New Guard (CHERUB) - Robert Muchamore Page 0,34
comes through that door on Tuesday afternoon.’
The engineer stepped back, wiping toner dust from his fingertips on to a rag. ‘I’d love to help, but I could work on this machine for a week with no guarantee it’ll run again. These things just aren’t designed to have water poured inside them.’
The boys kept ripping carpet as Monty showed the engineer out of the building.
‘So the mysterious Uncle’s gonna show his face here on Tuesday,’ Daniel whispered.
‘Sounds that way,’ Ryan agreed.
Like most things, there was a knack to pulling carpet tiles and by nine the boys had cleared more than half the floor. Monty worked at the back of the room using the Mac Pro to design new menus for a local restaurant.
As the boys worked, they placed listening devices under all the desks, including specially designed low-frequency microphones that were ideal for recording keystrokes. Although tapping any key on a keyboard sounds the same to a human ear, sophisticated listening software can detect a slightly different sonic signature for every key and then use simple decoding techniques to work out what is being typed.
It was past ten and the Sharma brothers had done three-quarters of the carpet tiles when Monty sent them to the shop downstairs.
‘Are we getting off soon?’ Leon whinged. ‘My knees are screwed from crawling around.’
The answer was no. A caged flatbed truck had reversed on to the pavement out front. An overalled man had unlocked the shop’s metal shutters, and the boys were shocked by the mess as they stepped inside.
It had been a convenience store, filled with scruffy metal shelving racks, for food, magazines and stuff. At the rear there was a big empty space where there had once been fridges selling milk and beer.
The ceiling bulged where floodwater had collected from the floor above. To the left, part of the ceiling had collapsed completely, leaving a hole big enough to climb through and a run of dangling strip lights. Water had drained from the vinyl floor, but it had filtered through concrete and plaster to get here, leaving a layer of pinkish silt over everything.
The overalled man was a giant, with knockout body odour and BEAST tattooed across his knuckles.
‘If it’s metal it goes on the truck,’ Beast explained, illustrating the point by pounding a metal shelf so hard that it buckled before crashing to the floor. ‘Wanna get home before one. So I’m working hard and you’re working hard. Dig?’
‘Dig,’ Leon said, earning a scowl for daring to grin slightly.
The noise was mad as the three boys and Beast tore into the shop fittings, ripping out shelves and bashing ones that wouldn’t budge with rubber mallets. By the end the brothers had little cuts all over their hands and sweat-soaked clothes smeared in plaster dust.
‘Need one lad to help unload at the other end,’ Beast announced. ‘Other two can piss off home.’
Ryan was the oldest and, since he’d not yet registered at the local college, he didn’t have school in the morning. It was close to midnight, so there was little traffic as the truck headed north out of the city. The metal shelving up back crashed over every bump, and even though Ryan was past smelling like a rose garden himself, he gagged at the stale sweat smell coming off Beast’s filthy overall.
‘You know Trey?’ Beast asked.
‘Met him once,’ Ryan said, as the truck pulled on to the A41, heading east out of the city.
Beast grunted. ‘Trey thinks he can pull the wool over Uncle’s eyes. Better to own up in my book.’
‘Sure,’ Ryan agreed.
‘Specially since Uncle’s tight with Trey’s dad. Worst Trey will get is a kicking.’
‘Don’t know all the ins and outs,’ Ryan said, looking out as a motorbike shot by, doing at least a hundred. ‘He’ll kill himself.’
‘Son’s got a bike,’ Beast admitted, smiling slightly. ‘I said to him, if you crash and break your legs, don’t come running to me.’
It was a bad joke but Ryan laughed, because Beast knew stuff that he wanted to hear.
‘What does Uncle do exactly?’ Ryan asked.
‘Fingers in a lot of pies,’ Beast explained. ‘If you’re loyal he’s a top man. I’m not the sharpest, but I’ve been alongside him twenty years, man and boy. Started at the scrapyard straight out of school, ’bout a month after me. Now, Uncle owns the joint and I’m still out in the truck, picking up scrap.’
They turned off the ring road and hurtled down a rutted track that set all the metal in the back rattling