” he said.

  Alex found himself drawn towards the stage like everyone else. He wanted to get as close to Cray as he could. Already he was feeling that strange sensation of actually being in the same room as a man he had known all his life … but a man he had never met. Damian Cray was smaller in real life than he seemed in his photographs. That was Alex’s first thought. Nevertheless, Cray had been an A-list celebrity for thirty years. His presence was huge and he radiated
confidence and control.

  “Today is the day that I launch the Game-slayer, my new games console,” Cray went on. He had a faint trace of an American accent. “I’d like to thank you all for coming. But if there’s anyone here from Sony or Nintendo, I’m afraid I have bad news for you.” He paused and smiled. “You’re history.”

  There was laughter and applause from the audience. Even Alex found himself smiling. Cray had a way of including people, as if he personally knew everyone in the crowd.

  “Gameslayer offers graphic quality and detail like no other system on the planet,” Cray went on. “It can generate worlds, characters and totally complex physical simulations in real time thanks to the floating-point processing power of the system, which is, in a word, massive. Other systems give you plastic dolls fighting cardboard cut-outs. With Gameslayer, hair, eyes, skin tones, water, wood, metal and smoke all look like the real thing. We obey the rules of gravity and friction. More than that, we’ve built something into the system that we call pain synthesis. What does this mean? In a minute you’ll find out.”

  He paused and the audience clapped again.

  “Before I move on to the demonstration, I wonder if any of the journalists among you have any questions?”

  A man near the front raised his hand. “How many games are you releasing this year?”

  “Right now we only have the one game,” Cray replied. “But there will be twelve more in the shops by Christmas.”

  “What is the first game called?” someone asked.

  “Feathered Serpent.”

  “Is it a shoot-’em-up?” a woman asked.

  “Well, yes. It is a stealth game,” Cray admitted.

  “So it involves shooting?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman smiled, but not humorously. She was in her forties, with grey hair and a severe, schoolteacher face. “It’s well known that you have a dislike of violence,” she said. “So how can you justify selling children violent games?”

  A ripple of unease ran through the audience. The woman might be a journalist, but somehow it seemed wrong to question Cray in this manner. Not when you were drinking his champagne and eating his food.

  Cray, however, didn’t seem offended. “That’s a good question,” he replied in his soft, lilting voice. “And I’ll tell you, when we began with the Gameslayer, we did develop a game where the hero had to collect different-coloured flowers from a garden and then arrange them in vases. It had bunnies and egg sandwiches too. But do you know what? Our research team discovered that modern teenagers didn’t want to play it. Can you imagine? They told me we wouldn’t sell a single copy!”

  Everyone broke into laughter. Now it was the female journalist who was looking uncomfortable.

  Cray held up a hand again. “Actually, you’ve made a fair point,” he went on. “It’s true – I hate violence. Real violence … war. But, you know, modern kids do have a lot of aggression in them. That’s the truth of it. I suppose it’s human nature. And I’ve come to think that it’s better for them to get rid of that aggression playing harmless computer games, like mine, than out on the street.”

  “Your games still encourage violence!” the woman insisted.

  Damian Cray frowned. “I think I’ve answered your question. So maybe you should stop questioning my answer,” he said.

  This was greeted by more applause, and Cray waited until it had died down. “But now, enough talk,” he said. “I want you to see Gameslayer for yourself, and the best way to see it is to play it. I wonder if we have any teenagers in the audience, although now I come to think of it, I don’t remember inviting any…”

  “There’s one here!” someone shouted, and Alex felt himself pushed forward. Suddenly everyone was looking at him and Cray himself was peering down from the stage.

  “No…” Alex started to protest.

  But the audience was already clapping, urging him on. A corridor opened up in front of him. Alex stumbled forward and before he knew it he was climbing up onto the stage. The room seemed to tilt. A spotlight spun round, dazzling him. And there it was.

  He was standing on the stage with Damian Cray.

  FEATHERED SERPENT

  It was the last thing Alex could have expected.

  He was face to face with the man who – if he was right – had ordered the death of Sabina’s father. But was he right? For the first time, he was able to examine Cray at close quarters. It was a strangely unsettling experience.

  Cray had one of the most famous faces in the world. Alex had seen it on CD covers, on posters, in newspapers and magazines, on television … even on the back of cereal packets. And yet the face in front of him now was somehow disappointing. It was less real than all the images he had seen.

