The Great Escape
Page 2
‘Of course I can hide you.’ Millie came to her senses, even if it was only temporarily. ‘Here you go.’ In one movement, she picked up her jumper, which was lying on the ground where she’d dropped it when the sun came out, and scooped up the cat, who sighed audibly. Millie ran over to the van and put her jumper and its contents on a pile of cleaning cloths in the back.
‘Now go back to what you were doing,’ muttered the cat. ‘And whatever anyone asks you, lie.’
Millie ran back to the doors and picked up her cloth. She walked the last few paces, hoping that the security guard wouldn’t think there was anything funny going on. She didn’t normally go sprinting off for no reason, after all.
She was just in time. A few seconds later, a man came racing down the same corridor.
His legs flew out behind him, his lab coat swinging around him in all directions. He landed at the reception desk, panting heavily. Millie strained her ears, but she could hear nothing through the doors. She saw the security guard shake his head once, then again, more firmly. He listened for a minute, then jerked his head in Millie’s direction. She tried to look very busy with her bucket. The cat’s pursuer came rushing up to the doors, which wouldn’t open.
‘Hello? Hello?’ he said, panicky.
‘Hello.’ Millie stared at him.
‘The doors won’t open,’ he shouted, gesticulating wildly.
‘No, I had to lock them,’ Millie explained. ‘The catch is just up here.’ She released the doors. ‘They’re automatic. If I don’t lock them, I can’t wash the glass, can I? They just open.’
‘How long have they been locked?’
Millie saw that the security guard was watching her intently. The true answer was, ‘About eight seconds, since I saw you coming.’ The right answer was, ‘The last ten minutes. Nothing has been able to get in or out in that time, not even a tiny fly. And I, by the way, have the same nasal condition as Pinocchio, so can’t possibly be lying, or you’d be able to tell.’ But the doors had opened, when she let the cat out – and the security man, even though he hadn’t been looking, might have felt the breeze as they opened, mightn’t he? It was a warm day, and not at all windy, but if she lied openly, she might get caught out. She hedged her bets and said, ‘Dunno. A while.’
‘How long?’ he said again. There was a high note of hysteria in his voice.
‘As long as it takes to do the doors.’
‘How long has she been here?’ The man had obviously given up on her as a surly teenager and was now quizzing the security guard.
‘About half an hour?’ he guessed. Millie nodded sullenly, delighted.
‘The doors’ve been locked all that time?’
She nodded again, sure now that the security guard had been paying almost no attention at all.
‘Damn it, he must’ve gone the other way . . .’ The man started off back down the corridor. ‘Lock the doors again, please. Now.’ Millie shrugged and reached up to the switch. The security guard shrugged back at her and pulled a face, implying that this man was a bit odd. Millie frowned back at him, her expression a picture of puzzlement at what had just happened. He nodded and rolled his eyes, then went back to his newspaper. Excitement over.
She was safe.
Millie finished rinsing the window, not daring to hurry too much, in case the lab-coat man reappeared, and then carried her things back to the van.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked quietly, lifting her jumper off the cat.
‘I smell of detergent. It wasn’t a life-long aim. Otherwise I’m fine.’
‘Is a man in a lab coat looking for you?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Did you put him off?’
‘Yes. Your accent’s funny. Where are you from?’
‘A minute ago you couldn’t believe I could talk. Now you’re criticising my vowel sounds? That’s quite picky, you know.’
‘I wasn’t criticising . . . I was interested.’
‘You have a critical tone of voice, then.’
‘Sorry,’ said Millie, thinking the cat had a pretty critical tone himself at the moment.
‘I’m from—’
‘Stop! My dad’s coming. Can you get in my bag?’ Millie grabbed her bag from behind the seat.
‘Do I have to?’ begged the cat, looking with some disdain at Millie’s canvas rucksack, covered in stars, badges and ribbons.
