i dont any rights to the alex rider bookds, or this story, it belongs to TheUlmuri
Part VI: Operation Stage II: Recon
The spec-ops team started to sow the beginnings of conflict a month-and-a-half after their arrival, each member beginning to slowly spread whispers among their contacts concerning the clandestine objectives of the others. They played off the secret fears and desires of each member state, alluding to nebulous plans to gain power by targeting rivals, that could be neither satisfactorily confirmed or denied, nor traced back to their source. Out of the growing rumor mill, the team would select a few of the created plots to focus on. By covertly bringing a few of the rumors into actuality and being sure that the incident would incriminate certain parties, they would create discord among the terrorist groups, playing off the fickleness of alliances made in crime.
Alex was usually the one to carry out the culmination of the plots that had been selected for actualization. His position granted him freer movement around the CUCN building without suspicion than the others who had embedded themselves within strategically important offices, and his authority and temper would keep people from asking questions anyway. This objective was helped along by a multitude of miniaturized high explosives and other devices that had been supplied by Smithers, allowing Alex to place them in the appropriate offices with out suspicion being directed at him.
Two months into the active stage of the operation, the team was once again gathered in the safe house's small kitchen. Alex had finished off his final search of the CUCN building only hours before and found nothing suspicious aside from a single door placed at the end of a deserted corridor on the first level, though its purpose had been reasoned out earlier that day. There had been several tense moments as he often used his searches to lay the groundwork for the team's plots, but the most nerve-wracking experiences had occurred when he had reached the sixth floor.
Alex had met with Kuznetsov face to face as part of his intelligence gathering objective, learning more about Scorpia's plot to kill him and Sabina's general location. He was able to puzzle together a respectable amount of information from Kuznetsov's allusions, learning that the attached building housed Scorpia's base of operations and was where all of the real decisions concerning the objectives of the N-USSR were made. The attached building also seemed to house living quarters for the highest-ranking officials and was the most likely place that Sabina would be kept. Alex had filed away all the new knowledge that he had gleaned to contemplate at a later time, but he was now certain that the attached building was the "command wing" that the General had alluded to on his second day.
While he was on Kuznetsov's home turf, Alex had to work harder than ever to keep his cover firmly in place. The top level was swarming with Scorpia assassins and some of his most formidable enemies from other criminal organizations; the chances that he would be discovered were quite high.
The meeting was particularly stressful since it forced Alex to dance the fine line between giving the Russian enough viable intelligence and advice to make his cover believable without being detrimental to his objective and the countries he and his team were working to protect. The situation had also pushed his cover to the limits; he had to worry about the threat posed by meeting people who knew him well from past operations as Alex Rider or another alias, rather than Vukasin "the Dragon" Pedragović.
Alex's disguise changed his features enough that the likeness between the Dragon and himself was not apparent unless one looked for it. However it was far from impenetrable and there had been moments where things had been touch-and-go. At one point, he had come face to face with Scorpia executive board member Vladimir Milanković when the Serbian had stepped into Kuznetsov's office for a few words, and in that moment it had taken everything he had to keep the cold, ruthless demeanor of the Dragon in tact. His fervently hoped that his disguise would hold up to the man's intense scrutiny, and there were a few tense moments when Milanković seemed to be suspicious of his identity. A nebulous recognition seemed to float just out of reach in the terrorist's mind, visible as a fleeting gleam in his eyes, but the Serbian executive board member had shaken it off; after all, there were logical reasons why Alex and the Dragon were similar in cold personality and fighting ability-with both of them entering the world of violence and deceit at such young ages, there were bound to be noticeably similar effects.
