CHERUB: The Fall (22 page)

James grimaced. ‘Nice.’

‘But when I bounced off the net I looked up at the obstacle and it was like,
is that all you’ve got
?’

‘When the weather’s better, I’ll take you over a couple more times, so you get used to it,’ James offered.

‘I’m sorry I went up when it was icy,’ Kevin said. ‘But after last night I just
had
to do it.’

‘I should report you,’ James said.

Kevin looked up pleadingly, knowing that the instructors could punish him hard if they knew he’d disobeyed James’ orders.

‘I won’t this time,’ James relented. ‘But you saw what happened to Bruce. I’m glad you’re not scared any more, but it’s dangerous up there.’

‘Thanks,’ Kevin said, as he stared up at the obstacle. ‘I hated you and Bruce that first night, but I reckon I owe you one now.’

‘Just doing my job,’ James said happily, as he considered all the History coursework he’d just got out of. ‘I guess I’d better piggyback you over to the med unit so they can take that splinter out of your arse.’

Lauren was pleased that she was getting good information out of Anna, but she woke up in a mood because she was facing a third boring day sitting around in Aldrington Care Centre.

To make matters worse, one of the house parents came to Lauren’s room after breakfast and told her that they’d found her a place at a school in Burgess Hill, starting the following morning. On top of the stupid green uniform and the fact that settling into a new school was always a nightmare, came the news that she’d have to leave at half six in the morning and walk to a bus stop two kilometres away before taking a thirty-five-minute bus ride.

‘You sound like you got out of bed on the wrong side this morning,’ John said cheerfully, when he rang Lauren on her mobile.

‘Seriously, don’t wind me up,’ Lauren moaned. ‘I might really lose my temper.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Thick grey tights, a hand-me-down pullover with a dirty great rip in the elbow and an hour a day on a bus full of strange school kids.’

‘Blah,’ John said dismissively. ‘You should count yourself lucky. When I first joined MI5, they had me staking out a gents’ toilet on Hampstead Heath.’

‘Nice,’ Lauren said, cracking into a smile.

‘You’ve not suffered until you’ve spent a week crawling around in an asbestos-lined roof cavity and coming home to your wife smelling like a public toilet. It’s no wonder I’m divorced …’

‘Oh,’ Lauren added, ‘and to make my life even more perfect, this idiot boy – the dude who was at the dining-table when you dropped me off – found out that I’m a vegetarian and hid a piece of bacon in my cornflakes.’

John laughed.

‘It’s
not
funny,’ Lauren said firmly. ‘I’ve got a piece of dead animal inside me. It makes me queasy just thinking about it.’

‘Got lots of bits of dead animal inside me,’ John said. ‘The landlady here does a cracking cooked breakfast.’

‘Anyway, I take it you heard the calls last night?’

‘Yep, and the messages you left with my assistant on campus. You must have called while I was in the shower.’

‘So what are we going to do with the information?’ Lauren pressed.

‘MI5 runs an anti-trafficking task force. We can pass the information on about Mr Broushka and the children’s home in Nizhniy Novgorod, but I’m not hopeful.’

‘Why not? I bet you could track him down easily enough.’

‘Probably,’ John said. ‘But it’s a question of resources. It would probably take a team of two or three officers to track him down and then we’d have to find evidence compelling enough to get the Russian police to prosecute him.’

Lauren tutted. ‘So why are we even bothering?’

‘We’ve got to hope that Anna knows a few more details that will enable us to get our teeth into the British end of the organisation. Keep pumping her gently for names, places, descriptions of the men and any snippets of conversation she might have overheard while she was in the truck or on the boat.’

‘The guy on the phone sounded creepy,’ Lauren said. ‘Maybe he’ll ring again. He certainly sounded keen to get his hands on Anna.’

‘I’m not surprised. They must have spent a lot of money smuggling Anna across Europe and into Britain and they probably had a buyer lined up ready to pay good money for her.’

‘How much is a twelve-year-old girl worth?’ Lauren asked.

‘It depends upon the buyer: twenty, thirty or maybe even fifty thousand pounds.’

‘It makes me shudder just thinking about it,’ Lauren said. ‘But why would they pay so much? Couldn’t you just pick any girl off the street?’