‘Yes,’ said Millie firmly, pushing the cat into her bag, shoving her jumper on top, and flipping the catch shut, before spinning round to grin casually at her father and Bill as they wandered over to the van.
Chapter Four
‘I’m going to do some stuff on the computer, Dad,’ Millie shouted, as she ran ahead of him through the front door and flew up the stairs. She heard him say something as she shut the door behind her, but assumed that whatever it was, it could wait. Her wardrobe was right behind the door, and she opened it. This meant that if you tried to open the door to her room, it would bounce off the wardrobe door, and you couldn’t walk immediately inside. It wasn’t a very sophisticated system, but it provided a small level of cover for secrets and emergencies. Both of which seemed to describe the current state of affairs. She put her bag on the bed, opened it up and said, ‘Hello again. You can come out now.’
‘Finally,’ sighed the cat, and angled his way past her jumper. ‘I thought I was going to be in there for ever.’
‘Sorry, we live quite a long way from the laboratory.’
‘In the circumstances, I think that is a good thing. It was just a little bit small for such a long journey.’ He looked back at the bag disapprovingly and stretched his spine. ‘Is this your bedroom?’ he asked, looking around him.
‘Yup.’
‘You have your own computer?’ He seemed impressed.
‘Yup.’ Millie nodded. It was her prize possession.
‘Good. So we could . . .’ His voice tailed off, as he began to think.
‘We could what?’
‘Plan the escape of the others Monty, Celeste and everyone.’
‘Sorry?’
The cat continued his train of thought: ‘I mean, if we could—’
Millie decided she needed to reassert some control over this situation, which seemed to be looping out of her reach.
‘Stop. Please.’ The cat looked up at her and frowned. ‘Could we start at the beginning? I’m Millie,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ said the cat. ‘I’m Max.’ They looked at each other, and Millie held out a hesitant hand. Max reached up a front paw, and they patted each other, almost shaking hands.
‘This is how you say hello in England, hmm? In Belgium, we would kiss three times on the cheek as well. It’s friendlier, I think.’
‘How did you end up here, if you’re from Belgium?’ Millie asked, wide-eyed. She would never have placed his accent if he hadn’t told her. It was almost French, and almost something else, which she supposed must be Belgian. She thought he had a surprisingly low voice. Although she wondered exactly what tone of voice wouldn’t be surprising, coming from a cat.
Max’s eyes narrowed, as though he had just seen a larger and deservedly much less popular cat, perhaps with a limp and a missing eye, across the room. ‘Kidnap,’ he spat.
‘Kidnap?’ Millie sat down on the bed and crossed her legs.
‘Exactly. I was roaming around Ixelles. That’s near the Avenue Louise. In Brussels.’
‘Where you used to live?’
‘Where I still live,’ he corrected her. ‘I’m just not there at this exact moment. And it was around lunchtime, I guess, and I was thinking of finding something nice to eat, perhaps from the kitchen of one of the cafés—’
‘You were going to steal lunch from a café?’
‘Not steal. Liberate.’
‘That’s what my dad calls it.’
‘He’s a smart man. Anyway, I was just heading down a small alleyway to the back of La Perruche – my favourite café, where they serve some very good chicken – and I walked past a grey va
n. And as I was going past, a man threw something over me, a . . . I don’t know the word in English. Like you use to catch fish.’
‘A net?’
‘Yes, a net. The humiliation. Caught like a stupid fish.’
‘It’s not that stupid.’ Millie tried to console him. ‘Being caught on a line would have been worse.’
‘True.’ Max nodded. ‘Yes, that is a different level of stupid that only the fish can attain. “What is this that looks like a small meal, on a big sharp metal hook? I will, perhaps, just put my mouth around it and find out. That is surely the safest way to discover more. Ah! I am caught, who could have foreseen?” Everyone but the idiot fish, of course. No wonder they are becoming extinct. They deserve it.’
‘I’m not sure that’s exactly why they’re becoming extinct,’ Millie said, thinking that deep-sea fishermen probably almost never used fishing rods.
