The Great Escape (11 page)

‘Max escaped from the laboratory. This is what they’re doing in there – making cats talk. This is why we’ve got to rescue the rest.’

‘Why would they . . .?’

‘Do you ever finish sentences?’ Max asked irritably. He turned to Millie. ‘I have to say, you took it a lot better than this when we met.’

‘Why would they want to give voices to cats? We don’t know,’ Millie said, trying to answer the question she would have asked in Jake’s position. ‘That’s the
other thing we need to find out. Now, are you going to keep your side of the bargain?’

‘Yes,’ Jake breathed. ‘So long as that cat stops being mean to me.’

‘Max . . .’ warned Millie.

‘OK,’ sighed the cat. ‘It was too easy, anyway. It’s funnier being mean to you.’

‘So, let’s go through the plan again, just to make sure we all know what we’re doing,’ said Millie, as they pored over the map she had brought.
‘Jake, you’re going to be the decoy. Get up close to the building, catch the attention of the security blokes, run off, and try not to get caught. If you do get caught, say you’re
just mucking around, and do a bored teenager thing. OK?’

‘OK.’ Jake looked way too nervous to be bored, but Millie was hoping that the security men wouldn’t be picky.

‘Meanwhile, me and Max—’

‘Max and I,’ corrected the cat.

Millie gave him a hard stare, and then grinned.

‘Max and I,’ she repeated, ‘will run to the main doors. Ah. What’s going to happen with the power?’

‘My brother’s doing it.’

‘Your brother? Does he work for the electricity company?’

‘Not exactly. He’s doing it from home.’

‘How?’

‘He’s hacked into their grid. He’s really good at that sort of thing. You’d never know he was . . .’

‘He was what?’

‘Nothing. He’s hacked into their system, anyway. Call him when you need the power cut, let it ring three times, then hang up. Have you got a phone?’ he asked.

Millie waved her mobile at him.

‘Great. Here’s his number. It’s pay as you go, so it can’t be traced.’

‘Good.’ Millie keyed the number into her phone.

‘We should swap numbers as well,’ Jake added, and they did.

‘So, when you run off with the guards, we call your brother and hang up after three rings. That’s the signal to cut the power to the alarms and the cameras, but not the doors. Has he
isolated those?’

‘Of course.’

‘We go through the main doors. We get up to the third floor, and then the airlock doors will still open, because the power to them stays on.’ Millie felt she had to go over
everything step by step, in case she’d forgotten something.

‘Once the cats are free, they run down three flights of stairs and into the woods, from which point, they’re on their own,’ said Millie rather sadly.

Jake frowned.

‘They wouldn’t want it any other way,’ Max assured them. ‘They will want to be alone after all this time cooped up in jail.’

‘Then we make a run for it, too. But if there’s any time at all, we’ll try to get some proof of what’s been going on from Arthur Shepard’s office, which is
here.’ Millie shone a faint beam of light on the map and pointed at it.

‘But if we can’t get it, it doesn’t matter,’ said Max. ‘We’re not going to get caught doing it.’

‘Agreed,’ said Millie. But her eyes burned at the prospect of letting Shepard get away with it. ‘Is everyone ready?’ she asked.

‘Ready,’ said the other two.

‘Then let’s go to work,’ she said, flicking off the torch.

A few hundred yards away, Arthur Shepard’s ears should have been burning, were there any truth in the old wives’ tale. He was still in his office, even though it
had gone eleven o’clock at night. He was waiting for a van to arrive at eleven fifteen, to ship the cats off to another laboratory in Lincolnshire where no one would find them – at
least not for a while. Not until it didn’t matter, anyway. He had been at work since dawn finalising these arrangements and smoothing things over with his boss, another rich yet unpleasant
men, and he was extremely tired and cross. He looked at the clock on the wall and felt his eyelids droop, simply too heavy to stay open much longer.

A few miles away, an unmarked white van turned merrily down a small road which the driver erroneously thought would lead him to the Haverham laboratory. He would drive several
more miles before he realised his mistake, performed a U-turn, and drove back to the main road to try again.

