Dark Sun (6 page)

‘I can’t trust him,’ Sophie shouted. ‘I’m gonna come home and find pizza crusts in my bed or something.’

‘Just get out of my sight, Sophie,’ her mum shouted. ‘Your father put locks on all the doors to stop this nonsense. Have you turned the key?’

‘I can’t find it,’ Sophie admitted.

George’s mum pointed her daughter downstairs at the front door. ‘I’ve got a spare. Now get out of this house before I really lose my temper and ground the pair of you.’

As Sophie slammed the front door, her mum steamed down the hallway towards the other three boys, who’d all disappeared into George’s room because she looked like she’d bite the head off anyone who dared open their mouth.

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She leaned into Sophie’s room and spotted the supposedly lost key amidst the jumble of hair products and GCSE revision on the desk.

‘Right,’ George’s mum said, as she locked Sophie’s room and put the key in her dressinggown pocket. ‘You boys might be on holidays, but I’ve got to go to work tomorrow. So have fun, but if anyone wakes me up there’s gonna be major eruptions.’

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7. TREES

George slowly closed the door of his mum’s bedroom, feeling a little woozy as he crept down the hallway towards his room. It was almost ten and nearly dark outside, but it was still boiling hot, so the four boys just wore shorts.

‘She’s soundo,’ George grinned as he stepped back into his room.

The room smelled mostly like pizza, but there was also a whiff of beer and sweat. The f loor was strewn with crumbs and pizza boxes, while Zhang had added to the carnage by stepping up on George’s bed and sticking a slice of cheese-topped garlic bread to the ceiling.

‘More beer?’ Greg asked, as he pulled out a can.
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‘Don’t mind if I do,’ Zhang slurred.

Before handing the beer across, Greg tilted the can, making sure there was a little blue mark on the bottom: they’d brought sixteen identical looking cans, but the contents had been tampered with by the technical team on CHERUB campus. The ones with blue marks were for George and Zhang and contained full strength beer, injected with a powerful sedative. The beer in the unmarked cans had been sucked out and replaced with an alcohol-free variet y. If the plan worked out, George and Zhang would get drunk and crash out, while CHERUB agents Greg and Andy remained wide awake and sober.

‘Check this out, babes,’ George shouted

jubilantly as he threw his bedroom window wide open and climbed up on to the ledge.

Andy and Greg were horrified as George hurled himself through the first-f loor window. They were supposed to be monitoring how drunk George and Zhang got and their mission would go straight down the toilet if someone ended up in casualt y. There was a crunch of branches followed by a triumphant whoop from George as Andy and Greg
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leaned out of the window. George was laughing wildly as he clambered out of a dense hedge.

‘I’ve
always
wanted to try that,’ George said, as he collapsed backwards on to the lawn, howling with laughter and thumping his chest. ‘Much beer give caveman George courage.’

Despite his initial alarm, Greg realised that the hedge was huge and the drop on to it from the first-f loor window less than two metres.

‘Come on you pussies,’ George shouted. ‘It’s such a rush.’

Andy pointed to the strapping around his chest.

‘I don’t want to rip this lot off.’

Greg had no such qualms and vaulted on to the window ledge before diving face first into the huge hedge. The leaves and branches were prickly, but it was a riot having the thick shrubber y crashing around his head and then tr ying to untangle himself.

Greg had only drunk alcohol-free beer, but he had to act drunk so he howled like a loon as he staggered out on to the lawn. Zhang seemed less confident as he climbed on to the window ledge.

‘Come on down, fat-boy,’ George taunted.

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George and Greg cheered as Zhang crashed

forward out of the window. At first it looked the same as when the first t wo boys dropped, but Zhang’s weight pushed him deeper into the hedge and there was an almight y snap of wood as one of the main stems holding up the hedge snapped.

‘A AAARGH!’ Zhang screamed.

He ended up with his legs high in the air, atop a giant clump of snapped hedge strewn across the back lawn.

Zhang wasn’t hurt and Greg laughed as he helped him up, but George was freaking out over the state of the hedge.

