| “ | If you want a volunteer, I'll be happy to fire the bullet myself | „ |
| ~ Brendan volunteers to kill Alex Rider |
Brendan Chase is a recurring antagonist in the Alex Rider novels by Anthony Horowitz. He sits on the executive board of SCORPIA.
Origins
Ironically, Brendan was, employed by the CIA and he was a notorious gambler and drinker. One day he got so drunk that he stole $50,000,000 of the CIA's money and flew off on his private jet. He met other criminals such as Julia Rothman, Winston Yu and Zeljan Kurst in Paris in the late 1980s to finalize the foundings of the Sabotage, Corruption, Intelligence and Assassination Bureau, which became known as SCORPIA.
Biography
Scorpia
Brendan Chase appears (unnamed) in the fifth Alex Rider book, Scorpia. He presides over the SCORPIA meeting as "an unnamed Australian." He likes the plan to poison thousands of English schoolkids (remarkably similar to Herod Sayle's plan) and he watches Julia Rothman kill retiring agent Max Grendel.
Snakehead
Brendan Chase returns in the seventh book. He attends a meeting at a funeral home in London (dressed casually in the Australian style) where he discusses various ways of killing the politicians and celebrities on Reef Island in the Pacific to stop their message of world peace and ending starvation. There are numerous assassination theories proposed, but finally, Winston Yu gets to use his untraceable (non nuclear) bomb.
Scorpia Rising
In the final book, Brendan Chase returns. Here, his backstory and name are finally revealed, as an intelligence agent who deserted his agency. He is infuriated by Alex's constant successes and ability to survive repeated assassinations. Desperate to put SCORPIA back on the map, Brendan personally volunteers to kill Alex himself. He "expresses the plan with perfect clarity" and impresses Zeljan Kurst. However, when Brendan is told forgery is out of the question in order to fool MI6, he asks how it will be done then. Zeljan tells him that to fool Alan Blunt they will need to be straightforward and he orders defective agent Levi Kroll murdered.
Aftermath
At the climax of the disastrous Operation Horseman, when leader Abdul al-Aziz Razim is killed and his men arrested, SCORPIA is eventually tracked down. Its chairman Zeljan Kurst is immediately arrested (as MI6 had been tracking Kurst since the beginning of the book) and this leads to the other leaders' arrests, including Brendan Chase.