Chapter Twenty
Jake and Millie agreed to stay in telephone contact throughout the evening. Millie wondered if they should have prearranged a signal to let the other one know if they were caught, but she hadn’t wanted to suggest it, in case she jinxed the mission, so she stayed quiet. If she didn’t hear from Jake at all for four hours, she decided, she’d call the police. Surely the most trouble they could get into was for trespassing and being a nuisance? Millie felt cold at the thought of what her dad would say if he found out that she’d been lying to him, wandering the countryside in the middle of the night and trying to break into a building.
They edged to the very outskirts of the forest, only a tiny distance away from the lab, almost exactly where Millie had first seen the man and his crate of cats. Jake ran off, hoping to bump into the security men on their rounds. Millie and Max stood poised, until their muscles ached. Nothing. What if they were doing their rounds inside the building, rather than outside? How would Jake draw them away then? After what felt like a thousand minutes, there was a sudden explosion of noise: a large dog barking; a man shouting; and Jake yelling nonsense at the man and racing off into the distance, taking the guard with him.
‘This is it,’ hissed Millie.
Max’s ears had gone flat on his head when he heard the first bark, and he jumped into her bag, a plan he had rather unwillingly agreed to for the sake of speed – although he could outrun Millie over short distances, he wasn’t used to running very far at a time, and they planned to go straight through the doors and up three flights of stairs. Millie dialled the number Jake had given her, waited for it to ring three times, and hung up. She looked at the building, hoping she would see something happen. Seconds later, the few lights on inside went out and, almost immediately, a second set came on. Millie guessed they were powered by an emergency generator. She just hoped the cameras weren’t as well, but she reasoned that some lights would have to stay on in any building, in case of fire. Cameras didn’t really help in a fire, unless you had a special passion for grainy video footage of burning buildings, so she felt a little reassured. Millie pulled up her hood on the off chance she was mistaken, thinking that if the CCTV did capture her, Shepard might think he was being robbed by a midget, not a twelve-year-old girl. She ran as fast as she could to the front doors. As she peered in through the glass, the lobby seemed to be empty. None of the cameras was moving, although they only changed direction every few minutes, so that didn’t necessarily mean she was safe. She expected the doors to open as she approached them, but they stayed resolutely shut. The outer doors must be on the same circuit as the cameras and lights, she reasoned. The only other possibility – that Jake’s brother had made a mistake, and that the airlock doors upstairs wouldn’t open for her either – didn’t bear considering. She was sure the outer ones would open manually. Who knew she’d been paying so much attention in last term’s fire safety lecture? So she pushed on the doors.
They didn’t move.
‘The other way,’ hissed Max, from her bag.
Millie took a quick, deep breath, trying to focus her brain. She pulled the doors sideways, and they were inside.
Upstairs, the noise of the dog barking almost woke Arthur Shepard, as he slept the sleep of the unjust. And the sound of the emergency generator firing into action might have woken him too, if it weren’t for the fact that it was a floor below, on the other side of the building. The lights going off and coming almost immediately back on merely made him murmur something incomprehensible. But he just, just about, slept on.
The driver of the white van pulled a mobile phone from his glove box. He had followed the map that had been faxed over this afternoon as best he could, and he was still lost. His sat-nav appeared to think that he was in the middle of nowhere and had stopped offering suggestions several miles ago. He would ring for further directions. He was dialling the Haverham area code when he paused, remembering just how obnoxious Arthur Shepard had been that afternoon when he’d called to arrange the pick-up. No – he wouldn’t give that jumped-up little beggar the chance to be rude to him again. He snapped the phone shut. He would just have to be a little late.
Millie and Max had already decided that they would go up the nearest stairwell. Now Millie raced up the three flights of stairs. She was breathless by the time they reached the second floor, panting uncontrollably by the time she wrenched open the fire door on the third.
‘You ride that bike everywhere,’ said Max, still sitting happily in her bag, peering over the side. ‘How come you’re so unfit?’
