James was pleased someone had finally noticed.
‘Yes,’ he said casually.
‘You’d better take it off, James,’ Bruce said. ‘Kids work really hard to earn them. They’ll kill you if they catch you wearing it.’
‘It’s my shirt,’ James said. ‘I did earn it.’
Kerry laughed. ‘Yeah, James, and I’m the Queen of China.’
‘Don’t believe me then,’ James said.
Bruce sounded a bit desperate. ‘I’m serious, James. People get angry when you wear a shirt without earning it. Take it off. They’ll stuff your head down the toilet or something.’
‘I’d pay money to see him bog-washed,’ Lauren giggled. ‘Leave it on.’
‘I’m not taking it off,’ James said. ‘It’s mine.’
‘You’re such an idiot,’ Kerry said. ‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you when we’re scraping you off the floor.’
Amy came in. She had Arif and Paul with her. The three of them rushed over to James.
‘Too late now,’ Bruce said. ‘You’re dead.’
James was worried. He wasn’t sure if Amy knew Mac had awarded him the navy shirt. He stood up from the table and turned to face Amy. Paul and Arif looked intimidating, muscles everywhere.
Amy wrapped James in her arms.
‘Congratulations,’ Amy said. ‘You really deserve that shirt. You were brilliant.’
Amy let go. Paul and Arif shook James’ hand.
‘I can’t believe you’re that wimp we had to keep throwing in the diving pool,’ Arif said.
James looked back at his friends sitting around the table. They all looked amazed. Lauren jumped up and hugged her brother. Kerry’s mouth was open so wide you could have shoved a tennis ball in it without touching a tooth. James couldn’t help smiling.
It was beautiful.
EPILOGUE
RONALD ONIONS (UNCLE RON) has had difficulty adjusting to life behind bars. He received two broken arms during a fight with a fellow inmate. He is scheduled to be released in 2012.
GLADYS DUNN used the money from her second book to buy a farm in Spain. She lives on the land with her son JOSHUA DUNN, who makes curry, stew or paella every day for the thirty former Fort Harmony residents who joined them. Gladys jokingly refers to her farm as ‘Fort Harmony 2, but warmer and without the mud.’
CATHY DUNN sold the Land Cruiser, purchased a round-the-world air ticket and went backpacking in Australia.
SEBASTIAN DUNN was released from police custody without charge. The stabbing of the policeman was classified as an accident. The policeman returned to duty a few months later.
Sebastian now lives in a cottage in Craddogh with his mother and brother CLARK DUNN. Sebastian and Clark have denied links to a number of cats that have disappeared since their arrival in the village.
FIRE & WORLD DUNN were tried and convicted at the Old Bailey in London. They were each sentenced to life in prison. The Judge recommended they serve a minimum of twenty-five years.
As SCARGILL DUNN was only seventeen and had no previous criminal convictions, he was sentenced to only four years in a young offenders’ prison. With early release for good behaviour he could be out within two years. He has begun studying for A-level exams and hopes to go to university after he is released.
Police suspect ELEANOR EVANS is a member of Help Earth who helped to plan the anthrax attacks on Petrocon 2004. No evidence was found and she was released from custody without charge. She now lives in Brighton with her mother, her son GREGORY EVANS and her newly born daughter Tiffany.
BRIAN ‘BUNGLE’ EVANS slipped M15 surveillance after a few weeks. He is now one of the world’s most wanted men. Police in Britain, the United States, France and Venezuela all wish to question him about terrorist activity.
JOANNA RIBBLE was disappointed that Ross Leigh didn’t write or call. She now has a new boyfriend. James kept her paper aeroplane and the photograph of the tree where they first kissed.
KYLE BLUEMAN returned from his eighteenth mission and finally got his navy CHERUB shirt. He was reportedly ‘upset’ that James got his navy shirt before him. Kyle reckons James only got the navy shirt because Mac felt sorry for him when he got anthrax.
