The Great Escape (21 page)

He waited patiently for a car to drive past, hoping that it would be soon – he was getting anxious. Although he had longed to be part of the rescue mission last time, he had known that
sitting at home, hacking into computer systems, was his real strength. He wasn’t sure he had the necessary skills for what he was about to do. A few seconds later he was rewarded as a
delivery van from a supermarket swept past him at high speed. The road was narrow and Ben hurled himself into it as the van sped off, shrieking loudly.

‘Ow! Ow!’ he hollered. ‘Owww.’ Nothing happened. He waited, and shouted again. ‘Owwwww.’

Elaine Peters’s door opened a crack.

‘Oh!’ she cried, and ran out into the street. ‘Don’t move! Are you hurt?’

‘Yes,’ said Ben – not quite lying, as he had obtained some good grazes when he fell onto the gravelly road.

‘Oh dear. Let me call an ambulance,’ she said.

‘No, no,’ said Ben hurriedly, realising that he would be exposed as a fraud in five seconds flat if medical professionals were involved. ‘He . . . er,’ Ben cast around
for something to say. He wished he’d practised this instead of the stupid piano. ‘He didn’t hit me quite, just clipped my wheel, and I fell. Nothing’s broken. I mean, except
my bike.’

‘Let me ring your mother, then. What’s her number?’ said Elaine Peters.

‘My mother’s dead. Car accident,’ Ben improvised.

‘Oh, no! Your father, then?’

‘He’s away,’ said Ben. ‘At sea.’

Two houses away, a shrub started giggling.

‘Away at sea?’ asked Elaine Peters, appalled. ‘Who’s looking after you?’

‘My brother,’ said Ben. ‘But he’s in, er, London today. He’ll be home later. I don’t want to bother him. He’ll be angry with me for breaking my
bike.’

‘Well, perhaps I could take you home,’ she said doubtfully, looking back at her front door.

‘No, really,’ said Ben. ‘You’ve been very kind already. I only live a few streets away – I can walk home. I’ll be able to get up in just a minute.’

He crawled feebly towards the kerb and she bent down to help him.

Millie and Jake heard Ben’s shouts from the other side of the house. They were already in place behind the fence and peered quickly through its slats to check the
whereabouts of the shed – which looked gratifyingly old, and not at all a state-of-the-art secure facility. This was their cue. Jake gave Millie a boost over the fence, then leapt over
himself. They both had their hoods up, just in case the neighbours were looking out of their back windows, instead of being safely at work as Millie was hoping. They ran to the shed and tapped
softly on the door.

‘Celeste?’ whispered Millie, feeling both nervous that the cat wouldn’t be inside and a little stupid talking to a wooden door. ‘Celeste? Are you in there? It’s
Millie.’

‘’Allo?’ said an unmistakably French cat.

The door was locked and Jake stood back. ‘Careful,’ he said. He thumped it hard. The damp wood around the lock splintered and cracked. ‘And again,’ he muttered, and hit
it a second time.

The door swung open and the eyes of a beautiful tortoise-shell cat met theirs as Millie opened a cage door to free her for a second time.

‘
Déjà vu
, hmm?’ asked Celeste.

‘I know,’ said Millie. ‘We came as soon as we realised where you were.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Is Max here?’

‘He’s keeping watch at the front,’ Millie replied, as they ran back to the fence. Celeste squeezed under it as Millie and Jake hefted themselves over it once again.
‘Let’s go.’

They ran back to the agreed meeting place, where Ben, limping slightly, and Max were waiting for them.

‘Celeste!’ cried Max. ‘We have found you.’ He ran up to her and they rubbed cheeks, their whiskers entangled.

‘Second time lucky, as I think you say over here,’ she said, looking at Millie, who nodded, not wanting to correct her.

‘Thank you,’ said Celeste. ‘You are a hero, Max.’ She gazed at him. ‘
My
hero,’ she breathed.

‘Is he blushing?’ Ben whispered loudly.

Max made a dignified swish of his tail. ‘Celeste and I have to do some . . .’ He looked at her, unsure of the phrase he wanted.

‘Catching up?’ she suggested.

