Russian Roulette (Alex Rider)

THE KILL
King’s Cross, London. Three o’clock in the morning.
The station was closed and silent. The streets were almost empty. A few shops were still
open – a kebab restaurant and a minicab office, their plastic signs garishly bright. But there
were no customers.
Inside his hotel room, Yassen Gregorovich took out the memory stick and turned off the
computer. He had read enough. He was still sitting at the desk. The tray with the dirty
dishes from his supper was on the carpet beside him. He looked at the blank screen, then
yawned. He needed to sleep. He stripped off his clothes and left them, folded, on a chair.
Then he showered, dried himself and went to bed. He was asleep almost immediately. He
did not dream. Since that final night in the Silver Forest, he never dreamed.
He woke again at exactly seven o’clock. It was a Saturday and the street was quieter than
it had been the day before. The sun was shining but he could see from the flag on the
building opposite that there was a certain amount of wind. He quickly scanned the
pavements looking for anything out of place, anyone who shouldn’t be there. Everything
seemed normal. He showered again, then shaved and got dressed. The computer was where
he had left it on the table and he powered it up so that he could check for any new
messages. He knew that the order he had received the day before would still be active.
Scorpia were not in the habit of changing their minds. The screen told him that he had
received a single email and he opened it. As usual, it had been encrypted and sent to an
account that could not be traced to him. He read it, considering its contents. He planned the
day ahead.
He went downstairs and had breakfast – tea, yoghurt, fresh fruit. There was a gym at the
hotel but it was too small and ill-equipped to be worth using, and anyway, he wouldn’t
have felt safe in the confined space, down in the basement. It was almost as bad as the lift.
After breakfast, he returned to his room, checking the door handle one last time, packed the
few items he had brought with him and left.
“Goodbye, Mr Reddy. I hope you enjoyed your stay.”
“Thank you.”
The girl at the checkout desk was Romanian, quite attractive. Yassen had no girlfriend, of
course. Any such relationship was out of the question but for a brief moment he felt a
twinge of regret. He thought of Colette, the girl who had died in Argentina. At once, he was
annoyed with himself. He shouldn’t have spent so much time reading the diary.
He paid the bill using a credit card connected to the same gymnasium where he
supposedly worked. He took the receipt but later on he would burn it. A receipt was the
beginning of a paper trail. It was the last thing he needed.
As he left the hotel, he noticed a man reading a newspaper. The headlines screamed out at
him:

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