CHERUB: Man vs Beast (6 page)

‘James, I came in here to apologise again,’ Lauren groaned. ‘Bethany was right, I shouldn’t have bothered. I mean, I miss talking and hanging out with you James, but if you don’t believe a word I say, there’s not much I can do.’

‘I don’t hate you,’ James said. ‘Just …’

James felt angry with himself for warming to Lauren’s argument. He stood up and pointed to a spot of carpet, directly in front of himself.

‘Get over here,’ James said.

Lauren didn’t know if she was going to get a hug, a slap, or what, but she stepped forward.

‘You think you know people,’ James said, laying his hands heavily on Lauren’s shoulders. ‘I
thought
I knew you.’

Lauren felt a shiver down her back as James scowled. He didn’t so much look at her, but right through her. The intensity was a nasty reminder of how badly she’d hurt his feelings.

‘Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that Kyle said nothing about our briefing?’

Lauren sounded a little scared. ‘I don’t know anything about any mission, James. What’s going on? You’re freaking me out.’

James realised he was acting weird and let go.

‘Sorry,’ he said, running a hand through his hair. ‘It’s a pretty hefty coincidence that’s all. You’d better
not
be lying.’

Lauren slapped a hand against her side. ‘How many times do you want me to say it?’

‘Me and Kyle got called down to the mission preparation building by Zara Asker this afternoon,’ James explained, finally deciding to trust his sister. ‘It looks like we’ll be going on a mission in a week or so, but we need a third person to cover all the angles. Someone younger, preferably a girl. You were the obvious choice, but I told Zara I wasn’t having it.’

Lauren shook her head. ‘Thanks a bunch.’

‘Zara agreed that it was no good having us both on a mission if we weren’t getting along. She asked me and Kyle to think of another girl about your age who could go instead. So I thought about Bethany, and Victoria, and Melanie, and Chloe and that whole girlie crowd of yours … I kind of realised that I’d much rather be on a mission with you than with any of them.’

Lauren was flattered, but tried not to let it show.

‘Kyle’s been going all out to persuade me to make up with you,’ James continued. ‘That’s why I was so paranoid when you turned up in my doorway.’

‘Right,’ Lauren said, twisting her leg awkwardly and looking down at the floor. ‘So …’

‘So, there’s another briefing at eleven tomorrow. If you want to come on the mission with us, I guess that’d be OK.’

Next morning, Lauren and James bumped into each other as they headed towards mission preparation after second lesson. They spoke without really saying anything, carefully measuring every word so as not to open up wounds.

As usual, the state-of-the-art retina identification system that controlled access to mission preparation was out of order. A note pinned on the door explained a more primitive enforcement system:

ANY KID WE FIND WHO DOESN’T
BELONG IN HERE WILL BE MADE TO RUN
AROUND THE ASSAULT COURSE UNTIL THEY PUKE!

Zara’s spacious office was fifty metres down a gently curved corridor. She was in her mid-thirties, but seemed older, with a mumsy air even when sitting behind a desk that clearly belonged to someone important.

Sixteen-year-old Kyle Blueman slouched on a suede-covered sofa off to one side, with his boots propped on a glass-topped table. He was reading from a stack of vanilla-coloured folders that contained police surveillance reports. Kyle had always been on the small side, but a recent growth spurt, bleached hair and a dusting of facial hair meant he’d finally started to look something like his age.

‘Ah-ha,’ Zara said, smiling as James and Lauren stepped up to her desk. ‘Have the terrible twosome made up?’

Before James could answer, a little shriek came up from the floor beside the desk. Zara’s three-year-old son, Joshua, scrambled away from a spread of toys and stood in front of James, begging to be picked up.

‘James, James, James,’ the toddler gasped excitedly, as he got raised off the ground by his hero.

‘You’re getting
sooooo
big, I can hardly lift you up,’ James lied.

‘Sorry to inflict him on you, James,’ Zara grinned. ‘Our child minder buggered off to Corfu with her boyfriend without giving us any notice and Ewart’s had to take Tiffany to the doctor’s with a temperature.’

‘Nightmare,’ James laughed. ‘Remind me never to have kids.’

Zara nodded. ‘Whoever the new chairman turns out to be, I’m gonna be straight round their office demanding employee day-care.’

Little Joshua gave James a pleading look. ‘Play with me?’

James didn’t know what Zara had planned and looked uncertainly at her.

Zara put on her strict mummy voice. ‘James can play with you for
ten
minutes, but then he’s got to work.’

Joshua shook his head as James put him down. ‘No! Till bedtime.’

‘James
can’t
play until bedtime,’ Zara said. ‘He’s a big boy, he has things to do.’

James realised what a big boy he was as he sat on the carpet amidst Joshua’s toys, feeling like a bit of an idiot.

Kyle grinned. ‘You and Joshua make a cute pair.’

