CHERUB: People's Republic (36 page)

Zara spoke as Duster munched his carrot stick. ‘I’ll just need both of you to kill a bunny by stabbing it through the throat with your pencils and then we can get a spot of lunch.’

Carlos jumped back from the cage as if he’d received an electric shock. ‘Why?’ he asked, horrified.

‘Well you eat meat, don’t you?’ Zara said. ‘Every animal you’ve ever eaten must have been killed by someone.’

‘I … I don’t like blood,’ Carlos said.

Zara looked at Ning. ‘What about you?’

‘Sure,’ Ning said.

Ning opened the rabbit cage and reached in to grab Duster – or possibly Bouncer because it was hard to tell. The rabbit was jittery and tried to escape Ning’s arms, but she calmed the animal with a series of long slow strokes from the top of her head down to her tail.

‘Good girl,’ Ning said soothingly.

With a sudden movement, Ning brought a heavy Karate chop down on the back of the rabbit’s head to stun it.

‘Shit!’ Carlos shouted, backing up to the wall as Ning grabbed her pencil and hung the limp animal over the bin by its hind legs.

She then trapped the rabbit’s head between her knees and jammed the pencil into the main vein running down its throat. The spurt of blood sounded like peeing as it hit the bottom of the bin. After he’d got on her nerves all morning, Ning turned slightly and made sure Carlos saw plenty of blood and gore.

As Carlos turned green, Zara found a tea tray for Ning to place the rabbit on when it had bled out.

‘You’ve done that before,’ Zara said, clearly impressed.

Ning nodded as she squeezed the rabbit’s body to force out the last drips of blood. ‘Some of the ladies who worked at my first orphanage used to breed and sell rabbits. We were allowed to play with them, but our diet wasn’t great so we ate them too. If you give me a sharp knife I can gut it. I’ve cured the pelts too. When I was little I had a rabbit fur hat that tied around my chin when it snowed.’

‘You have no problem with killing and eating animals?’ Zara asked.

‘I think animals should be well treated while they’re alive, but humans come first,’ Ning said. ‘There are many rich people in China, but millions of peasants still go hungry in the countryside.’

Zara nodded, then looked at Carlos. ‘She’s shown you how it’s done. Are you sure you don’t want to have a go?’

‘I just can’t,’ Carlos said. ‘That was the horriblest thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘Oh well, Duster,’ Zara said, as she put the cloth back over the cage. ‘Looks like you’ll live to see another recruitment test. Now, let’s get some lunch.’

Ning looked at Carlos and spoke in her politest
butter wouldn’t melt
voice as she followed Zara towards the dining-room.

‘I wonder if they have stir-fried rabbit on the menu?’ she teased. ‘It’s delicious.’

*

Over in the mission control building Alfie plucked warm sheets of paper out of a laser printer.

‘This is the e-mail the woman from Oberon sent me,’ Alfie said, as he waggled the papers in front of Amy. ‘They’ve made twenty-eight sets of kit with maroon and orange hooped socks since 2002. Three football and two rugby clubs, they’ve given me all the customer addresses and postcodes.’

‘Nice,’ Amy said brightly as she fired up Google Maps on the computer in front of her. ‘Give me postcodes, let’s see how many are within an hour’s drive of where Ning got pulled out of that car.’

Oberon Sports was based in the south-west and the first four postcodes were all in Devon or Cornwall. The final kits had been delivered to a youth club in Milton Keynes. Amy typed in
Wigan to Milton Keynes
and got an answer of 155 miles and two hours forty minutes’ driving time.

‘It must be Kitmeister UK,’ Amy said, as she walked over to Ryan and Max. ‘How are you getting on?’

Ryan huffed with frustration. ‘I spoke to Kitmeister’s managing director, but he’s at his cottage in Yorkshire for the weekend and can’t get into the office until Monday, because only the building manager has the code for the alarm. To make matters worse, he says he’ll have to talk to his solicitors before giving any information to any government department.’

