‘How long till they reach us?’
‘Fifteen or twenty minutes,’ John said. ‘Depending upon the traffic and how long it takes them to track down the care homes.’
‘Do you think they’ll try snatching Anna straight away?’
‘Snatching her from inside the home is too risky. They’ll either try picking her up shortly on her way home, or on her way to school tomorrow morning … The car just moved about a kilometre west. Looks as if they’ve turned on to the A27 and they’re not hanging about.’
‘So what do we do?’ Lauren asked. ‘Can we get the police here to protect her?’
‘We can’t get the local plods involved without blowing our cover and a lot of long-winded explanations. In the longer term, we can either get Anna moved to another home, or I can have an MI5 surveillance team out here by tomorrow morning. But if they’re planning on scooping her up now, it’s down to you and me.’
Lauren realised that she had to start preparing. ‘Carl, I’m going inside,’ she yelled, as she dashed towards her unit.
Carl screamed and ran after Lauren, but she didn’t have time to listen.
‘Where are you, John?’ she asked, as she bolted up the stairs.
‘On the way out of my room,’ John said. ‘I’m taking the car, I’ll be outside the ACC’s front gate within ten minutes.’
Lauren was relieved to hear that John would get there before the baddies. She raced into her room, shut her door and grabbed her case from the wardrobe under the bed. After lifting out a stack of clothes, she found the hidden catch. A flap opened up, revealing a few pieces of emergency equipment.
Lauren pocketed a small can of pepper spray and pulled down her leggings before strapping a concealed knife to her thigh.
‘Young lady,’ a man said stiffly, as he burst into the room.
Lauren jumped with fright as she straightened her clothes. ‘Haven’t you heard of knocking?’ she demanded. ‘I’m undressing here.’
It was Ronald, one of the house parents. ‘What’s going on with Carl?’ he asked.
‘I dunno,’ Lauren said, mystified.
‘You were outside playing with him. Then you stormed off and locked him out in the dark.’
‘Oh,’ Lauren gasped. She’d forgotten that the front door had a catch that locked if you shoved it hard. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s not a very respectful way to treat one of our youngest guests, Lauren. He’s a vulnerable human being, not a toy that you can abandon in a dark playground the instant you get fed up with him.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lauren repeated, as she pointed at the open phone on her bed. ‘I got excited, my best mate just rang me.’
‘Well don’t do it again.’
Lauren flicked Ronald off as he closed the door behind himself. She grabbed her phone off the desk. John was still on the line.
‘I know where Anna gets off the bus from school,’ Lauren said. ‘I’ll wait at the end of the street. I should be able to get to her before she’s in sight of ACC. I’ll tell her that I’m treating her to a burger or something.’
*
Twenty minutes later, Lauren stood nervously on a dark street corner as the kids started to filter down from the main road in their school uniforms. John had parked up outside ACC’s main gate and was keeping a suspicious eye out for any car with two men inside it.
The wind was bitter. Lauren started getting paranoid when it got to ten minutes past four. Finally, she looked down the main road and saw Anna stepping off a double-decker bus.
‘Hey,’ Lauren said, smiling with relief. ‘You’re late today.’
‘I have special English class at the learning support unit in town. What are you doing out here? It’s freezing.’
‘I had another call from your Russian friends,’ Lauren explained. ‘They said they knew you were here and that they’re coming to get you.’
‘You’re joking,’ Anna said as she glanced around nervously. ‘How can they know?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lauren lied. ‘But they do.’
‘You haven’t told anyone else about this, have you?’
‘No,’ Lauren said. ‘But I’m worried sick. I think we’ll have to tell someone. They could grab you off the street. I came out here because for all we know, they’re waiting outside the ACC gates right now.’
‘What can we do?’
‘I’ve got twenty quid,’ Lauren said. ‘The longer we stand around here, the more chance that they’ll spot us. We’ll find a McDonald’s or somewhere warm and think everything through.’
‘I guess,’ Anna said, as she spun around.
Lauren’s phone rang as they started walking. It was John.
‘Pretend like you’re speaking to your best friend,’ he said.
‘Hi, Bethany,’ Lauren said enthusiastically.