Max ignored her loftily. Some grievances couldn’t be put aside, especially where fish were concerned.
‘But this net is heavy, weighed down at the edges, so once it is over me, I can’t get it off. And in an instant, I am lifted inside the van and put into a tiny box.’
‘You must have been terrified,’ Millie sympathised.
‘Not terrified. Never terrified. Cats are very brave, you know. More angry, and unsure how to escape, and a little, you know, perhaps nervous.’ He eyed her, warily, as he continued: ‘That evening, I was shoved into a room full of cats in boxes. Next day, I was in a big car, with the windows blacked out, with another dozen or so cats. We were driven for a while, and then we went onto a boat.’ Max shuddered, overcome by the distress of his kidnap, the memory of the long, cramped journey and the sheer fury of having been made to travel on water, when this was as unnatural to cats as flying through the air on wings.
‘I saw that car!’ Millie tried to keep her voice down, in case her dad could hear. ‘Last week. There was an annoying man who had a couple of crates that—’
‘That what?’
‘That meowed,’ she whispered.
‘That would have been the most recent shipment. Another twelve stolen cats.’
‘Miiiiilliiiiie!’ her dad shouted up the stairs. ‘Dinner time.’
‘I’ll be right there,’ she called.
‘I’ll be right back,’ she said to Max. ‘Well, I’ll be half an hour. Are you hungry? I’ll bring you something up.’
‘A little chicken, or maybe some fish would be nice.’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah?’
‘I’m vegetarian. We probably don’t have any meat in the house.’
‘No meat?’ Max looked as if she had just told him that, usually, she and her father wore cats’ skins as coats, except for the nicest ones, which they used for matching hats.
‘Well, you wouldn’t like to be eaten.’
‘That’s true, but chickens are so stupid, and fish are so ugly. It’s different, eating a carnivore – we are clever and—’
‘Edible. It’s an honour thing. Just because you can kill something, doesn’t mean you should. Unless you don’t have a choice. Like, if I was on a desert island or something, and I had to eat a fish or starve to death.’ Millie frowned at this prospect, although the likelihood of it occurring anywhere in East Anglia seemed pretty slim.
‘If we all thought that way,’ Max sniffed, ‘the world would be overrun with mice.’
Millie thought for a minute. ‘OK. You catch mice, or birds, and eat them, fine. But humans don’t need to do that. We can eat anything.’
‘Interesting as these philosophical distinctions are, what have you got for me to eat?’
‘Cheese?’ Millie ventured.
‘Cheese will do for now, thank you. But we will have to arrange something else tomorrow. I cannot live off cheese, like a cartoon mouse. I need amino acids that are only in meat.’
‘You’re pretty well informed, for a cat.’
‘I’ve just spent three months in a laboratory – you pick things up.’
‘Miiiiiilliiiiie!’
‘I’ve got to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you hear anyone come up the stairs, hide under the desk in case it’s not me.’
The cat looked plaintive. ‘Make it a big piece of cheese. Maybe shape it like a sparrow. Or a goldfish. Even a squirrel.’
The door shut behind her, and the cat looked around his new home.
Chapter Five
Millie had the second largest bedroom in the house – her dad had the biggest one, ‘because I’m the biggest’, as he had unarguably pointed out when they moved in. And the smallest one was kept for ‘visitors’, who were usually Millie’s friends. Max looked around him – he hadn’t been in a girl’s bedroom before. In Brussels, he lived with Sofie and her son, Stef, who must be about the same age as Millie, he guessed. But he had always thought that girls’ rooms would look more, well, girly. Pink and so on. Millie’s room was not like that at all. There were aerial photographs on the walls, some of the sea. He shuddered again. The walls were covered with lots of shelves filled with books. On her desk were a computer and printer, and some other devices he couldn’t quite name. Maybe a scanner, he wondered, although he wasn’t entirely sure what that was. Perhaps Sofie and Stef weren’t very technologically minded, he thought, jumping up onto the desk and looking more closely at Millie’s computer, which appeared to be both smaller and newer than the ones in the lab.
