Triads (Alex Rider)

"This was a man who had been prepared to chase him over a thirty-foot wave to hunt him down"

- The Triads' personality

The Triads are recurring villains in the Alex Rider books.

Biography
The Triads first appear in the book Skeleton Key when MI6 agent Crawly recruits Alex to investigate a break-in at the Wimbledon tennis. The Triads are employing one of their agents, a "little brother" to hack the system and make the bets on the players most likely to win. The Triad agent is drugging the player expected to lose with a mild drug which makes one's body unresponsive. Fortunately, Alex follows the Triad man, finds the man about to kill him with a fork lift, and fights the man, finally knocking him out amidst a refridgerator full of famous Wimbledon strawberries.

After this humiliation, the Triads meet again, and decide to send one of their men down to Cornwall, where Alex is on holiday with the Pleasures, and the Triads take revenge on the humiliation and their agent's imprisonment by hunting Alex across the Cribber wave which comes to England every few years. The man hunts Alex down on a jet ski and almost kills him, but Alex knocks him off the ski and the man is imprisoned, after being almost drowned.

The persistent, and furious Triad decide to kill Alex permanently, and they will return to England and may threaten Brookland school, but MI6 come to Alex's rescue and decide to send him down to Skeleton Key island to protect him, but send him to what appears to be World War Three, because General Sarov buys uranium from The Salesman and worries the CIA.

MI6 threaten the Triads to leave Alex alone and they eventually do so. The Triads are the cover Harry Bulman uses to hunt Alex down in the Chelsea graveyard.

The Triads are later mentioned in Ark Angel as one of Nikolei Drevin's financial backers.

Trivia
The Triad interestingly appear in The Power of Five as protagonists, rather than antagonists, but they seem unrelated.