‘Mason LeConte was a hero of the French resistance during World War Two, fighting alongside our founder Charles Henderson.1 He later became one of the first batch of CHERUB agents. He recently celebrated his ninety-second birthday, but he still puts in two shifts a week at the vehicle shop here on campus.’
As Mason shook Ewart’s hand and settled into a chair in front of the console, an AHHH sound began rippling through the crowd. A cute boy and girl in red CHERUB shirts were coming up the stairs on to the stage.
‘They’ve been allowed to stay up late,’ Ewart joked, as the two five-year-olds came on stage looking spooked. ‘Joining the oldest surviving CHERUB agent, two agents of the future. Freddie and Sophia.’
As the two kids shyly stood at the detonator panel at either side of Mason, Ewart picked up an old-skool wired army telephone and spoke to the engineers.
‘I have the all-clear,’ Ewart announced dramatically, as cheers and whoops came out of a crowd close to a thousand strong. ‘Let’s have a nice loud countdown from ten, nine …’
‘Eight,’ James chanted, as he slid an arm around Kerry’s back.
‘Seven, six,’ as Rat did the same to Lauren.
Ryan held hands with Ning and gave her a smile on five.
‘Four, three,’ Kyle shouted, as he remembered the day he arrived in the main building at nine years old. Scared out of his wits.
‘Two,’ everyone yelled, as floodlights illuminated the glassless hulk of the main building.
‘One.’
Mason, Freddie and Sophia pressed their buttons on the detonator panel. The first of five sharp cracks erupted, starting at the bottom and working their way up seven floors. For a half-second it seemed as if something had gone wrong, but a low rumble began to build and everyone screamed and cheered as the front façade collapsed, followed by the floors behind, with the side walls coming in last.
‘Holy crap!’ James shouted, as the roar became deafening and a billowing cloud of dust erupted in all directions.
As the ground rumbled, banks of powerful hoses began misting the perimeter where the main building had stood, to help keep the dust under control. But even with water and nets in place, the crowd tasted grit in the air as the last defiant strut buckled. Then stunned silence became a cheer of relief, accompanied by a wailing all clear siren.
* * *
1 See the Henderson’s Boys series for more information on how CHERUB began. week at the vehicle shop here on campus.’
7. LYNX
Four days later
James eyed himself in the mirror. He pulled up the tatty white CHERUB T-shirt he was wearing and clenched his stomach muscles, struggling to make any kind of six-pack. He needed to eat less and exercise more, and decided to start by just having coffee for breakfast.
Since he was a fairly junior staff member, James’ first-floor apartment wasn’t huge and didn’t have the luxury of a view over campus. But on the other hand, it was modern and rent free, comprising a bedroom, shower room, walk-in wardrobe and a combined kitchen and lounge. He’d added a few personal touches, including a large photo of his late mother, and black and white photos of retired Arsenal players.
After popping a pod into his Nespresso machine, James pulled a shirt up his arms, then sat at his glass dining-table and flipped up the lid of his laptop. There were fifteen e-mails since he’d finished work the previous night, but before he got to any of them he noticed his mobile was vibrating and saw John Jones on caller display.
‘John,’ James said, faking enthusiasm. It felt like he spent half his waking hours with his boss’ voice in his ear.
‘You’re not in your office,’ John noted.
James scowled. ‘I didn’t finish work until gone ten last night.’
John laughed. ‘I’m not having a go, pal. I appreciate how hard you’ve been working these past couple of months with so many other controllers away on missions. You’ll be going up a couple of notches when the pay review comes around in Feb.’
‘Really?’ James said, smiling at the prospect of extra cash.
‘Gotta keep pace with that banker-bonus girlfriend of yours,’ John joked. ‘Anyhow, I’ve been nagging various people and Birmingham is good to go.’
‘Seriously?’ James grinned, relishing an escape from campus bureaucracy to head off on a mission.
‘I’m just about to send through an e-mail with all of the details of the agreement.’
