CHERUB: Man vs Beast (25 page)

Adelaide realised that this was a glitch in the AFA’s carefully laid plan. She grabbed a small key out of her jeans and undid the cuffs before pointing at James. ‘Try any funny stuff and the boy will shoot you.’

A couple of studio employees had ventured out on to the first-floor fire escape and one of them filmed bravely with a camcorder. James waved the gun at them before jumping on the thickly padded rear seat of the giant bike and locking his arms around Mark’s waist.

‘All set,’ James said.

Adelaide and Nick roared off first. She hit sixty miles an hour on the slip road out of the lot, before taking a quick glance over her shoulder and surging on to a lightly trafficked section of dual carriageway. James had ridden dirt bikes across tracks in Idaho, but he’d never experienced a bike at high speed.

The AFA had deliberately provided tight clothes, but even on a touring bike with a big screen to prevent buffeting, his trousers flapped like crazy and he struggled to breathe as the two Hondas doubled the 60mph speed limit.

The bikes kept in close formation as James glanced back for any sign of a police car. According to Jo’s plan, the nearest station was fifteen minutes away, but you could never be certain that there wasn’t a patrol car somewhere closer.

Dodging between traffic, with the wind rushing and the blur of tarmac a few centimetres from his boot was one of the most frightening experiences of James’ life. He wasn’t wearing properly padded motorcycle leathers and had no idea how much experience Mark had of riding a heavy bike on a damp road. He tried not to remember the horrific images of skin grafts and shattered bones he’d seen in his motorbike magazines, but they kept popping into his head as the sweat drizzled inside his helmet.

Mercifully, the trip was short. Mark and Adelaide covered eight miles in under five minutes, before pulling off for a final stretch at saner speeds, shooting along a deserted side road past boarded-up warehouses.

They ended up at an abandoned container terminal on the edge of the River Tyne. Two vans and two cars awaited them. One van had its rear doors open with Jo and Kyle sitting on the ledge. Kyle slid out a metal ramp and the passengers climbed off the bikes, before the riders drove them inside and cut the engines.

The helmets and riding gloves were tossed in after the bikes, then Kyle and James turned the metal ramp on to its edge and shoved it noisily back inside. Jo pointed her gun at Cobb and ordered him to walk towards a blue van parked twenty metres away.

James checked nobody was within earshot before whispering to Kyle, ‘I’ve got Mark’s gun. Do you reckon we can take them down?’

‘Not a chance,’ Kyle said, shaking his head. ‘Jo’s got a gun, so’s Adelaide. There’s another guy with a gun in the van around the corner. Tom’s up on the roof keeping lookout.’

‘Shit,’ James muttered. ‘Even if we
could
pull that off, it’d be a bloodbath.’

A police helicopter blasted overhead. Everyone looked up in shock, but it was flying high and fast, probably heading towards Tyneside Studios.

Mark was walking towards the boys. ‘Heart missed a beat there,’ he grinned, as Kyle slammed the van doors.

‘Are you driving this one, Kyle?’ James asked.

Kyle nodded, before pulling James into a hug. ‘See you,

dude.’

‘Keep safe,’ James said, as he felt Kyle slip a piece of paper into his pocket.

A blue van with Jo at the wheel and Nick Cobb handcuffed in the back roared past, with spray shooting off its back wheels.

Mark jangled a set of car keys in front of James. ‘Better shift,’ he said. ‘Adelaide’s changed already. We need to get to the safe house.’

As Kyle stepped into the driver’s seat of the van with the motorbikes in the back, James and Mark strode briskly towards a small Renault parked around the corner. Adelaide gave a quick wave as she skimmed past in a Mini. Tom had jumped off the roof as soon as he’d seen the hostage leave and Kyle drove away with him a few seconds later.

Mark opened the back door of the Renault. He kicked off his shoes and began a quick change into a tracksuit and white canvas pumps. James stripped off his punk gear, revealing a white Nike tennis shirt with blue shorts underneath, then took a pair of white trainers out of a bag containing rackets and balls on the back seat of the car.

The clothes, shoes and sunglasses they’d used in the raid were all stuffed into a black bin liner that would be incinerated later. Mark told James to zip the handgun inside a plastic case covering a tennis racket.

James glanced at his watch again as they pulled out of the dockyard: 12:07. Thirteen minutes earlier they were masked punks waving guns around in a TV studio. Now they had different wheels and looked like a father and son heading off for a knockabout on the local courts.