BRUCE NORRIS & KERRY CHANG frequently remind James that although he earned a navy shirt, they have both done more missions than him and can easily kick his butt any time he starts to get cocky.
AMY COLLINS hopes to complete a couple more missions before she leaves CHERUB and goes to university.
LAUREN ADAMS (formerly LAUREN ONIONS) is enjoying life at CHERUB. She starts basic training shortly after her tenth birthday in September 2004.
JAMES ADAMS (formerly JAMES CHOKE) got his Karate black belt shortly after returning from his mission. His exuberant celebrations ended badly and his punishment was one month cleaning up in the CHERUB kitchen every night after dinner.
He is currently preparing for his second mission.
CHERUB: A HISTORY (1941-1996)
1941
In the middle of the Second World War, Charles Henderson, a British agent working in occupied France, sent a report to his headquarters in London. It was full of praise for the way the French Resistance used children to sneak past Nazi checkpoints and wangle information out of German soldiers.
1942
Henderson formed a small undercover detachment of children, under the command of British Military Intelligence. Henderson’s Boys were all thirteen or fourteen years old, mostly French refugees. They were given basic espionage training before being parachuted into occupied France. The boys gathered vital intelligence in the run-up to the D-Day invasions of 1944.
1946
Henderson’s Boys disbanded at the end of the war. Most of them returned to France. Their existence has never been officially acknowledged.
Charles Henderson believed that children would make effective intelligence agents during peacetime. In May 1946, he was given permission to create CHERUB in a disused village school. The first twenty CHERUB recruits, all boys, lived in wooden huts at the back of the playground.
1951
For its first five years, CHERUB struggled along with limited resources. Its fortunes changed following its first major success: two agents uncovered a ring of Russian spies who were stealing information on the British nuclear weapons programme.
The government of the day was delighted. CHERUB was given funding to expand. Better facilities were built and the number of agents was increased from twenty to sixty.
1954
Two CHERUB agents, Jason Lennox and Johan Urminski, were killed while operating undercover in East Germany. Nobody knows how the boys died. The government considered shutting CHERUB down, but there were now over seventy active CHERUB agents performing vital missions around the world.
An inquiry into the boys’ deaths led to the introduction of new safeguards:
(1) The creation of the ethics panel. From now on, every mission had to be approved by a three-person committee.
(2) Jason Lennox was only nine years old. A minimum mission age of ten years and four months was introduced.
(3) A more rigorous approach to training was brought in. A version of the 100-day basic training programme began.
1956
Although many believed that girls would be unsuitable for intelligence work, CHERUB admitted five girls as an experiment. They were a huge success. The number of girls in CHERUB was upped to twenty the following year. Within ten years, the number of girls and boys was equal.
1957
CHERUB introduced its system of coloured T-shirts.
1960
Following several successes, CHERUB was allowed to expand again, this time to 130 students. The farmland surrounding headquarters was purchased and fenced off, about a third of the area that is now known as CHERUB Campus.
1967
Katherine Field became the third CHERUB agent to die on an operation. She was bitten by a snake on a mission in India. She reached hospital within half
an hour, but tragically the snake species was wrongly identified and Katherine was given the wrong anti-venom.
1973
Over the years, CHERUB had become a hotchpotch of small buildings. Construction began on a new nine-storey headquarters.
1977
All cherubs are either orphans, or children who have been abandoned by their family. Max Weaver was one of the first CHERUB agents. He made a fortune building office blocks in London and New York. When he died in 1977, aged just forty-one, without a wife or children, Max Weaver left his fortune for the benefit of the children at CHERUB.
The Max Weaver Trust Fund has paid for many of the buildings on CHERUB campus. These include the indoor athletics facilities and library. The trust fund now holds assets worth over £1 billion.
1982
Thomas Webb was killed by a landmine on the Falkland Islands, becoming the fourth CHERUB agent to die on a mission. He was one of nine agents used in various roles during the Falklands conflict.
