New Guard

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Here’s a picture.’

  Daniel looked at his brother’s phone, seeing a police mugshot of a meth addict with sunken eyes and blackened teeth.

  ‘Oh you’re so funny,’ Daniel said, giving Leon an almighty shove in the back. ‘And it’s pure luck you know. If I’d been sitting by the door when she walked in …’

  ‘Nah-nuhh-uh-nuh-nuh-nuh,’ Leon mocked, as he wiped lipstick off his cheek. ‘So Captain Bullshit’s all set for lunchtime?’

  ‘I bet he’s not coming,’ Leon said. ‘Chicken shit.’

  He was in a side street with Daniel, sitting on a low wall in front of an abandoned exhaust centre. Both boys had coat hoods up, with rain pelting the outsides.

  ‘Better text James,’ Daniel said, but Oli came around the corner just as he was about to dial.

  ‘Howdy, partners,’ Oli said, stuffing his face from a family bag of Walkers Cheese and Onion. ‘Sorry I’m late. Had to wait till lunch was over ’cos they had someone on the back gate today.’

  ‘No probs,’ Leon said, as he started a slow walk. ‘So our cousin wants this garage cleared out, says he’ll pay us thirty each. Take maybe three or four hours.’

  ‘Cool,’ Oli said. ‘I don’t even care about the money, because I’ve got three grand in my Nationwide savings account. I just wanna get off Games, you know?’

  ‘We’ve done odd jobs for him before,’ Leon continued. ‘Sometimes he gives us a bit of weed as well.’

  ‘I love smoking joints,’ Oli said. ‘I had one that was like, twenty-five centimetres for New Year and I smoked the whole thing myself.’

  ‘Nice,’ Daniel said, trying not to meet his brother’s eye because he knew he’d laugh.

  They walked a couple of side streets, with the wind whipping rain and leaves. As they turned into a street of two-storey houses, an elderly woman came down an overgrown front path. She clanked her gate and set off at a decent pace towards the boys. When she was a few steps in front of the trio, a set of keys dropped from the woman’s coat pocket. She must have been hard of hearing because they made a clatter but she kept on walking.

  Daniel picked up the keys and turned to shout after the old lady, but Oli stood in front of him and raised a hand.

  ‘We could go in there,’ Oli said urgently, pointing up towards the house. ‘Keep your mouths shut.’

  Leon and Daniel exchanged glances.

  ‘Old people keep cash in the house,’ Oli said, as he watched the lady cut across the road. ‘Thousands sometimes. Or she might have antiques, or shit.’

  ‘She’s an old lady,’ Daniel pointed out.

  ‘You’re an old lady,’ Oli said, as he looked across at Leon.

  ‘He could be right,’ Leon told his brother. ‘Old people don’t trust banks.’

  ‘What if there’s someone else in there?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Even if there is, they’ll be old, like her husband or something,’ Oli said. ‘You wanna slave for your cousin for thirty quid when there could be all kinds of valuable stuff to rip off?’

  ‘He’s right,’ Leon said.

  Daniel handed Oli the dropped keys and the three boys glanced about, before dashing up ten metres of driveway towards the house.

  The front door was tatty, with a crack in the frosted glass. Oli took a minute, working out which of four keys undid the deadlock and the main lock.

  ‘It’s deadlocked, so there’s probably nobody else home,’ Oli noted, as he stepped into a gloomy house.

  It wasn’t very warm and there was a smell of damp in the hallway. The living-room had lots of framed photos, an old TV and an ancient video tape recorder with the clock flashing. Leon checked out the kitchen, which had a feeding bowl and a whiff of cats. Oli started opening jars along the counter top hoping to find money, but he only found stale biscuits, flour and gravy powder.

  ‘This isn’t worth the risk,’ Daniel noted.

  Oli laughed. ‘What risk? If they catch me they’ll put me in a secure care home. But I’m already in a secure care home. They might tighten up my curfew or move me back to secure corridor, but who really gives a shit?’

  As Oli said this he opened a cupboard under the sink and found a black enamel money-box on a shelf. It was narrow, and the inside was divided into sections with handwritten labels saying things like gas, telephone, vet and birthday.

