The Great Escape (9 page)

‘Well, I must have failed to pay attention,’ said Max serenely. ‘Anyway, you appear to have the idea. So I escaped from the cage, which was easy, because, as you noticed, that
man was not very good at his job. I hid behind him, and snuck through the door as he did. The second door opened, and then a noise sounded, like an alarm. So I ran straight past him and down the
stairs: the stair door was propped open with a fire extinguisher.’

‘Simple, but brilliant,’ Millie congratulated him.

Max shrugged modestly. ‘I thought so.’

‘So,’ Millie pondered, as she would a tricky equation, ‘the alarm only sounded when the second door opened. Had you heard it go off before?’

‘No, never. The lab techs used to come in and out all the time, and it never went off. To be honest, when it did go off, I was pretty . . .’ He looked pained. ‘Is the word I
want here “alarmed”?’

Millie laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is that your first pun?’

‘And my last. I guarantee it.’

‘Did the lab techs come in one at a time, or together?’

Max tried to think. ‘One by one. I am sure of it.’

‘Then I think there must be a motion sensor there that picks up two people in the lock, well, one person, one cat, instead of just the usual one. And it’s on the outer door, so that
suggests they’re more worried about people coming
in
than cats going
out
. That’s useful to know. And the door to the stairs would normally be shut, because they all have
signs on – at least all the ones I saw do – saying they’re fire doors, and they have to be kept shut. So someone must have just propped it open to get some air. It was hot that
day, wasn’t it?’

‘The windows don’t open on the top floor. There was no fresh air in there.’

‘That makes sense, then. You were pretty lucky.’

‘And very skilled,’ Max reminded her.

‘That too. This is all stuff we need to think about for the rescue. I think it has to be at night – we couldn’t get that lucky again. And so much for leaving a window open and
hoping for the best. I was really hoping we could get in through the rubbish room, where I spent most of this afternoon. But it’s no good – I saw that woman lock it from the inside. We
can’t do it on our own,’ she declared. ‘We’ll need those protesters to help us.’

‘Will they?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see. They raid laboratories sometimes – I’ve seen it on the news. We just need to persuade them to do Haverham,’ she
said thoughtfully.

‘And soon,’ Max reminded her. ‘Monty and Celeste, they are waiting for me.’

‘Yes, soon. I think we’re going to have to pretend to be disgruntled former employees with insider information.’

‘That is virtually the truth, apart from the bit where you only worked outside the building, and I was there against my will, and not getting paid.’

‘OK, I’m going to think about it tonight. You go outside in case those men come back. We’ll reconvene tomorrow morning,’ Millie said decisively.

‘Reconvene?’ Max looked perplexed.

‘Meet again.’

‘Why do you not say that?’

‘I dunno. “Reconvene” sounds better. More military.’ She looked slightly embarrassed.

‘You want to sound like a soldier?’ asked the cat.

Millie looked him squarely in his luminous eyes. ‘Isn’t this a fight?’

‘Of course.’ Max skimmed past Millie’s arm as she reached up to open the window for him. ‘I’m glad it was you I ran into,’ he whispered, rubbing his head on
her wrist.

‘Me too. I mean, I don’t really wish you’d been another cat,’ she replied, and she ran her fingers through the velvet fur between his ears.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to bring you a nice dead bird, as a gift?’ he asked in a kindly voice.

‘Scram, pesky cat.’ She rolled her eyes at him, laughing again. ‘See you tomorrow.’ But he had already disappeared, eaten alive by the shadows around him. It wasn’t
cold, but still Millie shivered, and shut the window fast, hugging her arms around her.

Millie spent the night watching TV with her dad, only half-concentrating on the programmes, and thinking hard. She went to bed and slept badly, jumping awake as she dreamed of
Arthur Shepard in her house, going through her things and combing her computer for secrets. She wished Max had spent the night indoors, and as she fell back to sleep, she dreamed that he had been
caught again, stuffed back in a box and taken away.