James, Mark and Adelaide’s role in the kidnapping was over, but Jo had laid down strict rules for their conduct. They’d worn disguises, but there was a chance that someone might have recognised them on TV and she wanted the trio out of the limelight until the operation was complete. She’d ordered them to hole up together in a safe house where they could keep an eye on each other. They weren’t supposed to go outside, or make any attempt to communicate with friends or family.

The Mini and the Renault arrived a few minutes apart, parking outside a terraced house in the coastal town of Whitley Bay. Each floor was a small, furnished flat. James raced upstairs to the top flat and dumped his overnight pack before rushing towards the toilet. Unfortunately the door was bolted.

‘Shan’t be a minute,’ Adelaide yelled.

Mark deadlocked the door at the bottom of the stairs before striding through to the living-room and flipping on News 24.

‘We’re the top story,’ he yelled happily.

James was torn between needing to pee and wanting to watch the news, but Adelaide was already coming out. She flicked water off her hands before grabbing James and surprising him with a hug.

‘You were bloody great, kid,’ she said, as her lips smacked his cheek. ‘Bloody great.’

‘Thanks – you weren’t bad yourself,’ James grinned, as he bolted the bathroom door.

There were towels on the rail and a grubby sliver of soap on the sink. So they were clearly borrowing someone’s home, and it wasn’t a palace.

James grabbed the piece of paper out of his pocket. He’d been driven out of the farm in the back of a van and still had no clue where it was, but Kyle was driving so he had to know where he was going. The were just four words in Kyle’s immaculate handwriting:
Hummingbird Farm near Rothbury
.

It was the information James had hoped for, but getting it to the outside world wasn’t going to be easy. The AFA plan called for James to stay in the flat for twenty-eight hours, when Mark would drive him to the station and put him on a train back towards Bristol. James didn’t have his mobile, the door at the bottom of the stairs was deadlocked and Mark and Adelaide both had guns.

James reckoned he’d be able to take Mark and Adelaide out and make a run for it, but he’d be putting Kyle in danger if word of his betrayal got back to Hummingbird Farm.

Once he’d peed, James went into the living-room to find the TV turned up loud. Mark and Adelaide sat on the sofa and an excitable newsreader spoke over footage from Tyneside Studios. The pictures showed the kidnapping, with TV CHEF KIDNAPPED rolling across the bottom of the screen.

Although the two camera operators on the stage floor had panicked and stopped filming, the Wendy and Otis Show’s director had remote cameras positioned around the studio and kept his show on air, cutting expertly between different angles as the drama unfolded.

‘That’s gotta hurt,’ James grinned, as he watched a replay of his mercifully unrecognisable self punching Otis Fox’s lights out.

Then the camera cut to a close-up of Gaynor, crying in her wheelchair as Mark’s gun hovered in her face. The newsreader spoke sternly over the images.

‘
These pictures were taken forty minutes ago inside Tyneside Studios near Newcastle. TV chef Nick Cobb was kidnapped live on air and taken away on the back of a motorcycle at high speed. Police currently have no idea as to Cobb’s whereabouts and have mounted a search for the three kidnappers.

‘The Animal Freedom Army have claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and have issued a statement saying that they will run a live webcast with Nick Cobb, starting at one p.m
.’

*

The drive from the banks of the Tyne to Hummingbird Farm took just under an hour. Two vans travelling at speed in a rural area might have raised eyebrows, so the one with Jo driving and Nick Cobb held at gunpoint moved quickly, while Kyle and Tom took the scenic route.

A stocky woman called Chase opened the gate for Kyle when they arrived. She had an assault rifle slung over her shoulder and as far as Kyle could tell, this was the only automatic weapon in the AFA’s small arsenal.

‘Take the van around the back and park beside the barn,’ Chase ordered, then she grinned. ‘Better get a move on, they’re about to start the webcast.’

Kyle’s heart was pounding as he stepped out of the van, making a point of keeping hold of the keys.

‘Excited?’ Tom smirked, as the two lads stopped by the back of the van and looked at each other.

‘Half excited, half scared,’ Kyle said uneasily.

They stepped close and kissed. Kyle’s feelings were all tangled up: Tom was great fun, he had a great body and was everything Kyle wanted in a boyfriend – apart from the difficult to ignore fact that he was one of the bad guys.