Amy tutted. ‘Sounds like he’s being awkward for the sake of it.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘Then he went into a rant about government harassment and the Inland Revenue strangling small businesses like his with red tape. After he slammed the phone down on me, I looked up Kitmeister’s Inland Revenue files. Apparently they’re under investigation for non-payment of taxes.’

‘That’s gonna make it tough to get info,’ Amy said.

‘If you want my opinion,’ Max said, ‘we should drive round to his house and threaten to nail his balls to a door.’

Alfie put on a mock gangster voice. ‘And even if he does cooperate we nail one of his balls to a door anyway, because that’s the kind of guys we are.’

Amy laughed. ‘Somehow I can’t see your testicle nailing scheme getting past Zara or the CHERUB ethics committee.’

‘Leaving the psycho nailing fantasies aside,’ Ryan said, ‘Kitmeister UK’s headquarters is only about forty minutes’ drive from here. Breaking in and having a little rummage through their filing cabinets and computer systems isn’t completely out of the question.’

Amy nodded. ‘I work for TFU not CHERUB, so I’ll have to get a mission controller on board, but if Kitmeister are being stroppy about cooperating with us it could be our best option.’

*

There were four pools in the CHERUB campus swimming complex: A twenty-five-metre learner’s pool, a full fifty-metre Olympic pool, an extra-deep diving pool and finally the leisure pool, where the fourth of Ning and Carlos’ five recruitment tests would take place.

Even at its deepest point the leisure pool was only two and a half metres. It had all the standard equipment: three water slides, a play castle, miniature islands with plastic palm trees and a wave machine.

For the test, seventeen-year-old identical twins Callum and Connor Reilly had spread over a hundred plastic balls around the pool. They’d also set the wave machine to its highest setting so that you had to fight half-metre waves to swim up to the deep end.

‘These are the rules,’ Zara said, as the slim-but-muscular twins stood behind, towering over her in their swimming shorts. ‘There’s a red bin for Ning on the island and a blue bin for Carlos next to it. You’ve got twenty minutes to put as many balls as you can in your bin. Green balls are worth one point, yellow three, blue five and red ten. You can throw balls, but you must only carry one at a time. There’s no physical contact allowed and you can use the poolside to access the slides, but you’ll be docked fifty points if you use the poolside to move around. Is all that clear?’

‘What are the ball scores again?’ Carlos asked.

Ning surveyed the pool as Zara repeated the scoring system. The low-value green balls were all bobbing in the water at the shallow end near the bins, while most of the higher-value ones were in inaccessible locations. The ten-point reds were in the furthest-flung locations, at the top of water slides, or on the upper level little kids’ castle.

‘Away you go!’ Zara shouted.

Carlos dived straight in and swam towards his bin, while Ning waded through knee-deep water towards the castle, feeling like a contestant in a TV game show. She’d spotted three red balls and managed to climb on to the castle and throw two of them into her bin, but the third bounced off the edge and Carlos grabbed the rebound and dunked it.

Ning picked the wrong moment to slide off the castle and almost lost her footing as a fast-moving wave knocked her sideways. She grabbed a blue ball worth five points as she waded on towards the island with the bins, but she was horrified to see Carlos rapidly scoring ones and threes by scooping up the easy balls that the waves had pushed to the edge of the pool.

Ning got her blue ball into her bin with a short throw, then joined Carlos in a mad scramble for greens and yellows. As balls flew, Callum clambered on to the island. As he threw the collected balls into an empty jet pool, Connor stood with a notepad and pencil keeping score.

‘Ning thirty-eight, Carlos fifty-one,’ Connor shouted.

By this time most of the easy balls near the island had been cleared. As Carlos picked the last few, Ning began swimming towards a larger island in the middle of the pool that had about a dozen five-point blue balls on it.

Ning had good strength and stamina, but a poor stroke meant that she found it tough swimming against the waves surging down from the deep end.

‘New balls,’ Zara shouted as she tipped a dozen ten-point reds into the end of the pool.

Ning hadn’t realised more balls would be added as the game progressed. As she dithered between sticking to a plan and getting the blue balls from the island or going for the reds in the deep water, Carlos skimmed past underwater.

