CHERUB: The Fall (3 page)

It was warm inside the Obidins’ house, with its under-floor heating and a gas generator buried beneath the garage, but the rest of Aero City got its electricity from a decrepit nuclear power station five hundred kilometres away and suffered regular outages. After a month living in Aero City, James had concluded that the only thing in the world worse than school was a school where you spent the entire day wearing fingerless gloves and watching your classmates’ breath curling up towards the ceiling.

‘It’s snowing,’ James said, in Russian, as he looked across a long desk at Denis Obidin’s six-year-old son, Mark.

James had been learning Russian intensively for three years and was fluent, though his accent was nowhere near good enough for him to pass as a native. James asked Mark to repeat the phrase in English.

‘Zisss nowing,’ Mark said.

‘Not bad,’ James said cheerfully. ‘Now let’s try English numbers again.’

The little boy shook his head and screwed up his face before breaking into a giant yawn. ‘I’m too tired.’

‘Come
on
, Mark,’ James said sternly. ‘I’m your tutor and if you don’t concentrate you’re not going to pass your entrance exam.’

Mark broke into an evil smile. ‘I’ll tell my daddy it was your fault and he’ll punish
you
.’

‘Oh you reckon, do you?’ James scoffed.

Mark folded his arms. ‘My uncle Vladimir is the chief of police. He’s got his own police station and his own cells. He can do whatever he likes.’

‘Maybe he’ll put you in a cell if you don’t pass your exam.’

‘Nah, he loves me,’ Mark grinned. ‘He buys me all the biggest Lego sets. I don’t ever want to go to a stupid English boarding school. I like it here.’

‘At least the classrooms are nice and warm in England,’ James said, giving a shrug. ‘And the lights never go out in the middle of the day. Besides, we all have to do things we don’t like, kiddo. My aunt and uncle make me come here after school every day and teach English to a horrible
smelly
little boy. And all because they’re trying to be nice to your daddy.’

Mark got out of his chair, ran around the desk and tried looking mean as he bunched his fist under James’ nose. ‘I’m not smelly. You’re smelly.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’

Mark smiled as he gently nudged his fist against James’ nose.

‘GRRRRR,’ James bellowed. ‘You’re dead, you chicken nugget.’

The little boy cracked up laughing as James scooped him off the floor and flipped him upside down so that his hair hung down in strands.

‘Now I’ll use you as a broom,’ James said, as he lowered Mark’s head towards the floor and swung him gently from side to side, before setting the youngster down on the edge of the desk.

‘Do that again,’ Mark squealed, giggling so much that he had spit bubbling out the corner of his mouth.

‘I’ll do it again, but only if you say
I want to be a broom
in English.’

‘Never in
stupid
English,’ Mark said indignantly, as he jumped off the table and crashed face first on to a beanbag by the window.

Both boys turned towards the door as it clicked open. Vladimir Obidin stood in the doorway. The powerfully built man wore the crisply tailored uniform of a senior police officer.

‘James, you’re leaving now,’ he said.

James looked at his watch as Mark sighed with disappointment.

‘It’s only twenty past,’ James said.

‘There’s a meeting here tonight,’ Vladimir said. He abruptly changed his tone to one of anger. ‘I don’t justify myself to children. When I say go, you go.’

Vladimir sent a shiver down James’ back. The man had worked for Russian military intelligence and had a reputation for extracting confessions from Aero City’s criminals with a set of dentist’s tools and a blow lamp. James tried not to feel intimidated as he said goodbye to Mark, grabbed his backpack and stepped out of the library.

‘I’ve got a long trek home,’ James said nervously. ‘Can I use the bathroom?’

Vladimir huffed as though James had just imposed some great burden upon him. ‘Quickly then.’

James stepped into a plush washroom, with a huge spa bath and beech-panelled walls. He slid off his backpack and – all too aware that Vladimir was on the other side of the door – quietly pulled a Nokia communicator out of the side pocket.

As James flipped it open, he noticed that the communicator had picked up some e-mails. Cellphone coverage in Aero City was flaky and his phone tended to receive a whole bunch of messages and missed calls whenever he passed through an area with good reception. But this wasn’t a good moment to read them. He switched to a wireless messaging application and tapped in a four-digit number to access a hidden menu.

