Choc Shock (2 page)

‘And now, a special word from Madame Ombre...'

The girls had changed out of their pyjamas and were watching TV when an ad came on for Madame Ombre's hugely popular cooking competition show, ‘Choc Chef'. Contestants on the show would come to Madame Ombre's bakery and compete for the title of Choc Chef.

‘Bonjour
friends of
chocolat,
as we say in France,' said Madame Ombre, a tall, skinny and slightly cross-looking woman. Emma wondered how you could possibly look cross when you baked chocolate cakes
all day. Madame Ombre's black hair was tied back in a severe bun, largely hidden under a tall chef's hat. Her small, dark eyes peered out over thin black-rimmed glasses that perched on the top of her long, narrow nose.

‘Today is an exciting day. It is the finals of a special Junior Choc Chef competition to be held in my chocolate bakery. The lucky finalists will receive a tour of my bakery and compete in my kitchen for the title of Junior Choc Chef of the Year, announced live on TV tonight.
C'est magnifique!'

‘C'est
cool!' cried Isi. ‘I wish we had entered. Imagine going inside Madame Ombre's bakery. It would be like Willy Wonka's factory!'

Emma thought of the globby mixture spilling over the tray in the oven. ‘Don't take this the wrong way, Is,' said Emma, ‘but I'm not so sure we would have made it to the finals.'

‘You may be right,' said Isi, smiling. ‘The world may not quite be ready for our Chocolate Surprise Cakes.'

Ping!

It was the oven timer. The world might not be ready for them, but the first batch of cupcakes was ready to come out of the oven.

That ping didn't come from the oven,
thought Emma.
It came from my phone.
It was no ordinary phone and no ordinary ping—it was a mission alert from
SHINE.

Emma's phone was one of the best things about being a
SHINE
agent. Sure, saving the world was better but Emma's special
SHINE
-issue phone was very, very good. It was a cross between a game console and a mobile phone, which was handy if you needed to pretend you were a normal girl playing a game when really you were a secret agent using one of the phone's many spy applications. There were apps to identify wild animals, apps to find your way around strange countries and, of course, apps
to help agents crack codes. There wasn't, however, an app to tell you how to report in for a mission if your normal reporting drill took place at school and you received a mission alert while at a friend's house. Which was exactly what had just happened. Emma would normally respond to a mission alert by entering the
SHINE
Mission Tube, an underground secret transport system, and she normally accessed the Mission Tube via the girls' toilets at school. Starting a mission in the toilets could be embarrassing but it got Emma to the Mission Tube fast. How was she going to do that from Isi's house?

Just as Emma was starting to worry about what to do, Isi's mum came into the room.

‘Emma, your mum just rang. Something's come up at home and she needs you back early. She is on her way to pick you up.'

‘Oh no, we haven't even begun to decorate the cakes,' cried Isi.

But Emma was relieved. She knew what her mum was up to—sometimes it was pretty useful having a mum who also used to be a secret agent
for
SHINE.

‘Lighten up, Isi!' said Emma, smiling at her friend.

Isi poked her tongue out at Emma and laughed.

Emma's mum arrived quickly and they were soon in the car and heading off.

‘This isn't the way to school, Mum,' said Emma, thinking that maybe her mum was not such a good ex-agent after all.

‘We're not going to school,' replied Emma's mum. ‘
SHINE
has requested you report to the Light Shop. It will be opening in five minutes and we'll be arriving there in six.'

Emma took back her thought about her mum not being a very good ex-agent.

‘And here we are: the Light Shop.'

‘Okay Mum, thanks,' said Emma, opening the car door.

‘Oh, don't forget to ask the lady if they have any new lights!' called her mum as she pulled out from the kerb and drove away.

Emma turned back to the Light Shop, an ordinary-looking shop in an ordinary-looking shopping street selling ordinary-looking lights. ‘We
SHINE
a light!' said the sign in the window and Emma smiled because she knew that was also one of the many
SHINE
mottoes, with two small but important words left off—‘We shine a light on evil.' Which is what, twenty floors down in their underground headquarters,
SHINE
did.

Emma pushed open the door and a buzzer went off. She walked up to the desk at the back of the shop where an elderly lady was sitting reading a book. As EJ approached, the lady looked up, smiling.