In many ways, the room matched its owner, Max decided. His rescuer had a very sensible face, but she definitely wasn’t pretty. Although he would probably have tried to come up with a more flattering description, if pushed. Well, maybe not – cats have an obligation to tell the truth, even if they’ve just been assisted in a daring bid for freedom. Millie had dark brown hair, cut into what might generously be described as a mess. She wasn’t very tall for her age, either, and she appeared to dress as though she were hoping to pass as a boy. He thought about how different she looked from the girls Stef knew. But the more he thought, the more he realised that it didn’t matter – Millie could obviously think quickly in an emergency, and that was what he had needed most today, and would continue to need, if he was going to keep his promise to Monty.
Max blinked quickly. Some of the cats in the lab had been pretty boring, he thought. And one or two had been quite unpleasant, especially a big ginger tom who’d tried to bully Max when he first arrived. And then there was the cat who had stood up for Max, and refused to let anyone pick on him – Monty. He was the oldest cat in the lab, in his mid-teens. And his was the only family to have been kidnapped – Monty’s daughter, Celeste, had been in the cage below Max, and they were the only cats that hadn’t laughed at Max when he explained his plan to escape.
Max had promised them both that he would come back and rescue them, as soon as he got the chance. The ginger tom had snorted with derision at the very idea that Max would make it to the outside world, let alone come back for his friends. Even Monty had only nodded sadly at Max, as though he couldn’t quite believe that he would be able to do it. But, as Max had made his escape, Celeste had whispered, ‘Come back for us, Max. We’ll be waiting.’ Max blinked at the memory and took a deep breath. He looked around approvingly at Millie’s desk, with its supply of electronics, and began to plan.
Max had no idea how long he had been sitting, thinking, when he heard the telltale creak of a foot on the stairs. In less than a second he was under the bed. The door opened, and shut again quickly.
‘Max?’
He wriggled out from under the bed, and sneezed twice, looking at Millie with an unmistakable air of reproach.
‘Sorry,’ she said guiltily. ‘I always mean to hoover under there, but I usually forget. That’s why I thought you might prefer hiding under the desk.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed ruefully.
‘I brought you some cheese.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Now, tell me about the Haverham lab.’
‘Is that what it’s called?’
‘Later, we will do that. First, I should tell you what they do there.’
‘They’re making cats that can talk.’ Millie knew she was stating the obvious, but she was still having problems making her brain accept what her eyes and ears were telling her.
‘Do you know why?’ asked Max.
‘Is it a government lab?’ Millie’s eyebrows shot up in alarm. ‘Are you a secret weapon? Like a spy?’
‘Yes, of course. Your government has decided it will send adorable kittens to dubious world leaders, media moguls and international terrorists. They will keep us on their laps at all times, because we are so furry and cute. We will overhear everything they plan, just like our role model, the fluffy white cat in your James Bond films. This has, in fact, been happening for many years, but with one flaw: we could not communicate what we knew. Many intelligence missions, many top-secret investigations, even many wars could have been avoided, if only we could tell what we had heard. And then, one day, voilà, someone has the bright idea. Kidnap cats from overseas, with a range of languages at their disposal. I, for example, speak French, Dutch and English, as you can hear. Give them voice-boxes, like humans have. Then, each time we go for our injections, or worm tablets, or minor operations, we can tell the vet everything we know, very, very quietly. The vet is not only a vet, but an operative from MI5. It is simple, but brilliant.’
Millie looked at Max for a long minute.
‘You’re pretty sarcastic for a cat.’
‘No more than average. It’s just you can hear me.’
‘OK, it was a stupid suggestion. But who does have an interest in making animals talk?’
‘I don’t know. That is something we have to find out.’
‘And do you know why they want to make cats talk? It might help us find out who’s behind it.’
‘No, they hardly let me see any memos while I was sitting in a cage.’