Shadow Wave

by Robert Muchamore

  *

  Kyle made it down to the fifth floor before seeing that the next landing was blocked by two burly policemen, who seemed to be waiting for backup before approaching the restaurant. He thought about trying to bluff his way past, but he suspected they’d arrest him first and ask questions later.

  Not only did he not want the hassle of an arrest and the possibility of a criminal record, he also suspected that the intelligence service wouldn’t publicise the contents of the memory card if they got hold of it. Most likely they’d use it to blackmail Tan Abdullah.

  So Kyle turned and headed back upstairs for a second time. Verhoeven and the others seemed to have caught the lift, because the sixth floor was quiet apart from scared looking waitresses and groaning bodyguards.

  He thought about taking the lift, but he suspected that the cops in the lobby would have been reinforced. He might have got out of the building with the elderly Verhoeven and the camera crew for company, but he didn’t fancy his chances as a young man on his own.

  This meant going up was Kyle’s only option. He stopped on the seventh-floor landing, hoping to find an escape route, but when he opened the door on to the floor itself, all he saw was a metal gantry overlooking the double-height bar and restaurant.

  The eighth floor was Tan’s and would be guarded. Kyle considered the roof, but didn’t fancy a potentially fatal chase across rooftops. And that’s when he remembered that Lauren was in the building. She was the last call he’d received, so he only had to press one button on his phone to call her back.

  It rang five times. ‘Have you any idea what’s going on?’ Lauren asked anxiously. ‘I shouldn’t even speak to you. If they find out we’ve been talking, they’ll want to know why and I’ll have a shitload of explaining to do.’

  ‘I’m on the back stairs,’ Kyle said, as he thought he heard footsteps coming up towards him.

  ‘What stairs?’ Lauren asked. ‘It’s pandemonium up here. Tan is screaming and yelling at his assistant. David Secombe is freaking out because Tan kicked us all out of his suite and won’t say what’s going on.’

  ‘Lauren, I didn’t want you to get tangled up in this,’ Kyle said. ‘But I’ve got a memory card. If the cops bust me, I might not get it back.’

  ‘What card?’ Lauren said. ‘What’s on it?’

  ‘Lauren, I don’t have time to explain,’ Kyle said pleadingly. ‘But you know I’m a good guy, right? Are there guards at the end of your floor? Can I get up to your room?’

  ‘It’s a nuthouse,’ Lauren explained. ‘Most of Tan’s bodyguards rushed downstairs, but there’s a policeman at each end of our hallway.’

  ‘What room are you in?’ Kyle asked.

  ‘Kyle, I could get kicked out of CHERUB. You told me it was just a few protestors. I have to know what’s going on.’

  Kyle didn’t hear what Lauren said next. He’d taken the phone away from his ear because the feet on the stairs were getting louder.

  ‘Lauren the cops are coming,’ Kyle said urgently. ‘What room are you in? I’m gonna try and get through to you, OK? Just take this memory card and give it to James.’

  ‘802,’ Lauren said reluctantly. ‘It’s right down by the lift. Zara put me on a final warning, Kyle. I can’t get into trouble.’

  ‘Lauren, please!’ Kyle begged, and started running towards the eighth floor.

  The boots pounding up the stairwell were getting louder as Kyle rounded the eighth-floor landing. He peered through a slot window and saw a police officer on a stall by the door looking bored.

  Kyle blasted through the door with all his strength, knocking the officer flying. He then sprinted at full pelt down the corridor between hotel rooms, trying to find 802.

  ‘Stop or I’ll shoot,’ the officer shouted.

  Kyle knew this was a bluff: a British police officer will only shoot when someone is under immediate threat, so he kept moving. Up ahead, he saw Lauren’s head bob out into the corridor. At the same moment, a huge man sprang through an open door and rugby-tackled him. Kyle smashed hard against the corridor wall and struggled for air as a huge knee crushed his chest.

  Kyle flipped over and forced the huge bodyguard off with a double-footed kick, but he soon had the cop behind him ready to swing his baton and another officer coming down the hall towards him. Even Bruce would have struggled with those odds and Kyle raised his hands in meek surrender.

  Lauren felt awful as the bodyguard stood with his shoe pressed against Kyle’s back, while the officer locked handcuffs around his wrists.

