People's Republic

by Robert Muchamore

  *

  It took Amy and Ryan an hour to make up a list of eighteen companies that produced the majority of Britain’s printed team kits. By the time they’d finished, Ryan’s mates Max and Alfie had been roped in and Amy divided the list so they each had four or five companies to call up.

  The team of four used the six desks in the control areas to make their calls. They each started by calling the phone number on the company’s website. Ryan’s first call was to a company called Kitmeister UK.

  After listening to an open Monday to Friday recorded message, he started looking up the names of company directors. Then he accessed mobile phone network databases and got the number for half a dozen mobile phones whose bills were paid by Kitmeister UK. He was about to start dialling them in turn, when Amy approached.

  ‘Think of it like cracking nuts,’ she said. ‘Deal with the easy ones first, and return to the tough buggers if you need to later.’

  It was Max who made the first breakthrough. He waited for everyone to finish the call they were making before explaining his scribbled notes.

  ‘I called Matthews & Son,’ Max explained. ‘It took about six attempts to explain what I was asking for, but the receptionist put me through to this old-timer. He sounded doddery, but he’s been in the kit business over forty years and he definitely knew his stuff.

  ‘He says that basic kits without logos are produced by several different manufacturers, and then customised with sponsors’ logos and player numbers by companies like his. He reckons that none of the big name manufacturers currently make an orange and maroon hooped sock. The only one that does is a Taiwanese kit producer called SoccaAce.

  ‘He says he wouldn’t sell SoccaAce because their stuff is cheap for a good reason. He also said that there are only two companies he knows who do print on SoccaAce kits. One is called Oberon Sports, the other is Kitmeister UK. He’s really got it in for Kitmeister. Apparently they’re the biggest company in the market, but their quality is poor and their customer service is appalling.’

  ‘Nice one, Max,’ Amy said, as she cracked a big smile.

  ‘Did I earn a kiss?’ Max asked cheekily, as he leaned back in his chair.

  Amy laughed and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  ‘Eww,’ Ryan said. ‘Have you any idea where he’s been?’

  45. PAPERS

  Ning’s exam took place in an empty office on the ground floor of the main building. The door was left ajar so that Zara’s assistant could keep watch as the potential recruits worked at small wooden desks.

  Ning had taken exams or practice exams at least twice a week at school in Dandong, during which she’d developed a routine of quickly checking through the entire paper before starting work. It didn’t take a genius to work out that it would take way more than ninety minutes to complete the whole paper, so she noted the questions offering the highest marks and targeted those first.

  Carlos’ attitude seemed more relaxed and he drove Ning mad by rustling his paper, humming and drumming his pencil on the desk. After twenty minutes Ning was starting to wish she’d knocked him out in the dojo.

  She finally snapped when Carlos started putting his finger in his mouth making pop noises.

  ‘Will you shut up,’ she said, in an angry whisper.

  Zara’s assistant overheard. She came out from behind her desk and stood in the doorway wagging her finger.

  ‘One more sound, young lady, I’ll take that paper from you and tear it up.’

  To make matters worse the lead inside Ning’s pencil kept breaking and she had to keep stopping to sharpen it. But for all the frustrations, Ning didn’t feel she’d done too badly when Zara came to collect the papers.

  The chairwoman had entered the office holding a metal cage covered with a checked cloth. Removing it revealed two fluffy white rabbits.

  ‘Meet Duster and Bouncer,’ Zara said, as she pulled a carrot stick out of her pocket and fed an eager bunny through the bars of the cage. ‘Aren’t they sweet?’

  The rabbits were cute and Ning crouched in front of the cage to look at them.

  ‘Can I feed them?’ Carlos asked, and Zara handed him a carrot stick.

  Zara spoke as Duster munched his carrot stick. ‘I’ll just need both of you to kill a bunny by stabbing it through the throat with your pencils and then we can get a spot of lunch.’

  Carlos jumped back from the cage as if he’d received an electric shock. ‘Why?’ he asked, horrified.

  ‘Well you eat meat, don’t you?’ Zara said. ‘Every animal you’ve ever eaten must have been killed by someone.’

