目录

Overview

Scorpia is the fifth book in the Alex Rider series by British author Anthony Horowitz.

The plot concerns the plans of a criminal organisation attempting to disrupt the "Special Relationship" between the United Kingdom and the United States, which Alex foils by infiltrating the organisation.

Plot

After the events of Eagle Strike, Alex Rider goes on a school trip to Venice, Italy in order to investigate Scorpia, having been told to do so by Yassen Gregorovitch if he wished to learn about his father. With the help of his best friend Tom Harris, Alex manages to sneak into a party hosted by Julia Rothman, whom he believes have a link to Scorpia, and discovers evidence linking the organization to a pharmaceutical company called Consanto Enterprises. Before Alex can learn more, he is confronted by a Scorpia agent named Nile, who overpowers him and locks him in a room that will flood as the Venice tide increases, drowning him. Alex manages to escape into the Grand Canal. He then managed to board a train with Tom, as Consanto happens to be near Naples where Tom's brother, Jerry, is staying.

With the help of Jerry, Alex BASE jumps into Consanto Enterprises, and is eventually confronted by Dr. Liebermann, the head of the organization. Nile shows up, but much to Alex's surprise, he kills Liebermann and takes Alex to see Rothman after blowing up the factory. While having dinner with her, Alex is told about Scorpia, an organization that carries out acts of terrorism for money, that his father was a Scorpia agent, and was not killed in a plane crash as MI6 claimed, but was in fact murdered by them while being exchanged for one of Scorpia's hostages, at the command of Mrs Jones. After hearing this, Alex decides to join Scorpia and begins his training at Scorpia's "institute" on Malagosto, an island near Venice. He becomes a top student, but his instructors become concerned upon learning that he lacks a willingness to kill. On Rothman's suggestion, the headmaster sends Alex to kill Mrs Jones, in hopes that it will overcome his psychological barrier.

Meanwhile, Scorpia mail a list of political demands for the American Government to the British Government, warning them that if the demands are not followed through by 48 hours, Scorpia will use a weapon code named Invisible Sword to carry out a massacre of children in London. As a demonstration, Scorpia use the weapon on the England national football team reserves as they return from a tournament in Nigeria. Despite the high security put in place at the airport, the team are all killed inexplicably. Elsewhere, disguised as a pizza delivery boy, Alex infiltrates Mrs Jones apartment where he attempts to carry out his operation. Though Alex finally fires at Mrs Jones, it hits an invisible pane of bulletproof glass, and he is captured by MI6. Alex later learns that he turned the gun away at the last moment.

Mr Blunt convinces Alex to help provide some information to a meeting of the United Kingdom's emergency COBRA committee. Based on Alex's observations, the group deduce that Scorpia has secretly added a lethal poison to a number of vaccines at Consanto Enterprises, including the yellow fever vaccines given to the football team, and the BCG injections recently received by London schoolchildren. They also figure out that Scorpia can activate the poison at will using beams of terahertz radiation. A search of the city for the dishes that will transmit the terahertz beams begins, but Jones and Blunt suspect that there is more to Scorpia's plan that meets the eye. They fake Alex's escape from MI6 custody to enable him to rejoin Rothman and learn the true location of the terahertz dishes.

Alex discovers that Rothman intends to use a hot air balloon to lift the dishes into position, keeping them out of sight until Scorpia's deadline. He also learns that Scorpia's plan is to destroy the special relationship between Britain and America. The demands to the Americans were deliberately made unreasonable to them; once Invisible Sword has been used, Scorpia will threaten the Americans with the weapon while making more lenient demands, intending to expose them as unwilling to help their allies and turn them into an international pariah. Alex alerts MI6 to the launch site's location with a tracking device designed as a mouth brace, but gives himself away when he reveals his knowledge that children will be the primary target of the attack. An SAS squad sent to follow Alex assaults the launch site, and Alex uses the distraction to climb onto the balloon, closely followed by Nile. He manages to destroy the balloon, with Nile getting himself killed in the process, and the terahertz equipment is destroyed. Alex survives by clinging onto the balloon. Rothman attempts to flee disguised as a tramp and slips past the MI6 men, but by pure chance is crushed and killed by the falling terahertz equipment.

A week later, Alex was briefed by MI6 and learns that John was in fact an MI6 double agent within Scorpia, and that his death at the hostage exchange had been faked, in order to both get him out of Scorpia and allow him to retire from the spy world. Alex's parents had indeed been killed in a plane crash, arranged by Rothman once she learned of John's betrayal. As Alex leaves MI6's headquarters, he is shot by a Scorpia assassin in retaliation for his actions, and the story ends on a cliffhanger.