Jake and Millie agreed to stay in telephone contact throughout the evening. Millie wondered if they should have prearranged a signal to let the other one know if they were
caught, but she hadn’t wanted to suggest it, in case she jinxed the mission, so she stayed quiet. If she didn’t hear from Jake at all for four hours, she decided, she’d call the
police. Surely the most trouble they could get into was for trespassing and being a nuisance? Millie felt cold at the thought of what her dad would say if he found out that she’d been lying
to him, wandering the countryside in the middle of the night and trying to break into a building.

They edged to the very outskirts of the forest, only a tiny distance away from the lab, almost exactly where Millie had first seen the man and his crate of cats. Jake ran off, hoping to bump
into the security men on their rounds. Millie and Max stood poised, until their muscles ached. Nothing. What if they were doing their rounds
inside
the building, rather than outside? How
would Jake draw them away then? After what felt like a thousand minutes, there was a sudden explosion of noise: a large dog barking; a man shouting; and Jake yelling nonsense at the man and racing
off into the distance, taking the guard with him.

‘This is it,’ hissed Millie.

Max’s ears had gone flat on his head when he heard the first bark, and he jumped into her bag, a plan he had rather unwillingly agreed to for the sake of speed – although he could
outrun Millie over short distances, he wasn’t used to running very far at a time, and they planned to go straight through the doors and up three flights of stairs. Millie dialled the number
Jake had given her, waited for it to ring three times, and hung up. She looked at the building, hoping she would see something happen. Seconds later, the few lights on inside went out and, almost
immediately, a second set came on. Millie guessed they were powered by an emergency generator. She just hoped the cameras weren’t as well, but she reasoned that some lights would have to stay
on in any building, in case of fire. Cameras didn’t really help in a fire, unless you had a special passion for grainy video footage of burning buildings, so she felt a little reassured.
Millie pulled up her hood on the off chance she was mistaken, thinking that if the CCTV
did
capture her, Shepard might think he was being robbed by a midget, not a twelve-year-old girl. She
ran as fast as she could to the front doors. As she peered in through the glass, the lobby seemed to be empty. None of the cameras was moving, although they only changed direction every few
minutes, so that didn’t necessarily mean she was safe. She expected the doors to open as she approached them, but they stayed resolutely shut. The outer doors must be on the same circuit as
the cameras and lights, she reasoned. The only other possibility – that Jake’s brother had made a mistake, and that the airlock doors upstairs wouldn’t open for her either –
didn’t bear considering. She was sure the outer ones would open manually. Who knew she’d been paying so much attention in last term’s fire safety lecture? So she pushed on the
doors.

They didn’t move.

‘The other way,’ hissed Max, from her bag.

Millie took a quick, deep breath, trying to focus her brain. She pulled the doors sideways, and they were inside.

Upstairs, the noise of the dog barking almost woke Arthur Shepard, as he slept the sleep of the unjust. And the sound of the emergency generator firing into action might have
woken him too, if it weren’t for the fact that it was a floor below, on the other side of the building. The lights going off and coming almost immediately back on merely made him murmur
something incomprehensible. But he just, just about, slept on.

The driver of the white van pulled a mobile phone from his glove box. He had followed the map that had been faxed over this afternoon as best he could, and he was still lost.
His sat-nav appeared to think that he was in the middle of nowhere and had stopped offering suggestions several miles ago. He would ring for further directions. He was dialling the Haverham area
code when he paused, remembering just how obnoxious Arthur Shepard had been that afternoon when he’d called to arrange the pick-up. No – he wouldn’t give that jumped-up little
beggar the chance to be rude to him again. He snapped the phone shut. He would just have to be a little late.

Millie and Max had already decided that they would go up the nearest stairwell. Now Millie raced up the three flights of stairs. She was breathless by the time they reached the
second floor, panting uncontrollably by the time she wrenched open the fire door on the third.

‘You ride that bike everywhere,’ said Max, still sitting happily in her bag, peering over the side. ‘How come you’re so unfit?’

‘Different muscles. Plus your extra weight,’ she gasped. ‘Now, which way?’

‘Straight ahead,’ said Max. ‘At the end, turn left.’

