‘Come on, son,’ he said gently. ‘It can’t be all that bad.’
‘He has emotional problems,’ Hassam explained politely, trying to sound like a decent parent despite stinging eyes and a huge welt where the club had struck his face. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’
‘You’ve got to believe me,’ Fahim shouted, looking at the golfers as his father found his feet. ‘Don’t let him touch me. Someone call the cops.’
‘Fahim Bin Hassam?’ a woman shouted.
All eyes turned towards a pair of policewomen sprinting out of the clubhouse. They carried assault rifles and wore full protective gear, including Kevlar helmets and visors over their faces.
‘Over there,’ a lady golfer shouted as the magnitude of what was occurring rippled through the crowd.
Fahim felt an instant of relief, but as the crowd focused on the approaching cops, Hassam pulled a knife from inside his jacket. He grabbed Fahim by his collar and put the serrated blade to his throat.
‘Stay back,’ Hassam shouted. ‘Lower your weapons or I’ll slit him open.’
As Hassam trembled, the metal teeth nicked the skin around Fahim’s throat. The golfers were all taking refuge inside the clubhouse, leaving a stand-off between Hassam and the two armed policewomen.
‘Put the knife down,’ the taller of the two officers ordered, eyeing Hassam through her scope. ‘If you make me shoot, I guarantee I won’t miss.’
But Hassam knew the officers couldn’t risk firing while the blade was so close to his son’s throat and he started backing into the shadows beneath the willow trees.
‘It’s over, Dad,’ Fahim choked, as his father dragged him backwards. ‘Let me go.’
‘I won’t rot in prison,’ Hassam whispered coldly, backing up to a gnarled trunk. ‘If they shoot me down I’m taking you with me.’
*
Muna leaned out of the back gate of number sixteen. A wave of panic hit her as she saw the stand-off between her brother-in-law and the two armed officers less than fifty metres away.
‘What’s happening, Mummy?’ Jala asked, as the seven-year-old tried getting a look for herself.
‘Back,’ Muna said firmly. She pulled the metal gate shut and gave her daughter a shove towards the house. ‘Run inside, pick up your things. We’re leaving.’
‘But what about Daddy and Fahim and Uncle Hassam?’ the little girl asked as her mother rested a hand against her back to make her hurry.
‘We’ll all meet up later,’ Muna said impatiently. Her mind was churning. She didn’t know what to do or where to go, but she realised she had to clear out. Her main hope was that Asif would call back and arrange a place to meet.
As Muna scooped her keys and mobile off the kitchen cabinet, Jala began shuffling her card game back into its cardboard packet.
‘No time for that,’ Muna said, grabbing her daughter’s wrist.
‘But it’s my favourite,’ Jala whined as her mother dragged her towards the front door.
‘We’ll buy another one, sweetie. It’s not safe here now, we have to leave.’
Muna unlocked her Volvo with the plipper and walked around to the driver’s side as Jala opened the front passenger door and clambered through to her booster seat in the back. But Muna froze when she discovered the flattened front tyre.
She cursed in Arabic before crouching down to try and see what had caused the wheel to deflate. Jala screamed as she saw the guns coming towards them through the bushes.
‘Hands in the air,’ an armed cop shouted, straddling the low wall between the houses. His partner came out from behind a hedge on the other side. ‘Do you have any weapons?’
Muna didn’t answer but Jala screamed, ‘Don’t kill my mummy,’ from inside the car.
‘No weapons,’ Muna shouted, holding her hands out wide as the cops stopped walking a metre behind her.
‘Who else is inside the house?’
‘Nobody,’ Muna said. ‘They went out the back gate.’
As the first cop frisked Muna, the second called in a backup unit parked fifty metres down the road.
Mac ran across the gravel as a pair of uniformed officers put Muna into handcuffs and coaxed a sobbing Jala from inside the car. He overheard news about the stand-off from a police radio as one of the armed officers used Muna’s key to enter the house.
The officers pointed their guns up the stairway and one raced upstairs shouting, ‘Police, surrender,’ as his companion kicked open the doors of the living-and dining-rooms before checking the kitchen and the cupboard under the stairs.