‘Different muscles. Plus your extra weight,’ she gasped. ‘Now, which way?’
‘Straight ahead,’ said Max. ‘At the end, turn left.’
Millie followed his instructions and came to a door which looked like an airlock in a continental bank.
‘Is this it?’ she checked, as she reached out her hand to press the button.
Max nodded.
She pressed the button, and nothing happened.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Damn,’ said Millie. She picked up the phone and redialled. She left it for three more rings and hung up again. Then she pressed the button again, and nothing.
‘What is it?’ asked Max.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, sounding agitated. ‘I don’t know if the power isn’t on, or if there’s a security pass we need, or . . . I don’t know.’
She pressed the button again, praying for a different outcome. Still nothing. They stood for a moment, wordless, neither of them wanting to give up, and neither of them knowing what to do. Millie had bitten her lip so hard it was bleeding. Suddenly, her phone lit up. Jake’s brother was calling in silence. The screen flashed once, twice, three times, and went black.
‘Maybe that’s the signal,’ said Max, hoping out loud.
Millie reached out and pressed the button one last time; the door slid smoothly open. Millie ran inside, and they waited for the first door to shut before she pressed the second button. Millie felt like a mouse caught in one of those humane traps – utterly powerless, completely visible and at the mercy of someone she had never even met.
‘I hope he knows what he’s doing, this brother,’ said Max, giving voice to her fears.
‘Me too.’
The door shut automatically behind them, and she pressed the next button.
The second door drifted weightlessly open.
‘Yes!’ Millie felt the way she imagined footballers must feel when they scored a goal, but only whispered her delight.
She looked around the pristine white room, the walls of which were lined with cages: each contained a cat. There were black cats, white cats, a few beautiful tortoiseshells, and one malevolent-looking orange cat. Nothing Max had told her had prepared her for this – each cat was in a small, cramped wire box, lying on newspaper. They had water bowls, food bowls and nothing else, not even a bed or a scratching post. They barely had room to stretch out. It was bad enough that they had been kidnapped, operated on, and changed for ever, but surely there was no need to keep them in these conditions? The wire was a fine gauge, as though the lab techs expected the cats to be able to squeeze through anything more than a quarter of an inch wide. Millie had no doubt as she ran forwards that these were the same cages the unfortunate rodents had been kept in, before the cats arrived. Clearly nobody had thought that an animal five times the size of a rat might require five times more space – they had simply jammed the bigger creature into the same miserable prison. She found herself hating Arthur Shepard and his helpers more than she would ever have believed possible. Furiously, she put her bag on the table in the middle of the room and began opening the cage doors.
‘Who are you?’ asked a grumpy voice.
‘It’s me,’ said Max, jumping from Millie’s bag onto one of the tables in the middle of the room. ‘I’ve come to get you out.’
‘Max?’ said fifty voices at once. ‘Is that you?’
‘Of course it’s me,’ he replied casu
ally. ‘I said I’d be back to get the rest of you.’
‘You brought a little girl along for our big rescue?’ said the huge orange cat, with a nasty sneer on his face.
‘She just broke into a guarded laboratory, made it up to the third floor without activating the cameras or the alarm and opened the electronic doors, so let’s not start calling her names.’ Max was getting increasingly sniffy on Millie’s behalf.
‘What time is it?’ The orange cat was obviously in charge here.
‘Er . . .’ Millie looked at her watch. ‘Twenty past eleven.’ She couldn’t believe it was still so early – the last few minutes had felt like hours.
‘What are you doing? Hurry! He should be here by now.’ The orange cat spat at her.
‘Who should be here?’ Millie was fumbling over the catches, going as fast as she could.
‘Shepard.’
‘What?’ Millie and Max both jumped, staring at the ginger tom in horror.
‘He knows something’s up. He thinks someone knows we’re here. I imagine that would be you,’ the cat said in an infuriatingly calm tone now he had their undivided attention. ‘We’re all to be moved tonight. He was due here at eleven fifteen.’
