CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,41

sizing up potential cherubs on a recruitment mission.

‘Morning,’ King smiled as he looked at Lauren over the rims of his reading glasses. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony. Go on through. Mac’s waiting for you.’

One end of King’s office was an alcove with floor-to-ceiling windows in which were usually placed suede sofas and a coffee table. These had been cleared out to make a space for Dr McAfferty to work. His desk had been extracted from a classroom and CHERUB’s retired chairman could barely be seen behind mounds of meticulously stacked paperwork, cross-indexed with hundreds of Post-it flags.

‘Ahh good,’ Mac said with a smile. He placed a hand on to his back as he stood up and shook Lauren’s hand. ‘I was just looking at your file and it seems congratulations are in order.’

Lauren was slightly perturbed at finding Mac in a cheerful state.

‘Wasn’t your thirteenth birthday last week?’

‘Oh that,’ Lauren said happily. ‘It was great. I went shopping with the girls on Saturday afternoon, then we had cake and stuff in the dining-room and a corridor party in the evening.’

‘Sounds fun,’ Mac replied. ‘I remember when you first came to campus and you were nine. You’ve really changed.’

Mac grabbed his back again and groaned as he sat down. This surprised Lauren because although Mac was in his late sixties, he was in good shape and he’d regularly run on campus right up until he’d retired.

‘Are you OK?’ Lauren asked warmly, as she sat in a plastic chair.

‘My wife was a potter,’ Mac explained, ‘a good one too. She won all kinds of prizes and even wrote a couple of books on it.’

‘I remember,’ Lauren nodded. ‘You used to have that huge bowl in your office.’

‘My youngest daughter followed in her footsteps and I said she might as well take her mother’s clay oven. But it weighs about a ton and I did the old back in lugging it out to the car with my son-in-law.’

Lauren smiled because Mac was smiling, but she felt really uncomfortable. She didn’t know what to say, but at the same time didn’t feel she could ignore what had happened to Mac’s wife and grandchildren.

‘I’m really sorry about your family,’ she said, feeling a touch of heat in her cheeks. ‘Everyone was. It must have been awful.’

‘It certainly has been,’ Mac said. ‘But life goes on and we had some relief this morning. It looks like the FAA is going to release all the bodies so that they can be flown home for a proper funeral.’

‘Great,’ Lauren said, although she immediately felt like she’d said the wrong thing. I’m glad, or that’s good would have been OK, but blurting out great felt totally dumb. There was nothing great about it.

‘I got so many messages from people on campus and Zara was wonderful. She was driving me everywhere. In the end I had to tell her to go back to campus and get on with her job.’

Lauren nodded. ‘I’m so glad they picked her as your replacement. She’s really nice.’

‘Have you heard what I’ve been doing on campus?’ Mac asked.

‘Only gossip, though obviously everyone knows it’s to do with the air crash.’

‘Although I’m retired from full-time work I still have seats on several intelligence committees and I do regular advisory work for the government; so I still had my security clearance,’ Mac said. ‘Whenever there’s a major incident, someone at CHERUB has to shadow the investigation and see if and where there’s a situation in which agents such as yourself might be useful. It’s not the most exciting part of a mission controller’s job, but I didn’t fancy sitting at home brooding so I asked Zara if she’d let me muck in. You can see the results in front of you.’

Mac panned his arms around at the mounds of papers.

‘And as I’m sitting here, I take it you’re on to something?’ Lauren asked.

‘I might be,’ Mac said cautiously. ‘It’s a lead, but it could easily turn out to be a hoax or a cry for attention.’

‘What kind of lead?’

‘A phone call,’ Mac explained. ‘Over eight hundred were made to the anti-terrorist hotline in the days after the air crash. Every call they receive is recorded and categorised A through D. A basically means send the cops out to arrest the bad guys now. B is a serious lead that will be followed up within a matter of days or hours. C is a lead that’s put on the back burner and may be investigated if more information comes