Point Blanc Read Online Free

miniature kitchen, the barge offered no living
accommodations at all. Instead, it had been converted for another purpose.
Skoda and his friend had turned it into a floating laboratory.
    There were two metal work surfaces, a sink, and a pair
of electric scales. Everywhere there were test tubes and Bunsen burners,
flasks, glass pipes, and measuring spoons. The whole place was
filthy--obviously neither of the two men cared about hygiene--but
Alex knew that he was looking into the heart of their operation. This was where
they prepared the drugs they sold: cut them down, weighed them, and packaged
them for delivery to local schools. It was an insane idea to put a drug factory
on a boat, almost in the middle of London, and only a stone's throw away
from a police station. But at the same time, it was a clever one. Who would
have looked for it here?
    The blond -haired man suddenly turned around, and Alex
hooked his body up and slithered backward onto the deck. For a moment he was
dizzy. Hanging upside down had made the blood drain into his head. He took a
couple of breaths, trying to collect his thoughts. It would be easy enough to
walk over to the police station and tell the officer in charge what he had
seen. The police could take over from there.
    But something inside Alex rejected the idea. Maybe he
would have done that a few months before: let someone else take care of it. But
he hadn't cycled all this way just to call the police. He thought back to
his first sighting of the white car outside the school gates. He remembered his
friend Colin shuffling over to it and felt once again a brief blaze of anger. This
was something he wanted to do himself.
    But what could he do? If the barge had been equipped
with a plug, Alex would have pulled it out and sunk the entire thing. But of
course it wasn't as easy as that. The barge was tied to the jetty by two
thick ropes. He could untie them, but that wouldn't help either. The
barge would drift away, but this was Putney. There were no whirlpools or
waterfalls. Skoda could simply turn on the engine and cruise back again.
    Alex looked around him. On the building site, the
day's work was coming to an end. Some of the men were already leaving,
and as he watched, he saw a trapdoor open about a hundred and fifty yards above
him and a stocky man begin the long climb down from the top of the crane. Alex
closed his eyes. A whole series of images suddenly flashed into his mind, like
different sections of a jigsaw puzzle.
    The barge. The building site. The police station. The
crane with its big hook, dangling underneath the jib.
    And the Blackpool amusement park. He'd gone
there once with his housekeeper, Jack Starbright, and had watched as she won a
teddy bear, hooking it out of a glass case and carrying it over to a chute.
    Could it be done? Alex looked again, working out the
angles. Yes. It probably could.
    He stood up and crept back across the deck to the door
that Skoda had entered. A length of wire was lying to one side, and he picked
it up, then wound it several times around the handle of the door. He looped the
wire over a hook in the wall and pulled it tight. The door was effectively
locked. There was a second door at the back of the boat. Alex secured this one
with his own bicycle padlock. As far as he could see, the windows were too
narrow to crawl through. There was no other way in or out.
    He crept off the barge and back onto the jetty. Then
he untied it, leaving the thick rope loosely curled up beside the metal
pegs--the stanchions--that had secured it. The river was still. It
would be a while before the barge drifted away.
    He straightened up. Satisfied with his work so far, he
began to run.

    ----
HOOKED
    ^ >>
    THE ENTRANCE TO THE BUILDING site was crowded with
construction workers preparing to go home. Alex was reminded of Brookfield an
hour earlier. Nothing really changed when you got older--except that maybe
you weren't given homework. The men and women drifting out of the site
were