Jump Start (2 page)

Emma was an average ten-year-old girl. She went to school, which she liked, most of the time. She had a family that she liked, most of the time—but not always all at the same time. Life went on pretty much as normal—sometimes really good, sometimes a little bad, sometimes a bit nothing.

Emma's favourite colour was blue—aqua actually. Emma liked to be exact about these things and there were some awful shades of blue around. She also liked purple and orange, but not together. She liked apples, pears, mandarins and grapes but she did not like bananas or grapefruit. She did like banana milkshakes though, but thought that banana
and chocolate milkshakes were much, much better. Emma liked chocolate. Correction: she
loved
it. Correction: she
adored
it. In fact, there was not much Emma would not do for chocolate. Luckily she also loved swimming, basketball and gymnastics!

When she was not eating chocolate or playing sport, Emma loved emailing her friends, irritating her brother, drawing and reading about animals. Actually, Emma loved animals even more than she loved chocolate.

She also liked maths. Emma didn't care that some people thought it was a bit nerdy. She just liked the way you could count on maths. She liked the way the numbers made up patterns and how you could usually tell what was coming next. But most of all, Emma liked numbers because they made sense, they didn't give you mean surprises, and you could rely on them.

Doing maths was relaxing for Emma. It wasn't that she didn't find it hard sometimes, because she did, it was just that she liked sorting out the problem,
she liked making things make sense. One plus one was two. It was
always
two—it didn't just sometimes decide to be three or maybe four and then say ‘only joking, two really'. Five times five had to be twenty-five, not 467 or 34,589! It would be twenty-five tomorrow and the next day and all the days to infinity. It didn't matter what you were wearing or whether you invited it to a sleepover or not, it would always be twenty-five. Emma wished that some of the girls at school could be that reliable.

It was actually maths that started it all—‘all' being the one thing that was not so average about ten-year-old Emma Jacks. Emma was a secret agent. She was EJ12, a field agent and code-cracker in the under-twelve division of
SHINE,
a secret agency that protected the world from evil-doers.

Emma was selected to join
SHINE
when she won a primary school maths contest.
SHINE
needed clever thinkers, especially people who loved maths,
and didn't seem to mind if they were still in primary school.
SHINE
needed agents to help them crack the codes and thwart the missions of evil agencies like
SHADOW.
SHINE
tried to defeat
SHADOW
by intercepting their secret messages and foiling their dastardly plans.

In some ways, Emma would have been just as happy simply cracking the enemy codes and letting some other field agent go on the missions, but that was not how it worked.
SHINE
had a motto (quite a lot of mottoes actually), ‘If you crack the code, you take the load.' So Emma, or EJ12, or just EJ, as she was called when she was on duty, would be sent on missions all over the world.

When she was EJ12, Emma seemed to be able to do incredible things. She could scale high walls, fly hang-gliders and skate across glaciers. She remained calm under pressure and always seemed to know what to do in a crisis. In fact, she seemed to be able to do things that would completely freak Emma Jacks out—why was that? Was it the special
equipment
SHINE
supplied? Emma wasn't sure but she often wished EJ12 could sometimes go to school instead of her and she wished EJ12 could be the one who had to do gym comps!

Emma pulled her mobile phone out of her gym bag. She flipped open the screen, hoping for a message. Nothing. It was a very cool phone though, a cross between a game console and a phone, with lots of applications. Many of the apps were top-secret, hiding behind the normal ones on the screen. When
SHINE
wanted Emma for a mission, her phone would vibrate and the screen would flash aqua. (You could select your own alert colour and Emma had, of course, chosen her favourite.) But right now the phone wasn't doing anything. It was most definitely, unfortunately, doing nothing at all.

Well, at least she had a mobile phone now, even if it wasn't flashing. At first, Emma's parents had been
firmly against letting her have one.

‘You don't really need a mobile, do you Em?' her mum had said. ‘Why can't you just use the home phone?'

Use the home phone? Really, was she serious? Emma loved her mum, but she did wonder about her parents sometimes. Why did they think that mobile phones were just for calling people? What about music, photos, text messages, apps and joining the twenty-first century.

Suddenly there it was—saved by the flash! (A nice aqua flash.) Mission alert!
Excellent,
thought Emma.
No more no-jumps today!

‘Sorry Lauren, I've got to leave early,' said Emma, grinning at Hannah as she headed towards the door.

‘But you'll miss your next turn on the beam,' said Lauren.

