Eagle Strike recap

On holiday in the south of France with Sabina Pleasure and her family, Alex recognises the assassin Yassen Gregorovich aboard a yacht in the bay. Days later a bomb wrecks the villa and leaves Sabina's father, an investigative journalist, badly injured. MI6 will not act, so Alex investigates alone, and the trail leads to Damian Cray: pop star, philanthropist and the most admired anti-drugs campaigner in the world. In Amsterdam, Cray forces Alex into a live version of his new console's game, with real traps and real weapons, and Alex survives it. Cray has bribed an American official for the codes to the United States nuclear arsenal and intends to seize control of the presidential aircraft and launch missiles at the world's drug-producing regions, killing millions in the name of his crusade. Alex gets aboard and stops him, and Cray dies. Yassen, mortally wounded, tells Alex that his father was an assassin, that John Rider saved his life, and that the answers are in Venice with an organisation called Scorpia.

Previously: Alex Rider, fourteen, learned after his uncle Ian's murder that Ian had been an MI6 officer and that his own childhood had been an unwitting apprenticeship. Alan Blunt and Mrs Jones of Special Operations have used him three times. He exposed Herod Sayle, whose gift of a computer to every British school was to have released a virus; he broke the Point Blanc Academy, where the scientist Hugo Grief was replacing the sons of the very rich with clones of himself; and he was lent to the CIA and ended up in Russia with General Alexei Sarov, who planned to detonate a stolen nuclear device to restore the Soviet Union and who shot himself in front of Alex when the boy refused to become his replacement son. Running through all of it is Yassen Gregorovich, the Russian contract killer who murdered Ian Rider and who has twice had Alex at his mercy and let him go. Alex lives in Chelsea with the housekeeper Jack Starbright and knows almost nothing about his dead parents.

Alex is in the south of France, invited along on a family holiday by Sabina Pleasure and her parents, and for once nothing is being asked of him. From the beach he sees a yacht anchored in the bay and, on its deck, a man he could never mistake for anyone else: Yassen Gregorovich, the assassin who killed his uncle. Alex swims out to it at night to find out who Yassen is working for and what has brought him to a quiet stretch of coast. He gets aboard, learns very little, and is nearly caught getting off again. Sabina's father, Edward Pleasure, a journalist, has meanwhile been working on a story he will not discuss.

A bomb destroys the villa. Sabina's father is dragged out alive but badly burned and is flown home to hospital, and Sabina is left with no idea why anyone would want to kill him. Alex is certain that Yassen was responsible and that the target was the story Edward Pleasure was writing. Back in London he takes what he knows to MI6, and for the first time the department turns him down flat: Blunt has no interest, and the man Alex's evidence points toward is beyond the reach of an accusation from a fourteen-year-old. With Jack's help and no official backing at all, Alex starts working through the journalist's notes and following the trail himself.

The trail leads to Damian Cray, a singer whose records have sold by the hundred million and who has spent the second half of his life as a philanthropist and the world's most visible campaigner against drugs. He has been knighted, is received by presidents, and is about to launch a games console called the Gameslayer. Following one of Cray's associates to Paris, Alex is chased through the city and escapes on a bicycle. He witnesses a meeting at which an American official, Charlie Roper, is paid for something Cray wants badly, and sees what happens to the man afterwards. Cray, it becomes clear, has been buying access to something that no private individual should be able to buy.

Alex is captured and taken to Amsterdam, where Cray is launching the Gameslayer in front of the world's press. Cray decides to test the console's flagship game with a live participant, and puts Alex into a full-size physical replica of it: the traps, the drops and the weapons are all real, and the audience believes it is watching a demonstration with a stuntman. Alex plays it through and survives, then escapes the building. Sabina, who has followed her own suspicions about the man behind her father's injuries, will not be sent home, and the two of them continue together. Neither MI6 nor the police will believe a word of it while Cray's public reputation stands.

Cray takes Sabina to force Alex's cooperation, and with both of them in his hands he explains what the money and the stolen access were for. The plan is called Eagle Strike. Having bought the codes to the American nuclear arsenal, he intends to take control of the presidential aircraft while it is in the air and launch missiles at every major drug-producing region on earth, wiping out the trade at its source. He does not deny that the strikes would kill millions of people; he regards their deaths as the price of ending an evil, and he is entirely serious. Yassen Gregorovich is on his payroll to see the operation through.

Alex gets Sabina clear and forces his way aboard the presidential aircraft, where Cray has already taken control and the launch sequence is running. Yassen, who has spent the whole operation working for Cray, turns on him at the decisive moment and is shot. Alex fights Cray in the body of the plane; Cray is killed and the launch is stopped with no missiles fired. The aircraft is brought down safely and the plot, which no government was prepared to believe in, is over.

Yassen Gregorovich is dying, and he uses what is left to tell Alex the one thing nobody in MI6 ever has. He knew Alex's father. John Rider was a contract killer, they worked together, and John Rider once saved his life, which is the debt that has kept Alex alive through three encounters. Yassen tells him to go to Venice and find Scorpia if he wants to know who his father was, and then dies. Alex, at his request, has his body cremated and the ashes scattered at sea. Sabina, who now knows exactly what Alex is, goes back to her recovering father, and her family are preparing to leave the country. Alex returns to London with his enemy dead, his rescue unacknowledged, and everything he thought he knew about his own parents in pieces, holding a single name he cannot let alone.

Alex gets aboard the presidential aircraft, where Cray has taken control and is minutes from launching American missiles at the drug-producing regions of the world, an attack that would kill millions of people who have nothing to do with the trade. Yassen Gregorovich, hired to protect the operation, turns on Cray instead and is shot for it. Alex fights Cray in the body of the aircraft and Cray is killed there; the launch never happens and the aircraft is brought down safely. The lasting consequence is not Cray's death but Yassen's. Dying, he tells Alex that he knew his father: John Rider was a contract killer, that they worked together, and that John Rider once saved his life, which is why Yassen has never been able to kill his son. He tells Alex to go to Venice and find Scorpia if he wants to know who his father really was, and dies. Alex is left with the ashes scattered at sea, a friendship with Sabina that has survived being told the truth, and one word he cannot leave alone.