Carlos might have been weak on land, but he made Ning feel clumsy as he swam fifteen metres without surfacing for breath. She decided to compete for the reds, but by the time she’d reached deep water Carlos had thrown ten of the twelve balls in the rough direction of his bin and was heading back.

After battling with the waves, Ning was gasping as she grabbed a single red ball. Carlos was already back at the shallow end, picking up the reds he’d thrown down and dropping them into his bin.

Ning desperately threw her red ball from the deep end. She came close to getting it into her bin, but it bounced off the edge and Carlos swept in ruthlessly and took it for himself.

‘Sixteen minutes to go,’ Zara shouted.

‘Ning forty-one, Carlos one hundred and eighty-seven,’ Connor shouted.

Ning punched the water with frustration as she headed for the blue balls on the island. She was getting completely thrashed.

46. HEIGHT

To get the Kitmeister UK break-in approved, Amy had to type up a mission briefing, get senior mission controller Ewart Asker to read and approve it, track down chairwoman – and Ewart’s wife – Zara to sign off on it, then e-mail the details through to two members of the CHERUB ethics committee, requesting an urgent response.

Amy wore her best poker face as she stepped into the hallway.

‘And?’ Ryan asked.

‘It’s all set,’ she said. ‘I had to play up the yobbo angle, so you might have to smash a few things up.’

‘I can do mindless vandalism,’ Alfie said, grinning and thumping on his chest. ‘I’m actually rather partial to it.’

Ewart overheard and shouted a warning from inside his office. ‘Nothing too extreme, boys. We don’t want anything that gets publicity and makes the police start a big investigation.’

‘Gotcha, boss,’ Max said, as he leaned into the office and gave Ewart a cheeky salute.

‘Good luck,’ Ewart said firmly. ‘Now close my door and bugger off.’

‘Right, boys,’ Amy said as she led the excitable trio towards the exit. ‘You’ll need to change out of CHERUB uniforms. We might as well have radio links so bring your communications stuff, as well as your break-in equipment. I’ll sort out a car and meet you in the dining-room in about twenty-five minutes. We can grab a quick bite, and set off by two.’

‘Sounds good,’ Ryan said, as he slid his feet into the muddy boots he’d left by the main door.

*

Ning was bigger and stronger than Carlos, so she changed strategy, staying close to the bins, trying to intercept anything that Carlos threw and only swimming when Zara threw new balls into a shallower part of the pool.

It was a reasonable strategy, but when the twenty minutes were up, Ning was completely exhausted and still more than a hundred points off Carlos’ score.

‘Well done, mate,’ Zara told Carlos enthusiastically, as she tousled his hair. ‘You cut through that water like a little tadpole.’

Ning resented the compliment and seethed with jealousy as she towelled off and switched her swimming costume for her blood- and puke-spattered T-shirt and combat trousers.

To make matters worse, she could hear Callum and Connor laughing and joking casually with Carlos as they changed just out of sight a few metres away. Ning had been trying really hard, but although she thought she’d done well on the written exam and killing the rabbit, she wasn’t confident that she’d done enough to be accepted as a trainee CHERUB agent.

The final test was the height obstacle. Ning hadn’t liked the look of the creaky wooden structure, with its narrow poles, ropes and beams, when Ryan had toured campus with her the day before. She liked it even less as she stood at the base of a wobbly thirty-metre rope ladder, looking up with slanting rain hitting her face.

Callum was already halfway up the ladder with Carlos and they’d left slippery clumps of mud from their boots on the rungs. Identical twin Connor would accompany Ning, while Zara had gone back to her office to catch up with e-mails and paperwork.

‘Will I die if I fall?’ Ning asked.

‘You won’t die,’ Connor said. ‘But the tree branches will lash you and the rope nets are strung tight. I’ve known a few people hurt themselves, and one guy who got his boot caught in the netting and broke his leg.’

Ning managed an awkward smile. ‘Best to avoid falling off then?’