CHERUB: Divine Madness

by Robert Muchamore

  Eve fretted over safe keeping of the hundred-dollar note she’d been given as spending money for their journey. She kept asking Dana questions: what kind of food would they find in the airport, whether aeroplanes had toilets on them, if the take-off would make her sick. In the crowded check-in area at the terminal, she gawped in all directions and insisted on linking her arm through Dana’s so that they didn’t get separated.

  The way the Survivors messed people up made Dana mad. If you got caught giving a little kid a bag of drugs you’d go to prison, but cults messed kids up just as badly, and nobody seemed to care.

  Still, getting bugged by Eve wasn’t enough to quell Dana’s excitement at finally getting her big breakthrough. She had no idea what this trip north was about, but the high level of secrecy meant it had to be dodgy.

  The 737 took four hours from Brisbane on the east coast to Darwin, capital of Australia’s sparsely populated Northern Territory. It was close to midnight when they landed.

  As the girls headed into the Darwin International arrivals lounge, carrying small backpacks containing a few personal items and a change of clothes, a man held up a sheet of cardboard with their surnames on. He was powerfully built, very tall, with blond hair tied back in a bunch.

  Dana knew the face from somewhere, but it took a few seconds to place him in a surveillance photograph: it was the dude Bruce Norris had beaten up in a Hong Kong hotel room three months earlier.

  ‘Welcome to Darwin,’ the man said, as he reached out to shake Eve’s hand. ‘The name’s Barry, Barry Cox.’

  *

  Next morning, Dana woke in a comfortable double bed. The shower was running in the bathroom next door and someone was moving in the hallway. She stepped on to a wooden floor that creaked under her bare feet and headed up to the window to check out the neighbourhood. They were half an hour’s drive from the city and it had been pitch black when they’d arrived the night before.

  She ripped back a curtain and peered through a dusty sheet of mosquito netting towards the next house along. The shabby home was thirty metres away, after a stretch of baked earth scattered with rusted-up junk. The bright yellow van on the neighbours’ drive had a picture of a satellite dish on the side with RAY’S ANTENNAS painted underneath.

  Dana reckoned she’d like to live somewhere like this: a slightly run-down house miles from anywhere, where you could do whatever you liked without anyone hassling you. Go into town once a week for groceries, a good-looking boyfriend who pumped weights in the garage, kept himself to himself and read a lot of books. Two or three dogs, definitely no kids …

  The door clicked. It was Eve, dressed already and looking at her watch. ‘It’s service time back at the mall, Dana. I think we’d gain strength against the devils if we prayed together.’

  Dana was cheesed off at Eve for shattering her little fantasy. The girls sat on the edge of the bed and hugged. Eve read a couple of paragraphs from The Survivors’ Manual, then they both closed their eyes and repeated the ten-sentence chant.

  ‘Good morning Lord. We are your angels. Here to serve you. Make us strong. Please protect us. Our souls are honest. Our thoughts are pure. We are leaders. We will take humanity. Through the darkness.’

  A woman called Nina stood in the open doorway when the girls opened their eyes. They’d met this middle-aged woman briefly before going to bed the night before. She had a long red face and you could tell she was a hardcore Survivor from the mass of beads on her leather necklace.

  ‘Angels,’ the woman sighed dramatically. ‘Coming in here and seeing two beautiful young girls praying like that … I think that was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.’

  Dana was tempted to throw up at the syrup, but she copied Eve and broke into an enthusiastic smile. Nina rushed into the room and gave the girls a big hug accompanied by an ahhh sound.

  ‘God protect us,’ Nina said, and the girls repeated the words before saying a round of Amens.

  ‘Now Dana, get yourself dressed and both of you come through to the kitchen. Barry and I will explain our task over breakfast.’

  *

  James sat facing Rat, with bowls of frosted cereal and beakers of orange juice on the table between them. The two boys had wet hair from the shower and were still puffed from morning exercises.

  Rat’s expression suddenly wilted. ‘Oh crap.’

  ‘What?’ James asked, but a glance over his shoulder answered the question before Rat got the chance. Georgie was steaming their way.

  ‘Why do you do it, James?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘Do what?’ James asked defensively.

