CHERUB: The General (9 page)

‘I want him to stay,’ Bradford said. ‘You can’t order me around like this.’

‘You need to learn some manners, son,’ Davis snarled.

‘Who do you think you are?’ Bradford shouted, as the bodyguard put a meaty hand on James’ shoulder.

The guard had been behind the door when they entered which meant James hadn’t been able to size him up, but the casual way he was manhandling James showed that he didn’t rate him as a serious threat.

‘OK, fine,’ James said, acting the stroppy teenager as he raised his hands and turned to face the bodyguard.

‘Green-headed ponce,’ the bodyguard laughed, before shoving James in the back.

Bradford had made it clear that he didn’t want James to leave and the insult gave James an excuse to lash out. As soon as there was a metre of space between himself and the bodyguard, James launched an explosive roundhouse kick.

The bodyguard clattered backwards into a chest of drawers and James felt a jolt of panic as he reached inside his jacket for a gun. James closed in, grabbing the bodyguard’s thumb and twisting it back until the bone snapped. A knee in the stomach sent the guard crashing to the ground.

‘You want to take the piss out of my hair?’ James shouted, booting his opponent in the guts before leaning forward and ripping the gun from the holster under his jacket.

‘Still want to shoot me?’ James asked.

The bodyguard was coughing blood and wouldn’t be getting up any time soon, so James pointed the gun at Davis.

‘Whoah! Careful son,’ Davis said, waving his hands warily. ‘We can talk about this.’

‘Don’t patronise me,’ James shouted. ‘If you offer to buy me a lollipop again, I swear to god I’ll take this gun and shove it right up your arse.’

After this, James expertly removed the clip from the gun -perhaps a little too expertly for someone who was supposed to be an ordinary teenager. He pocketed the bullets and checked the chamber was clear before handing the empty weapon to Davis.

The room went into an uneasy quiet. Bradford and Davis glowered at each other, James scowled at the bodyguard, defying him to stand back up and take another swing at him.

Finally, Davis looked down at the empty gun in his hand and burst out laughing. ‘I’ve seen some things in my time, but that’s a right nasty little green-haired thug you’ve got yourself there, Mr Bradford.’

James taking out the bouncer had given Bradford confidence and he allowed himself to smile slightly. ‘James is a good man,’ Bradford nodded. ‘I’ve got a lot of good men. Now do you think we can forget all this macho shit and talk some business?’

*

When it opened in a month’s time the air traffic control centre would be the workplace of a hundred and fifty civilian and eighty military air traffic controllers, along with more than two hundred support workers ranging from canteen staff to software engineers and senior management.

Right now it was ghostly. Many of the main lights were switched off to save energy and Lauren and Bethany crept down a corridor lit only by green emergency exit signs.

‘The arrow said that the security office is along here somewhere,’ Lauren whispered, as Bethany clattered into a bucket half filled with water.

‘Oww,’ Bethany moaned, as she flipped on her torch to see what she’d hit.

‘Keep the noise down,’ Lauren warned. ‘If that last guard radios out we’re totally screwed.’

‘Looks like the builders did a good job on the roof,’ Bethany said, as she shone her torch up at a mouldy glass skylight that was feeding the water into the bucket.

Lauren had carried on walking and saw light shining around the rim of a door. She flicked her torch on and was delighted by the sign on the door: ROOM G117 – SECURITY STAFF LOUNGE & TRAINING AREA.

Lauren put her ear up to the door and could hear a woman speaking into her radio. ‘Guys, what’s going on out there? Respond please. You tossers better not be jerking me around.’

‘One woman, and she’s close to losing her cool,’ Lauren said, as Bethany got close. ‘Get the bucket.’

‘Bucket?’ Bethany said, sounding like she’d misheard.

Lauren didn’t know the layout of the security lounge, but there was almost certainly an emergency alarm trigger somewhere in the room. If they burst in, the female guard might reach it before Lauren and Bethany could grab her.