‘Hello,' she said.

‘Hello,' replied Emma.

The lady looked back down at her book.

Hang on, that's not right,
thought EJ.
Oh, what was it Mum said? Yes, I remember now.
EJ coughed to clear her throat and looked at the lady again.

‘Excuse me, do you have any new lights that you can show me?'

‘Yes we do, indeed we do!' cried the woman.
‘Well done, that was the password. Please put your hand on here,' said the lady, smiling as she placed a small black box in front of EJ.

EJ put her hand on the pad, which buzzed for a moment, then stopped. A small green light on the side of the box glowed.

‘You are cleared for access, EJ12,' said the lady. ‘Please take the lift to level 20 and await further instructions. Good luck—and I hope you like chocolate, EJ12!'

Chocolate? A mission with chocolate? Could it be true?
EJ12 hoped so.

The lift stopped at level 20. EJ waited. A digital voice started talking.

‘Welcome, Agent EJ12. Exit lift and turn left. Continue until you come to the Code Room.'

EJ walked until she came to a plain metal door with a small keypad and screen next to it. EJ knew the drill. She keyed in her pin code and another digital voice began talking.

‘Security test commencing. Knock knock.'

Knock knock? This was new.
SHINE
always had new ways of confirming an agent's identity but was
this really a knock-knock joke? There was nothing for it, EJ had to answer.

‘Who's there?'

‘Agent.'

It is a knock-knock joke,
thought Emma.

‘Agent Who?' she answered.

‘Agent EJ12, welcome, voice and sense of humour recognition complete. Door open.'

Very funny,
thought EJ as she went into the room. Isi would have liked that one.

The Code Room at HQ was a small, simple, yellow-painted room with a chair, a table with
SHINE
-issue paper and pen, and a long, clear tube coming from the ceiling directly over the table. The messages came via the tube and EJ sat and waited until a little capsule came whooshing down. EJ took the capsule and unscrewed the lid. She pulled out a memory stick.

I kind of expected a coded message,
thought EJ.
Maybe it's on this.
She plugged the stick into her phone.

A message came up on her screen.

Then EJ's screen went black for a moment before a part of an episode of Madame Ombre's ‘Choc Chef' came on.
Was there a mistake?
wondered EJ.

It was a cooking segment, showing how to decorate cupcakes. Madame Ombre was using smarties and sprinkles, tiny flowers and silver balls, lots of lovely things, all to make the most beautifully decorated cupcakes.

‘I call these Mixed-Up Surprises, and to make them you must first cook perfect cakes,' said Madame Ombre. ‘They must be light and fluffy and perfectly smooth.'

EJ thought back to her and Isi's Chocolate Surprise Cakes and winced as she saw how different two ‘surprise' cakes could be. She could not, however, see what the segment might have to do with
SHINE.
She watched it again, and then again, trying to spot why
SHADOW
would be sending this to one of their agents. She also checked her watch to see how long she had taken.
SHINE
kept records of how quickly their agents cracked messages and EJ wanted to do well. She couldn't crack a message she couldn't see though, could she?

Then, on the fourth watching, EJ noticed something. There was one tray of cupcakes already decorated on Madame Ombre's workbench and they all had smarties on them, little smarties with letters on them. Was it just a half-baked idea or was there a message on those cupcakes? EJ paused the video on the bit where she could best see the tray
and looked closely at the smarties on each cupcake, copying down on a piece of paper what she saw.

It has to be a message,
thought EJ. Why else would you have such a random collection of letters on top of the cakes, unless they weren't random at all but rather a coded message! EJ looked at the ‘words'. Could it be a backwards code? She tried that.

EJ didn't need to go on, it clearly wasn't a backwards code.
Hold on,
EJ thought,
hadn't Madame Ombre called these cakes ‘Mixed-Up Surprises'? Was that a hint? Were the letters all mixed up?
EJ looked to see if she could unjumble them.

EJ smiled as she wrote the decoded message down on a piece of paper, put the paper back in the capsule and pushed the capsule up the tube. There was a whoosh as the capsule was sucked up and away to the briefing room, where A1, the head of
SHINE,
would be waiting for it—and for EJ12.