Skeleton Key

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

He got up and made his way over to the phone.

The guard was standing with his back to him. This time he might be able to get close enough to hear what was being said, “…will be completely successful.” The guard was talking in English but with a thick accent. He still had his back to Alex. There was a pause. Then: “I’m going to meet him now. Yes… straight away. He’ll give it to me and I’ll bring it to you.” Another pause. Alex got the feeling that the conversation was coming to an end. He took a few steps back. “I have to go,” the guard said. “Bye.” He put the receiver down and walked “Alex…?” Sabina called to him. She was on her own, sitting where he had left her. He realized she must have been watching what he did. He raised a hand and waved to her. He would have to find some way to explain all this later.

The guard didn’t climb back up to the surface. Instead he took a door which led to a long corridor, stretching into the distance. Alex opened the door and followed.

The All England Te

But there is a second, less well-known world underneath all this. The entire club is co

The corridor in which Alex found himself was called the Royal Route and co

He was in an underground chamber, banana-shaped, curving round, with concrete pillars supporting the roof. It looked like an underground carpark and there were indeed three or four cars parked in bays next to the raised walkway where he was standing now. But most of the space was taken up by trash. There were empty cardboard boxes, wooden pallets, a rusting cement mixer, bits of old fencing and broken down coffee vending machines, thrown out and left to rot on the damp cement floor. The air smelled bad and Alex could hear a constant whine, like an electric saw, coming from a garbage compactor just out of his sight. And yet the area was also used for the storage of food and drink. There were beer barrels, hundreds of bottles of fizzy drinks, gas cylinders and, clustered together, eight or nine massive white boxes-refrigerators, each one carrying the label RAWLINGS REFRIGERATION.

Alex looked up at the roof. It was slanting upwards and the shape reminded him of something. Of course! The raked seating around Court Number One! That was where he was-in the loading bay beneath the te

But where was the guard? Why had he come here and who was he going to meet? Alex crept forward carefully, once again feeling very alone. He was on a raised platform with the single word DANGER repeated in yellow letters along its edge. He didn’t need to be told. He came to a flight of steps and went down, moving into the main body of the chamber, on the same level as the refrigerators. He walked past a stack of gas cylinders, pressurized carbon dioxide. He had no idea what they were for. Half the things down here seemed to have been dumped for no good reason.

He was fairly sure now that the guard had gone. Why would he want to meet anyone down here? For the first time since he had left the Complex, Alex played back the telephone conversation in his mind.

I’m going to meet him now. Yes… straight away. He’ll give it to me…

It sounded ridiculous, fake, like something out of a bad film. Even as Alex realized this and knew that he had been tricked, he heard the screaming sound, saw the dark shape rushing out of the shadows. He was in the middle of the concrete floor, out in the open. The guard was behind the wheel of a fork-lift truck, the metal prongs jutting out towards him like the horns of an enormous bull. Powered by its forty-eight volt electric engine, the truck was speeding towards him on pneumatic tyres. Alex glanced up and saw the heavy wooden pallets, a dozen of them, balanced high above the cabin. He saw the guard’s smile, a gleam of ugly teeth in an uglier face. The truck covered the distance between them with astonishing speed then came to a sudden halt as the guard slammed on the brake. Alex yelled and threw himself to one side. The wooden pallets, carried forward by the truck’s momentum, slid off the forks and came clattering down. Alex should have been crushed, would have been, but for the beer barrels. A line of them had taken the weight of the pallets, leaving a tiny triangle of space. Alex heard the wood smashing centimetres above his head. Splinters rained down on his neck and back. Dust and dirt smothered him. But he was still alive. Choking and half blinded, he crawled forward as the fork-lift truck reversed and prepared to come after him again.

How could he have been so stupid? The guard had seen him that first time in the Complex, when he had made his telephone call. Alex had stood there, gaping at the tattoo on the man’s arm and had thought that his ballboy uniform would be enough to protect him. And then, in the Mille

And so he had laid a trap so obvious that it wouldn’t have fooled… well, a schoolboy. Alex might want to think of himself as some sort of superspy who had twice saved the whole world, but that was nonsense. The guard had made a fake phone call and tricked Alex into following him into this desolate area. And now he was going to kill him. It wouldn’t matter who he was or how much he had found out once he was dead.