‘Right,’ Lauren said. ‘So what does that mean for us?’
‘The Intelligence Minister will make a televised statement at eight-thirty this evening, putting the country on its highest state of alert. Every oil facility is going to be evacuated of all but a few essential staff. Dana and her terrorist buddies are going to be picked up when they try to set off in their boat. The Ark is going to be stormed and all the senior personnel will be detained for questioning.’
‘Stormed by who?’
‘The Australian military have had their Tactical Assault Group training for a surprise raid on the Ark ever since the link with Help Earth was first uncovered. They’re afraid that information will be destroyed, or that there’ll be a siege situation if they move in on the Ark by road. So they’re using a small airborne force: four helicopters, sixty TAG commandos and a dozen back-up personnel from ASIS. The aim is to land troops inside the Ark’s perimeter and take control before the Survivors can do anything to stop them.’
‘Sounds dodgy to me,’ Lauren said, grinding her palm against her forehead. ‘They’ve got armed guards in all six watchtowers, Rat says there are heaps of illegal weapons hidden inside the compound and there’s nothing going on around here. You’ll hear the choppers coming in from miles off.’
‘They’re experts, Lauren, we have to trust in their abilities. I’m sure they’ve put a lot of thought and training into it, but I’d still rather you and James weren’t around when it kicks off. The assault team’s ETA is around eight p.m. this evening, just after it gets dark. That gives you and James a little over two hours to get out.
‘I want you to meet up with him as soon as he gets back with the post. If you think it’s safe, I’d like you to try getting into Susie Regan’s office and making copies of any interesting looking data first. She’s bound to start destroying evidence when the helicopters approach.’
Lauren thought for a second. ‘I’ve only been up to the residence one time …’
‘Talk it through with James. If you think it’s too risky, don’t do it. My number one priority is to get you two out of harm’s way. Steal a car, bluff your way out through one of the turrets, or whatever, but get out. Radio me before you leave and I’ll pick you up somewhere nearby.’
‘Right,’ Lauren said, as the magnitude of what was going to happen over the next few hours began sinking in. The commando raid on the Ark and the links between Help Earth and the Survivors would be the top story on every TV news in the world.
‘I’ve never tried to get out before,’ Lauren said.‘But I don’t think it’ll be hard. There’s only a couple of guards on each turret. They’ll be easy enough to take out if we sneak up on them.’
‘Great and remember, safety first.’
‘Gotcha,’ Lauren said, taking a quick glance at her watch. ‘I expect I’ll be seeing you in a couple of hours.’
*
A cherub usually carries a few basic computer hacking tools, but the strict rules on personal possessions inside the Ark made it impossible to bring anything with them. As the end of her shift approached, Lauren sneaked into the stationery cupboard. She grabbed a spindle of blank CDs and headed into the post room with them.
‘You wanna head back to the school with me?’ Rat asked, giving Lauren a start as she turned to leave.
‘Haven’t you got to take the signature book across to Joel Regan?’
Rat shook his head as he picked up and inspected the spindle of CDs. ‘Apparently the old man’s taken a turn for the worse. Susie reckons he’s in no fit state to look at any letters.’
‘Right,’ Lauren said edgily.
‘What are these disks for?’ Rat asked.
‘Oh,’ Lauren said, stumbling for an excuse that she realised she ought to have thought up in advance. ‘I was supposed to take them to one of the accountants.’
‘Which one? I can run them over for you if you’re doing something in here.’
‘No, no,’ Lauren said, as she reached out to grab them back. ‘He’s gone off for the day now, anyway.’
Rat broke into a big smile. ‘You’re up to something, aren’t you?’
Lauren tutted. ‘Give over, I’m not up to anything.’
‘You can’t pull the wool over my eyes,’ Rat said. ‘Did I ever tell you that I have an IQ of one ninety-seven?’
‘Hmm, let me think,’ Lauren grinned, putting a finger over her lips and scowling as though she had to think hard. ‘I think you might have mentioned it thirty-six or thirty-seven times over the last couple of days.’
