Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz

to the empty room. If he was going to find anything, it would have to be soon.
    He started along the glass passage that joined Block C to Block D and here at last there was something different. The corridor was split in half with a metal stair case leading down into what must be some sort of basement. And although every building and every door he had seen so far had been labeled, this staircase was blank. The light stopped about halfway down. It was almost as if the stairs were trying not to get themselves noticed.
    The clang of feet on metal. Alex backtracked to the first door he could find. Fortunately, it opened into a storage closet. He hid inside, watching through the rack as Mr. Grin appeared, rising out of the ground like a vampire on a bad day. As the sun hit his dead white face, his scars twitched and he blinked several times before walking off into Block D.
    What had he been doing? Where did the stairs go?
    Alex slipped off his shoes and, carrying them in his hand, hurried down. His feet made no sound on the metal steps. It was like stepping into a morgue. The air-conditioning was so strong that he could feel it on his forehead and on the palms of his hands, fast-freezing his sweat.
    He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put his shoes back on. He was in another long passageway, stretching back under the complex, the way he had come. It led to a single metal door. But there was something very strange. The walls of the passage were unfinished dark brown rock with streaks of what looked zinc or some other metal. The floor was also rough and the way was lit by old-fashioned bulbs, hanging on wires. It all reminded him of something … something had very recently seen. But he couldn’t remember what.
    Somehow Alex knew that the door at the end of the passage would be locked. It looked as if it had been locked forever. Like the stairs it was unlabeled. And it seemed somehow too small to be important. But Mr. Grin had just come up the stairs. There was only one place he could have come from and that was the other side. The door had to go somewhere!
    He reached it and tried the handle. It wouldn’t move. He pressed his ear against the metal and listened.
    Nothing, unless … was he imagining it? … a sort of throbbing. A pump or something like it. Alex would have given anything to see through the metal. And suddenly he realized that he could—the Game Boy was in his pocket. So were the four cartridges. He took out the one called Exocet. X for X ray, he reminded himself. Now … how did it work? He flicked it on and held it flat against the door, the screen facing him.
    To his amazement, the screen flickered into life; a tiny, almost opaque window through the metal door.
    Alex was looking into a large room. There was something tall and barrel shaped in the middle of it. And there were people. Ghostlike, mere smudges on the computer screen, they were moving back and forth.
    Some of them were carrying objects—flat and rectangular. Trays of some sort? There seemed to be a desk to one side, piled with apparatus that he couldn’t make out. Alex pressed the brightness control, trying to zoom in. But the room was too big. Everything was too far away.
    But Smithers had also built an audio function into the machine. Alex fumbled in his pocket and took out the set of earphones. Still holding the Game Boy against the door, he pressed the wire into the socket and slipped the earphones over his head. If he couldn’t see, at least he might be able to hear, and sure enough the voices came through, faint and disconnected—but audible through the powerful speaker system built into the machine.
    “…place. We have twenty-four hours.”
    “It’s not enough.”
    “It’s all we have. They come in tonight. At o’two hundred.”
    Alex didn’t recognize any of the voices. Amplified by the tiny machine, they sounded like a telephone call from abroad on a very bad line.
    “…Grin … overseeing the delivery.”
    “It’s still