  ‘I … I don’t like blood,’ Carlos said.

  Zara looked at Ning. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Ning said.

  Ning opened the rabbit cage and reached in to grab Duster – or possibly Bouncer because it was hard to tell. The rabbit was jittery and tried to escape Ning’s arms, but she calmed the animal with a series of long slow strokes from the top of her head down to her tail.

  ‘Good girl,’ Ning said soothingly.

  With a sudden movement, Ning brought a heavy Karate chop down on the back of the rabbit’s head to stun it.

  ‘Shit!’ Carlos shouted, backing up to the wall as Ning grabbed her pencil and hung the limp animal over the bin by its hind legs.

  She then trapped the rabbit’s head between her knees and jammed the pencil into the main vein running down its throat. The spurt of blood sounded like peeing as it hit the bottom of the bin. After he’d got on her nerves all morning, Ning turned slightly and made sure Carlos saw plenty of blood and gore.

  As Carlos turned green, Zara found a tea tray for Ning to place the rabbit on when it had bled out.

  ‘You’ve done that before,’ Zara said, clearly impressed.

  Ning nodded as she squeezed the rabbit’s body to force out the last drips of blood. ‘Some of the ladies who worked at my first orphanage used to breed and sell rabbits. We were allowed to play with them, but our diet wasn’t great so we ate them too. If you give me a sharp knife I can gut it. I’ve cured the pelts too. When I was little I had a rabbit fur hat that tied around my chin when it snowed.’

  ‘You have no problem with killing and eating animals?’ Zara asked.

  ‘I think animals should be well treated while they’re alive, but humans come first,’ Ning said. ‘There are many rich people in China, but millions of peasants still go hungry in the countryside.’

  Zara nodded, then looked at Carlos. ‘She’s shown you how it’s done. Are you sure you don’t want to have a go?’

  ‘I just can’t,’ Carlos said. ‘That was the horriblest thing I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Oh well, Duster,’ Zara said, as she put the cloth back over the cage. ‘Looks like you’ll live to see another recruitment test. Now, let’s get some lunch.’

  Ning looked at Carlos and spoke in her politest butter wouldn’t melt voice as she followed Zara towards the dining-room.

  ‘I wonder if they have stir-fried rabbit on the menu?’ she teased. ‘It’s delicious.’

  *

  Over in the mission control building Alfie plucked warm sheets of paper out of a laser printer.

  ‘This is the e-mail the woman from Oberon sent me,’ Alfie said, as he waggled the papers in front of Amy. ‘They’ve made twenty-eight sets of kit with maroon and orange hooped socks since 2002. Three football and two rugby clubs, they’ve given me all the customer addresses and postcodes.’

  ‘Nice,’ Amy said brightly as she fired up Google Maps on the computer in front of her. ‘Give me postcodes, let’s see how many are within an hour’s drive of where Ning got pulled out of that car.’

  Oberon Sports was based in the south-west and the first four postcodes were all in Devon or Cornwall. The final kits had been delivered to a youth club in Milton Keynes. Amy typed in Wigan to Milton Keynes and got an answer of 155 miles and two hours forty minutes’ driving time.

  ‘It must be Kitmeister UK,’ Amy said, as she walked over to Ryan an
d Max. ‘How are you getting on?’

  Ryan huffed with frustration. ‘I spoke to Kitmeister’s managing director, but he’s at his cottage in Yorkshire for the weekend and can’t get into the office until Monday, because only the building manager has the code for the alarm. To make matters worse, he says he’ll have to talk to his solicitors before giving any information to any government department.’

  Amy tutted. ‘Sounds like he’s being awkward for the sake of it.’

  Ryan shook his head. ‘Then he went into a rant about government harassment and the Inland Revenue strangling small businesses like his with red tape. After he slammed the phone down on me, I looked up Kitmeister’s Inland Revenue files. Apparently they’re under investigation for non-payment of taxes.’

  ‘That’s gonna make it tough to get info,’ Amy said.

  ‘If you want my opinion,’ Max said, ‘we should drive round to his house and threaten to nail his balls to a door.’

