“We have to go,” he said. “Turner and Troy are dead. The cave is a trap. Do you understand? You have to take me back to the hotel.”

Garcia still said nothing. For the first time, Alex noticed something about the cigarette in the man’s mouth. It wasn’t actually lit. Suddenly uneasy, Alex reached out. Garcia fell forward. There was a knife sticking out of his back.

Alex felt something hard touch him between his shoulder blades and a voice, which seemed to have trouble with the words it was saying, whispered from somewhere behind him.

“A little late to be out swimming, I think. I advise you now to keep very still.”

A speedboat which had been lurking in the shadows on the other side of the diving boat roared to life, lights blazing. Alex stood where he was. Two more men climbed onboard, both of them speaking in Spanish. He just had time to glimpse the dark, grinning face of one of Sarov’s macheteros before a sack was thrown over his head. Something touched his arm and he felt a sting and knew that he had just been injected with a hypodermic syringe. Almost at once, the strength went out of his legs and he would have collapsed but for the invisible hands that held him up.

And then he was lifted up and carried away. Alex began to wonder if it would have made any difference if the shark had reached him after all. The men who were carrying him off the boat were treating him like someone who was already dead.

THE CRUSHER

Alex couldn’t move.

He was lying on his back on a hard, sticky surface. When he tried to raise his shoulders, he felt his T-shirt clinging to whatever it was underneath him. It was as if he had been glued into place. Whatever had been injected into him had removed all power of movement from his arms and legs. The bag still covered his head, keeping him in darkness. He knew that he had been loaded into the speedboat and taken back to the coast. Some sort of van had met him and brought him here. He had heard footsteps and rough hands had grabbed him, carrying him like a sack of vegetables. He guessed that three or four men had been involved in the journey, but they had barely spoken. Once he had heard the same man who had spoken to him on the boat. He had muttered a couple of words in Spanish. But his voice was so indistinct, the words so garbled, that Alex had found it hard to understand what he was saying.

Fingers brushed against the side of his neck and suddenly the bag was removed. Alex blinked. He was lying in a brightly lit warehouse or factory; the first thing he saw was the metal framework supporting the roof, with arc lamps hanging down. The walls were bare brick, whitewashed, the floor lined with terracotta tiles. There was machinery on both sides of him. Most of it looked agricultural and a hundred years out of date. There were chains and buckets and a complicated pulley system that fed into a series of metal wheels that could have come out of a giant antique watch, and next to them, a pair of earthenware cauldrons. Alex twisted round and saw more cauldrons on the other side and, in the distance, some sort of filtration system with pipes leading everywhere. He realized now that he was lying on a long conveyor belt. He tried once again to get up or even roll off, but his body wouldn’t obey him.

A man stepped into his line of vision.

Alex looked up into a pair of eyes that weren’t actually quite a pair. They weren’t positioned correctly in the man’s face and one of them was bloodshot. Alex wondered if it could even see. The man had been horribly injured at some time. He was bald on one side of his head, but not on the other. His mouth was slanting. His skin was dead. In a beauty contest, he wouldn’t even come a close second to the great white shark.

There were a couple of dark, unsmiling workers standing behind him. They were shabbily dressed, with moustaches and bandanas. Neither of them spoke. They seemed keenly interested in what was about to happen.

“Your name?” The movements of the man’s mouth didn’t quite match what he was saying, so seeing him speak was a bit like watching a badly dubbed film.

“Alex Gardiner,” Alex said.

“Your real name?”

“I just told you.”

“You lied. Your real name is Alex Rider.”

“Why ask if you think you know?”

The man nodded as if Alex had asked a fair question. “My name is Conrad,” he said. “We have met before.”

“Have we?” Alex tried to think. Then he remembered. The man he had seen limping down the boardwalk in Miami wearing sunglasses and a straw hat! It was the same man.

Conrad leaned forward. “Why are you here?” he asked.

“I’m on vacation with my mom and dad.” Alex decided it was time to pretend he was just an ordinary fourteen year old. “Where are they?” he demanded. “Why have you brought me here? What happened to the man on the boat? I want to go home!”

“Where is your home?” Conrad asked.

“I live in LA. De Flores Street, west Hollywood.”

“No.” There was no doubt at all in Conrad’s voice. “Your accent is very convincing, but you are not American. You are English. The people you came with were called Tom Turner and Belinda Troy. They were agents of the CIA. They are now dead.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

Conrad smiled. At least, one side of his mouth smiled. The other could only manage a slight twitch. “Lying to me is stupid and a waste of time. I have to know why you are here,” he said. “It is an unusual experience to interrogate a child, but it is one I shall enjoy. You are the only one left. So tell me, Alex Rider, why did you come to Cayo Esqueleto? What were you planning to do?”

“I wasn’t planning to do anything!” Despite everything, Alex thought it was worth one last try. He was still speaking with an American accent. “My dad’s a film producer. He’s got nothing to do with the CIA. Who are you? And why have you brought me here?”

“I am losing my patience!” Conrad took a break, as if the effort of talking was too much for him. “Tell me what I want to know.”

“I’m on vacation!” Alex said. “I’ve already told you!”

“You have told me lies. Now you will tell me the truth.”

Conrad leaned down and picked up a large metal box with two buttons-one red, one green-attached to a thick cable. He pressed the green button. At once, Alex felt a jolt underneath him. An alarm bell rang. Somewhere in the distance there was a loud whine as a machine started up. A few seconds later, the conveyor began to move.

Using all his strength, Alex fought against the drug that was in his system, forcing his head up so that he could look over his feet. What he saw sent a spasm of shock all the way through him. His head swam and he thought he was going to faint The conveyor belt was carrying him towards two huge, spinning grindstones about seven metres away. They were so close to each other they were almost touching. There was one underneath and one on top. The belt stopped just at the point where they met. Alex was slumped helplessly on the belt. There was nothing he could do. He was moving towards the grindstones at a rate of about ten centimetres a second. It would take him a little over a minute to reach them. When he did finally get there, he would be crushed. That was the death that this man had arranged for him.

“Do you know how sugar was produced?” Conrad asked. “This place, where you are now, is a sugar mill. The machinery used to be steam-powered but now it is electric. The sugar cane was delivered here by the colonos-the farmers. It was shredded and then placed on a belt to be crushed. After that it was filtered. Water was allowed to evaporate. Then the remaining syrup was placed in cauldrons and heated so that it formed crystals.” Conrad paused to draw breath. “You, Alex, are at the beginning of that process. You are about to be fed into the crusher. I ask you to imagine the pain that lies ahead of you. Your toes will enter first. Then you will be sucked in one centimetre at a time. After your toes, your feet. Your legs and your knees. How much of you will pass through before you are allowed the comfort of death? Think about it! Whatever else it is, I can promise you that it will not be sweet.”