CHERUB: Dark Sun - Robert Muchamore Page 0,15

and stepping into the gloomy room. If Dr Lydon had been awake, he’d have pretended to have walked into the wrong room on the way to the toilet, but the doctor was dead to the world after her double shift at the hospital.

‘Clear,’ Greg said, as he backed out.

Andy tightened the straps of the gas mask behind his head and leaned into the room holding the pressurised cylinder. He pointed the nozzle up at the ceiling over the double bed and pressed the trigger to release a gentle mist. Job done, Andy backed out and swiftly pulled shut the door.

‘Give it four minutes for the gas to clear out of the air,’ Greg said, looking at his watch as Andy pulled off his mask and tucked it back inside his pack, along with the gas cylinder.

After an anxious wait crouching in the hallway, Andy burst noisily into Dr Lydon’s bedroom. He flicked on the light and stumbled on to the bed. This was a deliberate strategy: if the gas hadn’t worked for some reason, he’d get yelled at for waking George’s mum but she’d hopefully think nothing of it apart from some hyped-up kid bursting through the wrong door.

In many ways this was the trickiest part of the whole operation, so Andy was delighted to find himself sprawled over Dr Lydon’s legs, with the mattress bouncing but the doctor’s body completely limp.

‘Gimme a needle,’ Andy shouted, as he ripped off the duvet.

The boys were slightly freaked out as the bedding landed on the floor. They’d both been through CHERUB training and were capable of all sorts of remarkable feats, but it was still a shock seeing one of your mate’s mums sprawled naked and unconscious over the bed in front of you.

‘I feel like a right perv,’ Greg confessed, as he rolled Dr Lydon on to her front.

‘Snap some pics with your camera phone,’ Andy grinned. ‘That’ll freak Georgie boy out when he wakes up.’

‘Be serious,’ Greg said, snorting with laughter as he swabbed Dr Lydon’s skin with a sterile wipe before Andy plunged the needle into the back of her thigh.

Greg threw the duvet back over the doctor before following Andy out into the hallway. He’d flipped his phone open to dial their mission controller.

‘John,’ Andy said cheerfully. ‘Phase one’s in the bag. Everyone’s sedated and we’re about to move into Kurt Lydon’s study.’

8. WINDOWS

Kurt Lydon’s study was locked, but that’s not a major problem for a CHERUB agent. Greg opened the door easily, using a straight pick attached to his lock gun. Two bedrooms had been knocked together to create Kurt’s workspace and thirty thousand pounds had been invested in specialised computer equipment.

Two powerful Dell workstations hummed away inside a special cooling cabinet and there was a huge inkjet plotter for making blueprints. One wall shelved thick books with titles like Advanced Molecular Thermodynamics and Mathematical Modelling for Turbulent Plumes and Jets. Pride of place went to a pair of 30-inch ultra-high-resolution LCD panels, worth over ten grand apiece. Beside Kurt’s regular keyboard and mouse was a multi-buttoned spaceball controller, designed for manipulating 3D images on screen.

Andy had spent hours practising with an identical system on CHERUB campus, but still felt intimidated as he sank into Kurt Lydon’s high-backed office chair. He tapped the space bar and was pleased to see that the computer was only in standby, but the screen demanded a password.

Greg was already on the case. He’d sneaked into the room on an after-school visit two weeks earlier and installed a hardware keylogger between the keyboard plug and the USB port on the back of Kurt’s main computer.

Keyloggers contain memory chips that record every keystroke entered into a computer. When the logger got back to the MI5 lab it would hopefully reveal all sorts of information that Kurt had typed over the previous fortnight, but all they needed right now was Kurt’s main password.

Greg pulled a tiny laptop out of his backpack, plugged in the keylogger and sat on the floor while the machine booted up.

‘We haven’t got all night,’ Andy moaned.

‘Keep your wig on,’ Greg teased. ‘These tiny laptops aren’t very powerful. It takes a couple of minutes to boot up and there’s diddly squat I can do about it.’

Andy hated waiting around. Missions were OK when his mind was occupied, but he had a nervous disposition and waiting always made him start thinking about stuff that could go wrong.

‘OK,’ Greg said when he’d finally accessed the keylogger data. ‘First session, last Friday week.