Once they were sure the house was clear, Mac headed out of the back door and jogged down to the bottom of the garden. He levered the gate open a few centimetres and poked his head through the gap to see what was going on.
Two minutes had passed since Hassam had backed into the shadows beneath the willow trees and nothing seemed to have changed. The two female officers still had their guns pointing at Hassam while Fahim stood quaking with the knife at his throat. But Mac was stunned to see another outline crawling through the shadows towards them.
*
Unlike number sixteen, the neighbouring house didn’t have a rear gate. To make it on to the golf course, Jake had to drag a toddler’s plastic playhouse across the lawn and then stand on it to scale a fence almost two metres tall. As he dropped on to the path leading towards the clubhouse, he saw Fahim whacking his dad with the golf club.
Jake pulled the tyre spanner out of his pocket and set off towards Hassam, intending to come up from behind and finish him off. But Jake made it less than fifteen metres before the armed cops appeared and as soon as he saw them he assumed Fahim would be safe.
He didn’t want to risk getting caught and having to explain himself, but there was no easy way back over the fence, so he cut under the willow trees, intending to phone Mac and let him know what was going on. But before he’d finished dialling, he saw Hassam backing up towards him with the blade at Fahim’s throat.
By the time Hassam stopped moving, Jake was crouched behind a tree trunk less than five metres away. His first instinct was to run, but as he took his first step towards the fairway of the first hole, he heard Hassam’s grim threat to take Fahim with him and realised that he was the only person who could do something.
Jake’s head spun as he realised that it was the biggest moment of his life. He’d spent years in training, and if he saved the day it would more than cancel out the mistakes he’d made earlier in the mission.
The trouble was, he didn’t have a clue what to do. The magnitude of the situation overwhelmed him and all he could think about was Lauren telling him that he was a cocky brat who was out of his depth and needed more training. But was Lauren really so perfect? She didn’t even have the brains to check Asif’s telephone and was lucky not to have fried the circuits when she gave him fifty thousand volts …
Jake thought about the training chant: This is tough, but cherubs are tougher. He’d earned his grey shirt the same way everyone else had. He just needed to calm down, use what he’d learned and switch his brain into gear.
The first thing he’d been taught was to observe a situation carefully before acting. He leaned out cautiously and saw that he had a reasonable view of Hassam and Fahim standing with their backs to a tree trunk. He thought about using the big spanner, but he faced the same problem as the armed police officers: Hassam only needed a fraction of a second to cut Fahim’s throat with the knife, and with the blade so close, even a stumble or sudden movement might lead to Fahim’s death.
Jake couldn’t leave things to chance. He had to move in and take control of the blade before Hassam even knew he was there. But this was easier said than done, especially as Jake was a smallish eleven-year-old while Hassam was a heavily built man.
The spanner was too clumsy, but as Jake turned back for another glance at Hassam he remembered the tyre pressure gauge and pulled it out of his pocket. The chromed gauge was shaped like a fat pen, and while the ends were hopelessly blunt, the shaft h
ad an arrow-shaped metal clasp that enabled it to clip over the edge of a pocket. It wasn’t sharp, but the point would puncture flesh if he used enough force.
Jake bent the clip outwards, then experimentally gripped the shaft of the gauge inside his fist with the clip protruding between his fingers. It made a pretty feeble weapon, but Jake was confident that it would do the job he had in mind.
After switching off his phone in case it rang and taking two deep breaths to calm his nerves, Jake dropped on to his belly and began crawling the five metres towards the tree where Hassam held Fahim captive.
‘He’s your son,’ one of the armed policewomen shouted, more in hope than expectation, as Jake closed in. ‘Do you really want him to die?’
‘He’s no son of mine,’ Hassam shouted back. ‘He works for you lot.’
Jake checked the ground carefully when he reached the base of the tree. He leaned cautiously around the trunk, ending up with his head just centimetres from the heel of Hassam’s shoe. His attack would rely upon basic knowledge of human reflexes, which he’d learned in combat training. When you’re surprised, everyone’s nervous system reacts identically. Jake knew that Hassam’s arms would fly outwards if he got stabbed below his ribcage, but he had to be certain that the knife wasn’t being held in such a way that the reaction would draw the blade along Fahim’s throat.
