CHERUB: Maximum Security

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Eduardo Santos,’ Curtis said, in a rubbish attempt at a Spanish accent. ‘Sounds good, hombres?’

  He gulped a small bottle of gin as Lauren pulled out the two Canadian passports.

  ‘Go easy on the booze eh?’ James said, still holding the unopened Jack Daniels in his hand. ‘So where are we going?’

  Lauren and James looked set to become Scott and Ellen Parks, of Toronto. James was no expert on forged documents, but the passports looked good to him. Fake identification of this quality would have cost thousands of dollars.

  ‘OK,’ James said. ‘Put the case where you found it, before Bill gets back.’

  Curtis crashed on his bed and ripped open a packet of dry-roasted cashews. James and Lauren walked into the other room together. They made sure Eugene was still asleep before exchanging hurried whispers over the noise from the TV.

  ‘Keep Curtis busy,’ James said. ‘Start a pillow fight or something. I’ll run out and try to make a quick call.’

  ‘What if Curtis asks where you are? Or Bill comes back?’

  ‘We’re kids,’ James shrugged, ‘people expect us to muck about. Just say I’m getting ice, or whatever.’

  James opened the door, while Lauren wandered back to join Curtis. He peeked along the corridor, finding nothing except a couple of uncollected room-service trolleys. Their room was at the end of a long corridor near a fire escape. James walked through the fire door and down a single flight of concrete steps to the fourth floor, where there would be no chance of bumping into Bill.

  James was planning to use the phones in the lobby, but he spotted an old-fashioned phone with a dial hanging on the wall near the entrance to a cleaner’s closet. It was designed for internal use by hotel staff, but James knew most switchboards are programmed to allow any phone to dial out to an emergency number. He picked up the receiver and dialled 911.

  ‘Emergency, which service please?’

  James smiled with relief. ‘FBI, I have a station number. It’s three-two-four-six and the application code is T.’

  Within a second of the operator patching the call through to the FBI, it diverted via an office in Phoenix and on to Marvin Teller’s cellphone.

  ‘We’re sorry, the mobile number you are dialling is currently busy. Please try again later or leave a message after the beep.’

  James cursed under his breath. ‘Marvin, it’s me. I’m at the Star Plaza, room five-three-four. Curtis is on a zero-nine-thirty flight to Dallas on American Airlines. He’s flying on to Rio using a passport in the name of Eduardo Santos …’

  31. BRAZIL

  James got back to the room without Bill, Eugene or Curtis even noticing that he’d gone. He was almost certain Marvin would have listened to the cellphone message, but it played on James’ mind as he lay in the dark room, with Lauren and Curtis asleep and Eugene’s snores rumbling through the connecting door.

  James was half awake at 5:30 a.m. when Bill crept up to Curtis’ bed and shook him awake. The teenager seemed to be suffering the after-effects of his attack on the mini bar as he sat up in bed.

  ‘I thought the flight was later,’ Curtis moaned, picking at a gluey eye.

  ‘Keep it down,’ Bill whispered. ‘I just made a scheduled call to your mother. She’s nervous about this whole show. There’s been another change of plan and we don’t want the two brats over there knowing about it.’

  ‘Mom’s whole life has been a change of plan,’ Curtis sighed. ‘Can’t I say goodbye to James and Lauren?’

  ‘Let ’em sleep. You know how this works better than anyone: the less they know about when you got out of here and where you went, the better.’

  James had a crick in his neck, but didn’t dare move in case the old man realised he was awake.

  Curtis swung off his bed and dashed to the bathroom. After bolting the door, James heard him pee, followed by a retching sound as he spewed up in the toilet bowl. James stifled a laugh as Bill wandered over and rapped gently on the locked door.

  ‘You OK in there, boy?’

  There was an array of noises from the bathroom, as Curtis cleaned himself up and gargled mouthwash.

  ‘Man,’ Curtis gasped, as he exited. ‘Must have been something I ate. I hope I’m not sick again on the plane.’

  ‘Something you drank, more like,’ Bill grumbled. ‘I can smell it comin’ out your pores.’