1986
The government gave CHERUB permission to expand up to four hundred pupils. Despite this, numbers have stalled some way below this. CHERUB requires intelligent, physically robust agents, who have no family ties. Children who meet all these admission criteria are extremely hard to find.
1990
CHERUB purchased additional land, expanding both the size and security of campus. Campus is marked on all British maps as an army firing range. Surrounding roads are routed so that there is only one road on to campus. The perimeter walls cannot be seen from nearby roads. Helicopters are banned from the area and aeroplanes must stay above ten thousand metres. Anyone breaching the CHERUB perimeter faces life imprisonment under the State Secrets Act.
1996
CHERUB celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with the opening of a diving pool and indoor shooting range.
Every retired member of CHERUB was invited to the celebration. No guests were allowed. Over nine hundred people made it, flying from all over the world. Among the retired agents were a former Prime Minister and a rock guitarist who had sold 80 million albums.
After a firework display, the guests pitched tents and slept on campus. Before leaving the following morning, everyone gathered outside the chapel and remembered the four children who had given CHERUB their lives.
READ ON FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER OF
THE NEXT CHERUB BOOK, CLASS A.
1. HEAT
Billions of insects fizzed about in the sunset. James and Bruce had given up trying to swat them off. The boys had jogged ten kilometres along a twisted gravel path. It was uphill, heading towards a villa where two eight-year-olds were being held hostage.
‘Better give us a minute,’ James huffed, leaning forward and resting his palms against his knees. ‘I’m wiped.’
If James had wrung out his T-shirt, he could have filled a mug with the sweat.
‘I’m a year younger than you,’ Bruce said impatiently. ‘You should be the one pushing me. It’s that gut you’re carrying.’
James looked down at himself. ‘Give over, I’m hardly fat.’
‘Not exactly thin either. You’re gonna get crucified at your next medical. They’ll put you on a diet and make you run all that off.’
James straightened up and drank some water from his canteen.
‘It’s not my fault, Bruce. It’s genetic. You should have seen the size of my mum before she died.’
Bruce laughed. ‘There were three Toffee Crisp and one Snickers wrapper in our bin last night. That’s not genetic, that’s you being a pig.’
‘We can’t all have little stick-insect bodies like you,’ James said, bitterly. ‘Are you ready?’
‘We might as well check the map now we’ve stopped,’ Bruce said. ‘See how far it is to the villa.’
James got a map out of his pack. Bruce had a GPS clipped on his shorts. The tiny unit told you your exact position anywhere on the planet to within a couple of metres. Bruce transposed the coordinates on to the map and used his finger to trace the winding gravel path towards the villa.
‘Time to go off road,’ Bruce said. ‘It’s less than half a kilometre away.’
‘It’s really steep,’ James said, ‘and the ground crumbles around here. It’s gonna be a nightmare.’
‘Well,’ Bruce said, ‘unless your plan is to walk up to the front gate of the villa, ring the doorbell and say, Excuse me love, can we have our hostages back? I think we’d better cut into the bushes.’
Bruce had a point. James gave up trying to fold the map properly and stuffed it in his pack. Bruce led the way into the scrub, the tinder-dry plants crunching under his trainers. It hadn’t rained on the island for two months. There’d been bush fires in the east. When the sky was clear, you could see the plumes of smoke.
James’ damp skin soon had a coating of grit. He grabbed on to plants, using them to pull his way up the steep slope. You had to be careful: some plants had barbs, others erupted from the dry ground as soon as you pulled on them, leaving you holding a clump of roots, clutching desperately for something sturdier before you tumbled backwards.
When they reached the wire fence around the villa, they backed up a few metres and lay flat on the ground, collecting their thoughts. Bruce was moaning something about his hand.
‘What are you whinging about?’ James asked.
Bruce showed James his palm. Even in the half-light, James could see the blood trickling down Bruce’s arm.
‘How’d you do that?’
