Scorpia Rising characters

Appears from the start

The chief executive of Scorpia, a heavy, expressionless man who runs the organisation's business with no appetite for display. Twice now a schoolboy has cost Scorpia a contract and its reputation for never failing, and Kurst regards that as a commercial problem requiring a permanent solution.

First appears in chapter 2

The Egyptian operative Scorpia puts in charge of the operation, working from a compound in the western desert. Softly spoken and precise, he is engaged in a private project alongside his professional one: he believes pain can be measured like temperature, and he collects and grades it in other people with the detachment of a man taking readings.

First appears in chapter 4

A decorated British soldier, badly injured in action and now walking with a stick, who works as head of security at an international school in Cairo. He believes his country abandoned him after his injury, and he says so to anyone who will listen.

First appears in chapter 5

The last of Dr Hugo Grief's sixteen clones, the one surgically remade to be Alex Rider's exact double. Since the Point Blanc affair he has been locked in a secure psychiatric institution in South Africa, and the years there have left him with one purpose. He knows Alex's face, voice and history better than anyone alive, and he hates him with complete single-mindedness.

First appears in chapter 7

Fifteen, back at Brookland and trying to stay there. He has told MI6 repeatedly that he is finished, and this time the request comes with a reason he cannot dismiss: it is not an assignment to break a conspiracy but a short, low-risk job in Cairo that the department says only he can do.

First appears in chapter 7

The American housekeeper who came to London as a student and has raised Alex since his uncle's death. She is the only family he has, she has fought MI6 over him for years, and she goes with him to Egypt because she is not letting him go alone again.

First appears in chapter 7

The head of MI6 Special Operations, who recruited a fourteen-year-old, told himself each time that it was the last, and has never once been overruled.

First appears in chapter 7

Blunt's deputy, who has spent years delivering the department's decisions about Alex and disagreeing with some of them in private. She has her own history with Scorpia and her own reasons for wanting the organisation finished.

First appears in chapter 9

MI6's gadget-maker, who has equipped Alex for every operation he has run and is the one person in the building who has consistently treated him as a boy rather than an asset.