Alex Rider: Luck of the Goddess

Infiltration

Heads up, this is from the Book, mostly, so if you want to see where it's not word for word from Antony Horowitz's Alex Rider Never Say Die to look closer to the end of the chapter.

Several House Earlier on Alex Rider: The Luck of the Goddess...

The Villa Siciliana was in the hills above Saint-Tropez, about five miles from the sea. It was a very private place, surrounded by pine trees and cedars and enclosed by a high stone wall. An electronic gate opened onto a drive that swept past a guardhouse with CCTV cameras mounted on either side so that nobody could enter or leave without being seen. During the day, armed guards patrolled the grounds. At night, infrared beams swept through the undergrowth searching for intruders. It was a lot of security for what was, after all, nothing more than a second home – but then the South of France is full of people who demand privacy at any cost.

The house itself was very beautiful; pink and white with old wooden shutters and ivy growing up the walls. A living room ran the entire length of the ground floor but all the windows folded back so that the interior could actually spill out into the garden. A dining-room table with seating for at least twenty people had been placed outside beneath a stone balcony that provided shade from the sun. A series of lawns rolled gently down the hillside with several terraces, an outdoor bar, a tennis court, a helicopter pad, and, of course, a king-sized swimming pool surrounded by sun loungers. There were flowers everywhere – lavender, sunflowers, and late-summer roses – filling the air with their scent.

The owners of the house were sitting at a table by the pool, eating the breakfast that had been brought to them by a servant, formally dressed in black trousers and a white shirt. Both of them had the same: a soft-boiled egg, a croissant, a plate of melon and yogurt, a cup of strong black coffee. They were identically dressed in white linen trousers and polo shirts. They were facing each other and, at a glance, it would have been easy enough to imagine that there was only one man there; that the other was his reflection. One was left-handed and the other right-handed and they often moved at the same time, which only added to the illusion.

Giovanni and Eduardo Grimaldi were twin brothers. They were exactly fifty years old. They had been born five seconds apart and often said that they had never been separated for any longer. Even as babies, they had been incredibly close. They had shared a pram. Otherwise, they screamed. They'd eaten at the same time or not at all. They'd slept in the same cot and always fallen asleep and woken up at the same moment. Only once – when they were six years old – had a nanny tried to separate them as a punishment for making too much noise. Nobody was quite sure what happened, but that same day the nanny fell out of a third-floor window. The two little boys were seen walking past her body, hand in hand. Both of them were smiling.

It was no surprise that violent death was part of their childhood. Their father was Carlo Grimaldi, one of the most notorious Mafia bosses in North America and the founder of a family that briefly controlled all the illegal gambling, the loan sharks, the drugs, and the protection rackets in Detroit. For ten years, Carlo was number three on the FBI's most-wanted list. His own parents were numbers one and two. But he had so many judges, policemen, and politicians working for him that nobody could arrest him. He wasn't just above the law. In Detroit, he was the law.

Despite their names, the twins were actually American. They had been born in Detroit and grew up in a huge house in Palmer Woods, one of the richest parts of the city. The house was a mansion built in an English style with black timber beams and no fewer than twelve chimneys. Every day they were driven to school by an armed chauffeur and they sat next to each other in every lesson. They never did any work. They understood very little. But their teachers were too nervous to give them a bad report. In fact, they came equal first in every subject. Even so, they left school as soon as they could and didn't bother with college.