‘Dad,’ Fahim sobbed, as a bead of Hassam’s sweat hit the mulch just centimetres from Jake’s face. ‘I’m sorry.’
Fortunately for Fahim, you need to dig a knife deep behind the windpipe to cut someone’s throat effectively. As the stand-off dragged on, Hassam moved the blade a few centimetres from his son’s skin to stop his trembling hand causing more accidental damage.
From such close range, Jake’s position would be given away by a breath or a downwards glance. He acted the instant he knew that the blade was in a safe position. His training kicked in and he felt strangely confident as he fixed his eyes on the serrated blade.
‘Don’t shoot,’ Jake shouted, as he thrust up from the ground and jammed the point of the tyre gauge beneath Hassam’s ribs. As the arm holding the knife flexed outwards, Jake smashed the spanner against the back of Hassam’s hand.
Fahim ducked out of his father’s grasp and the cops closed in as Hassam’s fingers sprang open and the knife clattered to the ground. Hassam looked down and gave Jake a brutal kick in the ribs as the eleven-year-old scooped the knife off the ground. Fahim made it on to the fairway of the first hole as Jake caught his breath and stumbled away with the knife. The cops stopped when they got within three metres of Hassam and kept the guns trained as the two male officers closed from behind.
‘Hands in the air,’ one of the women shouted.
‘I’ve got a gun,’ Hassam smiled as he plunged his hand into the pocket of his blazer.
With hindsight, it might have seemed obvious that if Hassam had a gun he would have already used it, but the four firearms officers each had to make an instant decision and the woman closest to him didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. The bullet carved into Hassam’s chest, passed straight through his heart and caused a shower of razor-sharp splinters as the bullet exited and slammed the tree trunk.
As Hassam slumped to the ground dead, Mac dived out of the back gate of number sixteen and raced towards the two boys, who’d collapsed on to the fairway of the first hole less than a metre away from each other.
‘Took you two long enough to get here, didn’t it?’ Fahim gasped, smiling with relief as he fingered the spots of blood on the front of his neck.
35. NICK
‘Hello?’
Lauren and Rat turned to see a slim woman leaning into the warehouse door. She carried a leather bag and wore a tight black coat that gave her a slightly sinister air.
‘Can I help you?’ Lauren asked.
‘I’m Dr Turpin, I had a call from Mac. My team has worked with CHERUB agents before, so we know the score.’
Lauren pointed her hand at Asif, who was now dead to the world with a block of foam Rat had found on one of the shelves under his head.
‘Nice work!’ the doctor smiled, as two more MI5 agents came into the warehouse, wheeling a metal trolley between them.
‘How will you work it?’ Rat asked.
Dr Turpin shrugged. ‘We’ll give him the once-over with a rubber cosh so that he ends up with a few cuts and bruises. Then I’ll inject a cocktail of LSD and other hallucinogens so that he’ll spend the rest of the weekend in a daze. He’ll come around in a secure hospital bed and we’ll tell him that he got into a fight with police trying to arrest him, took a nasty bump on the head and suffered a minor stress-related heart attack.
‘Hopefully his short-term memory will be so shot that he won’t remember getting taken down by a pair of kids, but even if he does his brain will be so fried that he won’t know what’s real and what isn’t.’
‘Isn’t treating a suspect like that illegal?’ Rat asked, as he held Asif around the middle and helped the two men lift his dead weight on to the trolley.
The three MI5 agents all laughed and the taller of the two men spoke. ‘Are you trying to tell me that knocking a suspect unconscious, beating him with rubber coshes and giving him drugs that scramble his brain is illegal?’
‘Nah,’ his colleague smiled. ‘It can’t be.’
Lauren tutted. ‘For god’s sake Rat, practically everything we do is illegal. Every piece of evidence we uncover has to be doctored so that it can be presented in court. If the civil liberties mob ever found out what CHERUB and the rest of the intelligence service gets up to, they’d spontaneously combust.’
Rat hummed uncertainly.