She was very glad when it was morning, although she felt as tired as she had been when she went to bed. She looked suspiciously at the computer, still seeing Arthur Shepard’s nightmare
fingers on its keyboard. She opened it, and the screen flashed up exactly as she had left it, the clock showing the time she had last used it for just a second before it woke up properly and
remembered which day it was. Millie tried to shake the bad dreams from her head – look, here was proof that the computer hadn’t been touched, and that no one had been near it but her.
Still, she went online to check her mail with a twitchy feeling in her stomach. At least, she thought that’s what it was, but it could just have been a really fervent desire for toast.

There was only one message this time, from the direct-action protesters:

Millie finally heeded the call to toast, and went downstairs.

Her dad had gone out early, and left a big note on the kitchen table telling her to eat something sensible and that he’d be back around four. Millie went to the front door and pulled the
security chain across. Then she went to check the window locks and fastened each one. She wasn’t taking any chances if those men had been able to get in yesterday.

She found Max at the French windows and let him in before bolting those shut, too.

‘Are you all right?’ asked the cat, noticing the circles beneath her eyes.

‘Slept badly,’ she explained. ‘I need to get on with this plan, because I won’t sleep well until I do.’

‘You
should
be worried,’ Max said. ‘I am, too.’

‘Great,’ Millie sighed. ‘OK, here’s what I think we should do. We’ve got to aim to get into the laboratory on Wednesday. The protesters can help us then – I
checked our mail first thing this morning. We’ll need an excuse so Dad doesn’t notice we’re missing. I don’t know how we pull that one off. I might have to arrange to go to
a friend’s, someone who’s on holiday or something. We’ll bike out to the lab – it’s only about three miles away, if we go cross-country – which will be dark, so
that might be a bit dangerous, but we’re less likely to be seen, which is good. We’ll meet the protesters at eleven o’clock – at least, that’s what they said in their
email. That should be late enough for all the staff to have gone, and it will have been dark for a couple of hours. Now, presuming they agree, we go to the building with some of them, while the
rest keep an eye out for the guard and the dog.’ Max bristled. ‘Or guards and dogs,’ she continued. ‘I don’t know how many there are. We need the protesters to help us
cut the power to the building – that’s the big problem.’

‘Why do we need to do that?’

‘Otherwise, the alarms will go off and the cameras will record us. So, then we race upstairs, and go into the lab—’

‘Wait,’ interrupted Max. ‘How?’

‘How what?’

‘How do we get into the lab if the electricity is off? The doors are automatic.’

Millie looked at him, horrified.

‘Of course.’ She slumped down in her chair, crushed. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. If the electricity stays on, the alarms will pick us up. And so will
the cameras. And if the power is cut, the doors won’t open. Could we break them open?’ she asked hopefully. ‘I don’t suppose they’re made of thin glass or
anything?’

‘No, they are metal, with a thick round window in the top half of each one.’

‘OK.’ They sat in silence for several minutes, Millie biting her lip furiously.

‘Would it have helped if I’d said they were made of paper? Thin tissue paper?’ asked Max.

‘Are they?’

‘No.’

‘Then no,’ she said sadly. ‘It wouldn’t have helped. I mean, the planning would have been easier, but the plan itself probably wouldn’t have been much
good.’

‘Stop,’ said Max softly. ‘You shouldn’t be sad. We have done amazing things. You have rescued me and kept me safe. You have seen the inside of that man’s office.
You have made a plan, which is very good and just needs a little refining.’

‘It’s not good. It’s rubbish,’ Millie wailed. ‘How can we open the doors and not set off the alarms? We don’t stand a chance.’

‘We will mail our co-conspirators. Perhaps they can help.’

Millie looked cheered at the prospect of something concrete to do. She ran upstairs with Max close on her tail, and clicked on her inbox. She replied to the protesters’ earlier email.

She sent the message, and they sat and gazed at the screen.