As soon as John hung up, James pocketed phone and keys and charged for the exit. He was halfway out the door when he had a realisation. After opening a shoe cupboard just inside the door, he pulled off the shoes he usually wore in his office and grabbed a trashed pair of combat boots, clad in dry mud.
Rather than leave mud flakes down the hallway and stairs, he kept the boots hooked over his fingers until he was out through the revolving door of the staff building. It was a school day, so the paved walkway through Campus Village’s low-rise accommodation was deserted, apart from a cleaner picking up litter and leaves with an electric handcart.
The dining-hall was mostly empty. A circle of gossiping red-shirt carers, taking breakfast now that lessons had started, and kids who didn’t have school because they were either preparing for or recovering from missions.
James grabbed bottles of orange, sandwiches and two packaged slices of carrot cake, and got a dirty look from one of the catering staff because he hadn’t quite walked all the dry mud off his boots.
James found an electric cart and rode it across campus. He had to take a circuitous route, because a large area was cordoned off where army bulldozer crews were working to clear the rubble of the main building.
The cart was only designed for tarmac or damp grass, so James had to abandon his ride when he got to a wooded area near the back of campus. It had been a wet autumn and he was glad he’d picked the boots as he walked the last five hundred metres, down a path regularly churned by kids on training runs.
After using his fingerprint to enter the gates of the training compound, James found Leon and Daniel Sharma, stood to attention in a muddy clearing, dressed in combat boots and filthy CHERUB uniform. The drill instructor had planted a remote camera in the mud, so that he’d know if they moved.
‘You look bloody terrible,’ James said, as he noticed the boys’ red eyes and mud-caked hair.
They didn’t answer and instead looked anxiously at the camera sticking out of the mud.
‘Did Capstick say why you’ve been made to wait here?’ James asked.
‘Nope,’ Leon said.
James rustled a plastic bag and pulled out a sandwich. ‘Hungry?’
The twins’ eyes lit up, but instructors had been tricking and bullying the pair for a week, so they didn’t take anything at face value. James flung the bag at Daniel, who ripped out a chicken and bacon sandwich. Leon seemed slightly miffed that the other sandwich was cheese and pickle, but still inhaled it in a few bites, despite muddy fingers.
‘Thank you,’ Leon said, as he guzzled his orange juice. ‘So good.’
‘Safe to say you’re keen to get out of here?’ James noted.
‘Yes, sir,’ the twins agreed.
‘Call me James. Fortunately for you guys, I was about to offer you a mission when you decided to go vigilante on Britain’s paedo population. It’s taken a hell of a lot of arm twisting, but we’ve reached agreement with Zara Asker. If you accept the mission I offer …’
‘We accept,’ Daniel blurted.
James smiled. ‘I haven’t told you what it is yet.’
‘Anything’s better than this,’ Leon added. ‘Drugs, terrorists, bring ’em on!’
‘The bad news is that you’re not off the hook,’ James explained. ‘Your punishments will be suspended, and your sixty days’ heavy drill will be reduced by one day for every two that you serve on the mission.’
‘How long is the mission?’
‘Two weeks,’ James said. ‘Three if you’re lucky.’
‘Any chance it could spiral??
?? Leon asked.
‘A hundred and four days would suit us best,’ Daniel added. ‘Wipe out the rest of our heavy drill.’
James smirked as the twins made simultaneous starts on their carrot cake. ‘I’ll need the pair of you in my office at noon. So get back to your rooms and scrub up.’
‘Sorry,’ James said, running into his office holding a red plastic pouch. ‘It’s chaos around here. You’re not the only ones who can’t wait to get off campus.’
Leon and Daniel stood in front of James’ desk. The pair now wore neatly pressed CHERUB uniform, comprising lightweight black boots, combat trousers and navy CHERUB logo T-shirts. Their hair was damp from a shampooing and there was a powerful aroma of Axe body spray.
