CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,23

breaking any rules, but it was still a relief when McEwen opened the back door of a minibus and James saw that he wasn’t alone.

‘Get in, Marigold,’ McEwen said, as he took off the handcuffs.

James stepped into the van and Dave Moss threw his boots, shorts and T-shirt after him. ‘Put ’em on,’ he said grudgingly.

The van was used exclusively by the training department, mainly for ferrying around kids in basic training. The carpet and seats were caked in mud and a hint of sweat lurked in the air. James found a cramped seat and nodded to Gabrielle and a couple of other familiar faces as he pulled his black CHERUB T-shirt over his bare chest. After his head popped through, he looked up front and saw the chief instructor, Mr Pike, in the driving seat as well as his sister, Lauren. She was smaller than anyone else. That’s when James realised what was going on.

‘We’re all black shirts,’ he said.

‘Looks like it,’ Gabrielle nodded.

James looked out the window and saw another minibus with black shirts on board and the instructor Mr Kazakov in the driving seat. Dana was one of the last to get dragged out of bed. She sat next to James as McEwen and Dave Moss climbed aboard and slammed the back doors behind them.

‘Ready to roll, Mr Pike,’ McEwen said exuberantly.

They waited a few minutes while the last black shirt was brought down and thrown in the other van, then Pike sped away with Kazakov’s van close behind. They took a right turn as they passed around the back of the main building.

Dana looked up from lacing her boot and gave James a relieved smile: a left turn would have taken them through the gardens towards the exit for an off-campus training exercise that might have lasted days. The right turn meant they were staying on campus, where exercises rarely lasted more than twenty-four hours.

The first part of the drive was through the open part of campus, which contained all of the buildings as well as the athletics track and pitches marked out for other sports such as rugby and football. For the remaining two kilometres, the vans crawled along a dirt path around the edge of the basic training compound. It was hard to tell at night because it was pitch black outside the headlight beams, but James was fairly sure that they were travelling across an area of campus into which he’d never ventured before.

This was confirmed when they branched off to the right and found themselves driving parallel to the back wall of campus. In the open part of campus, you could go right up to the fifteen-metre-high walls, but out here in the wilderness there was ten metres of gravel between the wall and huge coils of barbed wire three metres high. The gravel was crisscrossed with motion sensors to detect anyone who breached the wall and signs urged intruders to wait for the security team or risk being blown up by unexploded tank shells – for official purposes, CHERUB campus was designated as an army firing range.

‘I haven’t been up here since I was about nine,’ Dana said quietly, not wanting to give one of the instructors an excuse to tell her to shut up.

‘What’s here?’ James asked.

‘Trees,’ Dana said. ‘But I loved exploring when I was a red shirt and they used to let us camp out overnight … Mucking around in tents, making little fires and cooking hot dogs and stuff.’

‘Isn’t it dodgy letting little kids out here on their own?’

‘Hardly,’ Dana smiled. ‘The whole of campus is rigged up with cameras and sensors and they always made us take walkie-talkies just in case.’

The road ended at a rectangular clearing. It was half the size of a football pitch, with tall weeds growing in cracks between the tarmac. At the far end was a concrete storage shed, beside which was a fragrant pile of manure used by the campus gardeners and a deceased JCB digger with flat tyres and a decade’s worth of rust.

As James stepped out he saw an electronic surveillance post bristling with aerials where the sections of perimeter wall joined at right angles. They were in the farthermost corner of campus, almost three kilometres from the front entrance and his bed.

‘Christ it’s got cold,’ Dana said, as she tucked her hands under her armpits.

James’ attention turned to a group of white shirts sitting in front of the shed. All aged between eighteen and twenty-two, they wore