  Kevin stepped out of the room behind Lauren and looked shocked. ‘Isn’t that Kyle Blueman?’ he gasped. ‘Is he working with us?’

  ‘Just stay quiet,’ Lauren said impatiently.

  Kyle was hitched to his feet, by which time the officers who’d stormed up the stairs now cluttered up the corridor.

  ‘I was just in the restaurant with my granddad,’ Kyle explained. ‘It all started kicking off. I panicked and ran. I’m really sorry officer, I didn’t see you when I ran through the door.’

  Kyle was putting on a good act and sounded like he was close to tears. But at the same time he was making a signal, pointing downwards with two fingers.

  ‘He just dropped a balled-up tissue down by his feet,’ Kevin whispered. ‘What’s he up to?’

  ‘Kevin, I don’t know,’ Lauren snapped, as Kyle kicked the tissue ball up against the skirting board. ‘I’ll pick it up. You get back in the room and don’t speak to anyone.’

  Lauren stepped out into the hallway and began walking towards Kyle and the officers. When she got close, Lauren pulled a tissue out of her jeans and pretended to blow her nose.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Lauren said politely. ‘I have to get something from my dad’s room.’

  ‘No problem,’ one of the officers said, and backed up the wall.

  As Lauren passed Kyle she dropped her balled-up tissue and bobbed down to pick it up. At the same time, she snatched the tissue that Kyle had kicked away.

  Lauren kept imagining that she was about to get called back as she squeezed Kyle’s tissue and felt the hard rectangular shape of the SD card wrapped inside it.

  She wondered what was on the card and what she’d do when she found out.

  34. INNOCENCE

  Melissa opened the door of her suite and let Lauren inside.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Lauren asked, trying to sound less flustered than she felt. ‘Is David here?’

  ‘All I know is that some media got into the hotel and cornered Tan,’ Melissa explained, as Lauren followed her into the suite. ‘David’s trying to work out what happened. Tan wouldn’t speak to him so he’s gone downstairs to try and get some sense out of the police.’

  The two-bedroom suite was identical to the one Lauren was sharing with Kevin down the hall. Melissa had a black silk evening dress draped over the back of a sofa, and Lauren swept her hand across the soft fabric.

  ‘Wish I could afford clothes like that in real life,’ Melissa smiled. ‘Not that I get invited to anywhere I’d be able to wear them.’

  Lauren looked out towards the balcony and saw a laptop standing on the desk. ‘Mind if I use that?’ she asked. ‘I wouldn’t mind checking my e-mails.’

  ‘Go for it,’ Melissa said. ‘It’s all logged in. Just make sure you save my expenses spreadsheet before you shut Excel.’

  ‘I enjoyed the spa,’ Lauren said, trying to make innocent conversation with the MI5 agent as she sat at the desk. To her relief, the chunky laptop had a row of memory-card slots along one side.

  ‘You hit the jackpot,’ Melissa laughed. ‘That Scandinavian masseur you had was a peach.’

  ‘Wasn’t bad, was he?’ Lauren agreed, but her mind was focused on the laptop and finding out what was on the memory card.

  Windows recognised the card when she inserted it, but the laptop’s media player refused to open the file. It gave her the option to search the internet to try downloading the correct video codec and Lauren clicked OK.

>   ‘Got a boyfriend on CHERUB campus?’ Melissa asked.

  This question momentarily startled Lauren. She wasn’t used to being asked about CHERUB by outsiders, but Melissa was a senior MI5 officer.

  ‘I do,’ Lauren said. ‘But even though you know about CHERUB, I’m still not supposed to talk about any details unless you have a good reason to know. No offence, it’s just the rules.’

  ‘None taken,’ Melissa said. ‘Careless talk costs lives.’

  Green download bars blipped across the laptop screen and finally the message Codec Ready flashed up in a dialogue box. Lauren had no idea what she was about to see, so she checked that the laptop’s volume was set to one bar above mute.

  Her phone rang before she could hit play and Kevin’s name flashed on the screen. ‘They just dragged Kyle off,’ Kevin said, audibly panicked. ‘What’s going on? I thought he was retired.’