‘I’ve thought it through,’ John said. ‘I’ve had a good look around and I can’t see the bad guys, but the mobile phone signal says they’re less than three hundred metres away. Head for the café on the corner. I’ll be your social worker, same as when you arrived on Sunday. When I come in, you tell Anna that you got scared and told me what was going on. I’ll tell her that she can have full British citizenship and protection if she tells us everything she knows.’
‘Can you do that?’ Lauren asked.
‘I had a word with Zara; she says the easiest thing is to fill in the paperwork as if we’re recruiting Anna into CHERUB. Then we’ll reject her application and send her out for adoption.’
‘What if we kept the item?’ Lauren was trying not to let Anna tag on to the conversation. Fortunately, she didn’t speak much English anyway.
‘I considered that,’ John said. ‘You said Anna’s bright, but she’s twelve already and there’s not much of her. By the time we’ve taught her enough English to get through basic training and toughened her up a bit, she’d be too old.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Lauren sighed. ‘I would have loved to come to your birthday party.’
‘I won’t be able to park on the main road,’ John said. ‘So I’ll be walking right behind you. I’ve got a gun, just in case they show their faces.’
‘I’ll send you a nice card,’ Lauren said. ‘Speak soon, bye.’
‘Who was that?’ Anna asked, as Lauren pocketed her phone.
‘Mate of mine,’ Lauren explained, switching back to Russian. ‘Wanted me to go to her party, but didn’t realise that I’d moved down here.’
‘Pity,’ Anna said.
Lauren pointed out the café on the opposite corner. ‘We can cross over and go in there, they do nice cakes.’
They were approaching the no-parking zone leading up to a pedestrian crossing when a battered Toyota saloon screeched to a halt alongside them. Lauren turned and saw two burly men staring right at her.
‘Run,’ she screamed, giving Anna a shove as the back of the car opened and a Reebok trainer stepped into the gutter.
To Lauren’s horror, Anna only managed two steps before the momentum from the push sent her sprawling across the pavement. Realising that Anna wouldn’t be able to outrun two grown men, Lauren went on the offensive. As the man in the Reeboks stood up, Lauren charged forward and kicked him in the balls. He crumpled over as she slammed her palm into his solar plexus, punched him in the face and crunched his arm in the car door.
Meanwhile, the driver stepped into the road, sprinted around the car and grabbed Anna off the pavement. He shouted to Lauren in English: ‘Hey, little girl.’
Lauren caught the light glinting from the saw-toothed blade at Anna’s throat.
‘Get in the car or I cut her head off.’
Lauren looked over her shoulder, but there was no sign of John. A woman screamed
hey
from the opposite side of the road as her buggy-pushing friend dialled the police on her mobile.
The man Lauren had beaten groaned as he grabbed the car door and used it to lever himself out of the gutter. Meanwhile, his knife-wielding companion bundled Anna into the front passenger seat. Once the knife was away from Anna’s throat, Lauren considered going back on the attack, but within a second, she had a gun pressed against her temple.
‘Little bitch,’ the bloody-nosed man spat, as he grabbed Lauren’s jacket and thrust her inside the car.
Lauren ended up straddling the back seat and the man sat on her, crushing her legs as he pulled shut the rear door. As the driver slammed his door and dropped the handbrake, his companion shoved Lauren’s legs from beneath him, before banging her head against the door trim and cracking his hand across her face.
‘Kick me in the balls, eh?’ he shouted, as Lauren collapsed across her seat. ‘You wait till we arrive. Then I’ll show you who’s boss.’
‘What the
hell
happened?’ the driver said, as the car sped away. ‘It was supposed to be fast and clinical.’
‘This one came at me,’ his bloody-faced companion answered, as he stared Lauren down.
‘Abby will go nuts. Half a dozen people saw us. We’re gonna end up with the cops on our tail and you know what it’s like with kids: it’ll probably end up on the news.’
‘Don’t blame
me
, arsehole. You told me it was one skinny little girl. You didn’t mention that she had Bruce Lee’s kid sister for a bodyguard.’
The tyres squealed as they took a sharp right turn. Anna was sobbing hopelessly in the front passenger seat.
‘Do you think they got our number plate?’ the driver asked.
‘We were parked there for over a minute, you can bet somebody did.’
‘Call someone and get them to pick us up in another car. We’ve got to ditch this crate as soon as.’