  Curtis stumbled meekly across the floor and started picking up his belongings.

  ‘Forget that junk,’ Bill said. ‘Put your pants and sneakers on, then we’re shipping out.’

  James racked his brain, wondering if he should follow Bill and Curtis. If Marvin hadn’t got the message, or if they were expecting Curtis to be getting a later flight and were still in bed, they’d permanently lose the trail to Jane Oxford. On the other hand, James would blow his cover if he was caught sneaking around after them.

  ‘Ready?’ Bill asked, as Curtis wriggled his foot into his trainer and stood up.

  ‘I guess,’ Curtis said, uncertainly. He stepped across the room towards the other bed and looked at James. ‘Have a nice life, buddy,’ he whispered softly.

  Curtis followed Bill through the connecting door and they exited via the other room. James sprang up as soon as the door clunked. He leaned in the next room to make sure Eugene was asleep, before scrambling into tracksuit bottoms and trainers and grabbing a room entry card from the table beside his bed.

  He poked his head into the corridor, as Bill and Curtis’ backs disappeared around a corner, heading for the elevators. James raced down the back stairs, planning to catch up with them in the lobby. Unfortunately, there were no guest rooms on the ground floor. James found himself at the back of a conference suite, staring at a blank grey fire door that only opened from the other side.

  Anxious not to lose Curtis for good, James broke open the fire door and found himself standing in the hotel car park. The sun was peeking over the horizon and his T-shirt did nothing to ward off the bitter wind sweeping across the open tarmac.

  James quickly glanced around, making sure there was nobody in sight, before jogging between the lanes of parked cars towards the hotel entrance. When he got close, he noticed a queue of people stepping on to a small bus with Star Plaza – Airport Shuttle written down the side. Curtis and Bill were in the line.

  James ducked between two cars. He was desperate to go into the lobby and call the FBI team to make sure they knew what was going on, but he was pinned to the spot until the bus left.

  Finally, the last passenger boarded and the hydraulic door hissed shut. As the bus began rolling away, a man thumped desperately against the side. The driver hit the brake sharply to let on a final passenger. He was huge black man, wearing a cowboy hat and a suit the colour of red wine. James smiled with relief. He needn’t have worried: Marvin Teller had got the message.

  *

  Lauren woke with a fright. She caught half a second’s glance inside the old man’s toothless mouth before her whole world turned black. Eugene smeared a pillow over her face and squeezed down so hard she could feel the mattress springs digging into the back of her head. Lauren arched her back and tried to wriggle free, but Eugene swung his knee across the bed and used it to pin down her thighs.

  There was no air in Lauren’s lungs to scream. She tried to pull some in, but the pillow driving into her face made it impossible, like trying to suck wet concrete through a drinking straw. She knew the numbers from when she’d learned to scuba dive: five minutes to suffocate, but only three for the lack of oxygen to cause permanent brain damage.

  Where was James?

  Lauren wondered if her brother was already dead, as she realised her right arm was free to move. She felt a glimmer of hope as she fumbled blindly over the top of the bedside cabinet, hunting for some kind of weapon. She recalled the Biro with the Star Plaza logo on it as soon as she touched it. She gripped it tight and flipped off the lid with her thumb. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.

  Lauren’s concentration d
rifted for a second: the first sign of losing consciousness. She bit her tongue to help focus her mind and blindly thrust with the pen. It hit Eugene in the shoulder, causing only mild discomfort and a blue trail down the sleeve of his shirt. Irritated by the prospect of having to wash out a stain, Eugene shifted his weight as he tried to grab the pen with his free hand.

  The pressure moved off Lauren’s thighs as Eugene leaned forward. She used all her strength to thrust her knees up into the man’s behind. Eugene’s grip on the pillow loosened as he jerked upwards, enabling Lauren to twist her head to one side and haul in a lungful of air. Eugene immediately shifted his entire bodyweight back on to Lauren, inflicting extra pain by digging his kneecap into her belly.

  Lauren refused to let the excruciating pain deter her desperate escape attempt. She glanced a shaft of light between the sheet and pillow, then spotted one of Eugene’s fingertips, as he attempted to straighten her head and reposition the pillow over her face.

