CHERUB: Shadow Wave (31 page)

‘You were only nine,’ James said. ‘If it was my choice, she probably would have ended up with the Arsenal crest.’

Lauren took a backpack off her shoulder and pulled out a bottle of soapy water and a sponge to clean the stone. James pulled a couple of weeds out of the ground before pressing the earth under his foot and laying out a bunch of sunflowers.

A bitter wind caught the cellophane James had peeled from around the flowers and he bumped into Kerry as they both tried to catch it. But it whipped high into the air and embedded itself out of reach in a nearby tree. When James got back he saw that Lauren had tears streaming down her face.

‘Hey,’ James said soothingly, as he went down on one knee. ‘What’s the matter? You don’t usually get this upset.’

‘I really miss her,’ Lauren sniffed. ‘And I missed you when you were in America.’

‘I missed you,’ James said gently.

‘I’ll probably go off to university in a few years,’ Lauren explained. ‘We’ll live in different towns, maybe even different countries. I’ll never just be able to go downstairs to your room and say hello, or come and see what you’re up to when I’m bored.’

‘Life’s always sad when you look backwards,’ James said, as his eyes teared over. ‘When I think about Mum. Or when I realise that I’ll never go on another training exercise, or see some of the friends I’ve made on my missions. But that’s how life goes. Things have to move on.’

‘I never met your mum,’ Kerry said, handing over a tissue as Lauren stood up. ‘But I bet she’d be really proud if she saw you both now.’

James smiled and pulled both Lauren and Kerry into a tight hug. ‘You’re my two best girls,’ he said. ‘We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us. Now let’s get back to the car. I’ve got used to California and I’m freezing my balls off up here.’

The following updates were written shortly before the publication of this book in September 2010.

RALPH ‘THE FÜHRER’ DONNINGTON stood trial at the Old Bailey in London charged with weapons-smuggling offences and resisting arrest. He received a prison sentence of sixteen years. Fellow defendant DIRTY DAVE was sentenced to eleven years.

The vicious gang war between Brigands MC and the Vengeful Bastards continues to rage. In mid-2009 the UK Brigands upped the ante by recruiting more than two hundred members of subordinate gangs such as the Monster Bunch in a process known as ‘patching over’. The Vengeful Bastards have also patched over more than a dozen gangs.

On the positive side, police believe that the arrest of Ralph Donnington brought an end to the Brigands’ weapons-smuggling operations and has significantly reduced the number of illegal weapons entering the UK.

ALISON and KAM LEE’s Surf Club restaurant burned down under suspicious circumstances in November 2009. Police believe that it was a revenge attack, ordered by the Führer.

AIZAT RAKYAT’s grandmother died in 2007 after which his younger sister WATI was taken in by friends living on the mainland who’d originally lived in Aizat’s village.

Aizat was released from prison in Malaysia in October 2009. He completed a high-school education while in a young offenders’ prison. Following his release he received a grant from Guilt Trips and now attends university in northern Malaysia.

His village on Langkawi island has now been developed as a luxury timeshare resort, linked to the adjoining Regency Plaza Hotel. A compensation case brought by villagers and funded by Guilt Trips was dismissed by a Malaysian judge on the grounds that the villagers had no legal entitlement to the land on which they had lived for generations.

HELENA BAYLISS continues to work as the global head of Guilt Trips. The organisation now has offices in eight countries and more than twenty full-time staff. She also writes articles on environmental and tourism issues for newspapers all over the world, and regularly appears as a pundit on British television.

In early 2010, Helena successfully appealed against her ban from Malaysia. She plans to travel to Malaysia in 2011, giving her son Aizat Jr a chance to meet his father.

Journalist HUGH VERHOEVEN’s story on Tan Abdullah received limited media coverage in the UK. However, the story was a sensation in Malaysia and the bribery scandal was a factor in the collapse of the Malaysian government a few months later.

Verhoeven has returned to retirement and is currently working on a volume of memoirs about his career as a TV journalist.

Following the death of TAN ABDULLAH, a bitter fight erupted between JUNE LING, Abdullah’s two previous wives and his nine children over an estimated $4.4 billion fortune. The disputes are expected to drag on for several years, spanning courts in Malaysia, Thailand and the United States.