‘You could,’ John said. ‘Trouble is, the girl would probably have family and friends. It gets in the paper, on the TV and the police mount a full-scale manhunt. If you take a girl like Anna from a children’s home in Russia and smuggle her in, she just vanishes. Nobody’s looking for her because nobody even knows she’s here.’

*

James put his head inside the training instructor’s hut. He’d knocked, but hadn’t got an answer.

‘Mr Pike?’

Pike emerged from a tiled area at the back of the hut, with wet hair and dressed only in a pair of alarmingly skimpy underpants.

‘Thanks for coming by during your lunchtime,’ Pike said.

‘No bother,’ James said. ‘I was coming up this way to see Bruce. The nurse asked me to bring his portable DVD player and some clean clothes.’

‘How’s he doing?’

‘About what you’d expect, I guess,’ James shrugged. ‘It’s a bad break. When I left him last night they’d given him a load of sedatives and he was dead to the world.’

‘Too bad. We’ve had a couple of bumps and sprains where kids have bounced off a net and hit a tree, but that’s the first broken bone we’ve had in my time here.’

‘I guess it’s just a freak thing, getting your foot caught in the net like that.’

‘Anyway,’ Pike said, as he pulled on a clean pair of combat trousers. ‘I asked you up here to say thanks. I wasn’t totally convinced that Kevin would respond to bullying tactics, but it seems to have worked out.’

‘He’s even a bit the other way, sir. I’m worried that he might go too far and start thinking he’s indestructible.’

‘I’ve got him for a hundred days of basic training, starting in just over three weeks,’ Pike smiled. ‘I reckon we’ll have his head straight by the end of that.

‘The other reason I wanted you to come up was to ask if you’d be interested in helping us out a bit more. There are always kids to be trained. We can always do with a hand on weekend exercises and of course, if you’re helping us out on a regular basis, we’ll make sure that your own training and academic requirements are lightened.’

James nodded. ‘Meryl said I had a choice between helping out with training and doing heaps more academic stuff. The only thing is, if they lift my suspension I’ll probably be out on missions most of the time.’

Mr Pike was now dressed, except for his boots. He walked over to a coffee percolator. ‘Drink?’

‘Nah, I’m fine.’

‘So how’s Ewart getting on with the investigation?’ Pike asked.

James shrugged. ‘I went over there, but Ewart won’t tell me what’s going on. He says there’s a big row going on with MI5. It looks like it could drag on for months and I could be the one who gets stitched up.’

‘That wouldn’t surprise me,’ Pike said. ‘Once upon a time, me and Ewart were best mates.’

‘Really?’ James said. ‘I’ve never seen you speak to each other.’

‘That’s ’cos I hate his snidey guts. I completed my basic training a few months before Ewart. We had rooms next to each other; I had your girlfriend’s room actually.’

James smiled. ‘Kerry’s room. I never knew that.’

‘We even went on our first couple of missions together. But the third time out, Ewart stitched me up big time. We were both still grey-shirts, thirteen years old. Some of our mates had got their navy shirt and we were both getting desperate. Anyhow, like you I hated writing essays and reports. The only things that interested me were skirt, rugby and punch-ups. So when our mission came to its end, Ewart generously volunteered to type up my report as well as his own. We’d both done a decent enough job, but I see him two days later and he’s wearing a navy shirt.

‘When I read the reports, it was like everything Ewart had done was perfect and everything I’d done was half-arsed. I did my nut, but I couldn’t complain unless I was prepared to admit that I hadn’t written my own mission report.’

James shook his head. ‘Some best friend.’

‘I dragged Ewart out of his room and kicked him from one end of the sixth-floor corridor to the other, but the damage to my career was done. Ewart was part of the elite, going off on all the best missions. It took me another eighteen months to get my navy shirt, but I was never regarded as anything other than an average agent.’

‘Do you get on with him now?’

‘Barely,’ Pike shrugged. ‘Zara’s a nice lady and she invited me when her kids were christened. I put my good suit on and acted civil, but Ewart still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. He’s a snidey little so and so and if I was in your position, I’d be worried. I’d bet you my left nut that what comes out of that investigation isn’t what’s best for you or for CHERUB, but whatever’s good for Ewart bloody Asker.’

James wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe Ewart had set Mr Pike up, but the incident must have taken place more than fifteen years ago and they’d both been kids. It hardly seemed like grounds for believing that Ewart would do the same to him. And what did Ewart even have to gain by stitching him up?

‘You know what?’ Pike grinned, as he pulled a blue plastic card out of his wallet and handed it to James. ‘That’s for the mission preparation building, full access.’

‘What am I supposed to do with it?’

‘The mission controllers don’t usually work late,’ Pike explained. ‘Go into Ewart’s office and have a good snoop around.’

James tentatively grabbed the card. ‘I dunno, sir.’

‘You only get one shot at a CHERUB career,’ Pike said. ‘Ewart ruined mine; don’t let him do it to you.’

‘Thanks,’ James said, as he tucked the card in his pocket.

‘Just be careful,’ Mr Pike said. ‘I could lose my job for giving you that. If they catch you, I’ll have to say that I lost it.’

The Aldrington Care Centre’s newest resident was a four-year-old lad named Carl. He’d arrived the night before, sporting ragged clothes, a swollen right eye and a layer of filth. After a thorough scrubbing, a night’s sleep and a morning being interviewed by police, Carl was allowed to explore his temporary home and found Lauren killing time on the Playstation in the living-room.

She felt sorry for the gloomy youngster and was happy to break the monotony by entertaining him. After some games of snap and a few laps chasing around the sofa, they put on coats and gloves and headed to the play area outside the unit. The young lad clearly hadn’t spent much of his short life in playgrounds and got ridiculously excited, screaming and laughing as he bounced on the seesaw and begged Lauren to push faster on the swings and roundabout.

She was following him up the steps of a slide when her mobile rang. She didn’t recognise the number on the display, but the call was coming from Britain.

‘Hello, are you Anna’s friend?’ the man asked. He spoke in Russian, but it wasn’t Mr Broushka and there was a lot of background noise, like he was travelling in a car or train.

‘I am,’ Lauren said. ‘But she’s not here. She’s at school.’

Carl slid down as Lauren sat at the top of the metal ramp.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ the man said. ‘I wanted to talk to you anyway.’

‘
Me?
What about?’

‘Anna won’t talk to us. We’d really like to speak to her. She’s got it into her head that we want to hurt her, but she’s mixed up. We’re her people, she needs to be with us.’

Lauren heard a second voice, speaking in English away from the phone. ‘Got it.’

‘Sorry to trouble you,’ the first speaker said abruptly. ‘I’ve got to go now. I’ll call back later when Anna’s out of school.’

The phone went dead before Lauren could answer.

‘Come down,’ Carl demanded, as he looked up at her from the base of the slide.

Lauren pushed herself off, but her phone was ringing again before she’d reached the bottom.

‘Lauren,’ John said urgently. ‘We’ve got a
big
problem. A tracking request was sent during your call and the local cell responded just before they hung up.’

‘You mean those guys know where I am?’

‘They know which radio cell your phone is operating within, so only to within a couple of kilometres,’ John explained, as Carl balanced himself on Lauren’s trainer. ‘It’s more primitive than the triangulation system that we can use to track mobiles.’

Lauren patted the youngster on the head. ‘Play on your own for a minute, Carl.’

‘Who’s that?’ John asked.

‘Just a little kid I was messing about with. How did they trace my phone?’

‘Probably through an online location service. You’re supposed to have permission from the person who owns the phone – like for parents who want to track where their kids are – but you can usually get around it by making a false declaration when you sign up.’

‘At least they can only pinpoint us to within a two-kilometre radius.’

‘But they know you’re in a children’s home,’ John explained. ‘All they’ve got to do is look up children’s homes in a local services directory. I’m not sure but ACC is probably the only one around here.’

‘Do you think they’re coming after Anna?’ Lauren gasped.

‘Definitely,’ John said. ‘Why else would they try and trace the call?’

Lauren looked at her watch. ‘She’ll be coming out of school in under half an hour.’

‘A23,’ John said.

Lauren was confused. ‘Eh?’

‘Sorry, I’ve asked the campus control room to put a trace on the mobile phone that called you. The Russian’s signal has jumped two kilometres in two minutes, so my guess is that they’re on the fast road into Brighton.’

‘How come they’re so close already?’

‘They knew Anna was picked up on the coast a few kilometres from here. She was bound to be somewhere in the Brighton area.’