  ‘I’m talking about your friendship with Rathbone. It does you no credit. It will lead to trouble and when it does, I’ll be on you like a Rottweiler.’

  There was nothing James could say without upsetting either Georgie or Rat, so he diplomatically crammed a spoonful of cereal into his mouth and crunched.

  ‘I got a message from the office,’ Georgie said. ‘Ernie’s taking the truck out for a special delivery run this morning. He reckons there’s going to be some heavy lifting, so he wants you along for the ride.’

  ‘Bless you for passing on the message,’ James said politely, doing his best impression of a good little Survivor.

  But Georgie didn’t appreciate the sentiment. ‘Finish your breakfast and get over to the vehicle compound. Chop, chop.’

  James smiled at Rat once Georgie had walked off to intimidate someone else. ‘Sweet, dude. No lessons for the big J.’

  Rat shook his head and gave James the finger. ‘Swivel on it, smartass.’

  *

  Two thousand kilometres north, Dana, Eve and Nina sat around a moulded plastic table with cutlery laid out in front of them. Barry Cox wore a white vest and a pair of swimming shorts as he cooked up a breakfast of bacon, hash brown, scrambled eggs and mushrooms, but the sizzling food was overpowered by the unappetising tang of strong bleach.

  ‘Get your stomachs filled,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Today’s really gonna be something. If it goes to plan, our masters will be very happy.’

  A CHERUB agent always has to be careful about how much they pry, but Barry’s comment seemed like an invitation to enquire.

  ‘You’re not wearing a leather necklace,’ Dana said. ‘So who is your master?’

  ‘I’m an environmentalist,’ Barry said. ‘The planet is my master. I assume you’ve all heard of Help Earth?’

  Eve shook her head, so Dana explained to her. ‘They’re a terrorist group that targets the oil industry. If you’d seen a newspaper or the TV news over the last three or four years, you’d have heard of them.’

  ‘I most certainly haven’t,’ Eve said indignantly. ‘The lives of devils are not my business.’

  ‘Haven’t you even heard it mentioned at school?’ Barry asked.

  ‘If they talk about things like that, I do a chant in my head to block it out,’ Eve said. ‘We mostly hang out with the other Survivors anyway.’

  Barry smiled as he turned around from the hob and began dividing a saucepan of scrambled egg between four plates. ‘We prefer not to think of ourselves as terrorists. But the traditional environmental groups are constantly outmanoeuvred by corporations and governments with billions of dollars in their pockets. We can’t fight back effectively unless we’re prepared to use extreme methods.’

  ‘But you’re not angels,’ Eve said suspiciously.

  Nina broke into a big smile. ‘Eve, darling, you know Joel Regan and his wife are extraordinarily passionate about environmental issues. The request to send you girls up here came from Susie Regan herself. What we’re going to do today will be historic. This is an opportunity for us to strike a blow for the environment as well as raising a significant amount of money towards building more Arks.’

  ‘Does Joel Regan know we’re doing this?’ asked Eve with excitement. ‘I mean, will he have heard my name and everything?’

  Nina smiled. ‘Of course he has, sweetheart. I wouldn’t be surprised if th
ere was some sort of reward in this. A personal presentation, maybe even a platinum bead for your necklace.’

  The prospect of a platinum bead – the highest award a Survivor can receive – had Eve bouncing in her chair.

  ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me,’ she squealed.

  Dana faked a grin and patted Eve on the back. ‘You haven’t earned the bead yet, mate,’ she said, before looking across at Barry, who’d finished dishing up and was taking his seat to start breakfast. ‘So what have we got to do?’

  Barry smiled. ‘Nothing too tricky: just blowing up a couple of supertankers.’

  31. TRAINING

  Ernie never slowed down. James felt his seatbelt straining to one side as the truck took a hard turn off the tarmac on to a dirt track, marked out by nothing except the marks laid by vehicles that had gone before it. There was a house and a large outbuilding on the horizon.

  ‘You been here before?’ James asked.

  Ernie nodded. ‘I drop their mail by once a week. Couple of American fellows, but it sounds like they’re shipping out pretty soon.’

