because she’d cut across another plot and her trainer landed awkwardly in a furrow. She stumbled forward, keeping upright for a couple of steps but losing it when she crashed into a bamboo frame used for growing runner beans.
As Ning’s body ploughed into freshly dug earth, the sprinter landed on top of her. She caught him with a nice elbow on the nose, but he had enormous shoulders and massive biceps that forced the air out of her lungs.
Ning continued to struggle as Shawn stumbled across the loose ground, then pointed a handgun at her head from less than a metre.
‘Keep still, missy,’ he shouted, clearly unhappy about getting a chair leg in the balls. ‘Break her arm.’
‘Ning, are you all right?’ James asked, over the com. ‘I’ve got your locator. I’m getting on my bike and I’m calling for backup.’
‘Break her damned arm,’ Shawn repeated, as blood from the guy on top of her’s nose dripped on to Ning’s T-shirt.
She’d fought her way out of all kinds of situations, but the guy was twice her weight and it was all muscle. Ning grunted and bucked as he squeezed her wrist, but he got her arm up behind her back and began pulling tight.
‘No,’ Ning sobbed. Then a scream, ‘Somebody help me!’
‘This’ll teach you to hit me in the balls,’ Shawn shouted, placing his boot on the back of Ning’s head as her arm made a sickening crunch.
*
‘James?’ Ryan yelled, taking off his garbage-soaked trainers before walking into the kitchen of their flat.
James hadn’t had time to send a message, but half-eaten marmalade toast and a laptop open at the kitchen table gave Ryan the impression that he’d left in a hurry. Ryan was torn: part of him wanted to get in bed and crash for a few hours, but he was also excited about all the stuff he’d found out in Chatham and he wanted to do some investigating.
Whichever he chose, Ryan needed to shower first. He stripped in front of the washing machine, lobbed everything including his trainers inside and put them on a hot wash with a big squirt of Dettol.
His body had lines of light and dark, where clothing had protected him from dirt. The shower water ran slate grey as chunks of soot and dirt dropped out of his hair. The cool blast perked him up and he enjoyed feeling clean as he sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing antiseptic down his pock-marked arms. He put plasters over several cuts and replaced the dressing on his grazed ankle.
People forget rapidly, so CHERUB agents are trained to get everything in writing as soon as it’s safe to do so. Ryan opened up a standard form on his laptop, typing a few paragraphs explaining what had happened overnight, then replaying the audio notes on his phone and making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.
Once he’d saved the note and e-mailed a copy to mission control on campus, Ryan opened up the special equipment box in James’ bedroom and found a drug testing kit. Using tweezers, he picked white specks off the plastic bag with the handprint and dropped them into a pale green solution.
After swirling the test tube and letting it settle for half a minute, Ryan dipped a strip of test paper into the solution. Pale green indicated some level of cocaine, but the paper turned to the colour of spinach, indicating that his tiny sample was close to one hundred per cent pure.
Satisfied that he was on to the source of high purity cocaine he’d been sent on the mission to find, Ryan opened a web browser and did a Google search for Sonata Loudspeaker Cable. The search came back with the company’s US website and he skimmed through the home page, reading that Sonata produced reference quality loudspeaker cable at highly competitive prices.
Ryan had never previously realised that cabling could make a hi-fi system sound better, and baulked when he saw that Sonata’s top line Carbon X cable sold for a hundred dollars per yard.
Ryan’s next click took him to a page listing Sonata’s overseas suppliers. The UK distributor was a company called AV Master, based in Rochester. Ryan hadn’t heard of Rochester until that morning, when his train stopped there five minutes before meeting Clark at Chatham.
For the next step, Ryan had to log into a secure browser. He yawned as he entered a long password, and swiped his left thumb on the laptop’s fingerprint pad. Now he was in the CHERUB