Millie followed his instructions and came to a door which looked like an airlock in a continental bank.

‘Is this it?’ she checked, as she reached out her hand to press the button.

Max nodded.

She pressed the button, and nothing happened.

‘Damn,’ said Millie. She picked up the phone and redialled. She left it for three more rings and hung up again. Then she pressed the button again, and nothing.

‘What is it?’ asked Max.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, sounding agitated. ‘I don’t know if the power isn’t on, or if there’s a security pass we need, or . . . I don’t
know.’

She pressed the button again, praying for a different outcome. Still nothing. They stood for a moment, wordless, neither of them wanting to give up, and neither of them knowing what to do.
Millie had bitten her lip so hard it was bleeding. Suddenly, her phone lit up. Jake’s brother was calling in silence. The screen flashed once, twice, three times, and went black.

‘Maybe that’s the signal,’ said Max, hoping out loud.

Millie reached out and pressed the button one last time; the door slid smoothly open. Millie ran inside, and they waited for the first door to shut before she pressed the second button. Millie
felt like a mouse caught in one of those humane traps – utterly powerless, completely visible and at the mercy of someone she had never even met.

‘I hope he knows what he’s doing, this brother,’ said Max, giving voice to her fears.

‘Me too.’

The door shut automatically behind them, and she pressed the next button.

The second door drifted weightlessly open.

‘
Yes!
’ Millie felt the way she imagined footballers must feel when they scored a goal, but only whispered her delight.

She looked around the pristine white room, the walls of which were lined with cages: each contained a cat. There were black cats, white cats, a few beautiful tortoiseshells, and one
malevolent-looking orange cat. Nothing Max had told her had prepared her for this – each cat was in a small, cramped wire box, lying on newspaper. They had water bowls, food bowls and nothing
else, not even a bed or a scratching post. They barely had room to stretch out. It was bad enough that they had been kidnapped, operated on, and changed for ever, but surely there was no need to
keep them in these conditions? The wire was a fine gauge, as though the lab techs expected the cats to be able to squeeze through anything more than a quarter of an inch wide. Millie had no doubt
as she ran forwards that these were the same cages the unfortunate rodents had been kept in, before the cats arrived. Clearly nobody had thought that an animal five times the size of a rat might
require five times more space – they had simply jammed the bigger creature into the same miserable prison. She found herself hating Arthur Shepard and his helpers more than she would ever
have believed possible. Furiously, she put her bag on the table in the middle of the room and began opening the cage doors.

‘Who are you?’ asked a grumpy voice.

‘It’s me,’ said Max, jumping from Millie’s bag onto one of the tables in the middle of the room. ‘I’ve come to get you out.’

‘Max?’ said fifty voices at once. ‘Is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me,’ he replied casually. ‘I said I’d be back to get the rest of you.’

‘You brought a little girl along for our big rescue?’ said the huge orange cat, with a nasty sneer on his face.

‘She just broke into a guarded laboratory, made it up to the third floor without activating the cameras or the alarm and opened the electronic doors, so let’s not start calling her
names.’ Max was getting increasingly sniffy on Millie’s behalf.

‘What time is it?’ The orange cat was obviously in charge here.

‘Er . . .’ Millie looked at her watch. ‘Twenty past eleven.’ She couldn’t believe it was still so early – the last few minutes had felt like hours.

‘What are you doing? Hurry! He should be here by now.’ The orange cat spat at her.

‘
Who
should be here?’ Millie was fumbling over the catches, going as fast as she could.

‘Shepard.’

‘
What?
’ Millie and Max both jumped, staring at the ginger tom in horror.

‘He knows something’s up. He thinks someone knows we’re here. I imagine that would be you,’ the cat said in an infuriatingly calm tone now he had their undivided
attention. ‘We’re all to be moved tonight. He was due here at eleven fifteen.’

‘Arthur Shepard is in the building? Oh no!’ Millie was opening the last few cages, although her fingers felt like rubber. The cats were massing on the floor, stretching their stiff
limbs and yawning. She wished she could feel so calm.

‘OK, we won’t try his office for paperwork, then,’ said Max, consoling.