  ‘Quite the little fighter, ain’t you,’ Eugene said, clearly not regarding the ten-year-old’s struggle as anything more than a minor setback.

  Lauren wriggled her head forward a few centimetres. When she felt the base of Eugene’s fingernail pressing against her lips, she bit down hard. The knee slipped off her stomach as the bite sent the old man into a spasm.

  Temporarily abandoning his murder attempt to concentrate on his finger, Eugene snatched the pillow away. With the finger still clamped between her teeth, Lauren inhaled through her nose and, now she could see what she was doing, aimed the pointed end of the Biro into the soft tissue at the side of Eugene’s throat. The pen sounded like a sink plunger, as the metal point speared his wrinkled flesh.

  Lauren let the finger out of her mouth as Eugene slumped across the bed, wailing in agony. Lauren pulled her legs from under him and knocked him cold with a two-footed Karate kick to the side of the head.

  Shaking with fear and clutching her painful stomach, Lauren rolled off the bed and lifted the corner of the mattress to retrieve the Glock handgun she’d seen James stash there the night before. She flipped the safety off and quickly checked the bathroom and the floor beside the other bed, terrified she was about to discover her brother’s suffocated body.

  She held the gun two-handed as she crept into the connecting room, again checking between the beds. The bathroom gave Lauren a shock: Eugene had carefully set out knives and polythene sheeting to dispose of her body.

  Lauren was still no closer to knowing what had happened to James. Maybe Eugene had knocked him out while he was sleeping and dragged him off to be suffocated in another room, or maybe he’d been invited downstairs for an early breakfast with Bill and Curtis. You might as well let Lauren sleep in if she’s tired. Eugene will look after her …

  With Eugene unconscious and James’ fate a mystery, Lauren knew she had no option but to call Marvin. As she picked up the receiver, she heard someone enter the next room.

  Realising she had surprise on her side, Lauren crept towards the connecting door, but managed to stub her bare toe on the leg of a table. Her tiny gasp was enough to send the figure in the next room diving into the shadows behind one of the beds before she’d got a proper look at him.

  ‘I’ve got a gun,’ Lauren shouted as she leaned into the doorway, squeezing the trigger to fire a warning shot.

  Lauren didn’t realise the Glock was capable of repeat fire, or that she’d inadvertently flipped it to automatic when she took off the safety. She felt like there was a high-pressure hose in her hands, as the recoil from half a dozen bullets shoved her backwards. The shots plunged into the wall, smashed the mirrored front of a wardrobe and knocked clumps of plaster out of the ceiling. Lauren ended up sprawled backwards over one of the beds.

  A stunned shout came out through the dust clouds and broken glass in the next room. ‘It’s me,’ James coughed, as he stood up with his hands in the air.

  ‘Where the hell did you disappear to without bothering to wake me up? I nearly got killed.’

  James stepped through the dust and snatched the gun from his sister. ‘Mental gun, eh?’ he said. ‘It’s what the SAS use. You’re supposed to stand with one leg behind the other so it doesn’t push you backwards.’

  ‘So where’s Curtis?’

  ‘On his way to the—’

  Before James finished speaking, the locks in both room doors clicked simultaneously. James spun around, ready to spray more bullets.

  ‘FBI,’ Warren shouted, aiming a gun into the room.

  ‘All safe,’ James and Lauren shouted back frantically.

  John and Theo had rushed into the other room and ended up staring at James through the connecting door.

  ‘We heard the gunfire. What happened?’ John asked.

  ‘The unconscious guy with the Biro sticking out of his neck just tried to smother me,’ Lauren explained matter-offactly.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ James said. ‘What about the Canadian passports we saw last night?’

  ‘Look for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ Lauren said, pointing indignantly towards the bathroom. ‘I don’t go round sticking people with Biros for the fun of it you know.’

  James, John, Warren and Theo peeked at the equipment laid out in the bathroom. James felt queasy when he imagined what had nearly happened.

  ‘Wasn’t Jane Oxford supposed to be loyal to people who help her out?’ James asked bitterly.

