CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,62
they knew he’d disobeyed James’ orders.
‘I won’t this time,’ James relented. ‘But you saw what happened to Bruce. I’m glad you’re not scared any more, but it’s dangerous up there.’
‘Thanks,’ Kevin said, as he stared up at the obstacle. ‘I hated you and Bruce that first night, but I reckon I owe you one now.’
‘Just doing my job,’ James said happily, as he considered all the History coursework he’d just got out of. ‘I guess I’d better piggyback you over to the med unit so they can take that splinter out of your arse.’
25. PIKE
Lauren was pleased that she was getting good information out of Anna, but she woke up in a mood because she was facing a third boring day sitting around in Aldrington Care Centre.
To make matters worse, one of the house parents came to Lauren’s room after breakfast and told her that they’d found her a place at a school in Burgess Hill, starting the following morning. On top of the stupid green uniform and the fact that settling into a new school was always a nightmare, came the news that she’d have to leave at half six in the morning and walk to a bus stop two kilometres away before taking a thirty-five-minute bus ride.
‘You sound like you got out of bed on the wrong side this morning,’ John said cheerfully, when he rang Lauren on her mobile.
‘Seriously, don’t wind me up,’ Lauren moaned. ‘I might really lose my temper.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Thick grey tights, a hand-me-down pullover with a dirty great rip in the elbow and an hour a day on a bus full of strange school kids.’
‘Blah,’ John said dismissively. ‘You should count yourself lucky. When I first joined MI5, they had me staking out a gents’ toilet on Hampstead Heath.’
‘Nice,’ Lauren said, cracking into a smile.
‘You’ve not suffered until you’ve spent a week crawling around in an asbestos-lined roof cavity and coming home to your wife smelling like a public toilet. It’s no wonder I’m divorced …’
‘Oh,’ Lauren added, ‘and to make my life even more perfect, this idiot boy – the dude who was at the dining-table when you dropped me off – found out that I’m a vegetarian and hid a piece of bacon in my cornflakes.’
John laughed.
‘It’s not funny,’ Lauren said firmly. ‘I’ve got a piece of dead animal inside me. It makes me queasy just thinking about it.’
‘Got lots of bits of dead animal inside me,’ John said. ‘The landlady here does a cracking cooked breakfast.’
‘Anyway, I take it you heard the calls last night?’
‘Yep, and the messages you left with my assistant on campus. You must have called while I was in the shower.’
‘So what are we going to do with the information?’ Lauren pressed.
‘MI5 runs an anti-trafficking task force. We can pass the information on about Mr Broushka and the children’s home in Nizhniy Novgorod, but I’m not hopeful.’
‘Why not? I bet you could track him down easily enough.’
‘Probably,’ John said. ‘But it’s a question of resources. It would probably take a team of two or three officers to track him down and then we’d have to find evidence compelling enough to get the Russian police to prosecute him.’
Lauren tutted. ‘So why are we even bothering?’
‘We’ve got to hope that Anna knows a few more details that will enable us to get our teeth into the British end of the organisation. Keep pumping her gently for names, places, descriptions of the men and any snippets of conversation she might have overheard while she was in the truck or on the boat.’
‘The guy on the phone sounded creepy,’ Lauren said. ‘Maybe he’ll ring again. He certainly sounded keen to get his hands on Anna.’
‘I’m not surprised. They must have spent a lot of money smuggling Anna across Europe and into Britain and they probably had a buyer lined up ready to pay good money for her.’
‘How much is a twelve-year-old girl worth?’ Lauren asked.
‘It depends upon the buyer: twenty, thirty or maybe even fifty thousand pounds.’
‘It makes me shudder just thinking about it,’ Lauren said. ‘But why would they pay so much? Couldn’t you just pick any girl off the street?’
‘You could,’ John said. ‘Trouble is, the girl would probably have family and friends. It gets in the paper, on the TV and the police mount a full-scale manhunt. If you take a girl like Anna from a children’s home in Russia and smuggle her in, she just vanishes. Nobody’s looking for her because nobody even knows she’s here.’
*
James