  ‘What do they do out here?’ James asked.

  ‘They make paint.’

  James looked surprised. ‘Why make paint in the middle of the outback?’

  Ernie shrugged. ‘It’s pretty easy to get Australian citizenship if you agree to start a business in the outback. Brian showed me around once; it’s a good little business. They’re not churning out five-litre tubs of emulsion. It’s all very specialised: natural pigments and stuff for restoring paintings and antiques.’

  ‘How come you collect their mail for them?’

  ‘You’re a curious little Dickens this morning, ain’t you?’ said Ernie. ‘I think they’re friends with Susie, or something.’

  ‘Just making conversation,’ James said, giving a couldn’t-care-less shrug.

  James realised he couldn’t push any further without seeming suspicious. It took five more minutes of Ernie’s psycho driving to reach the buildings. The house looked as if it had stood for decades, but the windowless rectangle next door was a recent addition. It was built from prefabricated sections with a corrugated metal roof.

  Ernie blasted the horn, as James flung open his door and jumped out of the cab. It was getting close to the hottest part of the day and he had flies swarming around within a second of his feet touching the red dust.

  ‘They must be around here somewhere,’ Ernie said, craning his neck to look behind the building. ‘I’ll try the workshop, you see if they’re in the house.’ As Ernie jogged off towards the concrete shed, James stepped on to a wooden porch and rapped on a screen door.

  ‘Anybody home?’

  He pushed the door open and found himself in a kitchen. There were a couple of suitcases on the floor and boxes packed with cutlery and utensils stacked up on the counter tops.

  ‘Hello,’ James yelled.

  As he stepped further into the house, James noticed a few photographs tacked on the fridge door. Most of them were regular scenes: two little dudes wearing armbands beside a swimming pool, a school photograph, an elderly couple sitting in a restaurant at some sort of family event. But one of the pictures made him gasp.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  James instantly recognised the little lad, who stood on a pebble beach on a drizzly English day. James had met him two years earlier, on his first CHERUB mission. His name was Gregory Evans and his father was Brian ‘Bungle’ Evans, a Texan biologist and a member of Help Earth who’d tried to kill two hundred oil executives and politicians with deadly anthrax bacteria. Brian was one of the world’s most wanted men, but he’d never been found. Nor had the laboratory or any of the equipment used to manufacture the anthrax.

  James’ brain raced. Everything made sense: Ernie said that one of the men who lived here was called Brian and paint production involves mixing up chemicals, making it a perfect cover for a facility that produced biological weapons or explosives.

  This was a big result. Uncovering the Help Earth laboratory would be front-page news all around the world, but James faced a massive problem: he’d met Brian Evans on several occasions when he’d been working in Wales under the name of Ross Leigh. As soon as Brian saw James’ face his cover would be blown apart.

  James felt his stomach shrink into a tight ball, knowing things could turn nasty any second. He realised that the best strategy was to grab hold of the biggest weapon he could find and he figured there would be knives in one of the cardboard boxes on the table. But before he had a chance to grab anything, he heard footsteps and a voice with a familiar Texas twang.

  ‘Hi there son.’

  *

  After breakfast, Dana, Barry, Eve and Nina headed off to train for their attack. Barry took them to a deserted stretch of beach in a Subaru wagon, towing a three-metre dinghy behind the car.

  They pulled up on a stretch of squishy sand. There was a strong breeze and the sea looked choppy. Once the four of them had hauled the dinghy off the trailer, Barry and the girls sat on the edge of their car seats and changed into wetsuits. Nina stayed behind with the car as the others set out to sea.

  As the shore receded and the outboard motors threw up a giant wash, Barry began speaking in a monotonous voice. ‘What you’re going to learn this morning is not complicated, but you must listen or we’ll fail in our operation tonight.’

  He started off explaining how to use the twin outboard motors and gave each girl a few minutes’ practice steering the boat and controlling the throttle. Next, he pulled out a couple of GPS receivers and showed the girls how to use them for navigation. He gave Eve a set of coordinates from a waterproof chart and told her to find it.