Rat looked offended as he put the tub of CDs back on the table. ‘Well I’m off for some grub. I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Not if I see you first,’ Lauren grinned.
She felt sad as she followed Rat out of the post room and walked off, pretending to have one last task to perform. Rat was fun to be with and she’d probably never see him again. She took a left behind a wooden partition and gave Rat a few seconds to clear off before doubling back to the post room.
There was a window set high in the wall behind a franking machine and she had to go up on tiptoes to look down into the vehicle compound below. The truck must have pulled up while Lauren was gone, because James and Ernie were already heading away. Lauren panicked as she realised that her brother would be out of sight by the time she walked down the corridor, through the fire door and down the metal staircase. There was no way she’d be able to contact him once he got into the school area, which was strictly segregated by sex.
Lauren grabbed the CDs and crammed them into the pocket on the front of her shorts. As she turned to run out, she remembered the chute used to drop bags of post down to the truck. The flap made a racket as she pulled it open, and she clambered on to a polished metal ramp that looked like an oversized playground slide.
The chute was dark, except for a few streaks of light breaking through the fat rubber strips dangling at the bottom. Nobody had bothered smoothing out the joins in the metal for the benefit of mail bags and Lauren’s bum juddered over each one as she clattered down. After pushing through the warm rubber strips, she sprinted into the subdued light under the canopy and yelled out:
‘James!’
He was a couple of hundred metres away, walking across a stretch of dirt alongside Ernie.
Lauren waved her arms and sprinted off towards her brother as he looked back curiously.
James realised Lauren probably had some information that wasn’t for Ernie’s ears, so he said a quick goodbye before jogging back towards his sister.
‘Hey,’ James grinned. ‘Are you OK? What’s going on?’
34. SILENCED
Dana helped Nina make vegetarian bolognese for dinner, but everyone was on edge and Barry was the only one who managed to eat more than half the food on his plate. Eve enthusiastically volunteered to do the washing up, but Barry just smiled.
‘Heroes don’t wash up,’ he grinned. ‘And we won’t be back here, so why bother?’
Nina reached out for the hands of the two girls sitting on either side of her. ‘I think we should all say a final prayer.’
Eve held out her hand to Barry and grinned at him. ‘Come on, and your other hand with Dana’s. Let’s make a circle to ward off devils.’
Barry looked unenthusiastic, but they all squeezed hands tightly and closed their eyes.
‘We thank you, Lord …’
Dana felt like she was floating as soon as she closed her eyes. She shut out Nina’s prayer and tried to calm herself down.
She’d radioed John from her bedroom before sitting down to eat. He’d said that ASIS would be tailing every move they made. They’d managed to sneak a tracking device underneath the Subaru and there were police officers stationed at every major harbour along a thirty-kilometre stretch of coast.
Ideally, Barry’s team would be intercepted as they boarded the boat and caught red-handed with the explosives and equipment required to complete the bombing. In the unlikely event that they managed t
o get the boat out, there were three Australian coastguard vessels and an Australian navy patrol boat ready to intercept them before they arrived at the LNG terminal.
All of that ought to have been reassuring, but the spaghetti still refused to settle in Dana’s stomach.
‘Amen,’ Eve and Nina said happily.
Dana’s hands were released and she joined in, ‘Amen.’
‘OK,’ Barry said, belching loudly as he stood up from the table. ‘Nice meal that, thanks Nina. It’s time we shipped out, so if you girls want to use the toilet or anything.’
‘I’m OK,’ Dana smiled. ‘Do you need any help loading our equipment into the car?’
Barry shook his head. ‘Everything on the boat is being set up by our support team. All we’ll have to do is climb aboard and set off.’
This was a disappointment to Dana, because loading up the boat would have given the police more time to move in and arrest them.
Barry looked at the two girls. ‘I need one of you to come with me and sort out a little problem. The other one can stay here and help Nina set up the incendiaries to burn out the house.’
