Darius Sayle: Revenge can be good, because in a few hours, at the science museum, my old friend the Prime Minister, he's gonna press a button and you know what's gonna happen? That button's gonna connect all the Stormbreakers on my wireless network. And at the same moment, it's gonna release a virus straight into the classes packed with British schoolchildren.
Alex Rider: You're going to kill thousands of innocent people.
Darius Sayle: Oh, no. Of course not. I'm gonna kill millions.
Alex Rider: You're going to kill thousands of innocent people.
Darius Sayle: Oh, no. Of course not. I'm gonna kill millions.
Alex Rider is a Teen Superspy who's faced many dangerous villains over the years, with these being the worst of the worst.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned
Literature
- Stormbreaker: Herod Sayle is a multimillionaire who holds a petty grudge against England and the Prime Minister. After being bullied incessantly as a child and teenager by English schoolchildren, Sayle planned to strike back by creating a smallpox outbreak that would kill hundreds of thousands of children. Using his new Stormbreaker computers, Sayle hid small vials of smallpox into the devices so that they would be released once children turned on the computers. When Alex Rider's uncle, Ian, found out about this, Sayle had him murdered. Later on, after Sayle discovers Alex was working undercover for MI6, Sayle instructed one of his lackeys to torture Alex to death with knives. Once Sayle's plans are foiled by Alex, Sayle kidnaps Alex and almost shoots him to death, all while promising that he'll resurface in the future to strike back at England again.
- Skeleton Key: Conrad is a freelance terrorist and General Alexei Sarov's most trusted lackey. A former bomber who blew up his school and later committed terrorist acts across the globe, Conrad began to work for Sarov shortly after he was injured in an accident. After Sarov comes up with a plan to take over Russia by setting off a nuclear bomb and dismantling most of Europe, Conrad wastes no time helping Sarov get the materials he needs, killing anyone who interferes with their plans. Once Sarov kidnaps Alex Rider, Conrad tries to have him killed on numerous occasions, despite Sarov's demands to keep the boy alive. While Sarov wanted to bring Russia to a more stable country with him as its leader, Conrad only helped Sarov for the sake of getting rich, not caring that millions would perish in the process.
- Scorpia: Julia Rothman is an executive board member of Scorpia. Under orders from a client to spoil the special relationship between America and Britain, Rothman infects every schoolchild in London with nanites containing cyanide, planning to make claims that she knows can't be satisfied and make a less extreme demand to America with the same consequence knowing that they will meet them after that. To demonstrate the weapon and show that she is not bluffing, Rothman kills a completely separate group of football players without giving them a chance to be saved. She also manipulates Alex into joining Scorpia by getting him to think his father worked for them and was killed by MI6 when it was the other way around. Rothman is also an awful boss who will frequently murder her own men for failure and kills a colleague via venomous scorpions when he objects to her plan. When confronted by Alex, Rothman shrugs off the thousands of deaths that will occur, all for the sake of money.
- Scorpia Rising: Abdul-Aziz Al-Razim, better known as just Razim, is another agent of Scorpia, and is affiliated with them purely to slake his sadistic curiosities. A cold, unfeeling sociopath since his history of violence in his youth, Razim sold out his own parents and sister to Saddam Hussein before joining Scorpia. Come his involvement in Operation Horseman, Razim plans to blackmail Britain into handing over the Elgin Marbles, or else defame the country by revealing the contents of the Horseman file, ultimately to assassinate the Prime Minister of England and throw the country into a war. Fascinated by pain, Razim routinely tortures countless innocents to death in perverse "experiments", in an attempt to create a measurement for pain, initially claiming it for the sake of science but likely simply to amuse himself more than anything. When Razim captures Alex, Razim forces him to watch his mentor and guardian Jack Starbright blown up—in truth handing her off to the Grimaldi twins but keeping the emotional stab to Alex all the same, while casually adding the boy's emotional pain was so great, he may have to create a second measurement. From there on, Razim tries to have the US Secretary of State assassinated, framing Alex so that he'll be shot dead. Lacking the scale of previous antagonists but trumping all of them in sheer, frightening sadism, Razim makes his mark even in the dark world of Alex Rider as Alex's most personal foe.
- Season 1: Dr. Hugo Greif was in the past a research scientist in the field of cloning, before vanishing and showing up many years later. Greif admired several dictators, especially Adolf Hitler, and would found the Point Blanc academy with the intention of taking over the entire world. To do so, Greif would market his academy as a place for troubled teens, only grabbing the children of rich influential industrialists and replacing them with clones of himself surgically altered to look like the teens, killing the parents so they could never discover the swap. Greif locked the teens inside a basement in the academy and had them tortured for information that the clones could use, with many of them going insane as a result, with Greif planning to kill all of the teens once they were no longer useful to him. Greif's final plan was to wipe out 99% of the entire human population so only the strong could survive to curb overpopulation and create a "better" world for him to rule over.
- Season 3: Julia Rothman presents herself as a polite, wealthy art patron, when in truth she's the effective leader of Scorpia. After having Scorpia back the dangerous plots of Dr. Greif and Damian Cray, Julia decides that Scorpia should carry out its own plan to assert their dominance. To this end, Julia devises Operation Invisible Sword, a way of covertly killing anyone in the world they desire. She then gives the UK deliberately unreasonable demands while threatening to kill hundreds of thousands of people if they aren't met, killing a football team as a demonstration. After this, Julia tries to kill everyone in the city of Bath to plunge Britain into chaos as an example to the world so she can threaten other countries with the same fate. Julia also takes an interest in Alex Rider, convincing him to join Scorpia like his father and that the Department had murdered him, when in truth Julia had him killed herself for being a mole from the Department, and she only wants to bring Alex in as revenge against his father and see the look on his face when she kills him.
Stormbreaker & Related Works
- Film: Darrius Sayle plots to use his Stormbreaker computers to release a deadly virus to kill millions of schoolchildren all over Britain, in retaliation for being bullied at school as a child for being a foreigner. When he discovers that security guard Ian Rider is actually a spy sent to find out about his plan, he has him killed by Yassen Gregorovich, and when Ian's nephew Alex is caught as well, Darius has him thrown into his aquarium tank to be killed by his pet man o' war. When the control to activate the Stormbreakers at the launch party is destroyed, he tries to activate them himself with an override, and tries to kill Alex and his school crush Sabina Pleasure when they try to stop him.
- Nintendo DS game'': Darrius Sayle is a wealthy businessman who plans on getting revenge for being bullied as a child on all of the schoolchildren in Britain. Sayle created the new Stormbreaker computers and donated one to every school in the country, so that when the Prime Minister activates them they'll release a deadly virus on all the children. When MI6 agent Ian Rider discovers the truth, Sayle has Yassen Gregorivich kill him and has Yassen execute one of his men for dropping a box. When Alex stops the activation, Sayle tries to kill Alex and activate the Stormbreakers himself.