‘My dad’s gonna slaughter me,’ George gasped. Greg grabbed the main chunk of the broken hedge and rested it against the intact pieces on either side. ‘Good as new,’ he grinned.

‘It’s not funny you guys!’ George moaned, as he crouched over and picked up leaves and snapped branches scattered over the lawn.

A torch f lickered on in the garden next door and an old woman’s voice came from behind the fence. ‘What the devil’s going on out there?’

‘Miss Hampstead,’ George gasped, as he started
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running around the side of the house.

‘Go back indoors, you nosy old bat,’ Zhang shouted.

‘She’s Sophie’s godmother: practically family,’

George whispered. He gave Zhang a shove before looking up towards his bedroom window. ‘Andy, get downstairs and open the front door before she shines that light over the fence!’

Andy smiled thoughtfully out of the window. ‘I might do,’ he grinned.

Andy laughed as the other three scrambled up the driveway, yelping as chunks of gravel dug into their bare feet. When they got inside George looked up the stairs nervously, half expecting the racket to have woken his mum up.

The boys muff led their giggles as they headed up the stairs, but Zhang held his hand over his mouth to stif le a huge yawn.

‘Man, I’m knackered all of a sudden,’ Zhang complained, stepping back into George’s bedroom and crashing backwards on to the bed.

‘Know what you mean,’ George nodded, as he caught the yawn. ‘That beer’s given me a headache.’

‘Can’t take your drink,’ Greg teased, as he looked
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at his watch and saw that it was ten-fifteen. It was ninet y minutes since George and Zhang had taken their first mouthful of drugged beer and the sedative was kicking in right on schedule.

‘We never got around to
Virtua Tennis
,’ Andy said, as George slumped on to a leather beanbag.

‘You guys up for it?’

Zhang had his eyes closed and George waved his hand in front of his face. ‘You start off, I need a few minutes’ rest.’

Greg loaded the tennis game into the X-box and turned the hi-fi volume down low as he grabbed one of the wireless controllers. The t wo CHERUB

agents played half-heartedly. Andy won the first set on a tiebreak, but t here were no protests or celebrations.

Instead, Andy leaned across the bed and pinched Zhang’s cheek, while Greg crept across the carpet and jabbed George’s thigh with his big toe.

‘Sleeping like babies,’ Greg said. ‘Get the kit.’

Andy unzipped a pocket on the side of his backpack and pulled out a plastic wallet. It looked like a packet of felt-tips, but instead of pens it contained twelve identical syringes filled with a
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fast-acting sedative. The sedative in the beer worked for less than two hours and it was hard to tell exactly how much they’d drunk. George and Zhang had to be injected with something more powerful to ensure that they didn’t wake up.

Even the gentlest of injections can turn into a small swelling and a bruise which looks obvious on open skin, so Andy had to inject an area of the body that’s hard to inspect.

‘Show me some butt,’ Andy grinned.

Greg rolled Zhang on to his belly and pulled down the back of his boxers.

‘Gross,’ Greg choked, gagging and turning away.

‘It’s skidmark cit y down there.’

Andy tried not to breathe as he pulled Zhang’s buttock upwards and wiped a patch of skin with a sterile wipe. He then dug the needle into the fold where Zhang’s f labby bum met the back of his thigh.

After injecting enough sedative to keep Zhang under for six hours, Greg hitched up the boxers and rolled Zhang on to his back again. George weighed half as much and showered t wice as often, so it was a much more pleasant experience rolling
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him off the beanbag and injecting his buttock as he lay f lat on the f loor.

Greg tucked a pillow under George’s head before looking uneasily towards Andy. ‘Two down, one to go.’

‘The tricky one,’ Andy noted, as he pulled a green cylinder and a gas mask out of his backpack before heading down the hallway behind Greg. Dr Lydon was probably asleep, but she wasn’t sedated like the boys and would wake with a start before they got anywhere near sticking a needle in her butt. She had to be taken down in a two-stage process, the first of which involved a powerful knock-out gas.