‘Do you really think they’ll track us back here?’ Eve asked.
‘Can’t be too careful about leaving fingerprints and DNA behind,’ Barry said. ‘We’ll set the timer for twenty minutes after we leave. This house is ancient and it’s got a wooden frame. It should burn up nicely.’
Eve smiled at Dana. ‘I’ll help Nina, if that’s OK.’
Dana shrugged and looked at Barry. ‘Seems like I’m with you.’
While Nina and Eve grabbed petrol cans, detonators and a bundle of industrial explosive sticks from the garage, Dana followed Barry into the hallway. He was tall enough to touch the ceiling without a ladder and easily grabbed a handle to pull down the wooden flap over the loft hatch. He went up on tiptoes, reached inside the dark hole and pulled out an automatic pistol with a silencer screwed on the front.
Dana looked shocked as Barry took the clip off and reloaded to make sure it wasn’t jammed.
‘What’s that for?’
Barry broke into a big smile. ‘Got a little problem with some devils.’
*
‘I thought this was the one,’ Lauren groaned.
She stared into a small cupboard at the end of an underground corridor. There was condensation dripping off the ceiling and the tiles at their feet were curled up from the damp.
‘I remember the map Rat drew. I was sure this was the right one.’
James was starting to lose patience. ‘Admit it, we’re lost.’
‘We’re not lost. I know roughly where we are, I just think we took a wrong turn when we passed that room with all the stacking chairs in it.’
James looked at his watch. ‘Well it’s nearly half-six. We’ve been going for fifteen minutes already and we can’t afford to wander around here all night.’
‘I know, I’m not stupid,’ Lauren said crossly. ‘If you’d shut your gob for a minute and let me think … I came down the corridor from the office. Took two left turns, down the spiral staircase and then …’
James started walking.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m finding the first exit sign, heading upstairs and clearing out of here.’
‘I’m sure I can find it, James,’ Lauren said as she started to follow him. ‘I recognise all these corridors.’
‘That’s because they all look exactly the same.’
A door clanked open fifty metres in front of them and a man in a chef’s uniform emerged, pushing a metal trolley stacked with tins of mixed fruit. They backed up to the wall as he headed for the exit.
‘At least we’re not missing a good dinner,’ James grinned. ‘I can’t stand fruit cocktail.’
They gave the chef half a minute to clear out before moving off again, turning left when they reached the T-junction at the end of the tunnel.
Lauren glanced at her watch as they walked. ‘James, we’ve got time. Can’t you let us have one last go at finding it?’
James tutted. ‘Fine, but then we’re out of here.’
Rat’s voice sounded a few centimetres behind their ears. ‘I’m sure I can help if you tell me where you want to get to.’
‘Jeeeeeesus,’ James gasped, as he and Lauren spun around in a state of shock. ‘Where did you pop out from?’
They realised he’d emerged through a door they’d passed a few steps back.
‘I knew you were up to something,’ Rat said, looking at Lauren. ‘You left the chute open behind yourself in the post room.’
James rapidly considered his options. He could easily knock Rat unconscious and bundle him back into the room, but he didn’t want to hurt his friend and Rat’s usefulness was obvious.
‘If I tell you the truth, will you take us to Susie Regan’s office?’
Lauren looked anxiously at James. ‘You can’t.’
Telling someone about the existence of CHERUB was up with taking drugs and underage sex on the list of things that could get you expelled from CHERUB.
‘Can you take us?’ James repeated, deliberately ignoring his sister.
‘I know every corridor and secret passageway inside this joint,’ Rat said. ‘But if I get caught messing around in Susie Regan’s office, she’ll have me paddled and locked in a sweatbox for a month. So you’d better have a pretty good reason.’
‘We’re not going back to the school,’ James said. ‘We’re escaping, there’s a car picking us up. You can come along if you help us.’
‘Are you serious?’ Rat gasped, breaking into a massive smile. But his tone quickly turned circumspect. ‘But … I mean, why do we need to go into Susie’s office first?’
