The Great Escape (5 page)

‘That’s not so bad,’ said Max.

‘. . . and threaten to kill their children,’ she finished.

‘Oh. That’s not so good,’ he admitted. ‘Still, they started it, kidnapping cats.’

‘I know, but their kids aren’t to blame, are they?’

‘No. I suppose not.’ Max didn’t look entirely convinced.

‘Maybe we should get in touch with the first lot,’ said Millie.

‘But if we are going to try and rescue the others, that’s direct action, is it not?’ asked Max.

‘Yes. I guess so.’ Millie thought for a moment. ‘There aren’t any phone numbers or other contact details. Let’s mail them both. We’ll see what we can find
out.’

‘No, don’t do that.’ Max stood up suddenly. ‘What if they are not real people, writing these things?’

‘You think fictional people are doing it? Can they even type?’

Max gave Millie a long, level stare. ‘Not fictional people, Miss Clever,’ he said, making her smirk. ‘You might wish to remember,’ he added haughtily, ‘that I am
speaking in my third language. I
mean
, what if the people at the laboratory are behind the sites? They are not real protesters, even though they are real people.’

‘Calm down,’ said Millie. ‘I’m on it. I’m going to set up a special account, which is remote from this computer. We’ll mail them from there, and they
won’t be able to track it back to us at all. And we’ll only use it for mailing this site, so nobody will be able to put two and two together.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘It’s just an expression – put two and two together. It means take little bits of evidence and jump to a big conclusion. But they won’t be able to match the person
mailing the site with the girl cleaning windows. I promise.’

Max still looked sceptical, but eventually shrugged his consent.

‘Now,’ Millie continued, ‘we need a user name, and a password – something no one else would know.’ She picked up her book, flipped to a random page, and picked the
first two nouns – overcoat and collar – that she found on page 35. ‘Right, that’s it. The username is “overcoat1”, and the password is “collar35”.
We’ll
remember that, but no one would be able to guess it.’

‘That’s pretty clever,’ said Max. ‘Have you done this kind of thing before?’

‘My dad’s really interested in codes and ciphers,’ replied Millie. ‘He wrote computer programs before he lost his job. He’s nuts about stuff like this. He’s
always going on about how people use stupid stuff for passwords – their friend’s name, or their pet’s, and their birthday, or someone they know’s birthday, you know, for the
number. Makes it easy for someone else to guess. But if you open a book at random, and pick two words, no one is going to guess those. Even if they get the book you were reading, what are the
chances they’ll come to the same page that you did, and pick out the same words?’

‘So, how will
you
remember them?’ asked Max, confused.

Millie shrugged. ‘I just will,’ she replied. ‘How do you remember your way around Ixelles?’

Max nodded slowly.

‘Right, that’s the account set up,’ Mille continued. ‘Now, the message.’

‘That should do, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so,’ Max agreed. ‘We don’t want to expose the truth straight away, though. We need to get the others out first, especially Celeste and Monty.’

‘I know. But we’ll have to offer them something, or they might not reply.’

‘OK, send it.’ Max was suddenly decisive.

Millie pressed the button. They waited for the ticking arrow to turn.
Message sent
flashed up on the screen. She did it again, and sent the same message to the second site.

‘Now what?’ asked Max.

‘Now I take this book back to the library and get you some cat food. You go for a wander, if you want to, or stay here, if you don’t. I’ll be back in an hour and we can see if
they’ve replied.’

Max decided to go and lie in the sunshine in Millie’s back garden. He had been warned by Millie about the nosy neighbour, so he found a tree to hide under and he lay
behind it, watching the stupid, stupid birds, and wondering about another meal. There were insects buzzing all around him and he thought about catching one of those, just for the practice. At this
point, a butterfly flapped into his ear and he sneezed. Probably there wasn’t much point trying to catch something that would just fly into you anyway. He lounged in the sun and began to
snooze.

Millie, meanwhile, waved cheerily at Mrs Ellis as she went out of the front door. She explained that she was just off to the library and showed her a bag full of books. This
was such an unquestionably respectable errand that Mrs Ellis waved back and didn’t interfere at all. Millie swapped her books for a new batch with only half her mind on the job. When she got
home, she would realise that she had read two of them before. She stopped off at the supermarket and bought dry cat food for Max, because the tins were much too heavy to carry. Then she saw some
little pouches of special cat food and bought one as a treat. She chose a cake for herself, so Max wasn’t the only one eating something nice, and hurried home. She unlocked the French
windows, but before she had even opened them fully, Max was snaking around her feet.

‘You must have sonar.’ Millie laughed. ‘Did the key make that much noise?’

‘Ah, it’s nothing. Everyone has something they are good at. Not all cats hear well, you know. There’s a cat near my home who is quite deaf. He will get hit by a car some day,
and it will be very sad. On the other hand, if your hearing is bad, it’s not so sensible to sit in the middle of the road.’

‘I brought presents. Look.’ Millie showed Max the dry cat food and the special pouch. ‘This was expensive, so I only got you one. But I’ll get you some more if it’s
nice. I wasn’t sure if you liked the dry stuff.’

‘You know, you are a very kind girl. And I will enjoy it, I am sure. I might still supplement it with the occasional bird or fish, however.’

‘Max, don’t steal fish from the goldfish pond next door but one. I’ll get in trouble.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, I will if they see you lying next to me in the middle of our garden and realise I’m the one who’s responsible for you.’

‘I am responsible for myself.’

‘Yes, well, you can tell my dad that when they come round demanding to know why we’re looking after a cat who visibly isn’t a stray and letting it eat fish out of their pond.
They’re really mean, that family.’

