Skeleton Key (Alex Rider)

Product Information

Sister" Professor Krysten Shultz: A former director at Harvard School of Engineering, until she disappeared twelve years previously, and responsible for developing the radio implants in the Numbers' heads. She has "long white hair that swept down over her shoulders, and a thin, angular face with a nose like a kitchen knife", with glasses and dangling silver earrings. At Harvard, she was leading microscopic radio receivers using diamonds, so she was responsible for creating the Numbers. She has responsibility for academic training of the Numbers. In the epilogue of the novel, it transpires that when Alex explained his predicament to George Prescott, his office heard their conversation through Prescott's radio, which was still turned on. Initially, they didn't believe Alex, but when they discovered Prescott's death, they immediately notified MI6, who in turn warned the Russians. Alex is depressed after everything he has been through, but Sabina approaches Alex and invites him on holiday with her family in France for a couple of weeks, cheering Alex up. He was shot and killed by his then-employer Damian Cray after he refused to kill Alex and Sabina, claiming that he did not kill children (though evidence in the last book would suggest it had more to do with his reluctance to kill Alex). However he lived long enough to tell Alex to find Scorpia in Venice.

Henryk does not contribute much to the novel, his only major appearances occurring towards the end of the story, when Alex and Sabina are forced to have afternoon tea with Cray, Henryk and Yassen, where Cray explains his plans to the two teenagers, to rid the world of drugs by firing twenty-five American nuclear missiles at various drug-running countries around the world, destroying those countries and their populations in the process. After Cray's men secure Air Force One for the takeover and missile launching, Henryk prepares the plane for take-off, with the destination implied to be Russia.Sukit is described as a short Asian man who wears a strange mixture between a suit and combat clothes. He has no ears, as they were cut off during a deal which was ambushed by a rival Bangkok gang. Mr. Grin (real name Sean Green) is a secondary antagonist in both the novel and film adaption of Stormbreaker. He is Herod Sayle's right-hand man and butler. Grin was formerly a circus performer, throwing knives into the air and catching them in his mouth. However, when Grin's mother came to see his act one day, he was distracted by her and his knives cut off most of his tongue, and left him with a Glasgow Smile. It was after this accident he changed his name to Grin. Scorpia - He went on his own volition to find out about the criminal organisation, as well as his father's motive for supposedly joining them. Belinda Troy is a minor protagonist in Skeleton Key. She was a CIA agent partnered with Tom Turner (Glen Carver in the US version) and Alex Rider on a mission to Cuba to investigate General Alexei Sarov. She and Turner do not take to Alex, because he is a minor, and believe he is unnecessary and could put their mission in danger. When Turner is kidnapped on the Salesman's boat, it is hinted that she has feelings for him. She is killed in the same manner as Turner while attempting to infiltrate Sarov's headquarters. She is described as being "a couple of years older than he is (Turner), slim, with brown frizzy hair tumbling down to her shoulders". David Friend • Smithers • James Sprintz • Michael J. Roscoe • Wolf • John Crawley • Fiona Friend • Julius Grief

The fact that Tom isn't even mentioned in the first four books i.e., Stormbreaker to Eagle Strike, suggests that Alex is not very close to Tom. In the TV series, however, Tom is shown to be very close to Alex. Tom and Alex hang out everyday and in Episode One, when Alex was grounded, Tom says that he cannot go to a school party without Alex. [25] Kyra Vashenko-Chao ALEX RIDER SERIES SKELETON KEY dirty plates. There was no sign of the guard and for a moment Alex thought he‟d lost him. But then he saw a figure disappearing behind a series of translucent plastic strips that hung from the ceiling to the floor. He could just make out the man‟s uniform on the other side of the barrier. He hurried forward and went through. Alex realized two things at the same moment. He no longer had any idea where he was—and he was there on his own. 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 tennis court. This was the underbelly of Wimbledon all right. This was where all the supplies arrived and where all the trash Left. And right now, ten thousand people were sitting just a few metres above his head, enjoying the game, unaware that everything they consumed throughout the day began and ended here. A couple of years later, Alex meets Sahara Sands again, where she reveals her father was working in the office of the American Secretary of Defense, and that his laptop hard drive contained classified information on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. da Silva had presumably been hired to steal the laptop and leak the data, which would have resulted in a huge embarrassment for the US government.

Sign up to the newsletter

After spending two months of a twenty-year sentence in HMP Doncaster, for possession of drugs with intent to supply (worsened by the fact that the drugs were impure, dangerous and possibly lethal), Skoda (whose real name is revealed to be Brian Smith [Jake Edwards in the American Version]) plots to kill Alex Rider and to escape. He does this by self-harming in the exercise yard and being taken to the prison hospital wing for night, put in the same room as terminally ill fellow inmate Harry Baker (known as 'Spider' because of the huge, self-made tattoo of a tarantula on his face), who is serving a life sentence for killing a policeman in a bank robbery. Skoda suffocates Spider to death with a pillow, then takes the body's place by switching beds and drawing a copy of Spider's tattoo on his own face with a marker pen; when the paramedics arrive, they carry Skoda off to Doncaster Royal Infirmary. Nightshade are a new criminal organization, introduced properly in Nightshade. They were first mentioned at the end of Never Say Die when Mrs Jones pores over a file marked "Nightshade", concerning a missing child who eventually resurfaced as a teenage assassin. The CIA is building up a case against Drevin, storing all of their evidence in The Pentagon in Washington. Meanwhile, Drevin's Ark Angel project went over-budget, and he decided to also destroy it to get some insurance out of it instead of maintaining the project further. It is revealed that he plans to solve both these problems by blowing Ark Angel out of orbit with a bomb as it passes above Washington. The falling space station, guided towards Washington, would serve two purposes: destroy the Pentagon, with all its evidence against Drevin, and destroy the space station itself and claim some insurance. To prevent himself from being accused of sabotaging the project, he hired some men to form Force Three, a fake group of eco-terrorists, which will be blamed for Ark Angel's destruction.

