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John had spent thirty-seven years working for his country. Twenty years of those were with MI6. Yet, somehow, nothing had prepared him for Alex’s living room.
It had been intended as a social call, more than anything. Yes, John was dropping off a few things from the office to an Alex Rider recovering from a gunshot wound to the hip. But, really, he was dropping off a bag of groceries and checking in on an agent that had climbed meteorically to his current position at the top of the list.
He had expected Alex to wave him off, keen to get rid of the man he had never quite forgiven for drugging him before his first mission. That was what had happened every other time, and that was pretty much the only reason that John was comfortable offering to come in.
People like John didn't do house calls, not even for senior agents like Alex. Everyone knew that.
Alex would always say no. Alex wouldn't say yes.
Alex had waved him in, ushered him to the living room, and vanished to make tea, limping down the corridor with remarkable aplomb despite the cane in his right hand.
A minute later, John had looked up from where he was perched uncomfortably on the sofa and been greeted with a wall of knives.
Alex had never quite got over the fact that he hadn’t been allowed a gun until he was eighteen. Even now, with him pushing thirty, he still brought it up on occasion. His ability to improvise, as he would tell the junior agents, had been one of the key factors in his early success. And his need to improvise, as he also told them, was solely the responsibility of their senior management.
And of the Prime Minister of the time, John often thought he should add, but in the man’s defence, that request had been somewhat justified. The first time Alex Rider used a gun on a mission, he nearly put a bullet through the man’s head as he sprayed down the stage at the Science Museum.
Whatever the cause, and whoever you blamed, Alex had solved the problem in the only way a precocious agent could: with extreme violence.
Alex would gleefully explain how to twist the lid off a can so that you could bury it into someone’s stomach. How you could take a pencil and ram it into someone’s ear. How a pen could puncture a windpipe. How bludgeoning someone was remarkably effective, and how to select the best branch from the forest floor to incapacitate those following you.
By the time Alex had reached seventeen, the Operations team had a bingo board on the wall, and John was pretty sure that Alex had found out about it by the time he was 18. He could see no other reason for Alex to have bludgeoned someone to death with a table. It would have been sensible to snap off one of the legs, or to use the chair, or any of the other options.
Throttling someone to death with their g-string?
Another contender for “Alex found out about the bingo board” as far as John was concerned.
And yet, he thought, Alex clearly had a thing for collecting weapons.
Knives on this wall, swords on the next one. A variety of sharp objects on the next one. There must have been thirty or forty killing implements in the room, and John recognised none of them.
Alex came back in just as John succumbed to curiosity and stepped closer to the one over the fireplace. An ornate steel dagger, in what John thought might be 1930s European style. A groove down the middle.
“I got that one in Paris,” Alex said, putting down the cups of tea, “off this charming young lady who was very keen to give it to me.”
“I was thinking it might be European,” John said. “I was trying to work out when it was from.”
“I got it about three years ago.”
John took a step to the right to examine one of the other ones. “I meant historically,” he clarified. “Like this one is clearly modern, right? It’s the KAMPO NS-2 that the Russians use.”
“No idea,” Alex said. “Never been that interested in history.”
John paused, looking around the room full of weapons. “Sorry?”
“It isn’t about where they’re from,” Alex said. “It’s about how I got them.”
“How did you get the KAMPO?”
“Ukraine, about four months ago. Pulled it out of my thigh and stabbed it into his eye. Thought I’d bring it home.”
John took a step back from it instinctively. “What?”
“And then that one next to it,” Alex said as he stepped up to pass over the cup of tea, “was from one of his buddies. They tried to get it into my gut, but I’d stolen this stabproof vest off the officer I was out there to kill, so that didn’t work out for them. I wasn’t sure if I should count it, but it is a nice knife, so–”
“What do you mean you weren’t sure if you should count it?”
“They didn’t injure me with it,” Alex said, clearly confused. “What else would I have meant?”
John looked around the living room, and then back down at his shorter colleague. “Everything in here?”
“Everything downstairs,” Alex corrected. “The ones I steal are upstairs, and the ones you give me are in the garage.”
John blinked rapidly, trying to process that.
“What?” he eventually settled on.
“You’ll probably remember this one,” Alex said, tapping what John realised was a kitchen knife. “It was one of ours that got me with this, during that bad business where I tried to go undercover with SCORPIA that time.”
