Secret Weapon by Anthony Horowitz

Author:Anthony Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781524739348
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

4

THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT Museum in South Kensington is so huge that you could spend a week there and still not see everything it contains. There are about 4.5 million objects on display in an area larger than ten football fields. As Alex followed the long underground passageway that led from the tube station to the museum entrance, he was thinking that this made a welcome break from ordinary school. There were thirty of them in the group, escorted by Mr. Kydd, who taught history, and Miss Maxwell. Alex wondered how she had managed to tag along. After all, she had barely been at the school for forty-eight hours. But at least she hadn’t told him off again.

They were here to visit an exhibition called Seven Hundred Years of War. It was basically about weapons, and there were hundreds of them on display, from medieval bows to ultra-modern semiautomatic air-burst grenade launch systems. The collection had been drawn from many different cultures. It seemed that there wasn’t a country in the world that hadn’t gone to war at some time in its history. Japan had provided samurai swords, razor-edged fans, and battle pipes. There were spears from Africa, tomahawks from America, clubs and boomerangs carved by the Aboriginal people of Australia, silk garrotes that the Thugee cult had used to strangle their victims in India. The First and Second World Wars each had a room to themselves, with models and photographs of planes, rockets, tanks, frigates, and destroyers. There were glass cases filled with hand grenades, gas masks, pistols, knives, bayonets, and flamethrowers. It really was incredible how many different ways human beings had thought up to kill each other.

The exhibition was arranged in a warren of rooms, spread out in the basement of the museum. Each room had a different theme, and Alex found himself fascinated as they moved among them. Even Tom seemed to be showing some interest, although he complained that all the weapons were locked away or fastened to the wall and that it would be much more fun to see some of them being demonstrated . . . particularly the flamethrower. They had arrived at three thirty and had a full hour and a half before the exhibition closed for the evening, after which they would return as a group to Brookland before they went home.

Alex particularly liked some of the secret weapons that were on display. These had been designed so that at first sight they didn’t look like weapons at all. There was a flashlight from Korea that fired a bullet at the touch of a switch, and an umbrella from Bulgaria that shot a poisoned pellet from the tip. It had famously been used to kill a dissident writer in the middle of London back in the seventies. Back in the nineteenth century, someone had come up with another tiny gun that could actually be worn around a finger, like a ring. It was called the Dyson LePetit Protector Ring Pistol. And

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