James had dropped a dozen pinhead-sized listening devices around the Obidins’ house over the three weeks in which he’d been tutoring Mark after school. Rows of bright green signal bars on the communicator screen showed that they were all powered up and transmitting perfectly.

‘Shift it,’ Vladimir shouted, pounding his fist on the door. ‘I’m a busy man.’

‘Just shaking off,’ James said, as he shoved the communicator inside his pack and raced for the door. At the last minute he remembered to flush the toilet.

Mark gave James a friendly wave from one of the first-floor windows as Vladimir escorted him down the woodchip driveway towards the solid steel gate at the front of the Obidin compound.

‘All right, Slava,’ James nodded, as he passed a guard and stepped through a reinforced steel door cut into a half-metre-thick wall.

The bored and half frozen guard usually exchanged a few sentences with him, but he clammed up under Vladimir’s gaze and didn’t even acknowledge James’ nod.

Once James was out of the compound, he zipped his jacket and pulled up the collar to ward off the cold. For the purposes of this mission, James lived in an apartment block six kilometres away with a fake aunt and uncle. They were posing as weapons dealers who wanted to buy missiles from Denis Obidin. In reality they both worked for MI5.

A bus ran into town from a stop half a kilometre from Obidin’s house, but Aero City’s transportation was erratic. The wait for a bus in sub-zero temperatures was unbearable and on the odd occasion when a bus actually turned up, it was filled with cigarette smoke and mean-tempered pensioners with vile coughs. Running home was the healthier option and it meant James would still be in decent physical shape when he returned to CHERUB campus.

The first part of James’ run took him along a gloomy road, with little traffic and trees packed along each side. He loved this section of his daily run home, with the crisp air and the smell of pine needles. The trees ended when he reached factory seven. A kilometre and a half long, the massive hangar had once employed thirty-five thousand workers who turned out a three-hundred-seat airliner every ten days.

It had been graffitied and vandalised in the years after closing, but most young families had left Aero City in search of work and taken the city’s delinquent teens with them. The only life James had ever seen around the plant were a few homeless boys who lived rough in an abandoned apartment block. They sniffed glue inside the dilapidated remains of a cargo plane and occasionally kicked a half inflated football around inside the hangar.

Once he was sure nobody was about, James stopped running and sat on a concrete step with his back against a fire door that had been taken off its hinges, probably to be burned as firewood. He slid the communicator out of his pocket and checked his messages.

The first was from his girlfriend back at CHERUB campus:

HAPPY 15TH BIRTHDAY.
MISS U
LOVE U
COME BACK SOON!
HOPE IT’S NOT 2 COLD.
KERRY.

James had heaps of other birthday messages from friends on campus and even a message from his handler, Meryl Spencer. The oldest unread message was from his sister, Lauren. It had been sent the evening before:

HAPPY BDAY 4 2MORO SCUMBAG!
SORRY THIS IS EARLY. MR LARGE IS
DRAGGING US OFF ON SOME BLOODY
HIKING EXPEDITION.
UR PREZZIE WILL BE WAITING
WHEN U GET HOME!
P.S. KEEP UR HANDS OFF THE
RUSSIAN GIRLS U PERV!

Lauren Adams’ life had been ruined when a pair of recently qualified CHERUB agents returned from a mission in the USA. The lads had spent much of their time tucking down hamburgers, ice cream and bucket-sized containers of soft drinks, and none of it following the strict exercise regime designed to keep them in shape. Every cherub has to undergo a medical and fitness test after a long mission and both boys failed spectacularly.

CHERUB’s handlers and training instructors put their heads together and decided that all of the younger agents needed a sharp reminder about the importance of keeping fit. The reminder would take the form of a three-day hike across the Yorkshire Dales, led by the notorious Norman Large. All CHERUB instructors are tough, but Large was the worst because he got a huge kick out of making kids suffer.

Twenty-six CHERUB agents, all aged twelve or under, were dumped off the back of a truck just after sun-up, and Large gleefully announced that they each had to carry a ten-kilogram metal weight, on top of the tents, utensils, drinking water and clothing already crammed inside their packs. Hot drinks and porridge were to be served ninety minutes later at a meeting point fifteen kilometres away, and those who didn’t make it would go hungry until the evening.

