Point Blanc recap

Two of the world's richest men die within days of each other in staged accidents. The only thing linking them is the Point Blanc Academy, a Swiss-run school in the French Alps for the unmanageable sons of the very rich, and MI6 need someone inside it. Alex Rider is given the identity of the spoiled son of a supermarket millionaire and sent up the mountain. At the academy he finds boys who have been drugged, sealed floors, and pupils who return from their rooms subtly different, speaking and standing alike. Beneath the castle he discovers a laboratory and a row of cells: the director, Dr Hugo Grief, is a fugitive South African scientist who has cloned himself sixteen times, had the clones surgically altered to match his pupils, and is swapping them for the real boys so that his copies will inherit the fortunes and influence of their families. Alex escapes down the mountainside on an ironing board, returns with the SAS, and the academy is destroyed and the prisoners freed. His own double, sent to take his place at school, is defeated in a final confrontation in London.

Previously: Alex Rider, fourteen, was raised in London by his uncle Ian after his parents died when he was a baby, with an American housekeeper, Jack Starbright, running the household. When Ian was killed in what was reported as a car accident, Alex found the wreck riddled with bullet holes and discovered that his uncle had in fact been an MI6 officer, and that the languages, climbing and martial arts of his childhood had been a training programme he never knew he was on. Alan Blunt and Mrs Jones, who run the department's Special Operations division, pressed him into finishing Ian's last assignment: investigating Herod Sayle, a computer magnate donating a machine to every school in Britain. Alex found that the computers were loaded with a modified smallpox virus and that Sayle meant to kill the country's schoolchildren out of an old grudge. He stopped the launch in London. Sayle was shot dead by Yassen Gregorovich, a Russian assassin who spared Alex and who had also killed Ian Rider. Alex went back to school, but MI6 had learned how useful he was.

Michael J. Roscoe, one of the wealthiest men in America, is killed in his own New York tower by a hired killer who has spent weeks preparing an accident: the lift doors open onto an empty shaft. Roscoe had spent his last weeks quietly worried about his teenage son, who had been sent abroad to a private school and had come back somehow altered. Days later, in Moscow, General Ivanov dies when an explosion destroys his boat. The two men shared nothing but enormous wealth and one detail nobody has yet connected: each had a difficult son who had been sent to the Point Blanc Academy, a school in the French Alps run for the unmanageable children of the very rich.

Alex Rider is back at Brookland School, bored and unable to talk about what he did in Cornwall, with Jack Starbright keeping the house going. On his way home he recognises a drug dealer his school has been warned about and follows him to a wharf on the Thames, ending the chase by taking over a quayside crane; MI6, who had the man under surveillance, collect Alex from the scene. Blunt and Mrs Jones use the incident as leverage. They explain the two deaths and the single link between them, and tell him that the academy's director, Dr Hugo Grief, admits no visitors and no inspections. They want a boy on the inside. Alex is to become the son of Sir David Friend, a supermarket millionaire who has agreed to lend his family as cover, which means living in the Friends' house, learning to behave like an intolerable rich brat, and enduring the open hostility of Sir David's daughter Fiona. Smithers fits him out with equipment disguised as a wealthy teenager's belongings.

The academy's assistant director, Eva Stellenbosch, arrives to inspect the candidate in person, a heavily built South African woman who takes an unsettling interest in Alex, and approves him. He is flown out to the Alps and driven up to Point Blanc: a converted castle on a peak with no road down, ringed by guards and dogs, its windows sealed and its upper floors closed to pupils. There are only a handful of boys, all sons of enormously rich or powerful men, and most of them are strangely docile and polite. The exception is James Sprintz, the son of a German industrialist, who tells Alex that boys who go quiet here never go back to being who they were.

Dr Grief runs the school as an experiment rather than an education, lecturing on discipline and improvement while his pupils drift through a routine of lessons and heavily supervised free time. Alex notices that the food and drink leave him drowsy, that the boys' rooms are watched, and that James is the only one whose personality still shows. Then James too goes quiet, and the boy who comes back to the common room shares his face but not his manner. Alex begins searching the parts of the building he has been forbidden to enter, working out that the sealed floors and the guarded lift are hiding the real business of the academy.

Getting below the castle, Alex finds a modern surgical laboratory and, beyond it, a row of cells holding fourteen frightened boys, the genuine pupils, kept alive and hidden. Grief is not a schoolmaster but a fugitive scientist from the apartheid regime, and the academy is the cover for a project years in the making: he has cloned himself sixteen times, raised the copies in secret, and had each one surgically reshaped to match a boy whose family controls a fortune, a corporation or a government. One by one the duplicates are being sent home in place of the sons, so that within a generation Grief's copies will hold much of the world's wealth and power. Alex also learns that one of the sixteen has been made to look like him. He is caught, and Grief has no intention of letting him leave the mountain.

Alex breaks out of the castle and escapes down the mountainside on an ironing board taken from the laundry, riding it through the snow ahead of pursuit and an avalanche, and reaches a road alive. His report brings in the Special Air Service, and he goes back in with the assault team, parachuting onto the academy and saving Wolf when his canopy fails. The castle is stormed, the laboratory destroyed and the imprisoned boys freed; Grief does not survive the attack. The operation cannot undo everything, because several of the duplicates are already installed in their new families and living as somebody else's son.

The last of Grief's copies still at large is the one wearing Alex's face. He goes to Brookland School to take Alex's place, and the two of them fight it out there in front of a school that cannot tell which is which. The double is beaten and taken away into secure custody rather than killed. The real boys are returned to their families, the substitutions unpicked, and MI6 count the affair a success. Alex is returned to his ordinary life with a duplicate of himself locked away on the other side of the world, an intelligence service that now regards him as a proven asset, and no assurance at all that he will not be called on again.

Alex escapes down the mountain on an ironing board taken from the academy laundry, survives the descent and an avalanche, reaches a road and gets word to London. He goes back in with the Special Air Service assault team, parachuting onto the academy, and saves Wolf when his canopy fails. The castle is stormed, the underground laboratory is destroyed and the fourteen real boys are brought out of the cells alive; Grief does not survive the assault. What the operation cannot immediately undo is the substitution already in place: several duplicates are living openly as the sons of powerful men. The last of them, the one made to look like Alex, comes to Brookland School to take his place and is only stopped after a fight there; he is beaten and taken into secure custody rather than killed. Alex is left with the knowledge that his own face now exists on somebody else, that MI6 have used him twice and will use him again, and that the department considers the operation a success. Blunt makes no promises about the next time.