After living briefly in New York with their stepmother, TJ and SUZIE returned to Malaysia to live with their biological mother.

Tan’s oldest son is still governor of Langkawi island, and despite his father’s controversial suicide he remains hotly tipped to some day become prime minister of Malaysia.

Following investigations in Malaysia and the UK, a slightly smaller £4.7 billion arms deal between the two countries was brokered by DAVID SECOMBE and signed in April 2010.

Following his arrest inside the Leith Hotel, KYLE BLUEMAN was briefly held at a central London police station and released without charge.

He is now in his final year studying law at Cambridge University and hopes to become a barrister. He continues to do volunteer work for Guilt Trips in his spare time.

MEATBALL has been banned from the next-door neighbour’s garden. Lauren adamantly refuses to let anyone have him neutered. Three of his mongrel children live in the junior block on campus.

DANA SMITH dropped out of her London art college. She works part-time in an art gallery owned by her Ugandan boyfriend.

DANTE WELSH attended the Old Bailey to see the sentencing of Ralph Donnington and was delighted to see the lengthy sentence handed down. The ex-girlfriend of a Brigand came forward shortly afterwards stating that she was willing to testify that both she and her former husband had been involved in a clean-up operation that followed the 2003 murder of Dante’s parents and two older siblings.

The murder trial is expected to take place in 2011 and Dante will be the star witness. If the Führer is convicted of the quadruple murder, he can expect to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Dante’s younger sister HOLLY WELSH is expected to begin CHERUB basic training in 2012.

BETHANY PARKER was expelled from CHERUB after campus security discovered that she was engaged in a relationship with a boy she’d met during a mission two years earlier. This was regarded as a severe breach of security regulations.

She now lives near to CHERUB campus, lodging with the mission controller Maureen Evans.

Following the award of navy shirts, KEVIN SUMNER and JAKE PARKER are both fourteen and regarded as part of the latest generation of outstanding CHERUB agents. Jake occasionally visits his sister Bethany, but they still don’t get on.

BRUCE NORRIS spent most of his last year at CHERUB on a mission in the United States. He plans to study journalism and photography at university after taking a year off to travel the world with identical twins CALLUM and CONNOR REILLY.

Bruce also has a long-term goal to bulk up and become an Ultimate Fighting champion.

KERRY CHANG was accepted into Stanford University and joined James Adams in Palo Alto California in August 2010. Despite her suspicions, James did not cheat on her during his first year at college.

Kerry’s long-term best friend GABRIELLE O’BRIEN is studying medicine at the University of Sussex and hopes to become a doctor.

LAUREN ADAMS remains on good terms with Bethany Parker, and her boyfriend Rat. She is due to retire as a CHERUB agent in 2012.

Her father RONALD ONIONS was granted parole and released from prison in March 2010. At the time he was in the advanced stages of throat cancer. He died four months later in a North London hospice.

Lauren and her friends Bethany and Rat were the only attendees at his cremation service.

JAMES ADAMS is in his second year studying maths and physics at Stanford University and has achieved reasonable grades. He spent his summer break working as an assistant at the CHERUB hostel. He is in regular contact with his father and has visited him several times during holidays in the UK.

James is expected to live happily ever after.

READ ON FOR AN EXCLUSIVE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE NEXT CHERUB BOOK,
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC.

Three women sat in the chairwoman’s office on CHERUB campus. Blinds shut out low evening sun as the air conditioner battled high summer.

‘Tell me about him,’ Dr D said, speaking in a brash New York accent as she studied a photo of a twelve-year-old. ‘He’s a good-looking boy. Do I see a touch of Arab in him?’

Dr D was tiny and the wrong side of sixty. Despite the heat she wore a tartan cape, thick grey stockings and knee-high boots. She looked like someone’s cranky old secretary, but was actually a senior officer with the American intelligence service - the CIA.

Zara Asker was another spy who didn’t look the part. CHERUB’s forty-year-old Chairwoman sat opposite Dr D, wearing a three-quid plastic watch and her youngest son’s dinner down the front of her dress.

‘Ryan joined CHERUB fourteen months ago,’ Zara explained. ‘His grandparents were a Syrian, a German, an Irishwoman and a Pakistani.’

Dr D raised one eyebrow. ‘Sounds like the first line of a bad joke.’