As her captors argued, Lauren felt inside her jacket. She still had her mobile phone, which meant that John would be able to track her. The only trouble was, they’d probably search her and confiscate it as soon as they had time to think straight, so she slipped it out of her pocket and pushed it down the back of her knickers, between the cheeks of her bum. It made sitting uncomfortable and it wasn’t a nice way to treat a new phone, but they’d be unlikely to find it on a casual search of her pockets.
School had finished for the day and James was sitting on Kerry’s bed in his socks. Kerry pulled two mugs of hot chocolate out of her microwave, handed one to James and grabbed a bag of miniature marshmallows off her bedside cabinet. After dropping a few into each mug, she leaned over and kissed James on the cheek before running her finger over the scar above his left eye.
‘You look like Harry Potter,’ she grinned. ‘So how did your meeting with Mr Pike go?’
‘It was weird,’ James said, as he slid the blue card out of his pocket. ‘He gave me this.’
‘What’s that?’
As James sipped his cocoa, he told Kerry about the card giving access to the mission preparation building and the story of Ewart and Mr Pike being best friends.
‘So,’ he finished, ‘what do you reckon?’
Kerry shrugged. ‘I think that seventeen years is a long time for Mr Pike to hold a grudge.’
‘I meant, what do you think about the idea of me sneaking into the mission preparation building?’
‘Isn’t the security in there supposed to be mental?’ Kerry asked.
‘They never got that biometric system working. In the end, they decided that campus is pretty secure so they’ve replaced it with swipe cards.’
‘What was Ewart like when you spoke to him the other day?’
James shrugged. ‘He seemed OK to be honest. But I was thinking in class this afternoon—’
‘First time for everything,’ Kerry butted in.
‘I’m trying to be serious,’ James said irritably. ‘Remember two years back when we were on our drugs mission and Nicole got expelled for snorting cocaine? Ewart was charging around the house that day, giving us all drug tests and it was like he
wanted
more of us to get expelled. I’ve had a few other run-ins with him as well, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to agree with Mr Pike: Ewart wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone.’
‘Ewart’s strict,’ Kerry said. ‘He doesn’t stand for any nonsense, that’s for sure. But it’s a big leap from that to saying that he’s actually dishonest.’
James slowly turned the blue card over in his hands. ‘I’d really like to know what’s going on with the investigation. I definitely don’t think that Ewart is telling me everything he knows.’
‘It’s the most sensitive area on campus, James. You’re already suspended from missions. If you get caught sneaking around mission preparation you might as well pack your bags and start saying your goodbyes.’
‘I know, but if what Mr Pike says about Ewart is right, I’m doomed anyway.’
‘Yeah,
might
be, based upon an ancient grudge. Taking a risk based upon solid information is one thing, but this doesn’t make any sense.’
‘But Mr Pike’s always fair. He was the one who stood up for us when Mr Large kept bullying Lauren.’
Kerry nodded. ‘Pike is a decent bloke, there’s no denying that.’
‘Which is why I think I need to go in there – and I’d really like you to come and be my lookout.’
‘Na-uh,’ Kerry said. ‘No way. It’s a massive risk.’
‘But you’re smart Kerry, I really need your help on this.’
‘James, if you’re really concerned about Ewart, speak with Meryl or go to a member of the ethics committee.’
‘Ewart will smooth-talk his way out of it. And let’s face it, he’s married to the chairman.’
‘You know what I think?’ Kerry said. ‘I think your curiosity is getting the better of you. You’re not really worried about Ewart. It’s just that this investigation is preying on your mind and you want to go into his office and have a good snoop around.’
‘Fine,’ James snapped. ‘If you’re not gonna help me I’ll ask Kyle.’
Kerry shook her head. ‘Can’t, he went off on some mission this morning.’
‘Shak then.’
‘Training,’ Kerry said.
James thought it through: Callum and Connor were away on a mission, so was Lauren, and Bruce was in the medical unit with a broken leg.
‘Please Kerry,’ James grovelled. ‘You’re the only one.’
Kerry grabbed James’ bicep. ‘I’m begging you, James, don’t do this. I know you’re worried about the investigation, but this is going to make things worse, not better. Even if you do start sneaking around Ewart’s office, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually find the information you’re looking for.’
James huffed. ‘I guess you’re right. I’ll give Mr Pike his card back and tell him that it didn’t work out.’
‘You know it makes sense,’ Kerry said, as she went up on her knees and swung her leg across James’ waist.