‘Arthur Shepard is in the building? Oh no!’ Millie was opening the last few cages, although her fingers felt like rubber. The cats were massing on the floor, stretching their stiff limbs and yawning. She wished she could feel so calm.
‘OK, we won’t try his office for paperwork, then,’ said Max, consoling.
‘You think?’ Millie’s eyebrows were sky high. ‘We need to go now.’ She addressed all the cats. ‘There’s a corridor in front of you when the door opens. Run down there, turn right – we’re going down the stairs at the end of that. It’s down three flights and across a lobby, then through the doors to outside. There’s a man out there with an Alsatian.’ Fifty tails went upright. ‘But he’s chasing our colleague, so hopefully that’ll be fine,’ she finished hurriedly.
The orange cat looked extremely scathing.
‘Hopefully? This is the best plan you could come up with?’
‘Yes,’ said Max firmly. ‘You can stay here if you prefer.’
‘No, no,’ said the cat airily. ‘I’ll come.’
‘Is everyone ready? We all need to get in here at once.’ Millie pressed the door button and the door slid open again. The cats all piled in behind her, in a frankly undignified scrum. Millie was pleased to see the ginger cat take a paw in the face in the confusion. ‘Is that everybody?’
‘Yes,’ said Max, doing a quick head count. Then, ‘No.’
Millie looked at him in alarm.
‘Where’s Monty?’ he said, looking round, trying to catch the face of his friend.
‘Monty is not here,’ said the orange cat. ‘Now hurry.’
‘What do you mean he’s not here?’ asked Millie.
‘He’s dead,’ said the orange cat, supremely unconcerned.
‘Dead?’ cried Millie, as Max stared, completely at a loss.
‘He refused to cooperate with them. They stopped feeding him. They stopped giving him water. He was already old. He died.’
Millie felt Max stiffen by her feet.
‘They killed him?’ he asked, uncomprehending.
‘Yes—’ said the orange cat, who was about to continue before two other cats appeared to feel the need to sit down urgently on his head.
‘Max, we have to hurry,’ said Millie. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘He left you a message, Max,’ said one of the tortoiseshells. ‘He knew you would come back.’
Max turned to face her, tears in his eyes. Millie was on the verge of crying herself, but adrenaline was pumping around her body and she couldn’t lose focus now.
‘Celeste, what did he say?’ asked Max, so quiet now that Millie could barely hear him.
The tortoiseshell cat gazed at him. Her voice shook a little. ‘He said to tell you that you were my rescuer, but not his. That he didn’t want to live with what they had done to him. That he was sorry he couldn’t stay to tell you himself, but that your escape was the only thing he had enjoyed this past year. He said to wish you luck.’
Max nodded very slowly. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t be here sooner,’ he whispered.
‘He knew you couldn’t,’ she said. ‘So do I.’
‘Max, I have to—’ Millie looked down at him and took a deep breath. She pressed the second button, but the inner door remained firmly open, and the outer one just as firmly shut.
‘Squash up more,’ she said desperately. ‘One of you is keeping the door from closing.’
There was a peevish meow from someone, and the door clicked shut. The second door now finally opened, and they ran full tilt down the corridor and around the corner. As one, the cats suddenly stopped and stood rigid in the dim light.
Millie ran as fast as she could to reach the cats, and almost tripped over a straggler as she rounded the north-west corner, trying not to tread on any paws or tails as she crashed to a halt.
‘What is it?’ she gasped.
‘Shh,’ snapped the ginger cat. ‘Someone is coming up the stairs.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
The van driver had eventually cracked and rung Arthur Shepard, who was annoyed on several counts: first, with himself for having been asleep; second, with the driver for having woken him up; third, with the driver again for being late. At the very moment the great escape was racing down the west side of the building, Arthur Shepard was heading up the stairs on the south-west corner to put all the cages on a trolley and take them down to the ground floor in the service lift for when the van arrived.
