That ping didn’t come from the oven, thought Emma. It came from my phone. It was no ordinary phone and no ordinary ping—it was a mission alert from SHINE.
Emma’s phone was one of the best things about being a SHINE agent. Sure, saving the world was better but Emma’s special SHINE -issue phone was very, very good. It was a cross between a game console and a mobile phone, which was handy if you needed to pretend you were a normal girl playing a game when really you were a secret agent using one of the phone’s many spy applications. There were apps to identify wild animals, apps to find your way around strange countries and, of course, apps to help agents crack codes. There wasn’t, however, an app to tell you how to report in for a mission if your normal reporting drill took place at school and you received a mission alert while at a friend’s house. Which was exactly what had just happened. Emma would normally respond to a mission alert by entering the SHINE Mission Tube, an underground secret transport system, and she normally accessed the Mission Tube via the girls’ toilets at school. Starting a mission in the toilets could be embarrassing but it got Emma to the Mission Tube fast. How was she going to do that from Isi’s house?
Just as Emma was starting to worry about what to do, Isi’s mum came into the room.
‘Emma, your mum just rang. Something’s come up at home and she needs you back early. She is on her way to pick you up.’
‘Oh no, we haven’t even begun to decorate the cakes,’ cried Isi.
But Emma was relieved. She knew what her mum was up to—sometimes it was pretty useful having a mum who also used to be a secret agent for SHINE.
‘Lighten up, Isi!’ said Emma, smiling at her friend.
Isi poked her tongue out at Emma and laughed.
Emma’s mum arrived quickly and they were soon in the car and heading off.
‘This isn’t the way to school, Mum,’ said Emma, thinking that maybe her mum was not such a good ex-agent after all.
‘We’re not going to school,’ replied Emma’s mum. ‘ SHINE has requested you report to the Light Shop. It will be opening in five minutes and we’ll be arriving there in six.’
Emma took back her thought about her mum not being a very good ex-agent.
‘And here we are: the Light Shop.’
‘Okay Mum, thanks,’ said Emma, opening the car door.
‘Oh, don’t forget to ask the lady if they have any new lights!’ called her mum as she pulled out from the kerb and drove away.
Emma turned back to the Light Shop, an ordinary-looking shop in an ordinary-looking shopping street selling ordinary-looking lights. ‘We SHINE a light!’ said the sign in the window and Emma smiled because she knew that was also one of the many SHINE mottoes, with two small but important words left off—‘We shine a light on evil.’ Which is what, twenty floors down in their underground headquarters, SHINE did.
Emma pushed open the door and a buzzer went off. She walked up to the desk at the back of the shop where an elderly lady was sitting reading a book. As EJ approached, the lady looked up, smiling.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ replied Emma.
The lady looked back down at her book.
Hang on, that’s not right, thought EJ. Oh, what was it Mum said? Yes, I remember now. EJ coughed to clear her throat and looked at the lady again.
‘Excuse me, do you have any new lights that you can show me?’
‘Yes we do, indeed we do!’ cried the woman. ‘Well done, that was the password. Please put your hand on here,’ said the lady, smiling as she placed a small black box in front of EJ.
EJ put her hand on the pad, which buzzed for a moment, then stopped. A small green light on the side of the box glowed.
‘You are cleared for access, EJ12,’ said the lady. ‘Please take the lift to level 20 and await further instructions. Good luck—and I hope you like chocolate, EJ12!’
Chocolate? A mission with chocolate? Could it be true? EJ12 hoped so.
The lift stopped at level 20. EJ waited. A digital voice started talking.
‘Welcome, Agent EJ12. Exit lift and turn left. Continue until you come to the Code Room.’
EJ walked until she came to a plain metal door with a small keypad and screen next to it. EJ knew the drill. She keyed in her pin code and another digital voice began talking.
‘Security test commencing. Knock knock.’
Knock knock? This was new. SHINE always had new ways of confirming an agent’s identity but was this really a knock-knock joke? There was nothing for it, EJ had to answer.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Agent.’
It is a knock-knock joke, thought Emma.
‘Agent Who?’ she answered.