  Cray was surprisingly young-looking, considering he was already in his fifties, but there was a taut, shiny quality to his skin that whispered of plastic surgery. And surely the neat, jet-black hair had to be dyed. Even the bright green eyes seemed somehow lifeless. Cray was a very small man. Alex found himself thinking of a doll in a toyshop. That was what Cray reminded him of. His superstardom and his millions of pounds had turned him into a plastic replica of himself.

  And yet…

  Cray had welcomed him onto the stage and was beaming at him as if he were an old friend. He was a singer. And, as he had made clear, he opposed violence. He wanted to save the world, not destroy it. MI6 had gathered files on him and found nothing. Alex was here because of a voice, a few words spoken at the end of a phone. He was beginning to wish he had never come.

  It seemed that the two of them had been standing there for ages, up on the stage with hundreds of people waiting to see the demonstration. In fact, only a few seconds had passed. Then Cray held out a hand. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Alex Rider.”

  “Well, it’s great to meet you, Alex Rider. I’m Damian Cray.”

  They shook hands. Alex couldn’t help thinking that there were millions of people all around the world who would give anything to be where he was now.

  “How old are you, Alex?” Cray asked.

  “Fourteen.”

  “I’m very grateful to you for coming. Thanks for agreeing to help.”

  The words were being amplified around the dome. Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw that his own image had joined Cray’s on the giant screen. “We’re very lucky that we do indeed have a teenager,” Cray went on, addressing the audience. “So let’s see how … Alex … gets on with the first level of Gameslayer One: Feathered Serpent.”

  As Cray spoke, three technicians came onto the stage, bringing with them a television monitor, a games console, a table and a chair. Alex realized that he was going to be asked to play the game in front of the audience – with his progress beamed up onto the plasma screen.

  “Feathered Serpent is based on the Aztec civilization,” Cray explained to the audience. “The Aztecs arrived in Mexico in 1195, but some claim that they had in fact come from another planet. It is on that planet that Alex is about to find himself. His mission is to find the four missing suns. But first he must enter the temple of Tlaloc, fight his way through five chambers and then throw himself into the pool of sacred flame. This will take him to the next level.”

  A fourth technician had come onto the stage, carrying a webcam. He stopped in front of Alex and quickly scanned him, pressed a button on the side of the camera and left. Cray waited until he had gone.

  “You may have been wondering about the little black-suited figure that you saw on the screen,” he said, once again taking the audience into his confidence. “His name is Omni, and he will be the hero of all the Gameslayer games. You may think him a little dull and unimaginative. But Omni is every boy and every girl in Britain. He is every child in the world … and now I will show you why!”

  The screen went blank, then burst into a digital whirl of colour. There was a deafening fanfare – not trumpets but some electronic equivalent – and the gates of a temple with a huge Aztec fac
e cut into the wood appeared. Alex could tell at once that the graphic detail of the Gameslayer was better than anything he had ever seen, but a moment later the audience gasped with surprise and Alex perfectly understood why. A boy had walked onto the screen and was standing in front of the gates, awaiting his command. The boy was Omni. But he had changed. He was now wearing exactly the same clothes as Alex. He looked like Alex. More than that, he was Alex right down to the brown eyes and the hanging strands of fair hair.

  Applause exploded around the room. Alex could see journalists scribbling in their notebooks or talking quickly into mobile phones, hoping to be the first with this incredible scoop. The food and the champagne had been forgotten. Cray’s technology had created an avatar, an electronic double of him, making it possible for any player not just to play the game but to become part of it. Alex knew then that the Gameslayer would sell all over the world. Cray would make millions.

  And twenty per cent of that would go to charity, he reminded himself.

  Could this man really be his enemy?

  Cray waited until everyone was quiet, and then he turned to Alex. “It’s time to play,” he said.

  Alex sat down in front of the computer screen that the technicians had set up. He took hold of the controller and pressed with his left thumb. In front of him and on the giant plasma screen, his other self walked to the right. He stopped and turned himself the other way. The controller was incredibly sensitive. Alex almost felt like an Aztec god, in total control of his mortal self.

  “Don’t worry if you get killed on your first go,” Cray said. “The console is faster than anything on the market and it may take you a while to get used to it. But we’re all on your side, Alex. So – let’s play Feathered Serpent! Let’s see how far you can go!”

  The temple gates opened.