With police blocking the road ahead and a flaming barricade behind, James was just one of three hundred heads that turned towards the side streets looking for a way out, but they’d all been blocked off by white cars with blue flashing lights.
*
Back on campus, Rat, Andy, Jake, Kevin and Ronan were charging down the main staircase, heading from Lauren’s eighth-floor room to the weapons storage cupboard on the ground floor.
‘Who the hell does Lauren Adams think she is?’ Jake moaned as he swung around the end of a banister. ‘Stuck up little troll…’
‘You’re talking about my girlfriend,’ Rat warned.
Andy knew they had to work as a team and tried smoothing things over. ‘Lauren might be full of it, but she knows her stuff, Jake. She’s got one of the best mission records of anyone on campus and she’s still only thirteen …’
Ronan giggled. ‘If she had massive jugs like Bethany she’d be perfect.’
Andy and Rat both laughed. ‘I swear they get bigger every time I see her,’ Rat said.
‘You’re talking about my
sister,’
Jake said bitterly.
‘Give over, Jake,’ Andy said. ‘You two hate each other.’
‘Andy’s in love with Bethany,’ Rat teased, as Ronan jumped half a flight of stairs on to the sixth-floor landing, making a massive thud. ‘But he’s too much of a shitter to ask her out.’
‘You talk rubbish, Rat,’ Andy said, aghast. ‘I said I liked her
one
time and you’ve been going on about it ever since.’
‘Shitter,’ Rat repeated.
By this time they’d all reached the sixth-floor landing, but Kevin peeled off into the corridor.
‘Where you going?’ Rat asked. ‘We’re all supposed to be going down for slingshot practice.’
‘I don’t want to get these muddy,’ Kevin explained, as he looked down at his glowing white Nikes. ‘I’ll nip to my room and change.’
Ronan shook his head. ‘Change your trainers! How much of a girl are you, Kevin?’
‘At least I don’t stink of piss,’ Kevin yelled back.
Ronan was half-way down to the fifth floor, but he spun around and squared up to Kevin. ‘Say that again and I’ll stomp on your head.’
‘Leave it out,’ Rat sighed. He was one of the strongest thirteen-year-olds on campus so he had no problem pulling the two eleven-year-olds apart. He shoved Kevin down the hallway towards his room before grabbing Ronan by his collar. ‘We’re gonna be stuck in a minibus for two hours on the way to the ATCC. If you smell like anything other than soap or deodorant, you’re riding on the roof rack.’
‘Yeah,’ Kevin smirked as he walked backwards down the hallway towards his room. ‘Take a bath, loser.’
‘See you down in the weapons room, Kev,’ Rat said, as Andy and Jake resumed the charge downstairs.
Kevin’s room was like all the others in the main building: small sofa by the door, double bed, desk with a laptop near the window, wardrobes along the length of one wall and a bathroom off to the side. But he was surprised to see a rusted toolbox in his bathroom doorway.
Karen, the campus plumber, leaned out of the bathroom. She wore battered denim dungarees over a white CHERUB shirt and held a toilet seat in her gloved hand. ‘Hello,’ she said warmly. ‘Just fitting your new toilet.’
All the toilets on campus were being replaced with water saving units. It had been announced in morning assembly that Monday but Kevin had forgotten all about it.
‘I’ll be done in ten minutes, but if you need to go, you can christen the one I’ve just fitted across the hall.’
‘No probs,’ Kevin nodded. He sat on the edge of his bed and leaned forward to grab an old pair of trainers from underneath.
After lacing his shoes Kevin wished the plumber a merry Christmas before running back to the corridor. He reckoned it was a good idea to take a leak before heading out into the December cold to shoot slingshots, so he grabbed the handle of the door directly across the hallway and stepped into James Adams’ bedroom.
James ducked in fright as heat from the flames popped a tyre on one of the burning cop cars. Sirens wailed in the surrounding streets, while the crowd pushed and shoved. James was tall enough to breathe, but some of those lower down were getting crushed and starting to panic.
‘Please remain calm,’ a police tannoy announced. ‘You will be dispersed in an orderly fashion.’
Eighty demonstrators had leaked up the side streets before the petrol bombs had gone off, leaving a rump of three hundred protestors trapped between the police lines.
Fifty officers blocked the crowd into place at the eastern end of the Strand and dozens more cut off side streets, but while the cops were outnumbered five to one, none of the protestors fancied their chances against shields, helmets and extendible batons.
A veteran protestor standing close to James explained police tactics to his girlfriend. ‘Bastards will keep us here for hours, letting us out two or three at a time. They’ll take all our photos and details before letting us go.’
‘SAG, SAG, SAG!’ someone shouted, but the reply from the crowd was half-hearted and people were being blinded by the spotlight on a police helicopter sweeping overhead. James suspected they were prowling for Chris Bradford and other senior SAG members, but a lot of high-profile SAG members had been imprisoned after Birmingham and those who remained on the outside had slipped away before the protest reached its peak.
A bigger explosion ripped off behind James as the fuel tank of a police car exploded. On the side of the street away from the fire, the police had rolled a couple of lightly damaged cars out of the blockade and begun marching through the gap to block the crowd from the rear. The cops drumming on their riot shields panicked the crowd into an even tighter formation and a woman standing close to James screamed out that she couldn’t breathe.
The crush wasn’t caused by a lack of space, but by the fact that none of the protestors wanted to be on the edge of the crowd when the police closed them down completely. They were huddling from police batons the same way emperor penguins huddle from the cold.
‘I’ve got to get out,’ the woman screamed. ‘Let me out of here.’
The crush seemed pointless to James and unlike the slender female, he had the muscle to make headway through the crowd. As he pushed past bodies he grabbed the panicking woman and put his arm around her back.
