Crocodile Tears recap

At New Year in Scotland with Sabina Pleasure's family, Alex saves the occupants of a car that goes through the ice, and the rescue puts him in front of a tabloid journalist, Harry Bulman, who works out what he really is and tries to blackmail him. MI6 offer to make the problem disappear in exchange for a favour, and the favour leads Alex to Greenfields, a British research centre developing genetically engineered crops, and from there to Desmond McCain, a celebrated preacher and aid-charity boss. McCain has had a crop disease engineered to order and intends to release it across Kenya, wiping out the harvest and starving a country, so that donations pour into his charity and the positions he has taken quietly make him a fortune. Alex is captured and held over a crocodile pit, escapes, and is taken to Kenya, where he stops the release before the disease can be spread. McCain does not survive. Bulman is murdered before he can publish, and Alex returns to London.

Previously: Alex Rider was pulled into MI6 after his uncle Ian was murdered, and has run one assignment after another for Alan Blunt and Mrs Jones: Herod Sayle's poisoned school computers, Dr Hugo Grief's cloned pupils at Point Blanc, General Alexei Sarov's stolen bomb, Damian Cray's hijacked missiles. Following the dying assassin Yassen Gregorovich's words he found Scorpia in Venice, was recruited with a lie about his father, and turned on the organisation when he learned it meant to kill thousands of London schoolchildren; MI6 then admitted that John Rider had been their own officer inside Scorpia, and that Alex's parents died when a bomb brought down their plane. Scorpia had Alex shot by a sniper. He survived, diverted the billionaire Nikolai Drevin's space station away from Washington, and fell back to Earth off Australia, where he was recruited to break a people-smuggling network and discovered that his godfather Ash had been the traitor who betrayed his parents. He lives in London with the housekeeper Jack Starbright, and his closest friend is Sabina Pleasure.

Alex spends New Year in Scotland as the guest of Sabina Pleasure and her parents. A car skids off the road and goes through the ice of a loch with a family inside, and Alex goes in after them and gets them out. The rescue is public, and among the people who see it is Harry Bulman, a tabloid journalist who is quick enough to wonder why a fifteen-year-old should be that capable, and persistent enough to start pulling on the thread. Alex goes home to London and to Jack Starbright believing the incident is over.

Bulman has assembled enough of Alex's history to be dangerous. He turns up with the outline of the whole story, from Cornwall onward, and makes his terms: money, or he publishes and Alex's life as a schoolboy ends. Alex has no money and nobody to appeal to except the department that created the problem. Mrs Jones is entirely willing to make Bulman go away, and equally clear that MI6 does not do favours for nothing. The price is a small piece of work, presented as trivial, and Alex takes it because he has no alternative. Not long afterwards Bulman is found dead, killed by people who were watching him for reasons of their own.

The work takes Alex to Greenfields, a heavily protected British research centre where genetically engineered crops are developed, run by its proud director Leonard Straik. MI6 want to know why the facility's security has been probed. Alex gets inside and finds that the place holds organisms designed as weapons against plants rather than people, and that something has already left the building. In the same weeks he encounters Desmond McCain, the head of an international aid charity and one of the most persuasive fundraisers in the country, a man whose past convictions form part of his public story of redemption. The two things turn out not to be separate.

Alex asks the wrong questions and is taken. McCain has no interest in threats and simply explains, with the calm of a man who considers the matter already settled, that Alex is going to die in a way that will not be investigated. Alex is held above a pit of crocodiles kept for exactly this purpose and comes within seconds of going into it before he gets himself free. He escapes, but he is now a loose end in an operation that is already moving, and McCain's people take him with them rather than leave him behind. His destination is Kenya.

In Kenya the scale of the plan becomes clear. McCain's charity has built a reputation for arriving first when a disaster strikes, and he intends to manufacture the disaster himself. The engineered disease taken from Greenfields will be spread over the country's maize, destroying the harvest and starving a nation, and the pictures of the famine will bring in donations from every government and television audience in the world. McCain has also arranged his own finances so that the catastrophe makes him personally rich. The delivery is to be from the air, over a wide area, and once it is airborne there is no undoing it.

Alex, alone in a country he does not know and with no help coming, works out where and when the release is to happen and gets himself to it. The attempt to disperse the disease is stopped before the crop can be infected, and the famine McCain was building never begins. McCain does not survive the day, and his charity and the research centre that supplied him are both exposed. Alex flies home to London and to Jack, back to school at Brookland, with a dead blackmailer, an intelligence service that used him again after he had told them he was finished, and no one he is allowed to tell.

Alex stops the release: the engineered disease is never spread across Kenya's crop, the harvest is not destroyed, and the famine McCain was manufacturing does not happen. McCain does not survive the attempt. The charity that was to have collected the world's money for a disaster of its own making is exposed along with him, and the research facility that supplied the organism is left to answer for its security. Harry Bulman, who tried to sell Alex's story, is already dead, killed by the people whose attention he attracted, and the story dies with him. Alex goes back to London with Jack and to school at Brookland, having again been used by MI6 after telling them he had finished with them, and again having no one outside a very small circle who can be told anything about it. Nothing about the arrangement between him and the department has changed, and neither side pretends otherwise.