it’ll be more than pieces of dead chickens sizzling in your deep fat fryers.’
Kerry was tempted to break Gabriel’s pointing finger, but she didn’t want to do any permanent damage so she shoved him backwards into the refrigerator.
‘You got Karate?’ Kerry growled, goading Gabriel on as she moved into a fighting stance. ‘Come on then, skinny. Show us your moves.’
Gemma jumped up in the air and clapped her hands noisily. ‘You tell him, sister,’ she shouted. ‘I already warned him I’d get my Danny in here to give him a slap if his busy hands came near me again.’
Gabriel was in a daze from his encounter with the microwave and didn’t fancy his chances. ‘Get back to work,’ he steamed, as his bandy arms flailed in the air. ‘All of you.’
Then he dashed into his little office and slammed the door.
Gemma ran over to Kerry. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked sympathetically.
‘I’d bet I feel better than his head,’ Kerry said, as she broke into a sly grin.
‘All right, sistaah,’ Gemma grinned, as she gave Kerry a high five. ‘I thought you were a square, but you showed him.’
‘I hate people like that,’ Kerry said as James stepped up to the microwave and admired the crack Gabriel’s head had made in the clear plastic door. ‘First day on the job when you’re vulnerable … I mean, I know how to defend myself, but there’s a lot of people out there who don’t.’
21. SCHOOL
The Emergency Relocation Unit is a sub-branch of the intelligence service that makes short-notice housing arrangements for everyone from CHERUB agents to protected witnesses. Within two days of Mac telling them that he’d need an apartment close to Hassam Bin Hassam’s Hampstead home, the local estate agencies had been scoured and the team had discreetly signed a lease on a three-bedroom apartment in a luxury block.
Mac dealt directly with Jake and Lauren’s enrolment in school. Over the years, CHERUB had become adept at manipulating school staff and computer systems to ensure that young agents ended up sitting in the same classroom as their targets.
Three hours after briefing on the mission, Mac was driving Lauren down the motorway with Jake in the back and their luggage stacked in the boot. He drove fast because he had to buy ties and badges for Lauren and Jake from the school uniform shop and then meet with their new deputy head at 5 p.m.
*
Lauren had slept in loads of places since she’d joined CHERUB, but she always found it hard to sleep on her first night in a new bed. No amount of experience seemed to quell the butterflies that came at the start of each mission. If anything, after being shot at, kidnapped, blasted with pepper spray and nearly getting blown up, her nerves had worsened.
Mac cooked a full English breakfast, but Lauren only managed to rearrange the food with her fork a few times before downing a couple of mouthfuls of egg and pushing away the plate.
‘My cooking not up to scratch?’ Mac asked, as he scraped the plate and loaded it into the dishwasher.
‘New mission nerves,’ Lauren explained.
Mac nodded and glanced at his watch. ‘Pretty standard, I think.’
‘I’m always fine once the mission starts and you know what you’re getting into,’ Lauren said. ‘It’s fear of the unknown, I guess.’
‘How about you, Jake?’ Mac asked. ‘You holding up OK?’
Jake sat at the kitchen table wolfing down his food, dressed only in the football shorts and grubby white socks he’d worn the day before. He was small for his eleven years, with spiky black hair, big brown eyes and a boyishly cute face.
‘I never get nerves,’ Jake said, his cheeks bulging with bacon and toast. ‘I’ve been trained. I know what I’m doing – more or less.’
Lauren gritted her teeth. Jake was so full of himself it made her want to scream.
‘You should take it more seriously, Jake,’ she warned. ‘If training goes wrong, you might break a few bones or have to repeat the exercise. If you mess up on a mission you, me and possibly lots of other people could end up dead.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jake said dismissively. ‘I’ve been hearing the same lecture since I was five years old. I’m not stupid, you know? I just can’t see the point in worrying about stuff you can’t control.’ Then he looked over at Mac. ‘Here, Doc, your scrambled eggs are way better than the ones on campus. You got any more going spare?’
Lauren groaned to herself as she headed down