CHERUB: People's Republic (4 page)

Most Chinese girls would weep and beg rather than face the wrath of their father. Ning’s stepdad was stricter than most, but she wouldn’t give Miss Xu any satisfaction by showing fear.

‘If I’m really bad, I expect my dad will send me away to live in a rotten little room, where I’m not allowed to go out, play sport, or watch TV and all I can do is cram for my exams before and after school every day and all weekend. But wait, he already did that,
didn’t
he?’

Miss Xu could take no more of Ning’s lip and swung her hand. But Ning had spent four years studying boxing at Dandong’s National Academy of Sport.

Ning ducked swiftly beneath the hand. Miss Xu was so surprised that she overbalanced, while Ning thrust upwards, jamming two fingers hard under Miss Xu’s ribs and sending her into spasm.

‘Ker-pow!’ Ning shouted, as Miss Xu stumbled backwards, clutching her sides.

The elderly woman was too stunned to react as Ning reached under the bunk and swept an arm across Miss Xu’s desk. A pen pot, papers, telephone and spider plant all crashed to the floor. Ning opened the office door, making the girls who’d been nosing outside spring backwards.

‘Mean old cow,’ Ning shouted. ‘No wonder nobody ever married you.’

Back in her room, Ning found Daiyu cowering on her bed with her knees tucked into her chest. ‘Are you mad?’ she asked nervously.

‘None of this would have happened if you’d left me alone in bed,’ Ning said. ‘But don’t worry, I doubt you’ll have to put up with me any more.’

Ning pulled her nightshirt over her head and dressed quickly in a T-shirt with the logo of her favourite Korean rock band, ripped black jeans, scuffed black snow boots and a leather jacket. Xifeng stood watching in the doorway.

‘Where are you going?’

Ning shrugged. ‘Anywhere but here.’

‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ Xifeng said nervously. ‘There are people who can help with your problems.’

‘My only problem is not wanting to spend fourteen hours every day studying for a stupid exam,’ Ning screamed.

As Xifeng sheltered in the next room, Ning considered packing a backpack, but she had nowhere to run away to, so she just grabbed her phone, wallet and a pair of sunglasses. Heads disappeared inside rooms as Ning stepped into the corridor.

Miss Xu was back on her feet at the far end of the hallway. Rather than face her again, Ning jogged back towards the showers. She cut through steam and kicked open a blue fire door. The concrete stairs led down to a courtyard filled with children’s bicycles.

News had spread to the boys on the floor below and a few of them yelled stuff like
Get ’em, psycho
and
Go Ning
through the barred windows of their rooms. For an instant she felt like the hero in some movie and when she reached the courtyard, she spun around and gave Miss Xu’s cramming school a two-fingered salute.

‘Screw the world,’ she shouted.

Ning crashed through a metal gate and walked fifty metres up an alleyway towards a main road. It was twenty past six, but the four lanes were already busy with trucks and bicycles. She thought about going into a café for breakfast, but Miss Xu might send someone after her so she kept moving.

Without thinking, Ning had walked the short route to her school and found herself at the front gates of Dandong Lower School Number Eighteen. A caretaker and a young teacher were on stepladders raising a sign painted by little kids:
LS18 Welcomes All for Joyous Parents’ Day
.

The thought of parents sent a shudder down Ning’s back. Her stepfather would go bananas when he found out what she’d done.

4. STANDARD

As China woke up, the sun was going down on the opposite side of the world. Ryan studied his toes as he walked away from the ocean, his soles coated with soft white sand. He’d been living in Santa Cruz, California, three and a half weeks but his new home still made him feel like he’d moved into a TV commercial.

The eight sculpted concrete homes stood back from the sea on sandy dunes. Each had panoramic windows, giving views of the ocean, and a rooftop terrace fronted by a glass-bottomed swimming pool which allowed you to sit in your vast living room and watch swimmers overhead.

The home owners shared several acres of private beach and a harbour. An electric fence kept the rabble out and the guard on the front gate had a shotgun, just in case.