  ‘Ker-ching!’ Oli said, rattling coins as he thumped the box on the dining-table. After popping off the lid, he stripped out eighty pounds in tenners, plus a five and a dozen pound coins. ‘I bet the old bag keeps more upstairs.’

  ‘We’re splitting this three ways,’ Leon said, as Oli led a charge upstairs.

  Daniel still seemed reluctant. ‘She’s just an old lady,’ he said, as he reached the upstairs landing.

  ‘So what?’ Oli said. ‘What have old people ever done for us?’

  There were two rooms and a bathroom upstairs. There was a jewellery box beside the woman’s bed. Oli pocketed a man’s sovereign ring and some diamond earrings, while Leon found another seventy pounds under a bar of soap in a drawer full of bras.

  Oli ignored the bathroom, then almost had a heart attack as he walked into the other bedroom. The large room was dominated by a hospital-style bed with an electric hoist above for lifting someone in and out, along with a portable toilet.

  The man in the bed was in his forties, with lank, greying hair. He snored lightly, but when he breathed, one side of his body seemed completely paralysed.

  ‘Stinks like hell!’ Oli whispered, pulling his shirt up over his face. ‘But I think we hit pay dirt!’

  Besides various pieces of medical equipment, there was a modern flat screen TV mounted on the wall, a laptop on the bed, an Android tablet alongside and an Xbox One with half a dozen games.

  ‘We can’t rob this guy,’ Daniel whispered, as he stepped in last.

  ‘I know a guy who’ll buy this stuff,’ Oli said, grinning ear to ear. ‘We’ll make four, even five hundred quid, easy.’

  ‘We need a bag,’ Leon whispered.

  ‘There was a wheeled suitcase under the stairs,’ Oli noted. ‘Go get it, Daniel.’

  But Daniel looked furious, holding up his hands. ‘I’m embarrassed,’ he said. ‘You two should be ashamed of yourselves.’

  ‘This is serious money,’ Oli said. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘I don’t want this on my conscience,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m outta here.’

  Leon followed his brother out on to the landing, then watched as he stormed downstairs and out of the front door.

  As Daniel headed down the front path towards the street, Leon retrieved the wheelie case from under the stairs, and came back to find Oli crawling under the disabled man’s bed, unplugging the tablet and laptop chargers.

  ‘He’s been pissy all day,’ Leon explained to Oli. ‘He won’t admit it, but he’s crazy jealous about me getting it on with Rhea.’

  ‘More money for us,’ Oli said, as he slid out from under the bed and swiped dust off the knees of his trousers.

  While Leon unzipped the case and started loading up with the Xbox and its accessories, Oli walked around to the far side of the bed, which was barely thirty centimetres from the wall. The disabled guy’s laptop was a swanky Lenovo that was probably worth more than everything else they’d stolen. Trouble was, the owner had fallen asleep while using it and the laptop lay open on his thighs, with one arm draped across the keyboard.

  Leon felt jittery as he watched Oli slide the laptop towards the edge of the bed. Then he grabbed the man’s outstretched wrist and began lifting it away. Oli thought he’d done the job, but as he snapped the laptop shut the man reared up in his bed.

  He was a big fellow, more than six feet tall and overweight. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he shouted, as he shot upwards. ‘What are you doing?’

  Oli tried scrambling back around the outside of the bed, but the man was only paralysed down his right side and managed to flick his leg, pinning Oli to the wall as the laptop clattered to t
he floor.

  As Oli tried to wriggle free, the man rolled over and swung his fist, hitting Oli hard on the chin. Fortunately for the twelve-year-old, the man was too broad to fit in the narrow gap between bed and wall.

  Oli moaned in pain as the punch knocked him back, but he was able to squat down, grab the laptop with its trailing power cord, then scramble under the bed and out the other side.

  ‘You OK?’ Leon asked, as he gave Oli a hand up.

  ‘No I’m not,’ Oli shouted, clutching at his jaw. ‘The asshole hit me.’

  Seeking vengeance, Oli grabbed a glass water jug from a bedside table. He threw it at the man’s head, but it just clanked off the bedframe and didn’t break.

  ‘Scum!’ the man shouted as he rolled over and punched a red emergency button on a cord around his neck.

  A voice came out of the necklace inside five seconds. ‘GoldAlert emergency. What’s the problem, Mr Brown?’

