Chapter Text
Alex liked life with the Pleasures well enough. It was quieter, for one thing. With MI6 finally out of his day-to-day life, he could almost pretend he was a normal teenager. He went to school, did his homework, picked up old hobbies—MMA at a local gym, rock climbing with the school team, and surfing with Sabina on weekends when she wasn’t off on an adventure with her friends.
He was walking back from an early morning surf session, board tucked under one arm and hair still dripping, when he saw something that didn’t fit.
A man emerged from one of the maintenance shelters at the edge of the golf course that bordered the beachdunes, carrying a heavy metal case. He moved furtively, glancing around before lugging the box into a waiting golf cart.
Alex knew he should ignore it. Half the trouble in his life had started because he couldn’t. But Sabina was gone for the weekend, and the Pleasures were out until dinner. The alternative was going home to finish calculus homework or slog through a few borrowed language textbooks.
Homework was less appealing than whatever was happening on the edge of the course.
He hid his board in the bushes and crept after the man. Maybe it was just a drug drop. But the box—sealed, metallic, burnished—looked disturbingly familiar. Alex couldn’t shake the memory of the containers Sayle used to ship his modified virus in Cornwall.
The golf cart buzzed to life. Alex trailed it across the dew-damp fairway, keeping to the tree line. The driver wasn’t speeding—he was being careful, almost reverent, as though worried the cargo might explode if jostled too hard but Alex still needed to move at a fast clip to keep up.
By the time they reached the far edge of the course, Alex was out of breath. The man ditched the cart and continued on foot toward the nearby San Francisco State University campus.
Alex followed at a safe distance. At sixteen, he blended in easily with the few Uni students awake early on a weekend, rushing between labs or the library on last minute projects. The man’s destination seemed to be the Science Building.
Maybe he’s a professor, Alex thought. Maybe this is nothing.
But the man’s stiff posture, his habit of glancing over his shoulder every few steps, told a different story. Alex’s therapist called it “hypervigilance.” MI6 had called it “good instincts.”
When the man slipped through a side entrance and descended a stairwell marked Basement Closed for Decontamination – Chemical Leak, Alex sighed, pulled out his phone, and made a call.
Joe Byrne had given Alex his personal cell number the day he’d arrived in the U.S. It was both a gesture of goodwill and a safety precaution.Everyone in the intelligence world knew that Alex Rider was essentially a heat seeking missile when it came to conspiracies, he hunted them down and then destroyed the cartel, or terrorist operation, or whatever it was that he had found with a great deal of fire and explosions.
Byrne had learned that it was better to know what Alex was doing before the explosions.
So far, it had worked. Mostly.
Alex would stumble across a criminal operation and would drop the intel off with Joe by texting or calling, and on one memorable operation by turning up on his front porch bleeding with half a dozen rescued children trailing after him like ducklings. It was, in all honesty, a bit like having a pet cat leave dead mice at his door, except the mice were packets of information that even Joe’s best analysts and agents hadn’t managed to dig up, but Joe Byrne had come to accept that Alex Rider was just like that.
Joe actually has the whole weekend off for once, he had pulled enough strings and called in a few favors to make sure he could spend a quiet weekend at home with his wife, helping clean up the kitchen and attempting to fix the leaky part of the shed roof.
It was only natural that, given the effort he had put into getting the weekend off, a Rider situation would arise. Still, he held out hope that all Alex was bringing him intel on was a nice, simple drug ring that he could pass off to the FBI without further involving himself.
The fact that Alex had called instead of texting was his first hint that this would not be the case. Alex only called if a situation was urgent, like most teenagers he preferred to communicate through text whenever possible.
With his hopes for a nice calm weekend withering faster than his brief attempt at a garden Joe stepped outside to take the call.
“University of San Francisco,” Alex said immediately. “Science Building basement. I tailed a man from the golf course—mid-forties, brown hair, tall, about two meters. Picked up a metal case from shelter 7. Looks sealed for biohazards.”
There was a faint clatter on the line, like Alex shifting position.
“One moment. Sending a photo.”
“Wait, Alex—don’t hang up—”
“Joe, you can take and text a photo while on a call. It’s not the 1900’s.”
Joe sighed. “Right. Forgot who I was talking to.”
The image arrived seconds later. The box looked exactly like something Byrne’s analysts would flag in three separate threat databases. The man’s face was also familiar—one of the many files that had crossed Joe’s desk, tagged classified and foreign cooperation.
“Alex,” Joe said slowly, “do not engage. I’m sending people now.”
“Bit late,” Alex replied. “He’s opening the box—ten-digit code—oh, ew. There’s something inside. It's some kind of worm thing, looks like something that you'd only find in Australia or the island with the weird trees - I'll try to get another picture”
Joe straightened. “A what?”
Before Alex could answer, there was a series of dull thuds, a sharp intake of breath, and the line went dead.
Joe Byrne was already running for the car. “Get me a direct line to SGC,” he barked into his phone as he ran for his car. “Rider turned up something beyond our scope”