‘Some catching up,’ Max continued. ‘I shall meet you at home later, Millie. I shall see you two’ – he jerked his head at Jake and Ben, who were trying, and failing,
to contain their sniggering – ‘another day. Perhaps tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ said Jake.

‘Sorry,’ added Ben.

They both started to giggle.

‘Thank you for helping to rescue Celeste,’ Max finished, looking at them all with a stern expression.

‘Any time,’ said Millie, whose nostrils were now flaring suspiciously.

‘
A bientôt
,’ said Celeste, as she and Max began to walk away.

‘Not if we see them first,’ Max muttered.

That evening, Celeste had already begun her journey home and Max would say nothing about her, except that she lived very near to Brussels, and that they had arranged to meet
again soon. He and Millie were at home, watching the late news. The director of Playmatic had resigned, saying he needed to spend more time with his family. The board had followed. All their
families had been pining for them too, it seemed. Arthur Shepard was revealed to be in the Maldives, applying frantically, but unsuccessfully, for new jobs. Elaine Peters’s cat burglary did
not make even the local papers.

Over the next few days, to Millie’s great surprise, none of the cats’ owners appeared in the news claiming their cats had been made to talk.

‘Why do you think that is?’ she asked Max, having puzzled over it for some time.

‘I don’t think they’ll have said anything,’ said Max.

‘The owners?’

‘The cats. I wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been an emergency. Cats aren’t meant to talk. We don’t really like it. Well,’ he corrected himself, ‘
I
quite like it. But only because it’s been interesting here with you. If I was just in someone’s house, saying, “Where’s the cat food? No, I didn’t leave that mouse
there,” it would be pretty boring. Plus, the reward was only for the first cat, I think. And they’ve probably been watching the television and seeing what’s happened to
Ariston.’ Ariston was now slated to front a show called
When Good Pets Go Bad
. Max had put his head in his paws for some moments when he heard about it.

‘I still can’t quite believe we did it,’ said Millie.

‘I know. There’s only one more thing left to do.’

‘What’s that? Oh.’ Her face fell. ‘Of course. We need to get you home.’

Max and Millie spent several days trying to work out how she could return him to Brussels. She considered inventing a pen pal who urgently needed her to visit (a sudden desire
to improve vernacular English, or only three weeks to live, for example), but realised her dad wasn’t an idiot. She hinted that they should maybe go on some sort of brief holiday before she
went back to school in two weeks. Her dad didn’t seem interested. She even thought of waiting till she was back at school and then proposing it as a school trip, before she gloomily accepted
that by the time it had been organised, Max’s family would probably have given him up for dead.

They began to plan instead for him to try and get home alone, by Eurostar. But Millie didn’t want him to have to get around London on his own. She tried suggesting that a day trip to
London would be nice, but her dad was buried in papers and muttered that it would have to wait. Anyway, she really wasn’t convinced that Max would be able to get through the security there
– it would be like an airport, surely. She still thought a ferry would be easier, although she understood his dislike of the water. But then, how would he get to Dover, and then from Calais
to Brussels? Max wasn’t so worried about the travelling, but he very much wanted her to come with him and meet Stef and Sofie. They gave themselves one more week to come up with something and
then they would give in, and Max would go home on his own. Millie looked desolate at the prospect.

‘I’ll write,’ promised Max.

‘You don’t have thumbs. You’re not a big reader.’

‘I’ll email. I’ve been practising. I can tap a computer key with my paw, look.’ Max illustrated his new-found skills.

‘OK, you can email me,’ she sniffed. ‘But it won’t be the same. And I bet your spelling’s awful.’

‘Something could still happen,’ he said sagely.

And something did.

The day before Max was due to head off alone, Millie’s dad bounded in through the front door.

‘Dad,’ said Millie, alarmed. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m better than all right,’ he said, picking her up and swing-ing her around.

Millie had begun to accept that she might never be tall enough for this not to happen, unless she moved to a country populated entirely by Snow White’s friends.

‘Put me down. What is it?’

‘I’ve got a new job.’

‘Really? Where?’

‘Anywhere I like! The bank manager has just given my freelance business the go-ahead.’

‘Freelance what?’

‘Well, I suppose I should have told you before, but you know when I lost my job?’

Millie nodded, astonished. Her dad never mentioned this by choice.

