Point Blanc Read Online Free PDF Page B

more senior officer appeared. Words were exchanged. Alex
was led down a corridor and put into a cell.
    Half an hour later, a female police officer appeared
with a tray of food. "Supper," she said.
    "What's happening?" Alex asked. The
woman smiled nervously, but said nothing. "I left my bike by the
bridge," Alex said.
    "It's all right. We've got
it." She couldn't leave the room fast enough.
    Alex ate the food: sausages, toast, a slice of cake. There
was a bunk in the room and, behind a screen, a sink and a toilet. He wondered
whether anyone was going to come in and talk to him, but nobody did. Eventually
he fell asleep.
    The next thing he knew, it was seven o'clock in
the morning. The door was open and a man he knew all too well was standing in
the cell, looking down at him.
    "Good morning, Alex," he said.
    "Mr. Crawley."
    John Crawley looked like a junior bank manager, and
when Alex had first met him, he had indeed been pretending that he worked for a
bank. The cheap suit and striped tie could both have come from the Macy's
"Boring Businessman" section. In fact, Crawley worked for MI6. Alex
wondered if the clothes were a cover or a personal choice.
    "You
can come with me now," Crawley said. "We're leaving."
    "Are
you taking me home?" Alex asked. He wondered if anyone had been told
where he was.
    "No.
Not yet."
    Alex followed
Crawley out of the building. This time there were no police officers in sight.
A car with a driver stood waiting outside. Crawley got into the back with Alex.
    "Where
are we going?" Alex asked.
    "You'll
see." Crawley opened a copy of the
Daily
Tele
graph and began to read. He didn't speak again.
    They drove
east through the City and toward Liverpool Street. Alex knew at once where he
was being taken, and sure enough, the car turned into the entrance of a
seventeen-story building near the station and disappeared down a ramp into an
underground parking lot. Alex had been here before. The building pretended to
be the headquarters of the Royal & General Bank. In fact, this was where
the Special Operations division of MI6 was based.
    The car
stopped. Crawley folded away his paper and got out, ushering Alex ahead of him.
There was an elevator in the basement, and the two of them took it to the
sixteenth floor.
    "This
way." Crawley gestured at a door marked 1605. The Gunpowder Plot, Alex
thought. It was an absurd thing to flash into his mind, a fragment of the
history homework he should have been doing the night before. Guy Fawkes had
tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the year 1605. Oh well, it looked
as if the homework was going to have to wait.
    Alex opened
the door and went in. Crawley didn't follow. When Alex looked around, the
man was already walking away.
    "Shut
the door, Alex, and come in."
    Once again,
Alex found himself standing opposite the prim, unsmiling man who ran MI6. Gray
suit, gray face, gray life ... Alan Blunt seemed to belong to an entirely
colorless world. He was sitting behind a wooden desk in a large square office
that could have belonged to any business anywhere in the world. There was
nothing personal in the room, not even a picture on the wall or a photograph on
the desk. Even the pigeons pecking on the windowsill outside were gray.
    He was not
alone. Mrs. Jones, the head of Special Operations, was with him, sitting
on a leather chair, wearing a mud-brown jacket and dress, and as always,
sucking a peppermint. She looked up at Alex with black, beadlike eyes. She
seemed to be more pleased to see him than her boss was. She was the one who had
spoken. Blunt had barely registered the fact that Alex had come into the room.
    Then Blunt
looked up. "I hadn't expected to see you again so soon," he
said.
    "That's
just what I was going to say," Alex replied. There was a single empty
chair in the office. He sat down.
    Blunt slid a
sheet of paper across his desk and examined it briefly. "What on earth
were you thinking?" he demanded. "This business with the crane.
You've done an enormous