Squeals came up from the ocean, as the retired basketball star who lived in house six splashed his toddler son in the waves. Ryan was heading in the other direction, towards a couple of twelve-year-olds squatting over a timber deck.

Ryan’s target, Ethan Aramov, was a stick boy. Even on a warm autumn night, he kept covered in jeans and a baggy hoodie. He had messy shoulder-length hair and he always squinted, even though he wore contacts.

Yannis was Ethan’s best friend and constant companion. Morbidly obese, with an oily Mediterranean complexion. He got teased at school, but Ryan felt no pity because he was utterly obnoxious.

‘Hey, guys,’ Ryan said, as he strolled up, acting like bumping into them was a big surprise. ‘How’s the ’bot coming along?’

Ethan and Yannis were uber geeks. Their only school activity was chess club. They spent entire weekends playing online games, and when that wasn’t nerdy enough, they built robots. Or more accurately, Ethan, who was smart, built robots, while Yannis sat about scratching himself and eating cheese puffs.

‘Our robot is top secret,’ Yannis said.

The tone was
we’re better than you
, but the fact that Yannis was twelve and using a line you’d expect from a pouting six-year-old made it pathetic.

The robot was based on a radio-controlled car. Ethan had adapted it with optical sensors and a small handheld computer so that it could drive itself at high speed across the beach, tracking a course mapped out by cones, while swerving around puddles and unexpected obstacles like a kid running into its path. You could buy a four-hundred-dollar robot vacuum cleaner that did the same stuff, but it was impressive for a twelve-year-old.

Ryan sidestepped Yannis and approached Ethan, who was on one knee, cleaning the robot car’s steering with a toothbrush.

‘Must get pretty clogged up with all the sand,’ Ryan said.

‘D-uh, it’s sand, retard,’ Yannis said.

Ethan was shy. He’d usually let Yannis talk for him, but seemed keen to tell someone other than Yannis about his robot.

‘I based it on a cheap fifty-dollar RC car,’ Ethan said ruefully. ‘Should have got a proper Taimya kit, with a waterproofed shell.’

Ryan had now spent three weeks trying to become Ethan’s friend and this was the longest conversation they’d had.

‘Would it be a lot of work to switch to a different car now?’ Ryan asked.

Yannis hauled his fat arse up and wedged himself in front of Ryan before Ethan could answer.

‘Let’s carry the stuff inside,’ Yannis said, with his flabby back in Ryan’s face. ‘It’s getting dark. You can see better inside.’

Ryan sidestepped Yannis. ‘This robotics stuff looks cool. Is there a club or something you go to?’

Ethan was about to reply, but Yannis blared over him. ‘We learned ourselves from books and online. It’s taken
years
to learn all that we know. We’re not interested in working with a rookie.’

Ryan was easy-going, but he’d done a lot of combat training since he’d joined CHERUB and at that moment he’d have happily used his Karate black belt and kickboxing skills to beat Yannis to a pulp.

‘Nighty-night, Ryan,’ Yannis said, waving his porky hand as he followed Ethan up the beach towards house number five.

Ryan turned to face the sea and swore under his breath. On the way back to his house he encountered the little boy sitting proudly on the shoulders of his enormously tall father.

‘How’s it hanging, bro?’ the retired basketball star asked.

‘Been worse,’ Ryan said, but his smile was fake and he was scowling by the time he reached house eight. He was living there with pretend half-sister Amy and FBI agent Ted Brasker, who was their pretend father.

Ryan pushed a sliding door and stepped inside on to the metal-grilled floor of a beach shower. After hosing the sand off his feet he padded into a huge basement room, kitted out like a proper health-club gym.

CHERUB agents are expected to maintain high levels of fitness when they’re undercover. Ryan thought about the treadmill or the weight bench, but the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling seemed the best outlet for frustration.

After some warm-up stretches and toe touches, Ryan exploded upwards, pirouetting on the ball of his foot and smashing the bag with a powerful roundhouse kick. As the bag swung back towards him, he dodged it, then launched a stream of heavy left and right hooks, accompanied by grunts.