  ‘We clearly overestimated the extent of that loyalty,’ Theo said. ‘But the passports are a classic Jane Oxford ruse. She always makes three or four different plans and only tells people which one she’s going to use at the very last moment. It’s possible that Bill was given the passports and believes that you two were going to be sent to Canada, while Eugene was under instructions to kill you.’

  ‘It’s a clever tactic,’ Warren added. ‘We’ve had it a few times where we’ve broken down one of Oxford’s operations and made arrests, only to find that there’s a mass of evidence pointing in different directions. When it gets to court, the defence lawyers use the contradictions to pull you apart: if Jane Oxford intended to kill James and Lauren Rose, why did she spend ten thousand dollars buying them false identities, booking airline tickets and arranging for them to stay with Mr and Mrs La-de-da in Toronto. And so on.’

  ‘But why would she try to kill us?’ Lauren asked. ‘We never did anything to hurt her.’

  ‘I suppose she thought you might have talked if you were ever recaptured,’ Theo said. ‘You knew about Etienne and the Little family. She clearly wanted you dead the second Curtis wasn’t around to see it happen.’

  ‘Heartless bitch,’ James said, shaking his head. ‘We helped her own son escape and her only thanks was to try and kill us.’

  ‘It figures though,’ Warren said. ‘Oxford hasn’t evaded the law for twenty years by being sentimental.’

  ‘We can speculate all we like once this is over,’ John said tersely. ‘Right now, I suggest we put our heads together and concentrate on working out where we go from here.’

  ‘I think we’d better call an ambulance for Eugene first,’ Theo said. ‘Things are starting to look a little gooey over there.’

  ‘Apart from that, all we can do is make sure we don’t lose track of Curtis,’ Warren said. ‘We’ve got agents on standby at Dallas airport and in Brazil. Hopefully Jane will show her face wherever Curtis ends up. Trouble is, she’ll run a mile if she finds out that everything here just went pear-shaped.’

  Theo’s cellphone rang. He grabbed it out of his jacket and had a brief conversation with Marvin.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Theo groaned. ‘Bill got a phone call while he was on the airport bus. When they arrived, Marvin got off and hung back to follow Bill and Curtis, but Bill told the bus driver he’d left something back at the hotel and they’re staying on for the ride back.’

  ‘Is Marvin still with them?’ John asked.

  Theo shook his head. ‘It would have been too suspicious if
he’d re-boarded the bus. Curtis and Bill should be back at reception any minute now.’

  32. MOTEL

  The shuttle bus only took fifteen minutes to ride between the hotel and the airport.

  ‘So here’s what happened,’ John said, thinking as he spoke. ‘Eugene tried to kill James and Lauren, but got his comeuppance. Once they realised Jane Oxford wanted them dead, James and Lauren grabbed the money and valuables and left the hotel in a big hurry.’

  Warren pointed at Eugene, who was still unconscious on the bed. ‘What about him? He needs an ambulance.’

  John shrugged. ‘He was about to kill the kids, so forgive me if I haven’t got a lot of sympathy for him.’

  Theo leaned over the bed and inspected Eugene’s injury. ‘It’s behind the windpipe and he’s not losing much blood. With the Biro still bunging up the hole, I believe he’ll be good for a few hours, at least.’

  ‘OK, let’s grab the valuables and clear out of here sharpish,’ John said.

  Theo pocketed Eugene’s wallet, while Lauren grabbed the briefcase with the money and passports. They were almost out of the door when the phone rang.

  John made a split-second decision. ‘James, you answer that.’

  ‘Hello,’ James said, as he frantically grasped the receiver and stumbled on to the bed.

  ‘Eugene? Is that you?’ Bill asked.

  ‘It’s James.’

  ‘Oh,’ Bill said, sounding exceptionally surprised. ‘I didn’t expect you to still be around. Is Eugene there?’

  ‘He’s been locked in the toilet for ages,’ James said, trying to sound cool. ‘I don’t know what he’s playing around at in there.’

  John gave James a smile and thumbs-up for his quick thinking.