Greg approached first, quietly opening the bedroom door and stepping into the gloomy room. If Dr Lydon had been awake, he’d have pretended to have walked into the wrong room on the way to the toilet, but the doctor was dead to the world after her double shift at the hospital.

‘Clear,’ Greg said, as he backed out.

Andy tightened the straps of the gas mask behind his head and leaned into the room holding the pressurised cylinder. He pointed the nozzle up
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at the ceiling over the double bed and pressed the trigger to release a gentle mist. Job done, Andy backed out and swiftly pulled shut the door.

‘Give it four minutes for the gas to clear out of the air,’ Greg said, looking at his watch as Andy pulled off his mask and tucked it back inside his pack, along with the gas cylinder.

After an anxious wait crouching in the hallway, Andy burst noisily into Dr Lydon’s bedroom. He f licked on the light and stumbled on to the bed. This was a deliberate strategy: if the gas hadn’t worked for some reason, he’d get yelled at for waking George’s mum but she’d hopefully think nothing of it apart from some hyped-up kid bursting through the wrong door.

In many ways this was the trickiest part of the whole operation, so Andy was delighted to find himself sprawled over Dr Lydon’s legs, with the mattress bouncing but the doctor’s body completely limp.

‘Gimme a needle,’ Andy shouted, as he ripped off the duvet.

The boys were slightly freaked out as the bedding landed on the f loor. They’d both been through
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CHERUB training and were capable of all sorts of remarkable feats, but it was still a shock seeing one of your mate’s mums sprawled naked and unconscious over the bed in front of you.

‘I feel like a right perv,’ Greg confessed, as he rolled Dr Lydon on to her front.

‘Snap some pics with your camera phone,’ Andy grinned. ‘That’ll freak Georgie boy out when he wakes up.’

‘Be serious,’ Greg said, snorting with laughter as he swabbed Dr Lydon’s skin with a sterile wipe before Andy plunged the needle into the back of her thigh.

Greg threw the duvet back over the doctor before following Andy out into the hallway. He’d f lipped his phone open to dial their mission controller.

‘John,’ Andy said cheerfully. ‘Phase one’s in the bag. Everyone’s sedated and we’re about to move into Kurt Lydon’s study.’

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8. WINDOWS

Kurt Lydon’s study was locked, but that’s not a major problem for a CHERUB agent. Greg opened the door easily, using a straight pick attached to his lock gun. Two bedrooms had been knocked

together to create Kurt’s workspace and thirt y thousand pounds had been invested in specialised computer equipment.

Two powerful Dell workstations hummed away inside a special cooling cabinet and there was a huge inkjet plotter for making blueprints. One wall shelved thick books with titles like
Advanced
Molecular Thermodynamics
and
Mathematical
Modelling for Turbulent Plumes and Jets
. Pride of place went to a pair of 30-inch ultra-high-resolution
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LCD panels, worth over ten grand apiece. Beside Kurt’s regular keyboard and mouse was a multibuttoned spaceball controller, designed for manipulating 3D images on screen.

Andy had spent hours practising with an

identical system on CHERUB campus, but still felt intimidated as he sank into Kurt Lydon’s highbacked office chair. He tapped the space bar and was pleased to see that the computer was only in standby, but the screen demanded a password. Greg was already on the case. He’d sneaked into the room on an after-school visit t wo weeks earlier and installed a hardware keylogger bet ween the keyboard plug and the USB port on the back of Kurt’s main computer.

Keyloggers contain memory chips that record every keystroke entered into a computer. When the logger got back to the MI5 lab it would hopefully reveal all sorts of information that Kurt had t yped over the previous fortnight, but all they needed right now was Kurt’s main password. Greg pulled a tiny laptop out of his backpack, plugged in the keylogger and sat on the f loor while the machine booted up.

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‘We haven’t got all night,’ Andy moaned.

‘Keep your wig on,’ Greg teased. ‘These tiny laptops aren’t very powerful. It takes a couple of minutes to boot up and there’s diddly squat I can do about it.’