Scorpia recap

Following Yassen Gregorovich's dying instruction, Alex goes to Venice and finds Scorpia, the organisation his father is said to have worked for. Julia Rothman, one of its executives, tells him that John Rider was one of Scorpia's finest assassins and shows him film of MI6 executing him, and Alex, in shock and rage, agrees to be trained at Scorpia's school on Malagosto. His final test is an order to kill Mrs Jones; she survives the attempt. Then Alex learns what Scorpia has been hired to do: years earlier, London schoolchildren were injected with nanoshells during a free inoculation programme, and a single transmitted signal will kill thousands of them. He turns on the organisation, and MI6 tell him the truth his father's employers concealed: John Rider was an MI6 officer who had infiltrated Scorpia, and his execution was staged by his own side. Alex destroys the transmitter and saves the children; Rothman and Nile are killed. Days later a Scorpia sniper shoots Alex in the chest.

Previously: Alex Rider, fourteen, discovered after his uncle Ian's murder that Ian had been an MI6 officer, and has since been used four times by Alan Blunt and Mrs Jones of Special Operations. He stopped Herod Sayle's poisoned school computers, broke Dr Hugo Grief's cloning operation at the Point Blanc Academy, was lent to the CIA and ended up in Russia with General Alexei Sarov, who shot himself when Alex refused to become his replacement son, and finally stopped the pop star Damian Cray from launching stolen American missiles at the world's drug-producing regions. Yassen Gregorovich, the assassin who murdered Ian Rider and who spared Alex three times, was shot during that last operation. Dying, he told Alex the thing MI6 never had: that he had known Alex's father, that John Rider was a contract killer, that John Rider had once saved his life, and that if Alex wanted the truth he should go to Venice and find an organisation called Scorpia. Alex lives in London with the housekeeper Jack Starbright and has never been told anything about his parents.

Scorpia's executive board meets on the Italian coast: twelve people who between them run the largest private criminal enterprise in the world, dealing in sabotage, corruption, intelligence and assassination, and who take contracts from governments that cannot be seen to act themselves. The meeting marks the retirement of one of the founders, Max Grendel, and accepts an enormous new commission, code-named Invisible Sword, from a client who wants the British government publicly broken. Meanwhile Alex Rider arrives in Venice on a school trip with his classmate Tom Harris, having no intention of staying with the party. He is there to find Scorpia, and he begins by asking, openly, in the one city where the name means something.

Alex's questions are noticed almost at once, and he is brought to Julia Rothman, an elegant Englishwoman who lives in a palace on a canal and sits on Scorpia's board. She is delighted by him rather than troubled, because she knew his father. What she tells Alex is that John Rider was one of the finest assassins Scorpia ever had, and that MI6 caught him and killed him; and she has film of it, an execution by firing squad on a courtyard wall, which she plays for him. Alex has spent his life being told nothing, has just been used and discarded by the department for the fourth time, and now watches his own side shoot his father. Rothman offers him the truth about who he is and a place in the organisation his father served, and Alex accepts.

Alex is taken to Malagosto, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, once a plague station and now Scorpia's training school. Its head, Oliver d'Arc, teaches killing as a technical subject; the other students are grown professionals; and the best of them, a young man named Nile, is assigned to assess the new recruit. Alex is taught weapons, poisons, forgery and disguise, and finds that most of it he can already half do, because his uncle spent a childhood teaching him the same skills for the other side. He is treated with respect for the first time in his working life. He also cannot avoid noticing how little difference there is between what Scorpia is training him to do and what MI6 has already had him do.

Scorpia sets Alex a final test to prove he has broken with his past: he is sent to London with a rifle and an order to kill Mrs Jones, the deputy head of MI6 Special Operations, as she follows her regular routine. The attempt is made and Mrs Jones survives it, and Alex returns to the organisation as a proven asset. Rothman, satisfied, brings him closer to the operation itself. Invisible Sword is already in motion, its groundwork laid in London years earlier, and Alex is about to be told what a contract worth that much money actually requires.

The weapon is not a bomb. Years before, a charity ran a free inoculation programme through London's schools, and the children who were vaccinated received something else at the same time: microscopic capsules of poison, dormant and undetectable, sitting in the bloodstreams of thousands of them. A single transmitted signal will open every capsule at once. The client's demand is a humiliation the British government cannot survive, and the deaths of schoolchildren are the instrument. Alex, who has been treated as a promising recruit and told he was being given his father's inheritance, discovers that he has been working for people who intend to kill children his own age. He refuses, and Scorpia's tolerance for him ends immediately. He gets out of Venice with Nile behind him.

In London, MI6 finally tell Alex the truth they have withheld his entire life. John Rider was never Scorpia's man: he was an MI6 officer who spent years inside the organisation under the codename Hunter, rose high enough to be trusted with everything, and was brought out at the end by a staged execution. The firing squad in the film was his own side, the bullets were blanks, and the whole performance existed so that Scorpia would close his file. He and Alex's mother died shortly afterwards, when a bomb destroyed the plane they were flying in. Rothman's version was a lie told to a grieving boy to make him useful. With that, Alex agrees to work with Blunt and Mrs Jones against Invisible Sword, and the department has days at most: the deadline is set, the capsules are in place, and the transmitter has not been found.

The search for the transmitter narrows to a single London site, and Alex goes in with MI6 in support and very little time. Scorpia is holding to its deadline, Rothman is preparing to leave the country once the signal has been sent, and Nile is waiting for Alex. The confrontation is at close quarters and at height, and it is settled by the one weakness Scorpia's best operative has never trained out of himself.

Alex destroys the transmitter before the signal can be sent, and the capsules in London's schoolchildren are never triggered; the children live. Nile is killed, and Julia Rothman dies trying to escape. Invisible Sword collapses, and with it Scorpia's reputation for never failing a client, which is the only thing the organisation genuinely values. Alex is left knowing at last who his father was, and how completely both Scorpia and his own government lied to him about it. There is no truce. Days later, walking through London, he is shot in the chest by a Scorpia sniper firing from a rooftop, and the book ends with him hit and falling.

Alex reaches the transmitter and destroys it before the signal can be sent; the nanoshells in London's schoolchildren are never activated and the city's children survive. Nile is killed in the final confrontation, and Julia Rothman dies as she tries to get clear. Invisible Sword is finished and Scorpia has lost an enormous contract and, worse for an organisation that sells reliability, its reputation for never failing. Alex ends the affair knowing who his father really was: John Rider was an MI6 officer who infiltrated Scorpia under the name Hunter, and the execution Alex was shown was staged by his own side to get him out. His parents died shortly afterwards when a bomb brought down their plane. Alex has been lied to by Scorpia, kept in the dark by MI6, and used by both. Days later, walking in London, he is shot in the chest by a Scorpia sniper on a rooftop. The book closes with him hit and falling, the organisation having made good on its policy of never leaving an insult unanswered.