‘We should go on holiday together when this is over,’ Tom said. ‘Just you and me. I’ve got enough cash for a couple of cheap flights down to Greece and we can go camping for a couple of weeks. Do you think your mum could handle that?’

Tom’s plan made Kyle sad. There was nothing in the world he wanted to do more than bum around the Med with Tom, but it wasn’t going to happen.

‘If she won’t let me, I’ll run away with you,’ Kyle said.

‘I’ll book tickets when we get back,’ Tom said, before glancing at his watch. ‘Wanna go watch Viv’s TV debut?’

The studio lights made the dining-room unbearably hot. The ancient electrics inside the house weren’t up to the demands of all the equipment and bundles of cable ran out through the windows to a diesel generator standing on the back lawn.

Two women manned the cameras. Jay sat at a fold-out table, in front of three screens and enough buttons to launch a space shuttle. He yelled orders at a couple of teenage flunkeys who were making last-minute adjustments to the lights and microphones hanging over the tiny set.

Viv stood centre stage. Tall, young and well spoken, he looked every bit the aspiring TV presenter, except for the black Balaclava over his head. Jo handed identical Balaclavas to Kyle and Tom, before shaking their hands.

‘Keep ’em on in the studio, just in case a camera turns around and catches you,’ Jo said. ‘Bang-up job this morning, by the way.’

‘Where’s Cobb?’ Tom asked.

‘He’s in the other room. I’d prefer him not to see the set until we’re up and running. I want the camera to film his reaction when he first sees the cage.’

‘So, who can pick up this broadcast?’ Kyle asked.

‘It’s going out live over the Internet. The public site might get swamped if too many people try to download our video, but we’ve just sent all the big media organisations access codes for a high-bandwidth website, which guarantees they’ll be able to download broadcast-quality video.’

‘Can they trace our signals from the Internet back to here?’ Kyle asked.

Jo shook her head and smiled reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry yourselves, boys. I’ve been working on the technical side of this for over three years. We’re sending the images from here via an encrypted satellite link and then uploading them to web servers spread all over the world. There is a risk that someone will shut our servers down and stop us broadcasting, but the only way we’ll physically get caught in here is if the police followed us or someone tips them off.’

‘OK, let’s have some quiet,’ Jay yelled, ‘on air in five, four, three, two, one.’

*

‘Hello,’ Viv stuttered, tripping over his first few words as he imagined the thousands – perhaps millions – of people watching the AFA webcast. ‘Welcome to Liberation TV, broadcasting live over the Internet from …’ Viv paused for effect, ‘Well, maybe I’d better not tell you that.

‘Today’s show is brought to you by the Animal Freedom Army, who believe in ending all forms of cruelty towards living creatures and using an animal-free lifestyle to create an environmentally sustainable future for our planet.’

Jay flipped the switch and Liberation TV cut to a computer graphic:

CRUELTY FACT N
^o
1.

Last year, 600,000,000 sheep, cows, pigs and chickens were bred to be slaughtered and fed to domestic cats and dogs.

The vegetables fed to those farm animals would have been enough to feed every malnourished child on the planet.

‘But you’re not here for facts,’ Viv said brightly, when Jay cut back to him. ‘You’re here to meet our very special guest, Mr Nick Cobb.’

Cobb was led on to the set, dressed only in a knee-length T-shirt with a picture of a rabbit on it.

‘Take a seat and let’s hear a big round of applause.’

A few dabs of applause broke out across the dining-room, as Viv and Nick sat on the trendy chairs.

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ Viv said, grinning sarcastically beneath his Balaclava. ‘What would you like us to call you? Cobb, Nick, Nicky Poos, Cobbykins?’

‘I’m not playing your games,’ Cobb said angrily. ‘I’m being held against my will and you’ll all be caught and locked up.’

The soft California twang had disappeared from Cobb’s accent and he sounded like he wanted to put up a fight.

‘Nick, you are but one man,’ Viv sneered. ‘Billions of your fellow creatures are being held in much nastier conditions than this room in farms and laboratories around the world.’

‘Give over, you pompous prig,’ Nick said dismissively.

Viv broke out laughing. ‘Cobby
darling
, I know you’ve been on a lot of chat shows recently talking about that dreary autobiography. One of the things that you
don’t
mention in your book is your Cobb Cleanse range of kitchen cleaning products. Sadly they’re not available here in the UK, but I understand they’re quite a hit across the pond.’