Autho

Anthony Horowitz's life might have been copied from the pages of Charles Dickens or the Brothers Grimm. Born in 1956 in Stanmore, Middlesex, to a family of wealth and status, Anthony was raised by nannies, surrounded by servants and chauffeurs. His father, a wealthy businessman, was, says Mr. Horowitz, "a fixer for Harold Wilson." What that means exactly is unclear — "My father was a very secretive man," he says— so an aura of suspicion and mystery surrounds both the word and the man. As unlikely as it might seem, Anthony's father, threatened with bankruptcy, withdrew all of his money from Swiss bank accounts in Zurich and deposited it in another account under a false name and then promptly died. His mother searched unsuccessfully for years in attempt to find the money, but it was never found. That too shaped Anthony's view of things. Today he says, "I think the only thing to do with money is spend it." His mother, whom he adored, eccentrically gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday. His grandmother, another Dickensian character, was mean-spirited and malevolent, a destructive force in his life. She was, he says, "a truly evil person", his first and worst arch villain. "My sister and I danced on her grave when she died," he now recalls.

A miserably unhappy and overweight child, Anthony had nowhere to turn for solace. "Family meals," he recalls, "had calories running into the thousands…. I was an astoundingly large, round child…." At the age of eight he was sent off to boarding school, a standard practice of the times and class in which he was raised. While being away from home came as an enormous relief, the school itself, Orley Farm, was a grand guignolhorror with a headmaster who flogged the boys till they bled. "Once the headmaster told me to stand up in assembly and in front of the whole school said, 'This boy is so stupid he will not be coming to Christmas games tomorrow.' I have never totally recovered." To relieve his misery and that of the other boys, he not unsurprisingly made up tales of astounding revenge and retribution.

So how did an unhappy boy, from a privileged background, metamorphose into the creator of Alex Rider, fourteen-year-old spy for Britain's MI6? Although his childhood permanently damaged him, it also gave him a gift — it provided him with rich source material for his writing career. He found solace in boyhood in the escapism of the James Bond films, he says. He claims that his two sons now watch the James Bond films with the same tremendous enjoyment he did at their age. Bond's glamour translates perfectly to the 14-year-old psyche, the author says. "Bond had his cocktails, the car and the clothes. Kids are just as picky. It's got to be the right Nike trainers (sneakers), the right skateboard. And I genuinely think that 14-year-olds are the coolest people on the planet. It's this wonderful, golden age, just on the cusp of manhood when everything seems possible."

Alex Rider is unwillingly recruited at the age of fourteen to spy for the British secret service, MI6. Forced into situations that most average adults would find terrifying and probably fatal, young Alex rarely loses his cool although at times he doubts his own courage. Using his intelligence and creativity, and aided by non-lethal gadgets dreamed up by MI6's delightfully eccentric, overweight and disheveled Smithers, Alex is able to extricate himself from situations when all seems completely lost. What is perhaps more terrifying than the deeply dangerous missions he finds himself engaged in, is the attitude of his handlers at MI6, who view the boy as nothing more than an expendable asset.

The highly successful Alex Rider novels include Stormbreaker, Point Blank, Skeleton Key, and the recent Eagle Strike.

Anthony Horowitz is perhaps the busiest writer in England. He has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. He writes in a comfortable shed in his garden for up to ten hours per day. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he has also written episodes of several popular TV crime series, including Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. He has written a television series Foyle's War, which recently aired in the United States, and he has written the libretto of a Broadway musical adapted from Dr. Seuss's book, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. His film script The Gatheringhas just finished production. And…oh yes…there are more Alex Rider novels in the works. Anthony has also written the Diamond Brothersseries.

Reception

The official review from Amazon Canada said, "Fans of the Alex Rider Adventures will not be disappointed by the slam-bang action in this fifth book in the spy thriller series, although the ending may leave them feeling a bit dismayed". The book won many awards including "The Children's Book of the Year" award at the Galaxy British Book Awards, and the BAA and Expedia Book Awards.

媒体推荐

High-tech and low-tech machinations will rivet readers. One book and they’ll be hooked! -- Booklist
What if James Bond had started spying as a teenager? Non-stop action keeps the intrigue boiling. -- Kirkus Reviews, on Stormbreaker
Will bring readers to the edge of their seats and keep them there until the final page. -- School Library Journal