“You mean when you tried to kill Director Jones?”
“No, the second time.”
“I don’t remember any of our agents trying to stab you.”
“We agreed not to put it in the mission report.”
“You agreed not to–” John sipped at his tea, desperately trying not to think about the implications of that. He relied on Alex’s mission reports to decide what to do next. “Why would you do that?”
“She didn’t want to mention that I threw her down three flights of stairs and broke both her legs.”
“That’s why she took medical leave?”
“Once I explained it all to her, she didn’t mind the injuries. And I didn’t mind mine either,” Alex said happily. “We went on a few dates after I sorted out the paperwork to get back on the books at the Bank, but it didn’t work out. Difference of opinion surrounding appropriate career ambitions.”
“You mean she didn’t want to be a spy.”
“No, she thought that my job was cool.”
“And you don’t?”
“I always wanted to be a footballer.”
“Aren’t you a bit old to–”
“Of course, now I want to be a Double-O.”
“We don’t have Double-O’s.”
“And?”
“You can’t set your career ambition to Double-O. We don’t have them.”
“That’s exactly what she said,” Alex replied, rolling his eyes. “You both have a startlingly limited idea of what my ambitions should be.”
“We’re not going to create a Double-O programme just so that–”
“And then this one,” Alex said, ignoring him completely, “I picked up in Germany. That bad business with that billionaire. It’s a bit tacky, and not very effective really, but it is made of platinum. It’s quite valuable, I think.”
“Right,” said John weakly.
“What is a pound of platinum worth on the open market anyway?” Alex mused, as he guided John out of the living room and into the corridor. “Couple hundred?”
About twenty thousand pounds, John thought to himself, though he had no intention of telling Alex that. Or of reporting the fact that, apparently, one of their top agents was a kleptomaniac who stole anything that someone stabbed into him.
Agents were a peculiar bunch, but this really was–
“And this is the gun that has kept me here this month,” Alex told him cheerfully. “Nice chap, needed to work on his hand to hand. Not that he’ll have the chance any more. I kept the bullets too. Hollow-points, I think. Nasty things, but nice to have.”
John whimpered.
The only reason hollow-points weren’t banned for use in warfare by the Geneva Convention is because they were already banned when they got around to writing the rules.
“It just seemed rude not to collect it before I headed back to the homeland, you know? Ian always used to tell me that I shouldn’t litter.”
Agents, John decided, had got weirder.
“Did you do any of the paperwork for these?” he settled on eventually. “You’ve got licenses for them, right?”
“Licenses?”
“Guns require licenses.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “For civilian use.”
“No,” John said, “that’s not how that–”
“Besides,” Alex said, opening up a cupboard to reveal a rack full of shotguns, “it isn’t like I’m buying any of these.”
“Alex, there are reasons for rules. You can’t just ignore everything that you don’t–”
“And Jamie has a collection too.”
John raised an eyebrow. “Jamie has a collection?”
“From floor seventeen?”
“Jamie from floor seventeen has a collection too.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No. He did–”
“Oh, this one is a classic,” Alex said cheerfully, pulling out a shotgun. “This is the first gun that I got shot with. Do you remember when you sent me off to the Friend estate back before Point Blanc?”
“They shot you?”
“Well, at me. I thought that counted, given the novelty.”
“Who shot you?”
“Rufus whats-his-name.”
“Rufus Del Montgomery. The Earl of Sottermoor.”
“Earl of Sottermoor? Is that what he does for a living?”
“He’s the Crown’s representative on the Intelligence Committee.”
“Huh,” said Alex. “Do you think he knows that I stole his gun?”
“You stole it?”
“It isn’t like he was going to give it to me.”
“How do you know it was his?”
“It was in his gun rack,” Alex said. “And it’s monogrammed, look?”
John drained the last bit of his tea. “I think I need to go back to the office,” he said, “before I find out about any more serious criminal offences that I should report up the chain.”
“I didn’t even show you the–”
“No.”
“But–”
“No!”
“They only explode a little bit!”
John put the tea cup down. “I’m leaving.”
“I even told them that I’d taken them after I left the base!”
“Alex, shut up.”
“But–”
John was never making a social call to a senior agent again.
God damn it, Alex.