‘This is silly,’ Millie said suddenly. ‘They won’t mail if we’re sitting here watching. They probably have jobs, after all, and can only email sometimes.
Let’s go and do something else. We’ll check every hour.’ The two of them went back downstairs and Max lay under the windows, basking in the sun, while Millie tried to concentrate
on a book. She made lunch, and Max played with some cat food, obviously wishing it would put up more of a fight. They watched a film, and tried to distract themselves from watching the clock.

On the fourth check, there was a reply.

‘What?’ Millie exploded. She typed back:

This time, they replied immediately:

‘What does
that
mean?’ asked Max, rubbing his head fondly on Millie’s arm, like a normal cat. He had been worried by her today – she seemed like such a calm,
sensible girl: she hadn’t shrieked when he first spoke to her, she hadn’t gone crazy when the house had been searched, she hadn’t ever seemed even slightly upset about any of
this, only annoyed that he should have been taken from his home, and determined to help him. Then suddenly the thought of not being able to break and enter into a secure facility at his request had
left her frustrated, even panicky. He was touched.

Millie read the second sentence out loud, paused for a moment as she thought about it, and said, ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

The week dragged by endlessly. Millie tried to kill time at the library, looking for more information about Arthur Shepard than she had been able to discover online, but she
had no luck. His address seemed to be unregistered everywhere. She was bored and nervous at the same time, which was making her twitchier than ever – she couldn’t remember how it felt
not to wake up in a cold sweat after a horrible dream had left her sickened. She wished there was more they could do, but she and Max had been over the map of the building and the plan for the
break-in a dozen times. She demolished all the books she had borrowed and headed off to the library to keep herself busy while Max was out eating hapless woodland creatures.

As she was replacing her books and retrieving new ones, her eye was caught by the new signs on the wall, one of which told her where the microfilm section was. She had never been to that part of
the library and wandered in for a look around. There was nobody there at all – it seemed that the newspaper archives were not a particular draw in Haverham. She scanned the shelves, and had a
thought – why had the newspaper which she had found in the rubbish been missing its middle pages? What had been on it that one of the lab technicians had wanted to keep? Probably a crossword
puzzle, she thought irritably. No – that couldn’t be it, because those were on the back page. She tracked down the microfilm of the correct date and paper, and searched through it. She
found the missing part, which was a double sheet from the middle – four pages of news. Well, three pages of news, because the first page was a huge picture of a supermodel wearing virtually
nothing. Millie looked around hastily. She hoped nobody thought she was weird, looking at pictures of naked women, and she flicked quickly to the next page. The other three pages were boring
business news – software and telecom share prices up, clothing retail and toy manufacturer share prices down. Millie wasn’t entirely sure how shares worked, but she couldn’t
believe that the lab techs had cared much more than she did. They must have wanted the picture of the girl. She put the microfilm away, annoyed.

‘It was a good idea, though,’ Max consoled her, when she grumbled about it later.

‘
I
thought so,’ she sighed, thinking of her fruitless search through all those bags of rubbish, her attempts to get onto the third floor of the laboratory, her hopes of
getting in through the rubbish room, and now this. She hoped her ideas would start working out soon. The next day, in fact, when they would put stage one of their plan into action.

Millie told her dad that she would be staying at Sarah’s on Wednesday.

‘I’ll need to speak to her parents,’ was all he said.

‘Sure,’ she replied anxiously. ‘I’ll get them to ring you.’

She thought for a while. When Max appeared from the garden, she said, ‘How good a liar are you?’

‘The best, of course. Why?’ Max’s face fell, as he realised suddenly that he might just have talked himself into trouble.

‘I have an idea . . .’ Millie said.

‘Just going to the library, Dad,’ she called out as she swung her leg over her old bicycle and shoved her bag in the basket.

‘Ow,’ muttered the bag.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

She rode to the woods which were on the way to the laboratory. They were unfenced, and it would, as far as she could see, be easy to get through them, even in the dark, although she would
definitely need a torch. And spare batteries. She added these to her mental list. She pedalled away to a nearby field, propped her bike up against the fence, and looked around to check that they
couldn’t be overheard by passing dog-walkers or farmers.