‘Agent EJ12, welcome, voice and sense of humour recognition complete. Door open.’
Very funny, thought EJ as she went into the room. Isi would have liked that one.
The Code Room at HQ was a small, simple, yellow-painted room with a chair, a table with SHINE -issue paper and pen, and a long, clear tube coming from the ceiling directly over the table. The messages came via the tube and EJ sat and waited until a little capsule came whooshing down. EJ took the capsule and unscrewed the lid. She pulled out a memory stick.
I kind of expected a coded message, thought EJ. Maybe it’s on this. She plugged the stick into her phone.
A message came up on her screen.
Then EJ’s screen went black for a moment before a part of an episode of Madame Ombre’s ‘Choc Chef’ came on. Was there a mistake? wondered EJ.
It was a cooking segment, showing how to decorate cupcakes. Madame Ombre was using smarties and sprinkles, tiny flowers and silver balls, lots of lovely things, all to make the most beautifully decorated cupcakes.
‘I call these Mixed-Up Surprises, and to make them you must first cook perfect cakes,’ said Madame Ombre. ‘They must be light and fluffy and perfectly smooth.’
EJ thought back to her and Isi’s Chocolate Surprise Cakes and winced as she saw how different two ‘surprise’ cakes could be. She could not, however, see what the segment might have to do with SHINE. She watched it again, and then again, trying to spot why SHADOW would be sending this to one of their agents. She also checked her watch to see how long she had taken. SHINE kept records of how quickly their agents cracked messages and EJ wanted to do well. She couldn’t crack a message she couldn’t see though, could she?
Then, on the fourth watching, EJ noticed something. There was one tray of cupcakes already decorated on Madame Ombre’s workbench and they all had smarties on them, little smarties with letters on them. Was it just a half-baked idea or was there a message on those cupcakes? EJ paused the video on the bit where she could best see the tray and looked closely at the smarties on each cupcake, copying down on a piece of paper what she saw.
It has to be a message, thought EJ. Why else would you have such a random collection of letters on top of the cakes, unless they weren’t random at all but rather a coded message! EJ looked at the ‘words’. Could it be a backwards code? She tried that.
EJ didn’t need to go on, it clearly wasn’t a backwards code. Hold on, EJ thought, hadn’t Madame Ombre called these cakes ‘Mixed-Up Surprises’? Was that a hint? Were the letters all mixed up? EJ looked to see if she could unjumble them.
EJ smiled as she wrote the decoded message down on a piece of paper, put the paper back in the capsule and pushed the capsule up the tube. There was a whoosh as the capsule was sucked up and away to the briefing room, where A1, the head of SHINE, would be waiting for it—and for EJ12.
Piinngg! There was another message on EJ’s phone.
EJ wondered why she needed to press two buttons for one floor. Then the lift stopped. As the lift doors opened, EJ saw a small sign with just two letters on the two metal doors across the corridor from the lift: HQ.
Now I get it, a simple letter-number match, 8=H and 17=Q, thought EJ, as the two doors slid open. Gee whizz, lemonfizz, SHINE likes codes.
‘Yes we do, EJ12
, and welcome back to SHINE,’ said an older woman standing in front of EJ as the doors opened to the SHINE operations room.
EJ smiled. It was A1, head of SHINE. A1 was, as always, wearing a smart black suit, crisp white shirt and a long chain around her neck with a beautiful, large yellow pendant that almost glowed hanging from it. EJ wondered what sort of stone it was.
‘It is a rare sapphire,’ said A1, who had a slightly unnerving habit of seeming to know what you were thinking. ‘Most people think sapphires are only blue, but they can be all sorts of colours. Now, we have work to do, EJ. Let’s take a look at the message.’ A1 turned, and as she did so said, ‘Light Screen lower’.
She and EJ watched as an enormous plasma screen came down from the high ceiling of the operations room. It was the SHINE Light Screen and with it you could find out almost anything you wanted or needed to know. Through the Light Screen you could access the Internet and, if you had the right security clearance, the entire SHINE network of files. The Light Screen was voice-activated and touch sensitive, and you could move screens around and call up new ones by command.