‘Cheers,’ Lauren said, as Bethany heaved over the plastic bucket. It was so full that the weight of grubby water inside buckled it out of shape.

Lauren began pouring the water under the door of the security lounge. Some ran back into the corridor and swirled around her trainers, but the majority of the brownish liquid ran under the door and the guard inside heard it splashing on the vinyl floor.

‘Goddammit,’ the woman yelled to herself. ‘Poxy roof. Now let’s just add mopping up to my job description.’

The guard was startled to open the door and see Lauren standing in front of her. In a move not out of any combat training manual, Lauren swung the empty bucket at the guard’s head. It hit with a hollow thunk but the plastic was too light to do serious damage and the guard screamed and tried slamming the door in Lauren’s face.

Lauren barged in as the guard ran towards the control panel. She locked arms around the guard’s chunky thighs and brought her down on to the damp floor with a rugby tackle. Bethany had picked up the bucket as she entered and couldn’t resist wedging it over the guard’s head.

The sight of the guard thrashing about with the bucket on her head and her muffled shouts of
‘Oh my god!’
touched the girls’ warped sense of humour and they both started to laugh.

‘Give us the tape, Bethany,’ Lauren snorted.

While Lauren pinned the guard to the floor and bound her wrists and ankles, Bethany spotted a marker pen beneath a whiteboard used for the security team’s shift rotas and used it to draw a smiley face on the bucket.

When Lauren saw it she started laughing so hard that she could hardly breathe. ‘Oh god,’ she snorted. ‘I’m gonna die.’

Bethany wasn’t laughing quite so hard, but still had trouble standing up straight as she wrapped a giant length of tape over the top of the bucket and looped it under the woman’s armpits so that it wouldn’t come off.

‘I’m
such
a bitch,’ Bethany shouted triumphantly. ‘Don’t you just love being evil?’

‘You can’t leave that on,’ Lauren said, trying to be serious between the howls of laughter. ‘She could be pregnant, or have asthma or something.’

‘Spoilsport,’ Bethany moaned, snapping a picture on her mobile before pulling off the bucket.

The woman let out a piercing scream before Bethany made a proper gag the way she’d been trained: a loosely wrapped ball of tape that would depress the tongue but not induce choking and a single strip of tape over the mouth, being careful not to block the nose.

‘We shouldn’t laugh,’ Lauren said, as she pulled out her phone and tried to calm down slightly before calling Rat. ‘But that bucket looked so damned funny.’

The guard was spluttering words into her gag and Lauren was pretty sure that they weren’t nice ones.

‘What’s so funny?’ Rat asked, when he answered his phone.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Lauren sniffed, rubbing a tear from her eye. ‘How you doing?’

‘It’s below freezing out here, so we’ve dragged all the guards into the shed under the radar tower. Now we’re waiting on you.’

‘I’m sitting on the last guard,’ Lauren said. ‘So get your worthless male butts inside, it’s time to trash this joint!’

‘The question is, can we do business?’ Rich said, as he pulled a set of long velvet curtains and invited Bradford to sit at a circular table set in the hotel suite’s bay window. James took a bottle of mineral water from the mini-bar and handed it to the bodyguard who was still down on the floor. He accepted it grudgingly, before swishing it around his mouth and spitting bloody water out on the carpet.

‘Where’d you learn your tricks?’ he asked, as James gave him an arm up.

‘My dad was a Thai kickboxing champion,’ James lied. ‘Taught me moves almost from the day I could walk.’

‘I could have had you, kid,’ he said, half smiling as he stared down at his dislocated thumb. ‘Just never expected it.’

James didn’t want another ruck, but wasn’t impressed by the attempt at camaraderie from a man who’d patronised and pulled a gun on him five minutes earlier.

‘All these phone calls, all this mystery,’ Bradford said, as he stared at Rich across the table. ‘You said something about a cache of Russian weapons.’