  A five-year-old can navigate with a GPS and it took less than ten minutes to reach their target, a natural harbour shielded from the waves by two lines of jutting rocks. The water was clear and the upturned hull of a recently stricken motor launch shimmered a couple of metres beneath the surface.

  ‘OK, cut the power,’ Barry said. ‘Put the GPS back in its pouch and pay attention.’

  Barry unzipped a backpack and pulled out three chunky metal discs.

  ‘It’s not easy to sink a large boat,’ Barry began. ‘When you’re talking about something that weighs over a hundred thousand tons, with watertight compartments and a double hull, you’re either gonna need a whole boat packed with explosives crashing into it at speed, or you’ve got to position your explosives very carefully.’

  ‘What about oil spills?’ Dana asked.

  ‘Help Earth only attacks empty tankers, but they’ve really upped the security. Every navy in the world is keeping tabs on them. This time we’re trying a different tack and going for LNG.’

  ‘LN what?’ Eve asked.

  ‘Liquid Natural Gas. This region has some of the world’s largest natural gas deposits. Japan, on the other hand, has no natural gas of its own but is the world’s second largest consumer of the stuff.

  ‘Natural gas explodes under high pressure, so the only way to move it over long distances is by chilling it to about seventy below zero, when it turns into a liquid. It has to stay at that temperature until it reaches its destination. The liquefaction process has to be done in a special facility that costs billions of dollars to construct. Then it’s shipped off in refrigerated tankers that cost another hundred million a pop to build.’

  ‘Big bucks,’ Dana grinned. ‘I’ve never even heard of the stuff.’

  Barry nodded. ‘You won’t meet a lot of people who have, but LNG is a massive industry. Not only does an attack on an LNG facility hit the oil companies in the wallet, the exploding gas burns cleanly and does little lasting damage to the environment.’

  Dana smiled. ‘No oil slicks or gooey black birds then.’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘You said facility,’ Dana said. ‘I thought we were going for

  a tanker.’ Barry nodded. ‘If you take out the boat when it’s refuelling, the explosion will take a nice chunk of the terminal with it.’ Dana looked solemn. ‘But if
we get caught, they’ll lock us up and throw away the key.’

  Eve hit Dana on the back and spoke furiously. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t even think that. It’s so negative. We’re Survivors. We have honest souls and God will protect us.’

  *

  James turned anxiously to face Brian Evans, but it wasn’t him. Same accent, similar face, but a younger looking dude with curly hair.

  ‘Name’s Mike,’ the man said. ‘You here with my man Ernie?’

  James nodded.

  ‘I see you’re admiring the picture of my little nephew.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s cute,’ James said. ‘That’s Brighton, isn’t it? I recognise the pier in the background.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, it’s my brother that married the limey girl. Are you from England?’

  ‘Nah, but I’ve lived there for most of the last three years.’

  ‘Certainly picked up the accent. You sound like a genuine Cockney boy.’

  Ernie came in through the screen door wearing his usual smile. ‘So you’ve found each other. Didn’t you hear the truck arrive, Mike?’

  Mike nodded. ‘The screeching brakes and the blasting horn were a giveaway, but I was up in the roof fetching down some boxes of documents.’

  ‘Brian not here?’ Ernie asked.

  ‘He’ll be landing back at the Ark this evening and running a few final errands here before shipping out himself,’ Mike said, to James’ massive relief.

  ‘Well, I sure hope your business takes off down south,’ Ernie said. ‘I’ll miss chatting with you guys.’

  ‘Thank you kindly,’ Mike nodded. ‘We’ve got customers all over the world; I reckon we’ll do all right.’ He turned and looked at James. ‘I hope you’ve got some good muscles on you, young fellow. Gonna work up a sweat clearing out that workshop.’

  Ernie smiled at James. ‘You don’t need to worry about the boy. You should see him throwing my mail sacks around. Tough as a bull, ain’t you, son?’

  James hated it when adults patronised him, but he couldn’t help smiling at being compared to a bull.

  *

  Dana sat on the side of the dinghy and flopped backwards into the water, clasping the metal can to her chest. This was her fifth practice, but her first wearing a near black visor designed to simulate diving at night. Even in the bright sunlight, all she could see was a mass of gloomy outlines.