  ‘I’m being robbed in my bed,’ he yelled, as Leon and Oli zipped up the suitcase and started scrambling down the stairs. ‘Call the police immediately, then contact my mother on her mobile.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Oli said, clutching his jaw but grinning exuberantly as he followed Leon and the wheeled suitcase out the front door down the driveway. ‘We’d better get the hell out of here.’

  12. SCARPER

  After parting company with Leon and Oli, Daniel passed through the old lady’s front gate, crossed the street, walked right for fifty metres and grabbed the rear door of a Mercedes van with a hire company logo on the side. James sat on a folding chair in the cavernous rear compartment, watching video from inside the house on his laptop.

  The screen showed the feed from six different cameras. In the top left corner, the disabled man was walking around, apparently cured of his paralysis. The centre of the bottom row showed Oli running down the driveway and Leon behind, dragging the wheeled suitcase.

  ‘Did you get good audio?’ Daniel asked.

  James made a fake shudder. ‘That kid has the moral compass of a sewer rat.’

  ‘I did like you told me, boss. Took the high ground, gave Oli plenty of opportunities to question whether he was doing the right thing.’

  ‘I heard every word,’ James said. ‘You were great.’

  ‘But it could be trauma or something,’ Daniel suggested.

  James looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like, Oli’s been an orphan his whole life. In and out of care homes. Maybe if he got the opportunity to be in a better environment he’d become a better person.’

  James snorted. ‘And let me guess, you’d like another week or so to study Oli in great detail and try to unearth this buried potential?’

  ‘CHERUB is supposed to be short of recruits,’ Daniel said.

  James broke into a big grin. ‘My cynical side thinks you’re just trying to delay your return to campus. As if you had some kind of horrible punishment hanging over your head, or something.’

  Daniel gave it a final shot. ‘I just think Oli deserves a fuller assessment.’

  ‘So do I,’ James said.

  Daniel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Really?’

  ‘The latest policy is to spend as much time and effort as possible on testing potential recruits, before they reach campus and learn the secret of CHERUB. Not like in my day, when you just woke up on campus after being drugged and got warned that nobody would believe if you said anything.’

  ‘Waking up naked was creepy too,’ Daniel noted.

  ‘And you’re not the only one keen to stay off campus,’ James added. ‘Every day there’s a half-metre stack of paperwork, and John Jones blaring in my earhole. Budget reports, mission briefings, threat meetings, education liaison meetings, ethics committee meetings, post mission reintegration plans. And when I’m out here on a mission, all of that becomes SEP.’

  ‘SEP?’

  ‘Somebody Else’s Problem,’ James explained.

  Daniel cracked a big smile. ‘So how long we gonna study Oli for? Two weeks?’

  ‘That’s probably pushing it,’ James said, smirking. ‘But I totally need to finish watching the last three seasons of Game of Thrones. And on a serious note, the intelligence service is putting so much effort into infiltrating Islamic State, that I think we can justify a bit more time to investigate the remote possibility that Oli didn’t invent the whole terrorist thing.’

  ‘Love Game of Thrones,’ Daniel said. ‘One of the carers made me take my nudie of Emilia Clarke from inside my wardrobe door.’

  ‘Which one’s she?’ James asked.

  ‘Daenerys, the dragon lady.’

  ‘She’s totally my dream girl,’ James said, before clearing his throat abruptly. ‘After Kerry, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously, boss.’

  James smiled. ‘In the spirit of thoroughly assessing young Oliver, I suppose we ought to test his mettle in a tense scenario, yes?’

  Daniel nodded enthusiastically. ‘I’ll head off now. With any luck, Oli will get his ass bit.’

  James tapped an icon on his laptop screen. ‘You there, Michael … ? Leon and Oli have left the house. They should be in sight any second now.’

  ‘Go left,’ Leon told Oli, as they reached a T-junction. ‘We can hide out at my cousin’s place while the heat dies down.’

  Oli was chuffed about the robbery and even more full of himself than usual. ‘Screw your cousin and his thirty quid cleaning a garage,’ he said. ‘I know this guy Trey who buys stolen shit. He’ll give us cash. Three hundred at least.’

  ‘But the cops’ll be looking for us, Oli. Best be off the street, yeah?’