‘Show message,’ instructed A1. Almost immediately, the message EJ had written in the Code Room flashed up on the screen.
‘Well done on finding the message, EJ,’ said A1. ‘Finding and decoding the message in just over half an hour, that is impressive.’
EJ blushed. ‘Thanks A1, but I don’t know what the message means.’
‘We can help with that, or at least some of it.’ A1 turned back to face the Light Screen. ‘Show files on SHADOW S6.’
Images flooded the screen, images of codes and of tiny gadgets.
‘What are they?’ asked EJ.
‘We are not completely sure,’ replied A1, ‘but we think they may be early prototypes of something called S6.’
‘Oh,’ said EJ beginning to blush again, ‘so it isn’t 6S.’
‘No, I don’t think so, but that doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,’ said A1, laughing at her own little joke. ‘Either way it means the same thing. It’s just that we have seen other messages about S6.’ A1 looked at the screen again. ‘Light Screen change 6S to S6,’ she said. ‘We know, EJ, that S6 stands for SHADOW Secret Scramble Send and Spy System. It is a new code-making machine, a machine that makes codes that are nearly impossible to crack. Our top code professor has been working on S6 and she is the best person to brief you.’ A1 turned again to the screen. ‘Light Screen, teleconference Agent CO45.’
There were a few beeps and then an image of a young woman in a white scientist’s coat and with slightly crazy, long curly red hair came onto the Light Screen.
‘Good morning A1. Good morning EJ12, nice to meet you.’
‘Hello CO45,’ said EJ smiling. She wondered if it was just a coincidence that if you used a simple alphabet-number match, starting with A being 1, 4 and 5 would make the scientist’s code name CODE. She thought not.
‘What can you tell us about S6?’ said A1.
‘It’s clever,’ said CO45. ‘I wish we had invented it, but actually SHADOW didn’t invent it either. They have really only created a smaller, digital version of a powerful code-making machine used more than fifty years ago. It was called the Enigma machine and it produced codes that seemed completely random, making them almost impossible to crack. We think SHADOW has created a modern version to communicate with their agents. We also believe they have developed it in such a way that they can send it out in small parts their agents can assemble. Ingenious really.’
‘But if they do that,’ said EJ, ‘we won’t be able to crack their messages. And if we can’t crack their messages, we won’t be able to stop their plans.’
‘Exactly, EJ12,’ said CO45, nodding. ‘But, luckily, they haven’t quite finished it. At least, that’s what we thought until you found their latest message on the cupcakes. And,’ CO45 added, ‘were you aware that “Ombre” is French for “shadow”? I think that and the fact she is sending out this message confirm she is working for SHADOW.’
‘Indeed. Good work, CO45. Thank you for your time.’
‘My pleasure, A1. CO45 out.’
‘So what do we know?’ said A1 to EJ as the decoded message appeared again on the screen.
‘S6 has to be the SHADOW code machine but I’m not sure what S6 cakes are,’ said EJ. ‘And Jnr Choc Chef has to be the Junior Choc Chef finals that are on today,’ she added, remembering the TV ad she and Isi had seen earlier. ‘They are being held in Madame Ombre’s bakery.’
‘Well done, EJ,’ said A1. ‘So, there are some cakes that have something to do with S6 and they will be ready after the competition. We can assume Madame Ombre has baked them and now, it seems, she wants SHADOW to send flakes.’
‘But what are flakes?’ asked EJ. ‘Decorations?’
‘Maybe, but we don’t know,’ said A1. ‘We have, however, had our suspicions about Madame Ombre and her chocolate cake bakery for some time. In fact, we have had an agent from the surveillance division in the bakery for the last couple of weeks.’
‘I didn’t know we had a surveillance division,’ said EJ.
‘All SHINE information is on a strictly NTK—need-to-know—basis EJ, and up until now you have not needed to know about it, but now you do. The agents in the surveillance division are highly trained not only in watching but also in hiding. They have to spend long amounts of time in some very strange and often very small places while they keep an eye on targets.’
‘I bet they are good at hide-and-seek,’ said EJ.