  Lauren was irritated, but she had to calm Kevin down. ‘Nobody knows what’s going on,’ she said, measuring her words carefully because Melissa was within earshot. ‘Stay in our room with TJ.’

  ‘TJ left with one of the bodyguards,’ Kevin explained. ‘Tan says it’s not secure here. They’re all packing up and leaving for the Malaysian embassy.’

  Lauren saw the video waiting to be played on the screen. She was acutely aware of the urgency and of Melissa hovering a few paces away. ‘Kevin, you’ll know what’s going on when I do. Speak later.’

  She shut her phone and pressed play. The video showed what looked like an office, with a big table and a man in glasses and a blue suit. The view out of the window and the loud decor made her sure that it was somewhere inside the Leith Hotel.

  The timeline running along at the bottom of the playback window showed that the recording lasted forty-four minutes. She clipped forward ten minutes, then twenty, and caught the moment when Tan Abdullah entered the dining-room.

  Melissa had stepped into her bedroom. Lauren put the volume up another notch so that she heard some dialogue through the speaker. She didn’t have time to listen to the whole conversation, but didn’t need to watch much to work out Tan was being offered a huge bribe and accepting it enthusiastically.

  Kyle hadn’t specifically said that the memory card held the only copy, but his desperation made it pretty obvious and David Secombe’s entry into the suite confirmed it.

  ‘Everything’s going down the pan,’ Secombe shouted, as Melissa came out of her bedroom to see what was going on.

  Lauren couldn’t risk watching more with the two adults in the room. She closed the media player and clicked an icon for the video file. She wanted to send a backup copy to her own e-mail address, but the forty-four-minute video file was over three gigabytes, which would take hours to upload, even on a fast internet connection.

  ‘So what happened down there?’ Melissa asked David.

  ‘Tan Abdullah got caught out being a greedy little boy,’ David said furiously. ‘I’ve been working on this deal for eight bastard months.’

  He lashed out with his foot, sending leather sofa cushions flying up into the air.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Melissa said.

  ‘They’ve arrested some teenager,’ Secombe explained. ‘We think he was carrying a video of Tan being offered a bribe. If we can get that recording, we might be able to get the deal back on track by using it to blackmail Tan. But if it gets into the media, Tan loses all credibility. He’ll be a sacked from his job and the whole deal will be delayed for months, maybe even dead in the water.’

  ‘Have they searched the one who got arrested?’ Lauren asked, slipping the memory card into her jeans.

  ‘There’s no sign of the card on him,’ David explained. ‘He might have swallowed it, or tried sticking it up his butt. Or he might have hidden it somewhere in the building. I’ve ordered in all available backup and told the cops to stop at nothing in order to find it. Right now, that card is worth five billion to the British economy.’

  ‘What a mess,’ Lauren said, trying to hide her nerves as she stood up from the desk. ‘I’d better head back to my room and let Kevin know what’s going on.’

  She kept her clammy fingers on the memory card in her pocket as she walked out of the suite and along the hallway to room 802. Tan’s assistant and the bodyguards were trying to get a trunk in the lift, but the police were insisting that nobody could leave until everyone had been properly interviewed. June Ling could be heard screaming at the top of her voice from inside her suite.

  In the section of hallway where Kyle had been captured the carpet had been torn up by officers trying to see if he’d managed to push the card into the gap between the thick carpet and the wall. Lauren shuddered. Before too long someone would ask questions about the girl who’d walked past and dropped her tissue moments after the arrest.

  ‘It was definitely Kyle,’ Kevin blurted, as Lauren stepped back into her suite. ‘What’s going on?’

  Lauren shoved past Kevin, heading for her bedroom. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know anything about this. We could get in a lot of trouble.’

  Lauren shut the door in Kevin’s face and sat on the edge of her bed trying to think.

  ‘I’m not just a kid, you know,’ Kevin shouted bitterly from the living-room.

  Lauren didn’t know what to do. If she was caught with the memory card in her pocket, everyone would assume she was in cahoots with Kyle and the protestors. She’d be expelled from CHERUB in two seconds flat.

  Her options were to either hide the card, dispose of it by flushing it down the toilet, or find some way to get it back to the protestors.