Bruce shrugged. ‘Somewhere coming up the hill. I didn’t realise until we stopped.’
‘I’d better clean it up for you.’
James tipped some water out of his canteen, washing away most of the blood. He got the first aid kit out of his pack; then lit a small torch and clamped it between his teeth, so he could see what he was doing while keeping both hands free. A thorn bulged under the webbing between Bruce’s middle fingers.
‘Nasty,’ James said. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘What kind of stupid question is that?’ Bruce snapped. ‘Of course it does.’
‘Am I supposed to pull it out?’ James asked.
‘Yes,’ Bruce said wearily. ‘Do you ever listen in class? Always remove splinters, unless there is severe and profuse bleeding, or you suspect you’ve punctured a vein or artery. Then apply disinfectant and a clean dressing or sticking plaster.’
‘You sound like you swallowed the textbook,’ James said.
‘I was on the same first aid course as you, James. Only I didn’t spend the entire three days trying to get off with Susan Kaplan.’
‘It’s a pity she had a boyfriend.’
‘Susan doesn’t have a boyfriend,’ Bruce said. ‘She was just trying to get rid of you.’
‘Oh,’ James said, crushed. ‘I thought she liked me.’
Bruce didn’t answer. He was biting down on the strap of his backpack. He didn’t want anyone in the villa to hear if the pain made him scream out.
James lined up his tweezers. ‘Ready?’
Bruce nodded.
The thorn slid out easily enough. Bruce moaned as a fresh dribble of blood trickled down his hand. James mopped it up, rubbed on antiseptic cream and wound a bandage tightly between Bruce’s fingers.
‘All done,’ James said. ‘Are you right to carry on?’
‘We can’t turn back after going this far.’
‘You rest for a minute,’ James said. ‘I’ll sneak up to the fence and check out the security.’
‘Watch out for video cameras,’ Bruce said. ‘They’ll be expecting us.’
When James switched off the torch, there was only moonlight left. He shuffled to the fence on his belly. The villa looked impressive: two storeys, four-car garage and a kidney-shaped pool out front. The lawn sprinklers chugged gently, the spouts of water illuminated by the porch lights. There was no sign of any cameras or hi-tech security stuff; just the yellow siren box from a cheapo burglar alarm, which would be switched off while anyone was in the house. Ja
mes turned back towards Bruce.
‘Get up here. It doesn’t look too serious.’
James got out his wire cutters and snipped links in the fence, until there was a slot big enough to squeeze through. He followed Bruce over the lawn, crawling swiftly towards the house. James felt something squish against his leg.
‘Oh … man,’ James said, sounding totally revolted. ‘Jesus.’
Bruce hushed him up. ‘Quiet, for god’s sake. What’s the matter?’
‘I just dragged my knee through a colossal pile of dog crap.’
Bruce couldn’t help smiling. James looked set to puke.
‘This is bad,’ Bruce said.
‘Tell me about it. I’ve had it on my shoe before, but this is on my bare skin.’
‘You know what a massive pile of dog mess means?’
‘Yeah,’ James said. ‘It means I’m extremely pissed off.’
‘It also means there’s a massive dog around here.’
The thought focused James’ mind and got him crawling again. They stopped when they got to the wall of the villa, adjacent to a row of French windows. Bruce sat against the wall and checked out the room inside. The light was on. There were leather sofas and a snooker table inside. They tried sliding the French doors, but every one was locked. The keyholes were on the inside, so there was nothing to use their lock guns on.
WOOF.
The boys snapped their necks around. The mother of all rottweilers stood five metres away. The huge beast had muscles swelling through its shiny black coat and strings of drool hanging off its jaw.
‘Nice doggy,’ Bruce said, trying to keep calm.
The growling dog moved closer, its black eyes staring them down.
‘Who’s a nice doggy-woggy?’ Bruce asked.
‘Bruce, I don’t think it’s gonna roll over and let you tickle its tummy.’
‘Well, what’s your plan?’