CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,76
?’
‘Ewart left about an hour ago with an overnight bag. He stopped me and moaned that I wasn’t cleaning his office well enough. He said he wants me to do the window ledges properly and make sure that the water doesn’t spill over when I water his cactus. I’m sorely tempted to piss in his bloody plant.’
‘I’ve never liked him, to be honest,’ James said. ‘I had him on my second mission and he was a total pain.’
Dana nodded. ‘It’s the cool guy thing that annoys me. You know, Ewart goes around dressed like a surf bum with his tongue stud and ripped jeans, but he’s actually thirty whatever years old, with a Vauxhall Astra, two kids and a mortgage.’
‘Exactly,’ James said. ‘John Jones is an old baldie, but he’s actually a million times cooler than Ewart.’
‘I’ve worked with most of the mission controllers, and Ewart’s definitely my least favourite.’
James looked forlornly at his stack of papers, then up at Dana. ‘I have to know what he’s up to, but I can’t go through all this on my own. You couldn’t give us a hand, could you?’
‘This is some serious shit,’ Dana said, shaking her head uncertainly.
‘Please,’ James said, but immediately regretted it. Dana didn’t stand for any kind of nonsense and the plea made him sound pathetic.
‘Gimme a second to think,’ Dana snapped. Then after a pause: ‘Ewart’s not gonna be back until late tomorrow. How about we load all of those papers into a bin liner? We’ll have to be careful not to jumble them up. Some of those documents are tagged, so you’d set off the alarm if you went out the front way, but I can stick them on the cleaning cart and put them out with the rubbish. You wait around the back and grab them while I’m putting the real rubbish into the incinerator. We’ll go back to your room and start going through them; then I’ll put everything back early tomorrow morning.’
James broke into a big smile. ‘You might have just saved my life.’
Dana wagged her finger. ‘And you’d better remember it next time there’s free go-karting and fancy hotels being bandied about.’
*
Carrying a bin liner across campus might arouse suspicions, so while Dana finished cleaning, James ran off to grab a backpack. Within forty minutes, he was standing in his room with Ewart’s paperwork stacked on his bed.
‘Gotta do this by the book,’ Dana said, as she pulled on a set of disposable plastic gloves. ‘Ewart can’t know that we’ve been through the papers. If anything makes him suspicious, he’ll ask for the video footage from the corridor outside his office and we’ll be dead ducks.’
‘Only thing is, they might be a bit fingerprinted and out of order already,’ James replied. ‘I dropped some stuff when you came in and surprised me, but I reckon I can put it back more or less as it was.’
All cherubs are trained to speed read and taught proper procedures for going through documents. After removing all the junk from around James’ bed, Dana took a digital camera and snapped a couple of photographs so that they’d be able to reassemble the stack precisely after going through it.
‘Even speed reading won’t get us through all of this,’ Dana said. ‘We’ll take half each and try and identify key documents, especially anything written by Ewart that gives us some idea of his thought processes.’
James had been on the same espionage courses as Dana and only resisted the urge to make a comment about not being born yesterday because she was doing him a massive favour.
After breaking the stack of papers into evenly sized piles, James took the bottom half and found himself staring at MI5 personnel files for Boris and Isla Kotenkov.
‘Snidey,’ James said, as he held the document up to show Dana. ‘Here’s something else Ewart told me he hadn’t been able to get hold of.’
He was surprised to learn that as well as being husband and wife, Boris and Isla were also cousins. During the Soviet era they had risked death, or life imprisonment in a brutal labour camp, to pass valuable intelligence on Russian weapons technology to the West.
‘Listen to this,’ James said, as he read a section of the report that Ewart had highlighted. ‘The Kotenkovs were financially well rewarded by British and American intelligence services. However, they lost everything trying to set up a Moscow based dry-cleaning business and offered their services to MI5 once again in 1998. They were able to