‘Sit,’ James said, pointing to a couple of chairs that needed to be dragged across. ‘What is it about teenage boys and body spray? You just need a tiny amount. You’ve made my office smell like a Thai brothel.’
‘Sorry,’ Daniel said.
But Leon grinned. ‘Do you have much experience with Thai brothels?’
James raised one eyebrow, as he pulled two ruggedised Android tablets out of the red pouch and handed them across. ‘If you want to go back to heavy drill, be my guest.’
As the boys leaned over to grab identical tablets, James noticed that the quick scrub up hadn’t extended as far as the twins getting all the mud out from under their nails, and Leon’s right ear seemed to have a leaf stuck in it.
‘I’m assuming you’ve both seen one of these before,’ James said. ‘Each unit has a mission briefing and a bunch of background files. You can access the tablets using your agent number and thumbprint. Once you accept the mission, the data will be transferred into your personal data cloud and be accessible using the secure area of your smartphones.’
‘What happened to paper briefings?’ Leon asked.
‘Too much risk of being carried off site,’ James explained. ‘All agent phones and laptops are set up to be remotely wiped if they’re lost or stolen. I have to go man the control room while the duty controller takes his twenty-minute break. So, you guys stay here, read this through and I’ll answer any questions when you get back.’
James charged out, then back again briefly to grab his phone off the desk as the twins started to read.
8. SKIP
**CLASSIFIED**
MISSION BRIEFING:
FOR LEON SHARMA AND DANIEL SHARMA
DO NOT PRINT, COPY, OR MAKE NOTES
MISSION GOALS
This mission has been given a dual classification, as an opportunity to recruit a CHERUB agent and to potentially gain insight into possible extremist activity in the Sandy Green area of Birmingham.
SANDY GREEN
Located 2km from the centre of Birmingham, Sandy Green is one of the most deprived areas of the UK. Over half of all children live in poverty and youth unemployment runs at more than 50 per cent. 70 per cent of the population is non-white, with Muslims forming the largest ethnic group.
While the vast majority of Muslims in Sandy Green have no sympathy for or connection to radical Islamic groups, the combination of poverty and unemployment means that the intelligence service regards Sandy Green as an area where there is a high probability of disaffected youths becoming involved with radical Islamic groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic State.
MISSION TARGET – OLIVER LAKSHMI
Oliver Lakshmi was born in 2004 and recently turned twelve. He is the son of an unknown restaurant worker, who is believed to have returned to India, and a mother who died following a drug-related stabbing in 2007. Since this time, Oliver has lived in a number of care homes and foster placements.
Oliver has been assessed with an IQ of 150, which places him in the cleverest one per cent of the population. Despite his intelligence, Oliver has been bored and disruptive at school, frequently bunking off. He has been involved in a number of serious incidents, including assaulting another boy at a care home and seriously injuring a teacher with clay modelling tools during an art lesson.
He has been in a number of fights and after being expelled from two secondary schools in Year Seven, he recently started Year Eight and now attends a Fresh Start programme designed to help disruptive pupils before eventually reintegrating them into normal classes.
Oliver has difficulty making friends with people his own age, and often describes them as dumb. He seeks out older kids for companionship, who he tries to impress with elaborate lies and various forms of bad behaviour, including theft from shops and breaking into cars.
THE ARSON
In April 2016, Oliver and two older boys burgled a flat in the Longsight area of Birmingham. During the burglary, a man returned home from work and confronted the boys. All three boys got away, but not before one of the older boys was grabbed and severely beaten by the householder.
Two nights later, Oliver and the boy who’d been beaten sought revenge. The pair poured petrol through the flat’s letterbox and set it alight. The householder was out working a night shift, but his wife was badly burned while rescuing two small children, and the family dog died. The flat was gutted, and there was serious fire and water damage to four other homes before the blaze was controlled. Property damage was estimated at £350,000.
