As MI6 controls the trust, if Alex does not co-operate, Jack (whose visa expired seven years earlier) will be deported back to America after prosecution, his house will be sold and he will leave his school and friends for an academy until he is of age. Intending to use him to covertly investigate Sayle, MI6 recruits Alex by essentially blackmailing him: they reveal that, as Ian's sole heir and next of kin, he left his house and money to Alex, in trust until he turns twenty-one. In his last communication with them, Ian had warned MI6 that the Stormbreakers could not be allowed to leave Sayle's manufacturing plant, but before he could explain, he was assassinated by Yassen Gregorovich, a professional killer apparently under Sayle's employ, on the return to London. Sayle plans to give a free Stormbreaker to every secondary school in the United Kingdom, accompanied by a grand activation ceremony in the Science Museum, supposedly as a gesture of thanks for the country taking him in when he was a child. They reveal the truth about his uncle's career, and explain that they had sent Ian to investigate Herod Sayle, a wealthy Lebanese businessman who has developed a revolutionary new computer, the Stormbreaker. Waking up somewhere out in the country, Alex meets MI6 head Alan Blunt and his deputy, Lale "Tulip" Jones. He breaks into Ian's office, discovering evidence of his uncle's double life before he is knocked out. After a near escape from a car crusher (and a fight with the dismantlers), Alex is asked to visit Ian's former employers, a bank called "Royal & General".
He finds his uncle's car at a wrecking yard, and discovers that his uncle had been murdered, shot repeatedly. Alex becomes suspicious upon being told that the outwardly safety-conscious Ian had been not wearing his seat belt, and discovering that Ian's office in the house attic has been emptied out whilst he and Jack were attending Ian's funeral. Unbeknownst to Alex and his housekeeper, Jack Starbright, Ian's position as a "banker" was actually a cover for his role as an MI6 agent. The novel opens as fourteen-year-old Alex Rider learns that his uncle and legal guardian, Ian Rider, has been killed in a car crash. Should he fail, every child in England will be murdered in cold blood. The government has given him the technology, but only he can provide the courage. Finding himself in the middle of terrorists, Alex must outsmart the people who want him dead. But he is about to, and once he does, there is no turning back. What he doesn't know yet is that his uncle was killed while on a top-secret mission. But when fourteen-year-old Alex finds his uncle's windshield riddled with bullet holes, he knows it was no accident.
He wasn't wearing his seatbelt, they claimed. They told him his uncle died in an accident.
0 kommentar(er)
