CHERUB: Class A - Robert Muchamore Page 0,38

in the loft, so it was safe to switch on the lights. Even before James got up the ladder, he could tell they’d found something good from the grin on Kerry’s face.
*
Kyle woke up at 3.30 a.m., in a smoky room snarled up with sleeping bodies. He didn’t know if he’d passed out or fallen asleep, or what the stain on his trousers was, but he remembered it was the wildest party of his young life. The host would be grounded for a year when her parents got back from the Lake District.
Kyle had hammered himself with alcohol and thumping music. Now he was suffering. Anyone else would have crashed back to sleep, but Kyle wanted to get home, have a shower and put his clothes in to soak. He’d always been neat. One of his earliest memories was of chucking a tantrum over going on to a beach with a load of other kids because he didn’t like getting sand on his clothes.
It took Kyle a while to find the room where he’d dumped his sweatshirt. He got abused when he trod on some naked guy’s ankle in the dark. He stepped over more kids crashed out on the front lawn as he went out of the front gate towards the bus stop. He waited forty minutes for the night bus, which dropped him on the wrong side of Thornton estate at half-four in the morning. Everything looked wrong as he stumbled towards the house: all the lights were on and there was a grey Toyota he didn’t recognise parked on the drive.
Nicole wasn’t home, but everyone else was in the living room. Lauren had dropped to sleep on the couch. Ewart had his laptop computer on the coffee table. A balding man in a suit and tie sat next to him.
‘What’s going on?’ Kyle asked. ‘Did I miss something good?’
‘Yeah,’ James grinned. ‘It turns out bringing Kerry on this mission wasn’t a dumb waste of time after all.’
Kerry gave James a look, but she was too full of herself to get offended.
Zara introduced Kyle to the stranger. ‘This is John Jones. He’s in charge of the MI5 taskforce that’s targeting KMG, so we called him over to look at the pictures.’
John Jones reached over and shook Kyle’s hand before speaking. ‘You kids are amazing,’ he grinned. ‘When Dr McAfferty offered me a CHERUB unit, I thought it was some kind of joke.’
James looked surprised. ‘You must have heard about missions where cherubs have done a good job.’
John shook his head. ‘I’d been an MI5 agent for eighteen years without ever hearing of CHERUB.’
Zara explained. ‘Thousands of people work for MI5, but only the most senior ones know about CHERUB. People like John only find out if they have to work with us.’
‘Even then,’ John said, ‘there are forty-three MI5 agents working on Operation Snort and I’m the only one who knows about you kids.’
‘So what’s happened?’ Kyle croaked, his throat raw from the smoke at the party.
‘Come and look at the pictures James and Kerry took,’ Zara said.
Kyle leaned over the laptop screen while John Jones explained what had been photographed.
‘KMG smuggles in cocaine at a very high purity, ninety per cent or more. The stuff that gets sold on the street is between thirty and fifty per cent pure. What you see in these pictures is a production plant. The pure cocaine gets mixed with borax and some other stuff in those aluminium vats. Then …’
John Jones clicked on the mouse, changing to a different picture.
‘The machine in this picture is a real beauty. It must have cost over fifty thousand pounds. It’s designed to package seasonings, like soy sauce or pepper. You turn it on, load up a roll of polyurethane bags and tip your powder or liquid in the top. This one has been set up to package one gram bags of cocaine.’
‘So did you find much coke?’ Kyle asked.
‘None at all,’ Kerry said.
‘There could be drugs hidden in the warehouse,’ John said. ‘Or somewhere else on the Thunderfoods site, but I doubt it. Most probably, a couple of guys turn up with a few kilos of cocaine, spend a few hours mixing and bagging it and then take it away with them when they leave.’
‘So,’ Kyle asked, ‘are you gonna bust this place up?’
‘No,’ John said. ‘We’re going to put it under surveillance. We’ll get an undercover team to rig the loft up with video cameras and microphones. We’ll watch who comes and goes