Scared of a lengthy spell locked up in a young offender institution with much older boys, Oliver told local police that he would give them information about a radical Islamic group operating in the Sandy Green area in return for being let off the arson charges.
The investigating officers had previously arrested Oliver for a number of minor crimes and picked him up when truanting from school. Knowing that Oliver was smart and had a tendency to invent elaborate lies, the officers logged his offer and followed procedure by forwarding it to MI5. However, nobody took the eleven-year-old’s claim seriously.
Oliver’s fourteen-year-old accomplice received a four-year sentence for the arson attack. Since Oliver was barely old enough to face criminal charges, he was sent for a detailed psychiatric evaluation, after which he was ordered to stay at a secure confinement facility. This would enable him to stay in his local area and carry on going to school, but ensure that he was closely monitored and subject to a strict curfew outside of school hours.
After four months of relatively good behaviour, Oliver has recently had his curfew and most other secure confinement conditions suspended.
THE ARREST
In July 2016, police arrested fifteen- and seventeen-year-old brothers in the Sandy Green area, acting on intelligence from MI5. The boys were linked to a series of armed petrol station robberies, the money from which was donated to a radical Islamic group.
When the teenagers’ bedrooms were searched, evidence was found that the boys had begun saving up to run away to North Africa and receive military training from a radical Islamic terror group. The boys are currently being held in custody, awaiting trial for the robberies.
When they were brought in for arrest, one officer on duty remembered that the younger boy had been caught truanting with Oliver Lakshmi the previous summer. This suggests the possibility that Oliver really might have some kind of information on radical Islamic groups.
MISSION PLAN
Daniel and Leon Sharma will move into the privately run Nurtrust Care Residence (NCR) in the Sandy Green area, with James Adams as mission controller. The twins’ role is to befriend Oliver Lakshmi and ascertain whether he has knowledge of Islamic terror groups, while simultaneously monitoring his behaviour to see if he will make a decent CHERUB recruit.
If information on radical Islamic groups is unearthed, an assessment will be made on whether to try and infiltrate the group, or to pass information on to the intelligence service and withdraw.
NOTE: ON THE 4TH DAY OF AUGUST 2016 THIS MISSION PLAN WAS PASSED UNANIMOUSLY BY THE CHERUB ETHICS COMMITTEE, ON CONDITION THAT ALL AGENTS UNDERSTAND THE FOLLOWING:
This mission has been classified MEDIUM RISK. All agents are reminded of their right to refuse to undertake this mission and to wi
thdraw from it at any time.
9. ARRIVAL
James wanted to bring his motorbike, so he bent the under-age agents should only drive if they have to rule and let Leon and Daniel take a Focus ST with blacked-out windows from campus to Sandy Green.
James had rented a small flat above a Morrisons Local and had already been downstairs, sworn at the self-checkouts and made a brew by the time the twins tramped upstairs carrying some of his luggage.
‘You can’t park for shit,’ Leon teased.
James looked down from a bare-bulb landing, with the apartment door open. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘We parked the Focus in the lot out back, like you told us,’ Leon explained, as he crossed the threshold into the grimly furnished studio. Campus staff had already delivered most of James’ clothes and a pair of aluminium flight cases containing communication and surveillance equipment. ‘This nutter tried to reverse park and it was a total fiasco.’
Daniel tutted. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘Did anyone see you?’ James asked warily.
‘Just some guy in a white van hooting,’ Leon said, grinning.
‘Cuppa?’ James asked. ‘Nurtrust is only a couple of hundred metres from here, so you’ll need to be discreet when you visit me.’
After tea and chocolate digestives, James helped the twins take the remaining luggage out of the Ford and sent them off to Nurtrust. Leon pressed a buzzer on a barred door, set between a betting shop and a local council office. The voice through the intercom was indecipherable, but he pushed when it buzzed and the pair found themselves in a graffitied hallway that smelled of cleaning product.
There was an office at the top of a staircase and a Sikh man in jacket and jeans greeted the pair at the top.