Alex Rider 03 - Skeleton Key by Anthony Horowitz

Author:Anthony Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780142406144
Published: 2011-04-18T05:00:00+00:00

THE CRUSHER

Alex couldn‟t move.

He was lying on his back on a hard, sticky surface. When he tried to raise his shoulders, he felt his T-shirt clinging to whatever it was underneath him. It was as if he had been glued into place.

Whatever had been injected into him had removed all power of movement from his arms and legs. The bag still covered his head, keeping him in darkness. He knew that he had been loaded into the speedboat and taken back to the coast. Some sort of van had met him and brought him here. He had heard footsteps and rough hands had grabbed him, carrying him like a sack of vegetables. He guessed that three or four men had been involved in the journey, but they had barely spoken. Once he had heard the same man who had spoken to him on the boat. He had muttered a couple of words in Spanish. But his voice was so indistinct, the words so garbled, that Alex had found it hard to understand what he was saying.

Fingers brushed against the side of his neck and suddenly the bag was removed. Alex blinked.

He was lying in a brightly lit warehouse or factory; the first thing he saw was the metal framework supporting the roof, with arc lamps hanging down. The walls were bare brick, whitewashed, the floor lined with terracotta tiles. There was machinery on both sides of him.

Most of it looked agricultural and a hundred years out of date. There were chains and buckets and a complicated pulley system that fed into a series of metal wheels that could have come out of a giant antique watch, and next to them, a pair of earthenware cauldrons. Alex twisted round and saw more cauldrons on the other side and, in the distance, some sort of filtration system with pipes leading everywhere. He realized now that he was lying on a long conveyor belt. He tried once again to get up or even roll off, but his body wouldn‟t obey him.

A man stepped into his line of vision.

Alex looked up into a pair of eyes that weren‟t actually quite a pair. They weren‟t positioned correctly in the man‟s face and one of them was bloodshot. Alex wondered if it could even see.

The man had been horribly injured at some time. He was bald on one side of his head, but not on the other. His mouth was slanting. His skin was dead. In a beauty contest, he wouldn‟t even come a close second to the great white shark.

There were a couple of dark, unsmiling workers standing behind him. They were shabbily dressed, with moustaches and bandanas. Neither of them spoke. They seemed keenly interested in what was about to happen.

“Your name?” The movements of the man‟s mouth didn‟t quite match what he was saying, so seeing him speak was a bit like watching a badly dubbed film.

“Alex Gardiner,” Alex said.

“Your real name?”

“I just told you.”

“You lied. Your real name is Alex Rider.”

“Why ask if you think you know?”

The man nodded as if Alex had asked a fair question.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.