‘Well, I didn’t lose it because they didn’t need me. I lost it because there was a fault in their system, a back door, which they thought I should have noticed – it left
them open to hackers.’

‘You would never have made that kind of mistake,’ Millie snapped.

Her dad beamed at her. ‘No,’ he continued. ‘It turns out I didn’t. They had someone inside the department who made the back door deliberately. He was passing on
information to a rival company.’

‘What a creep.’ Millie couldn’t help wishing she’d met Ben a bit sooner.

‘Quite. I spent two weeks after they kicked me out trying to work out what had happened, and I realised that was the only answer. But it was difficult to convince them that it wasn’t
just me trying to protect my reputation.’

‘Oh! Is
that
what you were doing?’ Millie asked, feeling a light bulb come on over her head again. This really had been an educational summer.

‘Yes, of course it was.’ He looked surprised. ‘Why? What did you think I was doing?’

‘Dunno. I thought you’d gone a bit mental.’

‘Cheek.’ Her dad pretended to clip her round the ear as she leaped out of reach and stuck out her tongue.

‘Very mature,’ he said loftily.

‘You started it. How did you convince them, then?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t. I sent them all the information and the conclusions I’d come to, and they ignored me. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I had a call from my old boss.’

‘To say sorry?’ Millie was feeling a little guilty herself. How could she not have noticed that her dad had been going through all this? She’d been too busy with her own
industrial espionage to pay attention to his, she supposed.

‘They never say sorry. But, this guy—’

‘The creep?’ Millie checked.

‘The very same. He had defected to their rivals the day before. They were calling to offer me my old job back.’

‘Good. But you said no?’ She was confused.

‘Not completely. I said I’d work for them on a freelance basis, and they could be the first clients of my new computer consultancy,’ he replied with a small smile.

‘Dad, you don’t
have
a computer consultancy,’ she pointed out.

‘Correction. I didn’t have one. I do now.’

‘You turned down your old job so you could start your own company?’ Millie was amazed and impressed.

‘I know.’

He was now almost jigging from one foot to the other, unable to contain his excitement. Millie suppressed a laugh when she realised how much he reminded her of Ben when he had begun persecuting
Alan Shepard.

‘I thought it was a bit of a risk,’ he carried on happily. ‘But I want a boss I can trust – me. So, I started to put together a business plan for my own company, arranged
a meeting with the bank manager to talk about setting up a business account, and then, of course, everything went crazy.’

‘What did?’ Millie asked.

‘Well, you know how much publicity there’s been this month about companies and computer leaks? You know, that case with Vakkson, and Playmatic, and that lab we were cleaning for a
few weeks, with Bill? Confidential emails appearing in journalists’ in-boxes, and that kind of thing?’

‘Mmm?’ said Millie casually, looking profoundly shifty. Luckily, her dad was too involved in what he was saying to notice.

‘Well, I thought it was the perfect time to send out some stuff to the companies in the area, assuming they’re all a bit nervous about their systems being hacked into and read,
offering them my amazing computer expertise at a surprisingly affordable price. That’s what I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks. And loads of them are interested – I’ve
had a pile of letters and emails. So I contacted the bank and showed them all the work I could get, and they thought it was a great idea, and now I’m Alan Raven, Freelance Computer Engineer
and Troubleshooter.’

‘That’s so cool. I’m really proud of you, Dad.’

‘Thanks, love.’ He gave her a quick hug, and added, ‘I’m going to start next week, just before you go back to school.’

Millie’s brain began to tick – if her dad started work before she went back to school, maybe she could sneak down to London, or Dover, and at least get Max part of the way home.

Her dad continued: ‘So, how about we go away somewhere for a couple of days, to celebrate?’

‘OK, like where?’

‘Where would you like to go? Don’t say the Bahamas, I haven’t earned anything yet.’

Millie couldn’t believe her luck.

‘Could we, erm, could we go to Brussels? Just for a day or two?’

‘Brussels? Why Brussels?’

‘I dunno. It sounds nice.’ Millie wished she’d asked Max more about his home town, so she could say something a bit more convincing than that. ‘The Atomium,’ she
said, suddenly remembering the huge sculpture that Max had shown her on the net. ‘And, uh, the botanical gardens.’ So, so feeble. Luckily her dad was distracted.