Rich grabbed a pair of ice cubes and dropped them into his whisky tumbler before nodding. ‘There’s still plenty of IRA kit floating around, but I can also get better things: plastic explosive from eastern Europe, Italian grenades, Israeli machine guns … The problem is it all costs and judging by that car you came in, you and your little bunch of anarchist friends aren’t exactly swimming in money.’

The conversation was just getting interesting, but James’ priority was to plant the tracking device inside something belonging to Rich. Busting Rich before anything was known about his organisation would be like cutting off a weed at the stem: if you don’t destroy the roots, it just grows back in a different shape.

‘Mind if I take a leak?’ James asked.

Rich turned and smiled. He clearly found the green-haired thug amusing. ‘Go for it,’ he nodded.

‘Don’t
lock the door,’ the bodyguard warned.

That wasn’t ideal, but James pushed the bathroom door closed and kicked one of the damp towels on the floor against it so it would be difficult to open quickly. The shower cubicle was a mess and he was delighted to see Rich’s toiletries spread out over the cabinets.

He lifted the toilet seat and studied Davis’ stuff as he started to pee. After zipping up he turned on the tap, but rather than washing his hands he glanced back over his shoulder to make sure Rich’s bodyguard wasn’t peeking before taking a tiny tracking device out of his jeans.

The three-centimetre disc was roughly the thickness of a CD. Although it wasn’t particularly large, the tracking device didn’t look like anything else and needed to be hidden somewhere out of sight, like the lining of a suitcase or the battery compartment of an electrical device.

Rich had a roll-open toiletry bag hooked on to the shaving mirror, but James was disappointed to discover that all the compartments were made from loose nylon mesh which made it impossible to hide anything.

The longer James took the greater the chance of the bodyguard getting suspicious and sticking his head around the door. He had half a mind to cut his losses when he eyed Rich’s shaving kit.

Rich used a Mach-3 razor, with a traditional bristle shaving brush and an upmarket brand of hard shaving soap in its own plastic tub. James grabbed the tub and twisted off the lid as he backed up to the door. The bodyguard couldn’t see James in this position and if he did push the door, it would hit James in the back giving him two or three seconds to disguise what he was up to.

With the tap running it was hard to follow the conversation at the table, but James’ nerves worsened as he caught a half a sentence from Bradford and realised that his voice was high and tense.

James moved fretfully, squeezing the circular tub so that the almost new bar of white shaving soap popped out. He took the sticky backing off both sides of the tracking device and pressed it against the bottom of the plastic tub, before squeezing the lump of soap down on top of it.

This was close to ideal from a disguise standpoint: Rich probably wouldn’t use the soap down to the last dregs where the tracking device would be revealed, and even if he did he’d hopefully assume that the disc was a part of the packaging designed to hold the soap in place.

James stepped back into the main room but nobody paid attention. The bodyguard sat on the end of the bed clutching his thumb while Rich Davis and Chris Bradford scowled at each other across the table.

‘Listen
to me,’ Rich said angrily. ‘You’re living in cloud-cuckoo land. If you want expensive toys you need money. I want to work with you, Bradford, but every successful terrorist organisation has to have two arms: one to raise money and one to spend it.’

‘I’m not a bank robber,’ Bradford said incredulously. ‘Or a con-artist. And I certainly don’t go around extorting money from stallholders and shopkeepers.’

‘Then how
do
you make it work?’ Rich bawled. ‘I hate the British establishment as much as I ever did. I can bankroll enough weapons to get you started, but I’m no billionaire. We can’t turn SAG into a serious threat unless there’s money coming into the kitty.

‘You’ve got enthusiastic young supporters like James over there. I’ve got
thirty
years’ expertise in raising money for terrorist groups, plus contacts in the defence industry that can bring in everything you need to get the job done.’

‘I didn’t come here looking for a partner,’ Bradford said firmly.

‘Well what did you come here for?’ Rich said angrily. ‘A handout?’

Bradford shrugged. ‘I guess I hoped you supported our cause.’

‘You expected me to hand you a bunch of weapons and tell you to go off and do whatever you liked with them?’