After five minutes Ryan’s knuckles hurt, the tops of his feet were bright red, his torso glistened and the bag had a huge dent from the pounding.

‘Give the poor bag a break,’ Amy shouted, as she came down the stairs.

Ryan backed up and tried to catch his breath. Amy was the kind of girl who’d look hot if you put a tent over her head, but fresh from the pool in a lime green swimsuit she was off the Richter scale.

‘Sorry, I was pushing the envelope, you know?’ Ryan said.

He was trying to sound macho, but Amy sensed his frustration.

‘I was floating,’ Amy replied. ‘I could hear your grunting two floors up.’

She inspected the dent in the heavy bag, before launching a heavy kick, spraying Ryan with chlorinated drips.

‘You’re not bad,’ Ryan said, as he matched Amy’s move.

Amy didn’t appreciate having her combat skills referred to as
not bad
. She threw a kick so hard that it pushed the bag violently upwards. As it crashed down, the chain holding it up made a clank followed by a hollow boom as the entire ceiling flexed.

Ryan gawped upwards, half expecting to see cracks in the plaster. He’d seen a heavy bag lifted up before, but only by a training instructor with thighs broader than Amy’s waist.

‘God help any guy who messes with you,’ Ryan laughed.

‘So why the naked aggression?’ Amy asked.

‘Nothing in particular,’ Ryan said.

Amy didn’t buy that. ‘I saw you with Ethan and Yannis while I was swimming. Can I assume it wasn’t the breakthrough you’ve been waiting for?’

Ryan looked depressed as he sat down on a weight bench.

‘I’ve got to pull this off, but I’m screwing up,’ he admitted. ‘A good agent should make friends with their target within a day or two – a week at most. I’ve done hours of role play, I know all the psychological tricks for making someone like me. But we’ve been out here almost four weeks. I’m getting nowhere with Ethan, at home or school.’

‘Is Yannis still the problem?’ Amy asked.

Ryan nodded. ‘I hate that fat dick, but they suit each other. Like, Ethan’s really clever, but he’s weedy and shy. It suits Ethan to have Yannis around. Yannis mostly does what Ethan tells him to, and the way Yannis brushes people off means Ethan doesn’t have to deal with his shyness. It’s like an impenetrable geek force field.’

Amy straddled at an overhead press machine and paused to think.

‘What about physically?’ Amy asked.

‘Physically what?’

‘Yannis gives Ethan what he wants, by fending off questions. But would Yannis be able to protect Ethan in a physical confrontation?’

‘A bit. I mean, Yannis is such a lard arse that most average kids wouldn’t start because he’d just end up sitting on them.’

‘But the tough guys, the jocks, football players or whatever you have at your school?’

Ryan laughed. ‘No way Yannis could fight them. You should see him in Phys Ed. He runs like a jelly having a seizure and sweats like a fountain.’

‘Well that’s it then,’ Amy said brightly. ‘Problem solved.’

‘What, you’re saying that I should beat Yannis up and then somehow take his place as Ethan’s protector?’

‘No,’ Amy said, showing off sparkling teeth as she laughed. ‘If you beat up Ethan’s only mate, he’ll hate you for it. You need a situation where Ethan is threatened but Yannis can’t help him. It won’t guarantee that you’ll become best buds, but it will make Ethan feel that he owes you something.’

‘So Ethan-the-wimp is about to get his arse kicked and Ryan-the-good-looking-hero steps in to save him,’ Ryan said, half smiling.

‘We tried something similar on a CHERUB mission when I was about your age,’ Amy explained. ‘An agent was trying to befriend the son of some mad Saudi terrorist but they didn’t hit it off.’

‘Couldn’t you have mentioned this a week ago?’ Ryan asked.

‘I said we
tried
something similar,’ Amy said. ‘But it didn’t exactly work.’

‘What do you mean,
didn’t exactly work
?’

‘Well, the whole mission went down the pan and my fellow agent spent three weeks in hospital recovering from a head wound. But on the up side I have a pretty good idea where we went wrong.’