Lauren made it in time for breakfast, but that had been the high point of her day. It was dark now, and she lay inside a two-person tent with swollen ankles and red welts where her pack had chafed her shoulders. She watched the sleeping bag of her best friend, Bethany Parker, swelling and dipping as she breathed.

‘Bethany?’ Lauren whispered, as she reached across and gave her companion a gentle nudge.

Bethany didn’t stir, so Lauren decided that it was safe to wriggle out of her sleeping bag. She’d kept her jeans on, so she only had to slip her unlaced boots over her socks before she crawled up to the zipper holding the tent flaps together and opened it slowly to keep down the noise.

The full moon gave Lauren enough light to see by as she crept between two rows of tents and into a cluster of trees at the edge of the field.

‘Rat,’ Lauren whispered. ‘Are you out there?’

The heavily built twelve-year-old called softly back in his Australian accent. ‘Over here.’

Lauren smiled as she sighted Rat, sitting with his back against a tree trunk. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Been better,’ Rat said, as he ran a grubby hand through his tangled hair. ‘Twisted my ankle when we crossed that lake and my back is
killing
me. You?’

‘About the same,’ Lauren said, giving a resigned shrug as she sat in the grass and snuggled up beside Rat.

‘How come you’re so late?’

‘Bethany. I thought she was
never
gonna fall asleep.’

The pair turned to face each other and exchanged a quick kiss.

‘Is that all I get?’ Rat asked indignantly.

‘You smell like BO and you’ve got dried-up baked-bean sauce around your mouth.’

Rat tutted. ‘Well Large had us walking and running for like, twelve hours. You’re no pot-pourri yourself.’

Lauren gave some thought to this before leaning in again and giving Rat a much longer kiss.

‘You know,’ Rat said when they broke off, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘Riiiiight,’ Lauren grinned. ‘That explains the clanking noise I could hear when you and Andy were walking in front of me earlier.’

‘Seriously,’ Rat said, a touch irritated. ‘We’ve been sneaking around behind everyone’s backs ever since I finished basic training. I reckon it’s time we went public.’

Lauren scowled at the grass between her legs and let out a deep groan. ‘If I’d known you were gonna start on that again I would have stayed in my tent.’

‘I want a
normal
girlfriend. This is driving me nuts.’

Lauren grabbed hold of a branch and hauled herself off the ground. ‘Goodnight, Rathbone.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ Rat said, as he reached out and grabbed Lauren’s trouser leg.

‘Let off or I’ll boot you one.’

‘You’re doing my head in, Lauren.’

‘I like it the way it is. I don’t want the pressure of everyone talking about us, and making snide remarks and asking what’s going on all the time.’

‘You’re so full of crap,’ Rat snorted. ‘You’re just scared that James will take the mickey. It’s totally immature.’

‘Hey,’ Lauren snarled, raising her voice above a whisper for the first time. ‘I’m not immature. Now let go of my
bloody
trousers.’

‘You’ll have to tell James that you’ve got a boyfriend sooner or later,’ Rat said, as he defiantly tightened his grip and tugged Lauren towards him. ‘I mean, he’ll get upset if you don’t invite him to your wedding and he’s bound to suspect something when you start knocking out kids …’

‘What makes you think I’ll ever be getting married?’

‘I spent all day looking forward to meeting up with you,’ Rat said, as he gave up the struggle and let Lauren go. ‘But you know what? I’m sick of this. It’s pathetic.’

Rat letting go coincided with an almighty tug from Lauren and the sudden lack of resistance caught her by surprise. She took an awkward stumble, tripped over a tree root and ended up clattering into the low-slung branches of a neighbouring tree.

‘Moron,’ Lauren growled.

‘This was
totally
worth losing an hour’s sleep over,’ Rat said caustically.

As he stood up, he grabbed a golden object from the pocket of his fleece and threw it at Lauren.

‘What’s that?’ Lauren asked, as she picked it off the ground between her boots.

‘Mint Twix bar, limited edition. The one you’re totally addicted to.’

Mr Large had given the cherubs strict instructions not to bring extra food or items that weren’t on the equipment list.

‘Large would have made you exercise till you puked if he’d caught you with this,’ Lauren said. She tried to keep up her grouchy tone, but couldn’t help letting a rush of warm emotion into her voice.

‘I know,’ Rat said, trying to make out that he couldn’t care less.