  Alfie put on a mock gangster voice. ‘And even if he does cooperate we nail one of his balls to a door anyway, because that’s the kind of guys we are.’

  Amy laughed. ‘Somehow I can’t see your testicle nailing scheme getting past Zara or the CHERUB ethics committee.’

  ‘Leaving the psycho nailing fantasies aside,’ Ryan said, ‘Kitmeister UK’s headquarters is only about forty minutes’ drive from here. Breaking in and having a little rummage through their filing cabinets and computer systems isn’t completely out of the question.’

  Amy nodded. ‘I work for TFU not CHERUB, so I’ll have to get a mission controller on board, but if Kitmeister are being stroppy about cooperating with us it could be our best option.’

  *

  There were four pools in the CHERUB campus swimming complex: A twenty-five-metre learner’s pool, a full fifty-metre Olympic pool, an extra-deep diving pool and finally the leisure pool, where the fourth of Ning and Carlos’ five recruitment tests would take place.

  Even at its deepest point the leisure pool was only two and a half metres. It had all the standard equipment: three water slides, a play castle, miniature islands with plastic palm trees and a wave machine.

  For the test, seventeen-year-old identical twins Callum and Connor Reilly had spread over a hundred plastic balls around the pool. They’d also set the wave machine to its highest setting so that you had to fight half-metre waves to swim up to the deep end.

  ‘These are the rules,’ Zara said, as the slim-but-muscular twins stood behind, towering over her in their swimming shorts. ‘There’s a red bin for Ning on the island and a blue bin for Carlos next to it. You’ve got twenty minutes to put as many balls as you can in your bin. Green balls are worth one point, yellow three, blue five and red ten. You can throw balls, but you must only carry one at a time. There’s no physical contact allowed and you can use the poolside to access the slides, but you’ll be docked fifty points if you use the poolside to move around. Is all that clear?’

  ‘What are the ball scores again?’ Carlos asked.

  Ning surveyed the pool as Zara repeated the scoring system. The low-value green balls were all bobbing in the water at the shallow end near the bins, while most of the higher-value ones were in inaccessible locations. The ten-point reds were in the furthest-flung locations, at the top of water slides, or on the upper level little kids’ castle.

  ‘Away you go!’ Zara shouted.

  Carlos dived straight in and swam towards his bin, while Ning waded through knee-deep water towards the castle, feeling like a contestant in a TV game show. She’d spotted three red balls and managed to climb on to the castle and throw two of them into her bin, but the third bounced off the edge and Carlos grabbed the rebound and dunked it.

  Ning picked the wrong moment to slide off the castle and almost lost her footing as a fast-moving wave knocked her sideways. She grabbed a blue ball worth five points as she waded on towards the island with the bins, but she was horrified to see Carlos rapidly scoring ones and threes by scooping up the easy balls that the waves had pushed to the edge of the pool.

  Ning got her blue ball into her bin with a short throw, then joined Carlos in a mad scramble for greens and yellows. As balls flew, Callum clambered on to the island. As he threw the collected balls into an empty jet pool, Connor stood with a notepad and pencil keeping score.

  ‘Ning thirty-eight, Carlos fifty-one,’ Connor shouted.

  By this time most of the easy balls near the island had been cleared. As Carlos picked the last few, Ning began swimming towards a larger island in the middle of the pool that had about a dozen five-point blue balls on it.

  Ning had good strength and stamina, but a poor stroke meant that she found it tough swimming against the waves surging down from the deep end.

  ‘New balls,’ Zara shouted as she tipped a dozen ten-point reds into the end of the pool.

  Ning hadn’t realised more balls would be added as the game progressed. As she dithered between sticking to a plan and getting the blue balls from the island or going for the reds in the deep water, Carlos skimmed past underwater.

  Carlos might have been weak on land, but he made Ning feel clumsy as he swam fifteen metres without surfacing for breath. She decided to compete for the reds, but by the time she’d reached deep water Carlos had thrown ten of the twelve balls in the rough direction of his bin and was heading back.

  After battling with the waves, Ning was gasping as she grabbed a single red ball. Carlos was already back at the shallow end, picking up the reds he’d thrown down and dropping them into his bin.

