Divine Madness (9 page)

‘When you get back – whenever you get back – I’d like us to give it another go.’

James smiled. It was something he’d wanted to hear Kerry say for five months; just a pity the timing was so awful.

‘That’s if you’re around,’ James said. ‘You might be off on a mission yourself.’

‘I know,’ Kerry said, stirring her drink sadly. ‘And I’m not gonna start turning down juicy missions, even for you.’

‘You’re not a cherub for very long when you think about it,’ James said, shaking his head slowly. ‘I was talking to Kyle about this before you went to Hong Kong. He’s sixteen now. Another year or eighteen months and he’s not going to be around.’

Kerry smiled. ‘Mind you, Kyle’s such a titch. It’s only a couple of tufts of bum fluff that makes him look any older than you.’

Kerry looked up with a needy little expression that James recognised as her
 
I want you to kiss me
 
face. There were more than a dozen cherubs and staff sitting at the next table, so it wasn’t exactly discreet, but James realised it might be his only opportunity in months.

They both leaned forward. It started off with a standard kiss, but they got quite excited and James ended up with his hands around the back of Kerry’s head and his T-shirt dragging through the runny yolk of a fried egg.

It took a barrage of bread rolls and butter pats to break them apart.

‘Get a room,’ Kyle shouted.

Lauren deepened her voice, mocking James. ‘I don’t know why you keep going on about me fancying Kerry. We’re just good friends now.’

James and Kerry both smiled guiltily at their mates before looking back at each other.

‘So, I’ll try and keep in touch,’ James said. ‘You know, e-mail and that.’

Kerry held her mug of tea up to her face, looking sad. ‘Yeah.’

*

Six weeks of getting up early for ACC training with a full day of school afterwards had left James bruised, aching and run down. He usually struggled to sleep on aeroplanes, but this one had sleeper seats that reclined into flat beds and the attentive staff fetched you pillows and a duvet as soon as you showed any sign of nodding off.

When he was awake, James played on his PSP, ate junk food, chatted to Abigail about the Australian lifestyle and skimmed some books John had got hold of on cults and mind control. The books looked stuffy, but James was amazed by some of the facts and got quite interested.

He’d never devoted any thought to cults, but had always assumed you had to be a whack job to join one. According to the books, the truth was different.

People recruited into cults tended to be thoughtful and intelligent. Their backgrounds were normal, although they were usually recruited at a time in their lives when they were lonely and ill at ease with everyday life. Typical cult joiners were people who had recently divorced, or lost their jobs, university students living away from home for the first time and older people who’d recently been widowed.

According to one of the books there were 7,000 known cults with more than five million members around the world. They ranged from dirt poor groups of a few dozen people who lived in tents and ate out of dumpsters, to billion-dollar corporations with their own TV networks and branded products.

Lauren was in the next seat to James. She’d got interested in the books too and they kept reading bits to each other, especially the more lurid stuff about cults that had assassinated politicians and kidnapped judges, and especially about mass suicides.

‘Here,’ Lauren said, ‘listen to this:
 
There have been more than seventy recorded incidences of mass cult suicide. The largest was the People’s Temple, where leader Jim Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide, resulting in nine hundred deaths. Babies and small children who were unable to take their own lives were given bottles laced with cyanide
. Then further down it says,
 
Cults based around an apocalyptic vision are usually the most destructive
.’

James smirked. ‘Well, that’s reassuring.’

*

February is high summer down under and Australia greeted James with a thirty-eight-degree blast of heat: the muggy kind that makes your shirt stick to your back three steps out of an air-conditioned building.

John and Chloe headed off to check into a hotel in the city. Abigail and the three youngsters took a yellow Toyota taxi. Brisbane was clean and modern, but there were road works on the way out of the airport and they spent three-quarters of an hour tangled in traffic.

While they crawled, the sky darkened and giant globs of rain began drumming the metal roof, while lightning exploded behind the tall buildings in the city centre. Once they got past the jam, they hit a hundred and twenty kph around the outskirts of the city and ended up in a suburban area ten kilometres from the centre.

They pulled into an upscale development of houses. The cropped lawns, recently planted trees and rain-washed tarmac had the orderliness of a town made from Lego. By the time the taxi pulled on to a sloping brick driveway at the front of an imposing house, the sun was back and the afternoon rain was evaporating into a shimmering heat haze.

James lugged his backpack and a couple of cases inside with him. He dumped them in a large wooden-floored hallway and looked up at two curved staircases and a gigantic concrete dome with a chandelier hanging off it.

‘Holy crap,’ James grinned, ‘we’re loaded.’

Abigail smiled as she waddled in behind him and dumped two cases. ‘Of course we’re loaded, James. If there’s one thing that’ll really get the Survivors salivating, it’ll be the prospect of recruiting Abigail Prince: wealthy divorcee, settling back in her native Queensland after a gory divorce from her millionaire husband.’

‘With her three delightful kids in tow,’ James added.

Lauren and Dana followed in and they all stood looking up at the fancy hallway for a moment. Even Dana allowed herself to look impressed.

‘I haven’t seen this place before,’ Abigail said. ‘Everything was arranged while I was in Britain. The rooms are supposed to be set up for us, but I don’t know whose is whose.’

James and Lauren bounded up the staircase to check the upstairs. There were six main rooms on the upper floor and James found his bedroom at the second attempt. Usually, all you have on a mission is a few bits you’ve packed up and carried with you, but because this mission was so long and because the plan called for the Prince family to eventually move in with the Survivors, James needed all the stuff a wealthy Australian boy was likely to own.