A1 laughed. ‘Actually, that is one of the ways we choose these agents, EJ. Anyway, back to business. Each day we have sent an agent, CC12, into the bakery. She has then found herself a hiding place and watched. She comes out a few hours later with the rubbish truck—after all, we can’t let our agents fall behind in their schoolwork. Agent CC12 has confirmed that there has been much more baking than usual, a lot even by Madame Ombre’s standards.’
‘Baking of what?’ asked EJ.
‘That’s what we need to find out, EJ, and quickly,’ replied A1. ‘It is time to get you into that bakery.’
‘But how?’ said EJ.
‘Congratulations!’ said A1 suddenly.
‘I beg your pardon, A1,’ said EJ.
‘Congratulations, EJ,’ repeated A1, ‘or should that be Emma Sekac, which is your undercover name for this mission?’
‘I get it,’ said EJ after a moment, ‘s-e-k-a-c is c-ak-e-s backwards, but why undercover?’
‘Because,’ said A1, ‘you, Emma Sekac, are the surprise late entrant in the Junior Choc Chef finals!’
Uh-oh, I really don’t think I am the right agent for this mission, thought EJ. I’ll have to tell A1 about Isi and my Chocolate Surprise Cakes!
‘Now EJ, I know you haven’t had a lot of cooking experience,’ said A1, ‘but it is all about a lightness of touch. Don’t let a few lumpy cakes get you down.’
How does she do that? wondered EJ. And ‘don’t let lumpy cakes get you down’—that’s easy for you to say! EJ didn’t think A1 would stress about anything.
‘We have some charms that I think should help as well,’ continued A1.
EJ smiled at that. Charm was actually CHARM, Clever Hidden Accessories with Release Mechanism.
The SHINE inventors would invent all kinds of useful gadgets and tools for agents to use on missions and then shrink them to the size of small charms, spy charms. The SHINE agents wore the charms on a special bracelet. When they needed to, they twisted the charm to release it to its normal size so it could work. There were four charms laid out on the table: a whisk, a heart, a cupcake and a chocolate bar. EJ was particularly interested in the last two.
‘This one is hard to beat,’ said A1, holding the whisk charm. ‘The SHINE whisk-o-matic guarantees beautiful, light and fluffy cakes every time and also tests and adjusts for perfect flavour, thanks to its hidden computer chip. That should help you stand out in the Junior Choc Chef finals. But this one
,’ A1 continued, holding up another little charm, ‘this is really the icing on the cake. It is a triumph, it is a...’
‘Cupcake?’ said EJ.
‘Yes, EJ, a cupcake,’ said A1 smiling. ‘But this is not a real cupcake. It is cupcake-cam, the world’s first flip-top cake and possibly the most ingenious creation yet from our SHINE inventor-in-chief, IQ400.’
‘How does it work?’ asked EJ.
‘You simply twist, as usual,’ explained A1, ‘and then wait for the cupcake to enlarge.’ She demonstrated. ‘There we are. Now, you see this cherry on top? It is no ordinary cherry, it is a tiny camera. You simply leave the cherry in a position where you want to film and press the little button on the side to start filming. To watch, you simply flip back the top of the cupcake. Underneath is a little screen. The film will be transmitted back to you on the cupcake-cam.’
‘Sweet!’ said EJ.
‘Indeed. EJ, as we are short of time, you will be briefed on the choc-charm on the way to the bakery.’
EJ looked forward to that one. She was really hoping the choc-charm was going to involve eating chocolate.
‘But what about Agent CC12?’ asked EJ. ‘How will I contact her?’
‘She will contact you,’ replied A1. ‘That is the best way to protect whatever hiding spot she has chosen. You will, however, need a special password sequence so you both know you are who you say you are. I will show you that now,’ said A1 as she turned to the Light Screen. ‘Light Screen, show password sequence.’
EJ looked at the screen and read a rather odd exchange that appeared there.
‘I am going to say that?’ asked EJ.
‘I know it’s a little silly,’ said A1 ‘but that helps make sure no one else would say it by accident. Now EJ, memorise the exchange.’
Choc Shock Page 2
