pal? Sorry I kept you.’
Clyde had a nervous touch in his voice, like a first date or a job interview. ‘No worries.’
‘OK mate, nothing goes in writing, so prick up your ears,’ the Australian said, too quietly for anyone in the noisy restaurant to overhear, but easily picked up by the tiny microphone half a metre away from his mouth.
‘The bag is for you. There’s a security pass and cleaner’s uniform inside. The pass is for an office block called the Pacific Business Centre, in Kowloon. The real cleaners work from eleven at night until two in the morning. You sneak in just after they arrive at eleven tomorrow night. Tell the security on the front desk that it’s your first night on the job and you got lost. Act nervous.’
Clyde smiled. ‘I probably will be nervous.’
The Aussie smiled back. ‘Only natural, son. When you arrive at the office, you stay the hell away from the other cleaners and hide out until they leave.’
‘Where do I hide?’
‘Toilets. Not the ones in the offices themselves, but the ones outside by the elevators. They’re maintained by a different contractor that only works during office hours.
‘At two a.m., you use the security pass in the bag and enter the offices of Viennese Oil on the sixth floor. It’s a small Italian oil exploration company. At the back of the office you’ll find the chairman’s suite behind a set of double doors. In the washroom off to the side will be a Samsonite overnight bag. It’ll be packed with clothes and toiletries. Open the bag and place the explosive at the bottom. Insert both fuses, in case one goes wrong. You activate them by snapping off the heads and twisting the two wires together.
‘When you’ve finished, you go back to the toilets and strip off your cleaner’s overall. Then you leave the building via the stairs. You’ll set off an alarm when you open the fire door. The security guard is no spring chicken, but he might call the cops so I wouldn’t hang around, OK?’
Clyde nodded. ‘What happens then?’
‘You’re a teenager, so my guess is that you go home and play with yourself before falling asleep.’
‘No, I mean what happens with the explosive. Why are we putting it into an overnight bag instead of under his desk or something?’
The Australian shook his head slowly. ‘Come on, you know how this works. We don’t tell you what you don’t need to know.’
Clyde felt stupid. ‘Of course, sorry.’
5. FOLLOW
John was troubled as he sat behind his newspaper in the noodle bar, listening to Clyde Xu’s meeting with the Australian. He was operating nine and a half thousand kilometres from home, without the knowledge of the Hong Kong authorities, and he was a couple of bodies shy of what he really needed to run his operation.
In the UK, a CHERUB mission controller can call in extra cherubs, adult intelligence officers or police at short notice, even bringing in a team by helicopter if necessary. Out here, there was nothing except a couple of deskbound MI5 officers at the British embassy, who John wouldn’t have trusted to carry his luggage, let alone conceal the existence of an ultra-secret organisation like CHERUB.
John’s team had spent six weeks building up to the moment when they could successfully identify Clyde Xu with a more senior member of Help Earth, but that would all be for nothing if the Australian walked into the crowd and disappeared before being identified. Someone would have to follow him.
It couldn’t be John himself; he’d be recognised after sitting opposite the Australian in the restaurant. Chloe was back at the apartment coordinating the phone tracking and there was a chance the Australian had been watching the restaurant for some time and had seen Kerry.
That left Kyle and Bruce as the only ones who could do the job. John had told them both to wear protective body armour under their clothing, but he still wasn’t comfortable about sending two boys after a man who might be carrying a gun. There was also a chance they’d bump into Clyde and get recognised as he left the restaurant.
John studied the physically imposing Australian, looking for any obvious sign that he was armed. But he’d been in the intelligence game more than twenty years and wasn’t fooling himself: unless your target is stupid enough to let a weapon bulge through their clothes, there’s no way to tell if a man is carrying a gun.
At least the potential problem of Kyle