Millie thought her heart would burst into her throat. She looked frantically for Max to confirm what the other cat had said.
‘He’s right.’ She heard his voice, even though she couldn’t see him. ‘Turn back.’
They raced back the way they had come and around to the far set of stairs, where Millie had collected all the rubbish bags. The fire door was shut now, so the cats couldn’t escape as easily as Max had when he fled the first time. Rather, they had to wait impatiently, twisting and writhing like a multi-tailed, fluffy hydra, as Millie ran to catch them up.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ muttered the orange cat.
Millie was now certain that this must be Ariston, the cat who used to pick on Max.
‘Sorry I’m slower than you,’ panted Millie, ‘but at least I brought my opposable thumbs.’ The cat frowned in annoyance, as Millie leaned on the door handle. ‘Now run!’ she said. ‘I’m right behind you.’
They raced down the stairs, Millie taking them two at a time to try and keep up with the pulsing carpet of fur. She reached the ground floor, and stopped.
‘Wait,’ she whispered. ‘I’d better look around first.’
The cats backed away from the door, and Millie opened it a crack. She and Max peered round it. The corridor which led towards the lobby looked empty. She couldn’t see the whole lobby from here – that was why they had preferred the other staircase. Well, preferred it until they realised Arthur Shepard was using it, anyway. She was sure that the front doors would be shut, as they expected. She dialled Jake’s brother one last time, and let it ring three more times, to signal that the doors needed to be unlocked again, and the cameras and alarms must remain turned off. They all waited, paralysed in silence, every second thinking that the door above them would open and that Arthur Shepard would find them, trapped at the bottom of the stairs. Millie felt sick from the tension. She swore to herself that after tonight she would never do anything again that involved waiting for someone else to do something – it was the most wretched sensation in the world. Her phone flashed once again. She looked around one final time and then glanced down at Max. He nodded.
‘Go,’ she said.
The door swung open and every single cat erupted simultaneously into the corridor, following Max to the lobby. They weren’t quite at the doors when the unmistakable sound of a curdling s
hout of rage came from the third floor. Millie and Max eyed each other nervously. The automatic doors remained stubbornly shut until Millie wrenched them apart a few inches. She held the doors open as the cats raced past her to get outside.
Suddenly Max hissed, ‘Millie – move!’
She frowned at him – half the cats were still waiting their turn to cram through the doors.
‘Now!’ he shouted.
And finally she saw the headlights of the van which Max’s pricked ears had heard seconds earlier, driving up to the front of the lab. She looked down in horror at the remaining cats, let go of the doors, and ran back into the lobby, hiding behind the security man’s desk. Max was there even before she was, but there were still eight or nine cats milling hopelessly by the closed doors.
‘Hide,’ Millie whispered urgently, peering round the side of the desk. Perhaps they couldn’t hear her, or perhaps they were too confused by the huge, empty space in which they found themselves, after so long cramped up in cages – but they seemed paralysed, gazing out at the unexpected lights. ‘You’ll be caught,’ she begged. ‘Please, hide.’ But it was too late.
The van driver was walking up to the doors, just as Arthur Shepard flew down the staircase that Millie and Max had originally planned to use, panting heavily from the exertion of running down three flights of stairs. Millie ducked back behind the desk, flattening herself against the chair so her reflection wouldn’t show in the huge windows.
‘Ah,’ he said, with a savage glee. ‘There you are. Well, some of you.’
The cats looked around in panic, recognising their captor from his recent visits to their room upstairs. Arthur Shepard, meanwhile, appeared to have used the very last of his energy in this short speech and he leaned against the doors, breathing hard. Millie was relieved – they were only a few feet away, and if he weren’t making such a noise himself, he would surely hear her heart beating as though it was about explode from her chest, like the alien in the film her dad didn’t think she had watched.
The Great Escape Page 9