Secret Weapon (Alex Rider) by Horowitz Anthony

Author:Horowitz, Anthony [Horowitz, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2019-04-03T18:30:00+00:00

SECRET WEAPON

SKODA

T he man with the two missing teeth had thought a great deal about killing Alex Rider. He had imagined it. He had planned it. And quite soon he was going to do it. There was just one problem. At the moment he was locked up in a maximum-security prison in South Yorkshire. He had only been there for two months. He had been sentenced to twenty years.

That would make him forty-eight when he came out. Middle-aged!

His name was Brian Smith although it had been a long time since anyone had called him that. Right now he was prisoner A8793WS. His skin had already gone pale from the amount of time he had spent inside: twenty hours a day, locked up in a cell with two bunks and a toilet, which left just four hours divided between the prison workshop, the education centre and the exercise yard. The prison food hadn’t helped either. He had been thin and unhealthy-looking when he went in but now his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. Not that she would have anyway. She had walked out when he was three years old.

Brian had been fostered and brought up on an estate in Dagenham, East London. His new parents had done their best for him but it was as if there was something in his blood. At school he had been difficult and disruptive. Though small for his age – smoking hadn’t helped – he knew how to use his fists and the other children were careful to keep their distance. By the time he was ten he had become the head of a gang of bullies and misfits who enjoyed hurting anyone unlucky enough to get in their way. He had stopped even pretending to do any work. Why did he need school? He had been excluded from two of them and knew that there were plenty of ways to earn a living that didn’t involve maths or science or reading or any of the dreary things that were thrown at him in class.

He was eleven years old when he first became involved in drugs. There was a gang – a real gang – in the neighbourhood where he lived and Brian was thrilled when he was asked to join them. A small, sickly boy was exactly what they needed. This was how it worked. The customer would draw up in their car and hand over the money to the dealer. They would signal to Brian, who was waiting at a corner, usually smoking. The dealer would walk away and only then would Brian come forward with the product. That way, the dealer was protected if there was a police ambush and because Brian was underage, there was a limit to the amount of time he could spend in jail.

Brian sold drugs. He took drugs. As far as he was concerned, it would have been stupid not to. When he reached his teens, his two front teeth had rotted away, his eyes had gone a strange shade of yellow and he had lost most of his hair.

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