‘Very well. It is OK to eat their canary?’

‘That’s not even a bit funny.’

‘If they had had a canary, it would have been hilarious.’

‘Shush. Now, come on. Let’s go and check if we’ve got any new messages.’

Millie logged onto their new account. ‘Inbox: 2 new messages’, it read. She clicked on the first, which came from the first website.

‘They think we work there. This is great.’ She typed back:

She pressed ‘Send’ and a reply arrow appeared next to the mail she’d received. They waited in silence for a few seconds, and Millie was just about to click on their other mail,
when a new mail flashed back up.

‘And now we wait?’ asked Max.

‘Yes, I think so. Let’s look at our other mail.’ As Millie expected, it came from the
.org
protesters. Max was having some problems remembering who was who. She clicked
on the second mail and read:

‘What shall I put?’ she said, looking at the cat.

‘Say yes,’ he suggested.

‘OK.’ She typed:

The reply came back immediately:

‘That looks promising,’ said Millie, as she logged out of the account. ‘Let’s look for any more information we can find about the laboratory online. My dad’s not
going back there until next week, so we can’t find anything out from the building until then. Maybe I can try and find some more stuff here.’

‘We can’t do things any . . . faster?’ asked Max despondently.

‘I don’t think so,’ Millie apologised. ‘I know we need to help your friends. But I think we need to know more before we can rescue them. It’s going to be
difficult.’

‘And dangerous.’ Max nodded.

The Net search proved fruitless. The keywords ‘Haverham laboratory’ and ‘Vakkson’ only ever took them to animal rights protest pages, or angry chat-rooms where people
debated the pros and cons of animal testing.

‘I’m sorry, Max. I think we will have to wait for these guys to get back to us. Or for next week, when I can go out there with dad and see what I can find out.’

They sat, disconsolate, in the garden – Millie eating her cake and Max rolling grumpily on the lawn. Neither of them had the slightest idea that Millie’s dad and Bill had already
received a phone call from the lab, asking if they could go back the next day for some extra cleaning work. And Millie’s dad, of course, had no idea when he agreed that the man who had
telephoned him couldn’t have cared less about the state of the windows. He was just sure that one of the window cleaners must have seen his missing property and was determined to find out who
knew exactly what.

Arthur Shepard hadn’t ever intended to be what his children, had they known what his job entailed, would certainly have described as ‘a bad man’. He had never
been especially clever, and he had never worked especially hard, but the main reason he’d ended up with the life he had was because he didn’t especially care. About anybody, except
Arthur Shepard. He had seemed to, briefly, at various times in his life – for example, in job interviews, or when he met the woman he would later, only half-interested in the response, ask to
marry him, or when his children, whose names he could only sporadically remember, were born.

This was very much the pattern of his life: he didn’t work, as he claimed, to provide for his wife and children; he worked to get away from them. If a lie detector had been taped to his
forehead and he had been asked if he loved his family, he would have said yes, and it would have registered nothing. Arthur Shepard genuinely thought he loved his family, because he had no idea
what other people meant by the term ‘love’. But the truth was that if someone had asked him if he would rather see his children ill or be ill himself, see his wife unhappy or be unhappy
himself, he would always, always have chosen for them to suffer, and to remain unhurt himself. He wasn’t ashamed of this, because he didn’t realise that someone else might answer the
same question differently.

Nonetheless, Arthur had never expected to end up doing what he did now. He had moved from job to job over the years, and when he had begun to work for Vakkson, he hadn’t had any misgivings
about a company with such a poor record in welfare and research. It was simply a well-paid job. When this particular scheme had presented itself to him, he hadn’t hesitated before seizing the
opportunity with outstretched hands. The only problems that he had been able to see had been practical: where would they find the cats, where would they keep them, how would they transport them in
secrecy, how could they avoid the prying eyes of the bleeding hearts campaigning, if you could call it that, outside the front gate. As each problem was resolved, Arthur Shepard felt the buzz of a
job well done. The rights and wrongs of it simply never occurred to him.

In the first place, he had realised that they would need a reasonable number of cats for the development stage – several hundred, in fact. They couldn’t breed them, because cats take
too long to mature – they didn’t have months to sit around waiting for gambolling kittens to become adult cats. It would have to be theft. He had also realised that if they stole them
all from the Haverham area, the ensuing cat drought would not go unremarked by residents. Even if his staff broadened their search to the rest of the country, they ran the risk of being seen and
traced to the laboratory. The most sensible thing was to do it abroad, in a rented van, and keep as much distance between the project and the outside world as possible. Belgium had been the ideal
place to start – barely any distance from Calais and the Eurotunnel and car-ferries. The men transported the cats a dozen at a time – none of them was ever stopped, but if they had
been, it would have been such a minor offence, they would not have been in much trouble. The transport had been easy to arrange: transfer the cats from the van to a car – customs were on the
lookout for large-scale cigarette and alcohol smuggling, or illegal immigrants – they had no interest in a small car with tinted windows that contained only a few crates.

And, of course, his masterstroke had been to avoid any real harassment from the protesters, because Arthur Shepard owned them. Two men and three women were paid by him to keep the protest
happening, so no real protesters could feel it was a cause no one cared about and decide to get involved, like the meddling idiots they were. These employees (he liked to think of them as moles, as
he had always had a faint interest in spying) ran a mildly critical website, which copied everything that came into it to him. He believed there had been some sort of argument with a few meddling
idiots, who’d decided that his moles were insufficiently committed to their cause, and had set up a rival website, but it was so small-scale that it caused him no real anxiety. Everything was
running smoothly. Until yesterday.