CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,45
any Deluxe Chicken branch, anywhere in the world.’
‘Super cool,’ James said.
Ten minutes later they sat at a table in the restaurant, James with a coffee and Kerry with hot chocolate. They each had a pencil and a workbook with smiling cartoon chickens on the cover and the slogan Welcome to the global Deluxe Chicken Family.
‘OK, Kerry, see if you can handle this one,’ James said, before reading aloud in an upbeat American accent. ‘You have now read and studied the section on hygiene and safety. Now please answer the following six questions. Number one, after using the restroom all members of staff must: A Turn out the bathroom lights, B Return to work as quickly as possible, or C Carefully wash and dry their hands using soap and hot water. Which one do you think?’
Kerry tutted. ‘James, we’ve just got here. Stop pissing about.’
‘It’s so lame,’ he said, before reading out another question. ‘If you find a spillage of liquid in the customer area of the restaurant should you: A Place a safety warning cone over the site of the spillage and ensure that a crewmember clears the spillage quickly, B Ignore it because it isn’t your responsibility or C Pull down your pants, grab your ankles and do an enormous shit in the puddle.’
Kerry kept a stony silence.
‘I made that last one up, by the way.’
‘You never grow up, do you?’ Kerry said irritably. ‘If you get fired from this, Meryl Spencer will have you running punishment laps, or scrubbing toilets on campus. And then we’ll all have to listen to poor James whingeing about how unfair life is.’
James shook his head as he waggled his cartoon chicken in the air. ‘Only you could take this seriously. This booklet must have been used by thirty other people; you can see the marks where the answers have been rubbed out.’
Kerry managed a smile. ‘The disturbing thing is, it seems quite a few members of the global Deluxe Chicken family have been getting the answers wrong.’
As James started to crack up, the girl in the miniskirt approached the table. Her badge said Gemma, Crewmember and James tried hard not to look at her body. She was sexy in a short-skirt-and-cheap-jewellery kind of way.
‘Sorry,’ Kerry said anxiously, wrapping a hand over her smile. ‘Didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘From mopping?’ Gemma said, as she raised an eyebrow and shook her head. ‘Don’t sweat it on my account. There’s only two things you need to know if you wanna work here. The first is that Gabriel is a miserable hard-arsed stickler for the rules. That’s because he’s twenty-eight years old and he’s never got within sniffing distance of a woman. The second is that all the urban myths you’ve heard about people dropping wings on the floor, spitting on your fries and melting chewing gum in the deep fat fryers are true – especially if I’m doing the cooking.’
James laughed and put his arm up to shake Gemma’s hand. ‘Sounds like you and me share the same work ethic,’ he grinned, as Kerry shook her head and sighed noisily.
19. TERROR
After fifteen minutes speaking with Mac, Lauren still wasn’t sure about the proposed mission. Whilst something clearly wasn’t right in the Bin Hassam household, the combination of phone bills, dubious no-fly lists and a three-sentence telephone conversation didn’t make a convincing picture of a terrorist conspiracy. Zara and the ethics committee had signed off on the mission, but Lauren wondered if it was more out of respect for the retired chairman than any genuine belief in Mac’s hunch.
‘The crash has dropped out of the news,’ Lauren said, as she stared at Mac between two mounds of indexed files. ‘Is there any information that hasn’t been released to the public? I mean, they never seemed sure whether it was mechanical failure or a terrorist attack.’
‘It’s still a tough call,’ Mac said. ‘I was patched in to a video conference between the crash investigators and the cops on both sides of the Atlantic last Friday. They’re having difficulty reaching any conclusions. They’ve recovered over eighty per cent of the aircraft and all but a handful of bodies, but the section they really need to examine is the piece of fuselage under the wing that blew out first. It would have landed in the sea more than a hundred kilometres from the main crash site and probably sank straight to the bottom of the ocean.’
‘But after the crash the TV said there’d definitely been an explosion,’ Lauren said.