Major Winston Yu is one of the members of the executive board of Scorpia, and the main antagonist of the novel Snakehead. He was asked by Zeljan Kurst, another board member of Scorpia, to command operation "Reef Encounter". This involved generating an artificial tsunami to destroy Reef Island and the west coast of Australia by detonating a stolen bomb named "Royal Blue" between two underwater tectonic plates when they are most vulnerable. He was the superior of Anan Sukit, but apparently inherits control of the Bangkok Snakehead when Ben "Fox" Daniels kills Sukit. Yu suffers from brittle bone disease, which makes his skeleton highly unstable. His mother named him after Winston Churchill.

Leave a reply

Alan Blunt was the head of MI6 Special Operations until Scorpia Rising. He is an aloof, impassive, and ruthless man. Throughout the series he is known for wearing a grey suit and grey glasses and being driven around in a Rolls-Royce. From the book Point Blanc, it is said that he had graduated with a First-Class Honours degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. Blunt is dedicated to his job and has a very analytical mind. After the events of the book Scorpia Rising and Scorpia's demise, Alan Blunt retires from his role at MI6, supposedly forced to by pressure from higher-ups. His assistant Lâle "Tulip" Jones, known better as Mrs. Jones, takes over from the end of Scorpia Rising onwards. It is stated in the same book that he receives knighthood following his retirement. In his first physical appearance, during the novel Snakehead, Kurst devises an operation dubbed Reef Encounter to destroy a small Australian island in which an anti-poverty conference is being held, by planting a powerful non-nuclear, British-made bomb called Royal Blue along a tectonic fault line to create a tsunami that will obliterate the island, as well as a considerable part of the west coast of northern Australia. After Kurst has his agents acquire Royal Blue, he puts the operation under the control of Winston Yu, who will have his snakehead, the most powerful criminal organisation in South East Asia, smuggle the bomb to the fault line. Kurst supervises Yu's progress throughout the novel, and when Alex Rider is found to be investigating Yu's snakehead, he advises the Major not to repeat Julia Rothman's mistake of underestimating Rider's abilities, referencing the boy's success in thwarting operation Invisible Sword during the novel Scorpia. Alex’s best friend at Brookland, Tom Harris, knows about Alex’s involvement with MI6 but unlike Alex’s other friend Sabina, is very supportive of him and covers for him whenever he needs it. [21] [24]Tom Harris is Alex's best friend but he isn't even mentioned in the first four books in the series. This may indicate that Alex is not very close to him. He makes his first appearance in Scorpia. Initially, Alex doesn't tell him anything about his involvement with MI6 and his mission of finding SCORPIA. Yet, Tom helps Alex in his mission in any way possible. Later, when Alex meets Tom on the train after escaping from SCORPIA, Alex tells Tom everything about his involvement with MI6, his past missions and whatever he knows about SCORPIA. Unlike with Sabina, Tom and his elder brother Jerry believe Alex immediately. Jerry teaches Alex BASE jumping and Alex BASE jumps into Consanto Enterprises. [15] da Silva is the main antagonist of the short story Christmas at Gunpoint. Very little is known about him.

Vosper is later widowed after the twins poison his wife, and is later still arrested by MI6, when it emerges that his wife told him the information he needed and he then sold it on to the twins. Dr. Raymond Feng is the main antagonist of the short story Spy Trap. Nearly nothing is known about him. After capturing Alex, Yu reveals that he will be sent to an illegal organ harvesting clinic in Kakadu, to pay for both his thwarting of Invisible Sword and his damage to Reef Encounter. However, Alex escapes, reunites with the Australian SAS, and storms Yu's Dragon Nine rig, where the bomb is due to be detonated. Although Yu falls down a maintenance tunnel, he survives, despite breaking his ankles, and escapes on his yacht. However, Alex (who had previously scanned his handprint into the control system) detonates the bomb prematurely, which causes a wave that hits Yu's yacht, and he dies when the wave hits, as every bone in his body shatters because of his illness.

Goodreads Summary:

Not much is known about Alex's mother, Helen, but because she knew about John's profession and loved John, it can be assumed that she cared a lot for Alex and was a loving mother in the three months she knew him. She died in a arranged plane crash because of her husband's risky profession, leaving behind her orphaned son. [15] Ian Rider The Gentleman is one of the two antagonists that have not heard of or met Alex Rider, the other being Ravi Chandra of Crocodile Tears. Despite being a doctor and surgeon, Tanner has several vices, including alcohol, cigarettes and gambling. He also does not present the image of a doctor, dressing only in open shirts and jeans, without a white coat on.