‘Calm down,’ James said firmly as they reached open space and found themselves in no man’s land between the protestors and a line of riot shields thirty metres away. Across the street, the eastbound traffic that had been trapped between the two police lines was being allowed out one car at a time.
As the girl – who looked like she was in her early twenties – rummaged inside her shoulder bag and grabbed an asthma inhaler, James took a bottle of water out of his backpack and offered her a drink.
‘Thank you,’ she said, speaking with a heavy French accent before pausing to down some of the water. ‘I got so scared in there.’
‘No worries,’ James smiled.
Once the traffic on one side of the road was clear, the crowd moved into the extra space and tensions eased as it dawned that the riot cops weren’t going to charge in and start whacking people.
James and his new friend backed up to a column between closed shutters in front of a jewellery store and an electrical store.
‘Smoke?’ the girl asked, as she pulled a packet of ten and a lighter out of her bag.
James shook his head and laughed. ‘Cigarettes and asthma. Nice combo!’
But his smile vanished when he glanced at his watch. He was supposed to be covering Chris Bradford’s back at a meeting on the other side of London in less than three hours’ time. It was important for the mission, but James didn’t have a hope of making it if the police were planning to disperse the protestors by releasing them two or three at a time over the space of several hours.
‘I need to be somewhere else,’ James said.
The French girl smiled. ‘If you ‘ave a plan I’m all ears.’
James studied her clothing for the first time. Her black stockings and expensive-looking striped coat didn’t fit the mould of a SAG activist or an urban yob.
‘How’d you find out about the demo?’
‘I’m studying journalism,’ the girl explained. ‘I’m working three months at the London bureaux of a Paris newspaper. I was at a party last night, I heard some guys talking about the possibility of trouble.’
‘Looking for a scoop,’ James said, before smiling absent-mindedly.
He usually paid attention to what pretty girls said, but his eyes had strayed towards the metal shutters at the front of the electrical store. Each shutter had metal clasps that were designed to be padlocked from the outside, but they’d been pulled down in a hurry and he wondered if there was any way to lock them from the inside.
‘Where are you going?’ the French girl asked, as James moved two paces to his left and peered between the slats of the roll-down shutters.
All the lights were on inside the store. There was a display area at either end of the shop’s frontage, and in between them a recessed area behind which were six glass doors, all locked.
‘There must be a way out of the back,’ James said.
He kept a wary eye on the line of policemen before squatting down, lifting the shutter quickly and ducking beneath it.
‘Where are you going?’ the French girl asked.
‘Don’t stare,’ James said anxiously.
He stood up slowly in the recessed area between the shutters and the door. It was a relief to see that everyone had left the store except the manager, who stood at the rear playing
Pro Evo Soccer
on an X-box.
James stepped gingerly across the tiles and pushed each of the six glass doors, but wasn’t surprised to find them locked. Cherubs are trained in lock picking using a mechanical lock gun, but it wasn’t something James carried routinely so he’d have to rely on his multitool to get inside.
A quick glance up towards the door handles provided some relief. The shop’s main security was provided by tough padlocks on the shutters. The doors also had deadlocks, but as with the shutters they were designed to be operated from the outside when the shop was closed up for the night. The two outer sets of doors were bolted from the inside, but the pair in the middle was designed to open electronically by swinging inwards. The current had been switched off, but there was no obvious physical barrier preventing them from being forced open.
James would be able to force them open as long as he could get his fingers between the two doors. The French girl blew cigarette smoke through the shutters as James crouched low and prepared to try.
‘Are you OK? Can you get inside?’
‘Don’t stare, for
Christ’s
sake,’ James said irritably.
There were hundreds of protestors and dozens of cops nearby and it was a minor miracle that he’d got this far without being spotted.
He pushed the toe of his boot against the bottom of one door, opening a small gap into which he hoped to wedge his fingers; but they were too chunky. To get around this James pushed the saw-toothed blade of his multitool into the gap between the two halves of the electronic door, then used it as a lever until the gap was big enough to squeeze in four fingers of his right hand.
The whole weight of the door pressed on his fingertips as he pulled and he couldn’t help making a noisy grunt. When the door had moved another centimetre he was able to get the fingers of his other hand into the gap, but it only budged when he shifted his whole bodyweight backwards.
The hydraulic pistons that usually operated the doors hissed in unison, but James’ sense of triumph only lasted for the half-second between the doors breaking open and the loud clattering sound as his fingers lost their grip and his entire body slammed the grille behind him.
As James recovered his balance and stood up, the French girl clambered under the shutter. Fellow protestors who’d heard the rattling shutters saw the whole thing.
Inside the store, the manager had dropped the X-box controller and vaulted over the cashier’s counter where he pressed the emergency alarm button.
‘Get out of my store,’ he shouted defiantly.
Unfortunately, sounding the alarm was the worst move he could have made. A couple of protestors were already following the French girl under one shutter, but everyone heard the alarm and the protestors were rejuvenated.
‘Oggy, oggy, oggy,’ someone shouted through a megaphone.
‘SAG, SAG, SAG!’ the protestors shouted back, as the remaining shutters opened and a scrum formed around the automatic doors.
Inside, James dragged the French girl by her arm and they ran together towards a door at the back of the shop.
‘It’s zee storeroom!’ she shouted, her French accent thickening as panic set in.
As James spun to exit, the manager blocked his path. If he’d known how much combat training James had done he wouldn’t have dared and James effortlessly grabbed the squat salesman by his company tie and bundled him sideways into a rack of battery chargers and mains adaptors.
‘Stay back or I’ll hurt you properly,’ James ordered, before setting off towards a fire exit sign on the opposite side of the store.