Authors: Robert Muchamore
Brigands M. C.
Robert Muchamore
was born in 1972 and spent thirteen years working as a private investigator.
CHERUB: Brigands M.C.
is his eleventh novel in the series.
The CHERUB series has won numerous awards, including the Red House Children’s Book Award. For more information on Robert and his work, visit
www.muchamore.com
Praise for the CHERUB series:
‘If you can’t bear to read another story about elves, princesses or spoiled rich kids who never go to the toilet, try this. You won’t regret it.’
The Ultimate Teen Book Guide
‘My sixteen-year-old son read
The Recruit
in one sitting, then went out the next day and got the sequel.’ Sophie Smiley, teacher and children’s author
‘So good I forced my friends to read it, and they’re glad I did!’ Helen, age 14
‘CHERUB is the first book I ever read cover to cover. It was amazing.’ Scott, age 13
‘The best book ever.’ Madeline, age 12
‘CHERUB is a must for Alex Rider lovers.’ Travis, age 14
The Henderson’s Boys series:
1.
The Escape
2.
Eagle Day
3.
Secret Army
4.
Grey Wolves
5.
The Prisoner
... and coming soon:
6.
One Shot Kill
The CHERUB series:
1.
The Recruit
2.
Class A
3.
Maximum Security
4.
The Killing
5.
Divine Madness
6.
Man vs Beast
7.
The Fall
8.
Mad Dogs
9.
The Sleepwalker
10.
The General
11.
Brigands M.C.
12.
Shadow Wave
CHERUB series 2:
1.
People’s Republic
... and coming soon:
2.
Guardian Angel
Copyright © 2009 Robert Muchamore
First published in Great Britain in 2009
by Hodder Children’s Books.
This eBook edition published in 2012
The right of Robert Muchamore to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior permission in writing from the publishers or in the case of reprographic production in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency and may not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 91054 4
Hodder Children’s Books
A Division of Hachette Children’s Books
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
An Hachette UK Company
CHERUB is a branch of British Intelligence. Its agents are aged between ten and seventeen years. Cherubs are mainly orphans who have been taken out of care homes and trained to work undercover. They live on CHERUB campus, a secret facility hidden in the English countryside.
Quite a lot. Nobody realises kids do undercover missions, which means they can get away with all kinds of stuff that adults can’t.
Cherubs are ranked according to the colour of the T-shirts they wear on campus. ORANGE is for visitors. RED is for kids who live on CHERUB campus but are too young to qualify as agents (the minimum age is ten). BLUE is for kids undergoing CHERUB’s tough one-hundred-day basic training regime. A GREY T-shirt means you’re qualified for missions. NAVY is a reward for outstanding performance on a single mission. The BLACK T-shirt is the ultimate recognition for outstanding achievement over a number of missions. When you retire, you get the WHITE T-shirt, which is also worn by staff.
1. PATCHES
The Brigands Motorcycle Club began in California in 1966, founded by an armed robber named Kurt Oxford. There were dozens of clubs just like it: mean dudes on big bikes, oozing menace and scaring regular citizens.
The Brigands weren’t the largest biker gang, nor the toughest or most notorious. Many thought Kurt Oxford’s death in a 1969 prison shooting would be their end. But instead of breaking up or being absorbed by a larger club – ‘patched over’ in biker speak – the Brigands expanded.
As he cruised Los Angeles freeways on his Harley Davidson, Kurt Oxford never could have imagined that his motorcycle club would one day have seventy chapters spanning the United States and a hundred more, from Sydney to Scandinavia. In 1985, Brigands membership was estimated at more than three thousand full-patch members, and ten times that number of associates and hangers-on.
Only a full-patch member of the Brigands is entitled to wear the club’s colours: an embroidered logo depicting a caped highwayman brandishing a sawn-off shotgun.
Excerpt from
Riding with Kurt and the Brigands
by Jane Oxford
*
Out of eleven British chapters, the South Devon Brigands ranked second only to London in power and seniority. Their clubhouse was a creaky affair, converted out of a pair of barns on fifteen acres close to the wealthy enclave of Salcombe. On a clear day the video cameras mounted around its corrugated metal fence could peer over the barbed wire at millionaires’ yachts moored in the marina below.
Dante Scott was eight years old, son of Scotty, the vice-president of South Devon Brigands. Dante was a tough kid who’d swing at anyone who took the mickey out of his tangled red hair. He liked hanging out with his dad at the Brigands clubhouse, which was usually on Wednesday and Friday nights when his mum drove to Plymouth for evening classes.
Bikers played pool, drank, smoked dope, swore and didn’t want kids under their feet. Nobody ever cleaned the compound outside and Dante’s mum told him never to play out because of broken glass and jagged metal, but he’d never been hurt and his dad didn’t mind if it kept him occupied.
Dante would get behind the wheel of a wrecked Ford and pretend to drive, or make a ramp with bits of rotting wood and send empty beer kegs crashing down the hill. Mostly there were other kids around. The ground was too sloped for football, so they’d play hide-and-seek or tag, which was most enjoyable in the dark with torches. Best of all was when Teeth came and coached kids in the boxing ring.
None of the Brigands were exactly teddy bears, but Teeth looked scary even by their standards. Huge and muscular, he wore sharp spurs on the back of his boots and greasy jeans held up with a length of bike chain that could be ripped out and used to beat the shit out of anyone who messed with him.
Biker names were usually ironic. Little George was the size of a house, Fats as thin as a rake and Teeth had nothing but squishy gums and a couple of brown molars at the back. He’d never say how he lost them. Dante asked one time and Teeth just said,
you should have seen the state of the other guy.
Teeth was a nightclub bouncer with a sideline in drug dealing, but he wanted to be a pro wrestler. Sometimes he’d get a few weeks’ work at a holiday camp in the summer and he’d wrestled on TV a couple of times, though he wasn’t one of the big stars who got in the wrestling magazines stacked up in Dante’s bedroom.