CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,85

to the driver’s side as Jala opened the front passenger door and clambered through to her booster seat in the back. But Muna froze when she discovered the flattened front tyre.

She cursed in Arabic before crouching down to try and see what had caused the wheel to deflate. Jala screamed as she saw the guns coming towards them through the bushes.

‘Hands in the air,’ an armed cop shouted, straddling the low wall between the houses. His partner came out from behind a hedge on the other side. ‘Do you have any weapons?’

Muna didn’t answer but Jala screamed, ‘Don’t kill my mummy,’ from inside the car.

‘No weapons,’ Muna shouted, holding her hands out wide as the cops stopped walking a metre behind her.

‘Who else is inside the house?’

‘Nobody,’ Muna said. ‘They went out the back gate.’

As the first cop frisked Muna, the second called in a backup unit parked fifty metres down the road.

Mac ran across the gravel as a pair of uniformed officers put Muna into handcuffs and coaxed a sobbing Jala from inside the car. He overheard news about the stand-off from a police radio as one of the armed officers used Muna’s key to enter the house.

The officers pointed their guns up the stairway and one raced upstairs shouting, ‘Police, surrender,’ as his companion kicked open the doors of the living-and dining-rooms before checking the kitchen and the cupboard under the stairs.

Once they were sure the house was clear, Mac headed out of the back door and jogged down to the bottom of the garden. He levered the gate open a few centimetres and poked his head through the gap to see what was going on.

Two minutes had passed since Hassam had backed into the shadows beneath the willow trees and nothing seemed to have changed. The two female officers still had their guns pointing at Hassam while Fahim stood quaking with the knife at his throat. But Mac was stunned to see another outline crawling through the shadows towards them.

*

Unlike number sixteen, the neighbouring house didn’t have a rear gate. To make it on to the golf course, Jake had to drag a toddler’s plastic playhouse across the lawn and then stand on it to scale a fence almost two metres tall. As he dropped on to the path leading towards the clubhouse, he saw Fahim whacking his dad with the golf club.

Jake pulled the tyre spanner out of his pocket and set off towards Hassam, intending to come up from behind and finish him off. But Jake made it less than fifteen metres before the armed cops appeared and as soon as he saw them he assumed Fahim would be safe.

He didn’t want to risk getting caught and having to explain himself, but there was no easy way back over the fence, so he cut under the willow trees, intending to phone Mac and let him know what was going on. But before he’d finished dialling, he saw Hassam backing up towards him with the blade at Fahim’s throat.

By the time Hassam stopped moving, Jake was crouched behind a tree trunk less than five metres away. His first instinct was to run, but as he took his first step towards the fairway of the first hole, he heard Hassam’s grim threat to take Fahim with him and realised that he was the only person who could do something.

Jake’s head spun as he realised that it was the biggest moment of his life. He’d spent years in training, and if he saved the day it would more than cancel out the mistakes he’d made earlier in the mission.

The trouble was, he didn’t have a clue what to do. The magnitude of the situation overwhelmed him and all he could think about was Lauren telling him that he was a cocky brat who was out of his depth and needed more training. But was Lauren really so perfect? She didn’t even have the brains to check Asif’s telephone and was lucky not to have fried the circuits when she gave him fifty thousand volts …

Jake thought about the training chant: This is tough, but cherubs are tougher. He’d earned his grey shirt the same way everyone else had. He just needed to calm down, use what he’d learned and switch his brain into gear.

The first thing he’d been taught was to observe a situation carefully before acting. He leaned out cautiously and saw that he had a reasonable view of Hassam and Fahim standing with their backs to