ASIS had gone to great lengths creating the material history of James Prince. He had drawers and wardrobes full of clothes – most of them chemically treated to look lightly worn – and everything else you’d expect, from stationery to a surfboard, a computer and even a few tatty board games and soft toys that his alter-ego must have grown out of.

James flipped on the air-conditioning and started going through his new clothes to work out what he was going to wear when he came out of the shower.

Thirty-five hours trapped inside airports and aeroplanes combined with a ten-hour time shift had left James with his worst ever jet-lag. He spent the night tangling up his sheets and gave up trying to sleep altogether for a while, spending the first hours of Monday morning wide awake playing on his PSP.

When the sun came up, he had a headache and felt groggy. He found some shorts and swam a few laps of the fifteen-metre pool to wake himself up.

The morning got taken up with the routine details of settling into a new home. James cut an acre of shaggy lawn with a ride-on mower, while Dana called up local tradesmen to arrange for someone to come in regularly and clean out the pool and for a plumber to come and fix a broken tap in one of the en-suite bathrooms. Abigail and Lauren drove to Big Fresh and did the grocery shopping.

After lunch they all went out together and visited their high school, which was about three kilometres from home. It was set in a large expanse of grassland. The four long lines of classrooms were at ground level, exiting on to a covered walkway that looped the entire school. They had a quick introductory meeting with their new deputy headmaster and Abigail shelled out A$500 in the uniform shop.

On the way home they stopped at Target and bought a bike for Lauren – something ASIS seemed to have overlooked – before heading back out for dinner at a fancy restaurant on the Brisbane river.

The food was Mexican and they ate in a private function room overlooking a harbour full of flash yachts, powerboats and motor launches. John and Chloe were there, along with a psychology professor from Brisbane University called Miriam Longford. James immediately recognised her name from one of the books he’d skimmed through on the flight over.

Longford had counselled hundreds of ex-Survivors who’d been traumatised during their involvement with the cult. Recently, she’d been involved in a legal wrangle with the Survivors over a book she’d written about them.

Although Longford had done criminal profiling work for ASIS and the Queensland police, she’d only been sworn to secrecy and informed about the existence of CHERUB a few hours earlier. She was fascinated by the psychology behind using children in undercover operations.

As the meal stretched through dessert, coffee and three extra rounds of drinks, Longford answered dozens of questions from the kids and threw dozens back. By the time they left, the three cherubs felt they had a much deeper understanding of the Survivors than ever could have been gleaned from books.

It was dark by the time Abigail drove them home in their smart E-class Mercedes wagon. James was relieved to find himself feeling sleepy at the right end of the day, but he was depressed at the prospect of having to sit through school in the morning.

*

At least the uniform wasn’t bad: polo shirt with the school logo on the breast, navy cargo shorts and you were allowed to wear trainers and whatever socks you liked. Before joining ASIS, Abigail had worked her way through university in the kitchen of a top hotel. She set the three youngsters up for the day with a blinding cooked breakfast plus a fruit garnish and French toast on the side. Their packed lunches had fancy-looking rolls, with fresh fruit salad and handmade cake from a bakery Lauren had spotted on the drive back from the supermarket.

The three kids set off on bikes at 8:40 a.m. As they got closer to the school, the population of bikes grew, until they pulled into a noisy mass of youngsters jumping off and walking their bikes under a covered shed, before locking them to the metal railings spaced every few metres.

‘Later,’ James said to his real and pretend sisters, as he headed off to a formroom that had been pointed out by the deputy headmaster the afternoon before.

James moved slowly, anxious not to make the wrong impression on his new classmates. Until now, James’ missions had required him to get in with a bunch of boys with a similarly lax attitude to work and class discipline to his own. On this mission, James had to override his natural instincts to muck around and be one of the lads. He had to appear shy and troubled, a kid who’d been upset by his parents splitting up and being forced to move into a new neighbourhood.

Even the youngest Survivors were asked to prowl for potential recruits and the idea behind James acting this way was to pique the interest of the seventy-odd pupils of North Park High School who lived in the nearby Survivors’ commune. That meant, on average, there were two Survivor children in each class. Unfortunately, ASIS had planned the mission at short notice and hadn’t been able to identify whether there were any Survivor students in James, Lauren and Dana’s tutor groups.

As James stepped out of the bright sunlight into a classroom, he deliberately found a lonely seat in the back corner where he could study his classmates. Every kid wore school uniform, but James had learned that Joel Regan didn’t splash out on designer gear for the children who lived in his communes around the world. He scanned along the rows of kids. Nike Air trainers, expensive backpacks, flash watches or jewellery were all signs that you didn’t live at the commune.

It took a couple of minutes for James to spot something he liked the look of: at the front of the classroom in the good-kid zone, a boy and girl sat together. The girl had a fit body and a nice face, but her long hair was tied back into a severe bun, her uniform looked like a hand-me-down and she wore basic canvas plimsolls, with bright pink socks. The boy sitting next to her was heavy set, with dark sweat patches on his polo shirt, brutally short hair with the acne in his scalp showing through and a pair of no-brand running shoes with chunks of the sole drooping off at the back.

First lesson was History, and James managed to sit beside the sweaty boy. The teacher was a youngish woman with a square jaw and manly shoulders. She hadn’t quite mastered class control and a group of boys took full advantage, talking about a fight that had happened before school that morning and some stuff that had gone down at the beach the previous Friday night. Before long, a couple of boys were out of their seats facing towards their friends and the teacher lost her rag.

‘You boys
 
sit
 
down.’

James could tell the cool kids didn’t have much respect from the way they sauntered back to their seats. Five seconds after the teacher went back to writing on the blackboard, one of the boys chucked a massive chewed-up paper spit ball and it splatted against the rolled-up projector screen.