CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,87
from each other.
‘Took you two long enough to get here, didn’t it?’ Fahim gasped, smiling with relief as he fingered the spots of blood on the front of his neck.
35. NICK
‘Hello?’
Lauren and Rat turned to see a slim woman leaning into the warehouse door. She carried a leather bag and wore a tight black coat that gave her a slightly sinister air.
‘Can I help you?’ Lauren asked.
‘I’m Dr Turpin, I had a call from Mac. My team has worked with CHERUB agents before, so we know the score.’
Lauren pointed her hand at Asif, who was now dead to the world with a block of foam Rat had found on one of the shelves under his head.
‘Nice work!’ the doctor smiled, as two more MI5 agents came into the warehouse, wheeling a metal trolley between them.
‘How will you work it?’ Rat asked.
Dr Turpin shrugged. ‘We’ll give him the once-over with a rubber cosh so that he ends up with a few cuts and bruises. Then I’ll inject a cocktail of LSD and other hallucinogens so that he’ll spend the rest of the weekend in a daze. He’ll come around in a secure hospital bed and we’ll tell him that he got into a fight with police trying to arrest him, took a nasty bump on the head and suffered a minor stress-related heart attack.
‘Hopefully his short-term memory will be so shot that he won’t remember getting taken down by a pair of kids, but even if he does his brain will be so fried that he won’t know what’s real and what isn’t.’
‘Isn’t treating a suspect like that illegal?’ Rat asked, as he held Asif around the middle and helped the two men lift his dead weight on to the trolley.
The three MI5 agents all laughed and the taller of the two men spoke. ‘Are you trying to tell me that knocking a suspect unconscious, beating him with rubber coshes and giving him drugs that scramble his brain is illegal?’
‘Nah,’ his colleague smiled. ‘It can’t be.’
Lauren tutted. ‘For god’s sake Rat, practically everything we do is illegal. Every piece of evidence we uncover has to be doctored so that it can be presented in court. If the civil liberties mob ever found out what CHERUB and the rest of the intelligence service gets up to, they’d spontaneously combust.’
Rat hummed uncertainly.
‘Look at it this way,’ Dr Turpin said, as the two MI5 men wheeled Asif into an unmarked ambulance. ‘Is what we’re doing to Asif better or worse than blowing up three hundred and fifty people over the middle of the Atlantic?’
‘Speaking of which,’ Lauren said, ‘I’ve been rummaging around while we were waiting for you guys to turn up. Do any of you know anything about the crash investigation?’
‘We’re just a response team,’ Dr Turpin said. ‘Our job is to clean up messes like this one; but I can get someone from the crash-investigation team to come up here if you like.’
Lauren shook her head. ‘Mac knows as much about the investigation as anyone. He’ll be here any minute.’
‘What do you think you’ve found?’ Turpin asked.
Lauren shrugged. ‘Just some junk, but it might mean something.’
The doctor looked at her watch. ‘We’d better scoot, but tell Mac that I said hi. Oh … and pass on my condolences about his wife and grandchildren.’
*
The unmarked ambulance left discreetly and one of Dr Turpin’s assistants drove off in Hassam’s Bentley. Jake and Mac pulled into the parking lot a quarter of an hour later, by which time Rat had visited a nearby café to buy Kit Kats and tea in polystyrene cups to ward off the cold.
‘Where’s Asif?’ Jake grinned, as he swaggered into the warehouse, back to his cocky self for the first time in days. ‘You didn’t give him too many volts and finish him off, did you?’
‘MI5 have been and gone,’ Lauren said, glowering at him.
‘Does Mac know that we forgot to look at the phone and started zapping him?’ Rat asked warily.
‘My lips are sealed,’ Jake teased. ‘At least, as long as you make it worth my while.’
‘Just as my lips are sealed about you breaking down in tears on the first night of the mission,’ Lauren said. ‘Me and Rat might get a reprimand from Zara, but you’ll get ripped to shreds by Bethany and all your mates if that story leaks out.’
Jake looked worried.
‘Did he really cry?’ Rat smirked.
‘Well he’s only a little baby cherub,’ Lauren grinned. ‘He was all better after a big hug and a goodnight