  Before Oli got to answer, a battered Renault SUV squealed to a halt in a disabled bay across the street.

  ‘You thieving little shits,’ the man getting out shouted. He was a big guy, dressed in trackies and a paint-spattered hoodie. Even worse, a huge black Rottweiler jumped out behind on a lead. ‘Gimme the stuff back.’

  Oli froze for half a second, before realising that Leon was already running. The pair scrambled into the road to dodge a woman with three young kids.

  ‘You stop, now,’ the man shouted. ‘I’ll crack your heads.’

  Oli was solid, but he wasn’t in the best shape. ‘Wait up,’ he gasped, clutching his side as Leon streaked ahead.

  While Leon reached a main road and sprinted past Costa Coffee, Oli found the paint-spattered man and his excited dog closing to within a few metres. Realising that he couldn’t outrun his opponent, Oli scrambled through a gate and ripped a windmill ornament out of a neat front garden. It was made of plastic, but weighted with a concrete base.

  The big man overshot the gate, then a combination of leaves underfoot and the enthusiastic Rottweiler tugging on its leash sent him skidding into a painful set of splits. Oli was delighted for two seconds, between his pursuer’s agonised yell and the moment when he let go of the dog’s leash.

  ‘No!’ Oli yelled.

  The twelve-year-old lobbed the windmill, but it just glanced the eighty-kilo dog in the side. After thinking about doubling back towards the gate, Oli made a run at the hedge leading into the next garden. He got a good jump, and would have scrambled over if the Rottweiler hadn’t got a paw on his tracksuit bottoms, dragging him down on to the manicured lawn as a woman stuck her head out of the front door fifteen metres away.

  ‘Help me!’ Oli screamed, getting sprayed with saliva as the dog jumped on his chest, ripping off barks.

  He had no way of knowing that this was one of the CHERUB campus guard dogs, trained to bark and contain rather than maul. As the dog’s writhing weight smeared Oli into the damp grass, he caught a glance of the paint-strewn man struggling to his feet, only to get kicked – fake-kicked – dramatically down by a boy who’d sprinted in from across the road.

  Oli realised it was Daniel as the woman by the door ran inside to call the cops. After vaulting the gate, Daniel closed up behind the barking dog and snatched its leash. It took all his strength to haul it back, j
ust long enough for Oli to roll free. As the dog turned to pounce on Daniel, the fourteen-year-old stumbled back and hooked the end of the leash over a fence post.

  ‘Move your butt,’ Daniel ordered, hitching Oli up by his trackies and throwing him over the hedge, before grabbing the laptop out of the churned-up lawn and making the dive himself.

  Oli was confused by the chain of events, but his pursuer appeared to be unconscious and Leon had doubled back and was waiting on the pavement as they exited through another front gate.

  ‘How slow are you?’ Leon jibed, as Daniel gave Oli a shove in the back.

  Muddy, shocked and with strings of dog spit in his face, Oli felt Daniel grab his neck and shove him forward. ‘The cops are gonna be here, start running.’

  Oli got dragged by the twins, feeling warm around his crotch and realising that some pee had leaked out when he thought the dog was about to bite.

  13. FENCE

  The reality had been Oli snivelling and peeing his pants, but he’d rewritten the story before the mud dried on his clothes. The three boys were in a tatty chicken shop, with Cokes and a jumbo chips on the plastic table in between.

  ‘I almost made it, man,’ Oli smiled. ‘That massive pit bull grabbed me, but I was all ready to kick up with both feet. Cane that thing in the head, but the dog got lucky when Daniel pulled it off.’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘You’d have been doggie chow if I didn’t come save your ass.’

  ‘That kick in the face was awesome,’ Oli said. ‘I didn’t realise you know martial arts. I used to do Muay Thai, could have got my black belt, but I got moved to a new foster placement before the grading.’

  Oli demonstrated his skills with a little jab.

  Leon laughed. ‘You make a fist like that you’ll break your thumb first time you hit someone.’

  ‘I know,’ Oli said defensively, as he dipped chips in brown sauce and filled his mouth.

  ‘So if we walk back into Nurtrust with a wheelie case filled with booty, chances are we’ll get busted in three seconds flat,’ Leon said.

  ‘School will still be open for homework club,’ Daniel said. ‘There’s nothing in my locker yet.’