‘Look at it this way,’ Dr Turpin said, as the two MI5 men wheeled Asif into an unmarked ambulance. ‘Is what we’re doing to Asif better or worse than blowing up three hundred and fifty people over the middle of the Atlantic?’
‘Speaking of which,’ Lauren said, ‘I’ve been rummaging around while we were waiting for you guys to turn up. Do any of you know anything about the crash investigation?’
‘We’re just a response team,’ Dr Turpin said. ‘Our job is to clean up messes like this one; but I can get someone from the crash-investigation team to come up here if you like.’
Lauren shook her head. ‘Mac knows as much about the investigation as anyone. He’ll be here any minute.’
‘What do you think you’ve found?’ Turpin asked.
Lauren shrugged. ‘Just some junk, but it might mean something.’
The doctor looked at her watch. ‘We’d better scoot, but tell Mac that I said hi. Oh … and pass on my condolences about his wife and grandchildren.’
*
The unmarked ambulance left discreetly and one of Dr Turpin’s assistants drove off in Hassam’s Bentley. Jake and Mac pulled into the parking lot a quarter of an hour later, by which time Rat had visited a nearby café to buy Kit Kats and tea in polystyrene cups to ward off the cold.
‘Where’s Asif?’ Jake grinned, as he swaggered into the warehouse, back to his cocky self for the first time in days. ‘You didn’t give him too many volts and finish him off, did you?’
‘MI5 have been and gone,’ Lauren said, glowering at him.
‘Does Mac know that we forgot to look at the phone and started zapping him?’ Rat asked warily.
‘My lips are sealed,’ Jake teased. ‘At least, as long as you make it worth my while.’
‘Just as my lips are sealed about you breaking down in tears on the first night of the mission,’ Lauren said. ‘Me and Rat might get a reprimand from Zara, but you’ll get ripped to shreds by Bethany and all your mates if that story leaks out.’
Jake looked worried.
‘Did he really cry?’ Rat smirked.
‘Well he’s only a little baby cherub,’ Lauren grinned. ‘He was all better after a big hug and a goodnight kissy.’
‘Screw you both,’ Jake growled. ‘And I didn’t cry… Well, barely … And only because I was in a lot of pain. And Mac sa
ys the way I saved Fahim was straight out of the textbook and one of the bravest things he’d ever seen.’
Mac came through the door and gave the agents a suspicious look. ‘What are you three whispering about?’
‘Nothing,’ the trio said in unison, before Lauren asked about Fahim.
‘The cops have taken him to casualty to get the wound on his back stitched.’
‘Will he really be coming back to campus?’ Rat asked.
‘Of course,’ Mac nodded. ‘I’m not convinced that he’ll pass the recruitment tests, but we made a promise and we’ll stick to it.’
‘I can imagine his big arse on the assault course,’ Jake snickered.
Lauren poked him in the back. ‘I thought you liked him.’
‘He’s OK,’ Jake said defensively. ‘I was just saying … Like, when he takes his shirt off he’s got all rolls of flab. He looks like a little Buddha or something.’
‘Jake Parker, you’re seriously out of order,’ Mac snapped. ‘He’s lost both parents in the space of a month. You’re probably the closest thing he’s got to a real friend.’
‘All right,’ Jake said indignantly. ‘Didn’t I just save the dude’s life, for god’s sake?’
Rat laughed. ‘Don’t start crying again, Jakey-poos.’
Jake made a zapping noise like a stun gun firing, which shut Rat and Lauren up. Mac was mystified by this, but he’d spent enough years working amongst kids to know that you never get anywhere when you probe into their private jokes.
‘Lauren, you said you had something to show me,’ Mac said.
‘Yeah, over here,’ she nodded. ‘After we gave Asif his injection I put on some plastic gloves and took a rummage through the bags he’d placed by the door. The first one had money and passports like you’d expect, the second had all this weird junk inside and it kind of looks like bits out of an aeroplane.’
‘Really?’ Mac said, raising an eyebrow.
Lauren gave Mac a set of polythene gloves from her equipment pack. Unfortunately, they were her size so it was a squeeze getting them on.