  Flushing would be the easiest option, but she thought about Kyle being arrested. Not only was Kyle a good friend, he’d put his CHERUB career on the line two years earlier when she’d been blackmailed by Norman Large. On top of that, Tan didn’t deserve to get off.

  She was torn over the five billion weapons deal, but only slightly: maybe a lot of British people would lose their jobs if the deal fell through, but she’d joined CHERUB to make the world a better place, not to boost the defence industry with dodgy arms deals.

  Lauren couldn’t call Kyle while he was under arrest. So she called her brother instead.

  ‘James,’ Lauren said anxiously. ‘I need you to listen carefully. Kyle’s been nicked. Do you have contact numbers for Helena Bayliss, or anyone else who’s involved with Guilt Trips?’

  ‘Shit,’ James gasped. ‘We’ve been hoping he’d turn up here. Do you know if Kyle had a memory card on him when he was arrested?’

  Lauren was confused. ‘How do you know about the card?’

  ‘I’m at our rendezvous point, in a church about half a mile from where you are.’

  ‘What rendezvous point?’ Lauren shouted, angry that Kyle had lied when he said that James wasn’t involved. ‘I thought you were visiting some university.’

  ‘Just a cover story,’ James said. ‘I didn’t want you or Kevin dragged into this.’

  ‘Kyle’s a lying son of a whore,’ Lauren said bitterly, stamping on the thick bedroom carpet. ‘What else haven’t you been telling me? Is it you lot that have been tracking us somehow?’

  James didn’t think it was the right moment to tell Lauren that he’d installed tracking software on her phone.

  ‘Never mind all that,’ he said nervously. ‘Do you know anything about a memory card? Is there any way you could possibly get hold of it, or even just make us a copy?’

  ‘The card is in my pocket,’ Lauren said.

  James gasped with relief and said something to Bruce who stood in the vestry beside him. Lauren overheard Bruce saying, ‘Thank bloody god.’

  ‘Lauren, we badly need that card. Can you meet me somewhere?’

  ‘It might be hard to get out of the hotel,’ Lauren said. ‘There’s a lot of cops around.’

  Lauren jolted as she heard a voice behind her.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ Kevin said.

  Lauren hadn’t heard him sneak into the room. She turned around and
pointed at the door. ‘I told you to stay out of this,’ she roared. ‘Get out of my room before I kick the shit out of you.’

  Then she put her mouth back to the phone. ‘I’ll find a way. Where do we meet?’

  ‘There’s a coffee bar on the corner,’ James said. ‘That’s about as close to the hotel as we can get at the moment with all the security. If I run I can be there in five minutes.’

  ‘Right,’ Lauren said. ‘And you’d better get someone from Guilt Trips to call a lawyer for Kyle. David Secombe is desperate to get that card and it’ll be fingers-up-the-bum time before he knows it.’

  Lauren shut her phone and was furious to see Kevin still standing behind her. ‘What part of stay the hell out of this don’t you understand?’ she shouted.

  ‘I’m not a kid,’ Kevin repeated indignantly. ‘What’s going on?’

  Lauren realised she’d need Kevin to cover for her while she was gone. She sighed and rubbed her forehead before quickly explaining the basics about Kyle, the blackmail attempt and the contents of the memory card in her pocket.

  ‘I trust you not to grass me and James up,’ Lauren said finally. ‘But if anyone asks, you don’t know anything about this, OK? This is a nasty little mess. I might get kicked out of CHERUB, but there’s no point you getting sucked into it too.’

  Kevin nodded and looked miffed. ‘I can’t believe James didn’t tell me why he really pulled out.’

  ‘I’ll be fifteen, twenty minutes maximum,’ Lauren said as she put on a hoodie and headed towards the door. ‘Turn the water on in my room and if anyone comes in, you thought I was in the shower.’

  Lauren opened her door. She was confident she’d be able to bluff her way past the police, but was surprised to find that they’d been replaced by swarms of men dressed in dark suits. The nearest one was less than two metres from the door.

  ‘Back in the room, little lady,’ he said abruptly.

  Lauren looked indignant. ‘Who says?’

  The big man was full of his own importance. ‘Security service,’ he said firmly. ‘I need you back in your room. Nobody gets on or off this floor until we’ve searched everything and everybody.’