YMMV / Scorpia Rising

• Complete Monster: 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.

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