‘Ryan was mainly brought up in Saudi Arabia and Russia. His dad was a geologist in the oil industry, but drink and gambling problems led to debts and he turned up dead under some rubbish bags. Nobody knows if it was murder or suicide. Ryan reached Britain in 2009 with his mother and three younger brothers. She’d bluffed her way into a private treatment program for a rare form of cancer, but got kicked out when she hit the limit on her credit cards. Immigration tried sending the family back to Syria, but she was too sick. She died penniless in an NHS ward, with four boys under eleven and no known family.’

‘Are they all here at CHERUB?’ Dr D asked.

Zara nodded. ‘We never split families. Ryan’s the eldest, he’s got twin brothers who are about to turn ten and Theo who’s seven.’

‘You said Ryan’s not had much mission experience,’ Dr D noted.

‘Just a couple of one-day things,’ Zara said. ‘But he’s champing at the bit, and the operation you’re proposing should be well within his capabilities.’

Dr D nodded as she reached forward and dropped Ryan’s photo on to a glass coffee table. ‘So when do I get to meet him?’

*

Ryan didn’t know he was being talked about as he strolled off the campus athletics track. It was baking hot and he had a six pack showing as he stretched up the bottom of his grey T-shirt and used it to mop sweat off his face.

The twelve-year-old was muscular but not bulky. He had brown eyes, straight dark hair in need of a trim and a silver stud in a recently pierced ear. After two mouthfuls from an underpowered drinking fountain, Ryan went up three paved steps towards a tatty shed used by the athletics staff.

It was gloomy inside because the frosted window was boarded following an encounter with a football. There was nobody home, but the coaches’ smell lingered in tracksuits and musty all-weather gear on wall hooks.

A clipboard on the window ledge bulged with crumpled forms. You could flip back and read through four months of minor crimes paid off with punishment laps.

A bead of sweat pelted the A4 page as Ryan grabbed the Biro-on-a-string and started filling boxes on the first blank page:
Time, date, name, agent number, laps run, reason for punishment.

This last box irritated Ryan and he was tempted to write
No good reason.

He had no problem accepting the tough discipline faced by agents who broke CHERUB rules, but having to run five kilometres because he’d got a fit of the giggles was ridiculous. Especially when other kids doing the same had got off.

‘You holding on to that all night?’ someone asked irritably.

Ryan’s heavy breathing meant he hadn’t heard the girl in red CHERUB shirt and pink Nikes step up behind. He reluctantly scrawled
Laughing in class,
signed his name and passed the board over.

‘All yours,’ he said sourly.

Ryan jogged along a gravel path towards campus’ eight-storey main building. Campus was dead because loads of kids were holidaying at the CHERUB summer hostel. A lift took him up to the seventh floor, but he broke off before reaching his bedroom to get a drink from a small kitchen.

‘Ryan, you reek!’ Grace complained, wafting in front of her nose as he squeezed by.

Grace was Ryan’s age, but a full head shorter. Her best friend Chloe sat bare-legged on the worktop between a microwave and three dessert glasses, which were halfway to becoming trifles.

The vibe was awkward because Grace was the closest Ryan had ever come to having a girlfriend and their weekend of holding hands and awkward silences had ended with Grace lobbing macaroni cheese at his head.

‘Can’t help stinking,’ Ryan explained, as he grabbed a pint glass from a cupboard and quarter filled it with ice chips from the dispenser in the fridge door. ‘Punishment laps. In this
bloody
heat.’

The girls seemed curious as Ryan took a bottle of Diet Pepsi from inside the fridge door and poured it over the ice. As he gulped fizz, Grace bashed up pink wafer biscuits before sprinkling the crumbs over custard in the dessert glasses.

‘It’s not like you, Ryan,’ Chloe said, with a slight tease in her voice. ‘You’re usually a good boy.’

‘Blame Max Black,’ Ryan said, before ripping off a vast Pepsi-fuelled belch.

‘Dirty pig!’ Chloe protested, before Ryan began his story.

‘We were in Mr Bartlett’s maths class. Bartlett goes out of the room to fetch something. Max and Kaitlyn had been rowing all through morning break. Kaitlyn calls Max a
mongoloid.
And you know how oranges shrivel up when they’re really old?’

The girls looked mystified by this turn in the story, but nodded anyway.