  Ning desperately threw her red ball from the deep end. She came close to getting it into her bin, but it bounced off the edge and Carlos swept in ruthlessly and took it for himself.

  ‘Sixteen minutes to go,’ Zara shouted.

  ‘Ning forty-one, Carlos one hundred and eighty-seven,’ Connor shouted.

  Ning punched the water with frustration as she headed for the blue balls on the island. She was getting completely thrashed.

  46. HEIGHT

  To get the Kitmeister UK break-in approved, Amy had to type up a mission briefing, get senior mission controller Ewart Asker to read and approve it, track down chairwoman – and Ewart’s wife – Zara to sign off on it, then e-mail the details through to two members of the CHERUB ethics committee, requesting an urgent response.

  Amy wore her best poker face as she stepped into the hallway.

  ‘And?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘It’s all set,’ she said. ‘I had to play up the yobbo angle, so you might have to smash a few things up.’

  ‘I can do mindless vandalism,’ Alfie said, grinning and thumping on his chest. ‘I’m actually rather partial to it.’

  Ewart overheard and shouted a warning from inside his office. ‘Nothing too extreme, boys. We don’t want anything that gets publicity and makes the police start a big investigation.’

  ‘Gotcha, boss,’ Max said, as he leaned into the office and gave Ewart a cheeky salute.

  ‘Good luck,’ Ewart said firmly. ‘Now close my door and bugger off.’

  ‘Right, boys,’ Amy said as she led the excitable trio towards the exit. ‘You’ll need to change out of CHERUB uniforms. We might as well have radio links so bring your communications stuff, as well as your break-in equipment. I’ll sort out a car and meet you in the dining-room in about twenty-five minutes. We can grab a quick bite, and set off by two.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Ryan said, as he slid his feet into the muddy boots he’d left by the main door.

  *

  Ning was bigger and stronger than Carlos, so she changed strategy, staying close to the bins, trying to intercept anything that Carlos threw and only swimming when Zara threw new balls into a shallower part of the pool.

  It was a reasonable strategy, but when the twenty minutes were up, Ning was completely exhausted and still more than a hundred points off Carlos’ score.

  ‘Well done, mate,’ Zara told Carlos enthusiastically, as she tousled his hair. ‘You cut through that water
like a little tadpole.’

  Ning resented the compliment and seethed with jealousy as she towelled off and switched her swimming costume for her blood- and puke-spattered T-shirt and combat trousers.

  To make matters worse, she could hear Callum and Connor laughing and joking casually with Carlos as they changed just out of sight a few metres away. Ning had been trying really hard, but although she thought she’d done well on the written exam and killing the rabbit, she wasn’t confident that she’d done enough to be accepted as a trainee CHERUB agent.

  The final test was the height obstacle. Ning hadn’t liked the look of the creaky wooden structure, with its narrow poles, ropes and beams, when Ryan had toured campus with her the day before. She liked it even less as she stood at the base of a wobbly thirty-metre rope ladder, looking up with slanting rain hitting her face.

  Callum was already halfway up the ladder with Carlos and they’d left slippery clumps of mud from their boots on the rungs. Identical twin Connor would accompany Ning, while Zara had gone back to her office to catch up with e-mails and paperwork.

  ‘Will I die if I fall?’ Ning asked.

  ‘You won’t die,’ Connor said. ‘But the tree branches will lash you and the rope nets are strung tight. I’ve known a few people hurt themselves, and one guy who got his boot caught in the netting and broke his leg.’

  Ning managed an awkward smile. ‘Best to avoid falling off then?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Connor said. ‘Start climbing and try to remember that nothing good ever came of looking down.’

  As Ning made it up the ladder, Connor stayed a few rungs behind. Up above, Carlos was shuffling across a scaffold pole, aided by shouts of encouragement from Callum.

  Ning’s strong upper body meant she had no difficulty crossing the pole and by the time she was over they’d caught up with Carlos, who’d lost his nerve at the first jump. There were trees all around the height obstacle, but they’d been cut away to make this first leap seem scarier. The two wooden boards jutted dramatically over open space.

  ‘I can’t,’ Carlos said.