CHERUB: Divine Madness - Robert Muchamore Page 0,22

some of the facts and got quite interested.

He’d never devoted any thought to cults, but had always assumed you had to be a whack job to join one. According to the books, the truth was different.

People recruited into cults tended to be thoughtful and intelligent. Their backgrounds were normal, although they were usually recruited at a time in their lives when they were lonely and ill at ease with everyday life. Typical cult joiners were people who had recently divorced, or lost their jobs, university students living away from home for the first time and older people who’d recently been widowed.

According to one of the books there were 7,000 known cults with more than five million members around the world. They ranged from dirt poor groups of a few dozen people who lived in tents and ate out of dumpsters, to billion-dollar corporations with their own TV networks and branded products.

Lauren was in the next seat to James. She’d got interested in the books too and they kept reading bits to each other, especially the more lurid stuff about cults that had assassinated politicians and kidnapped judges, and especially about mass suicides.

‘Here,’ Lauren said, ‘listen to this: There have been more than seventy recorded incidences of mass cult suicide. The largest was the People’s Temple, where leader Jim Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide, resulting in nine hundred deaths. Babies and small children who were unable to take their own lives were given bottles laced with cyanide. Then further down it says, Cults based around an apocalyptic vision are usually the most destructive.’

James smirked. ‘Well, that’s reassuring.’

*

February is high summer down under and Australia greeted James with a thirty-eight-degree blast of heat: the muggy kind that makes your shirt stick to your back three steps out of an air-conditioned building.

John and Chloe headed off to check into a hotel in the city. Abigail and the three youngsters took a yellow Toyota taxi. Brisbane was clean and modern, but there were road works on the way out of the airport and they spent three-quarters of an hour tangled in traffic.

While they crawled, the sky darkened and giant globs of rain began drumming the metal roof, while lightning exploded behind the tall buildings in the city centre. Once they got past the jam, they hit a hundred and twenty kph around the outskirts of the city and ended up in a suburban area ten kilometres from the centre.

They pulled into an upscale development of houses. The cropped lawns, recently planted trees and rain-washed tarmac had the orderliness of a town made from Lego. By the time the taxi pulled on to a sloping brick driveway at the front of an imposing house, the sun was back and the afternoon rain was evaporating into a shimmering heat haze.

James lugged his backpack and a couple of cases inside with him. He dumped them in a large wooden-floored hallway and looked up at two curved staircases and a gigantic concrete dome with a chandelier hanging off it.

‘Holy crap,’ James grinned, ‘we’re loaded.’

Abigail smiled as she waddled in behind him and dumped two cases. ‘Of course we’re loaded, James. If there’s one thing that’ll really get the Survivors salivating, it’ll be the prospect of recruiting Abigail Prince: wealthy divorcee, settling back in her native Queensland after a gory divorce from her millionaire husband.’

‘With her three delightful kids in tow,’ James added.

Lauren and Dana followed in and they all stood looking up at the fancy hallway for a moment. Even Dana allowed herself to look impressed.

‘I haven’t seen this place before,’ Abigail said. ‘Everything was arranged while I was in Britain. The rooms are supposed to be set up for us, but I don’t know whose is whose.’

James and Lauren bounded up the staircase to check the upstairs. There were six main rooms on the upper floor and James found his bedroom at the second attempt. Usually, all you have on a mission is a few bits you’ve packed up and carried with you, but because this mission was so long and because the plan called for the Prince family to eventually move in with the Survivors, James needed all the stuff a wealthy Australian boy was likely to own.

ASIS had gone to great lengths creating the material history of James Prince. He had drawers and wardrobes full of clothes – most of them chemically treated to look lightly worn – and everything else you’d expect, from stationery to a surfboard, a computer and even a