‘Oh, what a pity but sorry, can't help it, got to go,' called Emma as she grabbed her bag and rushed out of the gym.

Not for the first time a mission alert from
SHINE
had saved Emma's day!

Emma ran to girls' toilet block, quickly checked that no one was there and turned on the hand-dryers. The noise of the hand-dryers would be important in hiding the noise of what was going to happen next.

Emma did often wonder why she had to report in to
SHINE
in the girls' toilets. It was not really what she had imagined during her secret-agent training. She was sure there were more secret, spy-like and glamorous ways to start a mission than sitting on
a toilet—but perhaps that was the point. Who would ever suspect a top-secret international mission was getting underway in the girls' toilet block?

Emma went to the last cubicle on the right. With one more quick glance around the toilet block, she closed and locked the door. She dropped her gym bag, put down the toilet seat, sat down and flipped open the toilet-roll holder. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you would never notice a small electronic socket on the side of the holder. Emma pushed her mobile phone into the socket and waited. There was a beep, then Emma entered her pin code and removed her phone. Another beep and then a message flashed up on her phone screen.

EJ picked up her gym bag, grabbed the edge of the toilet seat and counted to three. On three, the wall behind the toilet spun around, with the toilet and EJ still attached. EJ slipped off the toilet seat and onto a waiting beanbag. A protective shield lowered itself down and clicked into place over the beanbag. She was at the top of a giant tunnel slide. It was the
SHINE
Mission Tube. EJ typed ‘go' into her phone...

EJ loved this bit. For the next two minutes she had the best giant slide ride of her life as she whizzed around the corners and down the straights of the
SHINE
underground tube network.

The tube was the secret transport system of the
SHINE
agency. It carried its agents from their home tube to different
SHINE
locations, including
SHINE HQ
where agents were briefed for their missions.

She finally came to a halt at a small platform with a keypad. The shield flipped back. She keyed
in her pin code and waited for the security check. This changed every time she started a mission. Sometimes it was fingerprints, sometimes an eye scan, sometimes hair samples. You never knew what it would be—and neither would anyone trying to break into the
SHINE
network.

‘Please sing the first line of the national anthem,' requested a digital voice.
Great,
thought EJ.
Voice recognition.
She didn't mind singing in the shower but that was about it. She cleared her throat and sang.

‘Louder, please,' requested the digital voice.
Thank goodness no one is listening,
thought Emma, feeling her cheeks blush. She took a deep breath then belted out the line again.

‘Slightly out of tune, but agent identity confirmed. Please drop in, EJ12!'

There was a beep and the floor seemed to fall away as EJ dropped down into a small chamber. The beanbag was perfect for a soft landing.

EJ was now in the Code Room, a small chamber with nothing in it except a table, a chair and a clear plastic tube coming from the ceiling directly above her. There was a whizzing sound and suddenly a small capsule popped out of the tube and onto EJ's lap. It was the first code.

Whenever
SHINE
intercepted an enemy message, they despatched it to one of their agents for decoding—the faster the better. That was another reason why
SHINE
had the underground tube network—it got the code to the agent quickly.
SHINE
could connect their network to the best location for each agent,
which in EJ's case was the school toilets. Hmmm, perhaps she could convince them to have a second location.

In the Code Room, EJ opened the capsule and took out a small piece of paper and a pen. She always felt a bit nervous opening the enemy message. Would she be able to crack the code? What if she couldn't? She unfolded the paper—there was nothing there! EJ turned the paper over. The other side was blank too!

It was unlike
SHINE
to make a mistake so there had to be something she wasn't getting. EJ thought hard.
If I can't see the message it must be invisible,
she thought.
Invisible ... invisible ink?
It was worth a go. She searched through the top-secret apps on her mobile phone and then touched one of them on the screen. A small but strong purple light came on—violet actually. EJ scanned the paper with the light and as she did, the message appeared.

She read carefully.

EJ laughed out loud. ‘They're going to have work harder than that,' she said to herself. ‘This will take no time at all!' She opened up another app on her phone screen and scrolled down. She knew exactly what she was looking for.

Gotcha!

Within minutes, EJ had broken the first two lines of the code.

The next bit was trickier.
Why suddenly have letters in a number code? That doesn't make sense.
Or does it?
EJ had an idea.
If there are letters where there are numbers, there are probably numbers where there are letters. Let's see if this works...

EJ remembered the maps they used in class.
If I'm not mistaken,
she thought,
that's a map reference: 2S 68W!

The last bit was easy. EJ had now cracked the whole code and she wrote the message underneath.