‘We don’t exactly have a lot of time on our hands,’ James said, as he desperately tried thinking up a plausible lie to explain their actions to Rat. ‘If you start walking, I’ll start talking.’
*
Barry cut out the back door, across the dried-out lawn and began taking huge strides through the overgrown scrubland behind the neighbours’ gardens. Dana had to take a little leap every four or five steps to keep up.
‘Keep your eyes open,’ Barry said. ‘I’ve seen a few snakes back here since we moved in.’
Dana could have done without that particular piece of information. A big man with a loaded pistol was enough to worry about, without poisonous reptiles getting thrown in.
‘Are you squeamish?’ Barry asked.
‘Not really,’ Dana shrugged. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I got mugged in Hong Kong a couple of months back. Freakish thing: little scrap of a kid surprised me with a knuckleduster. But when I came around I’d been laid out in the recovery position and I was trussed up all neatly, like no kid ever would have done. I think the security services were on my tail and they used the mugging as an opportunity to search my room.’
Dana allowed herself a tiny smile. Barry – like hundreds of criminals before him – hadn’t even considered that it was the child mugger who’d been the intelligence agent.
‘I realised they’d put a tail on me when I arrived back in Brisbane a few days later. I thought I’d shaken them off, but it looks like I was wrong.’
‘What makes you think that?’ Dana asked, struggling to keep cool.
‘I grew up around here; an old school mucker works the radio at the local cop shop. I drop him a few bucks if he gets wind of anything suspicious around here. Late last night a routine patrol spotted a couple of guys sitting in a blue pick-up truck. Cops stopped and asked the dudes what they were up to. They pulled out ASIS IDs and told the cops to mind their own.’
Dana acted innocent. ‘What’s ASIS?’
‘Australian Secret Intelligence Service. It’s damned lucky she told me, ’cos this whole operation could have been blown out.’
Barry stopped walking and crouched down, craning his neck into the gap between two abandoned houses.
‘You see that red Holden?’
Dana pe
eked out at a bulky red saloon car parked on a driveway. The windows were blacked out, but the one on the passenger side was two-thirds open and she could see a man and a woman sitting inside. It was a clumsy position for a stake-out, but the Northern Territory wasn’t exactly a hotbed of criminal activity and Dana suspected that an operation on this scale would be using every available officer, experienced or otherwise.
Dana realised the two officers’ lives were in her hands. But what could she do? Barry was a powerfully built man who’d demonstrated advanced combat skills during his hotel room encounter with Bruce. He was in a high state of readiness, with the gun cocked and loaded in his hand.
Barry grabbed a Motorola out of his shorts and dialled the house. ‘Nina, I’m in position. Are you ready to move?’
‘All set to burn in fifteen,’ Nina confirmed. ‘We’re on our way out the door.’
Barry switched off the phone and handed it to Dana.
‘Take this, walk around to the driver’s side of the Holden and tap on the window. Try sounding upset. Your boyfriend just kicked you out of the house, your phone is dead and you want to borrow theirs to call a cab. That should be enough to distract them for the few seconds I need to get in close to their car. OK?’
‘Right,’ Dana said, unable to control her quaking voice. ‘Are you going to kill them?’
‘What else can I do?’
Dana tried thinking, but her brain felt like a cotton wool ball, clogged up by the sense of dread.
‘I can’t do this, Barry,’ she said, not having to put much effort into faking a sob.
‘There’s no time for games here,’ Barry said, his voice turning nasty as he pointed the gun at Dana’s chest. ‘You will do exactly what I tell you. If you mess this up, the first bullet I shoot will be going in your back. Now stand up and move.’
Barry shoved Dana forwards, almost sprawling her in the dirt. If it had been Nina, or even a less imposing man, she would have made a grab for the gun. But all she could do was walk dumbly between the houses towards the car. Everything seemed to go slowly. Each time her trainer crunched in the gravel and each swing of her arm took forever. Her skin felt boiling hot, as if she could already feel the bullet that would tear through her if she made a wrong move.