Lauren almost butted in with
They’ve got the same mental age
, but thought better of it when she remembered that James was still sore at her.

As James helped Joshua line up a row of toy cars for a race across the carpet, he looked up at Zara. ‘So is Joshua coming on the mission with us?’

Zara looked extremely anxious as she answered. ‘It was OK when he was a baby, but he can’t come on missions now he’s able to talk.’

James realised he’d mentioned the unmentionable when he looked around and saw Joshua’s face starting to screw up.

‘I want a holiday!’ Joshua squealed. ‘I want Mummy and James.’

Zara smiled diplomatically. ‘Sweetheart, I won’t be away for long. You’ll be here with Daddy and Tiffany …’

But Joshua had slipped beyond reason. ‘I want to go,’ he screamed, as he kicked out at a toy car and erupted into a full tantrum.

James looked awkwardly at Zara. ‘Sorry …’

Kyle gave James a thumbs-up sign and shouted over Joshua’s racket, ‘Way to stick your foot in it, dude.’

‘WANNNAAAAA GO WITH MUMMMY AND JAAAAAAAAAMES!’

‘Why don’t you sit down nicely and play cars with me?’ James asked hopefully.

‘You not my friend any more,’ Joshua wailed, as he rolled on to his back and started kicking his light-up trainers wildly in the air.

Kyle glanced at Lauren and summoned her with a sneaky finger.

‘Some people might say your brother’s a bit of an idiot,’ he whispered.

Lauren tried really hard not to smirk. ‘Don’t make me laugh, Kyle,’ she answered anxiously. ‘I was out of order and I’m still walking on eggshells.’

Kyle reached under the stack of folders and handed Lauren a stapled document.

‘Here, have a butcher’s at our mission briefing,’ he said. ‘That’ll wipe the smile off.’

***CLASSIFIED MISSION BRIEFING***
FOR KYLE BLUEMAN, JAMES ADAMS,
PLUS ONE OTHER (TBC)
THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED WITH A RADIO
FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION TAG
ANY
ATTEMPT TO REMOVE IT FROM THE MISSION
PREPARATION BUILDING
WILL SET OFF AN ALARM
DO
NOT
PHOTOCOPY OR MAKE NOTES

M
ISSION
B
ACKGROUND
– A
NIMAL
L
IBERATION

It’s often said that Britain is a nation of animal lovers. The first animal rights campaigners were British and in 1824 Britain’s parliament passed the world’s first animal protection laws.

Mainstream animal protection groups have always stayed within the law, working closely with governments, farmers, pet owners and other groups involved with animals. But in the late 1960s a new wave of radical animal rights campaigners came into being. Calling themselves Animal Liberationists, they believed that all human exploitation of animals should be stopped.

The liberationists argued that every thinking being should be treated as an equal. They claimed that there were no grounds for harming any living creature, just because it seems less intelligent than a human.

Liberationists opposed eating meat and fish, dairy production, fur farming, leather production, the wool industry, circuses, zoos, wildlife parks and the use of animals in scientific experiments. Many liberationists even believed that keeping animals as pets was an unacceptable form of exploitation.

With few supporters and little money, some liberationists decided that the best way to help animals and get their radical points of view noticed was by taking non-violent direct action: organising raids and freeing animals from captivity.

Most of the early liberationists were university students and professors, so it was natural that their first actions were staged on university campuses, freeing animals that were being used for scientific experiments.

These first raids by a few dozen activists were an extraordinary success. The media loved telling stories of idealistic youngsters breaking into laboratories and freeing defenceless animals from cruel scientists. The activists took photographs of the mangled and disturbed animals they had rescued and the dreadful conditions in which they frequently lived.

Newspapers printed horrific photographs taken by activists during the raids. They showed animals that had been subjected to major brain operations without anaesthetic, or had had their eyes burned out in tests on the toxicity of household chemicals.

The public was shocked by its first glimpse into the unseen world of animal experimentation and the liberationists’ campaign gained significant popular support.

Over the next few years, the number of liberationists taking part in direct action grew from single figures to several hundred. Hunt saboteurs disrupted fox hunts and hare coursing events, anti-fur campaigners released tens of thousands of animals from fur farms and launched advertising campaigns that made wearing animal fur socially unacceptable.

The publicity given to these early British liberationists inspired others around the world. By 1980 animal liberation was a global movement, with activist groups taking direct action throughout mainland Europe, Australia and North America.

But after their early success, things became much tougher for animal liberationists.

While the British government introduced new controls on animal experimentation, it also passed laws that made it easier to send activists to prison and asked the police to create special task forces to crack down on the liberationists’ illegal activities.

Hunters, scientists and fur farmers began to defend their livelihoods vigorously. Many laboratories installed hi-tech security systems that made breaking in as hard as cracking a bank vault.

The scientists also won back a lot of public sympathy by hiring public relations experts, who emphasised advances in medicine that would not have happened if new drugs and vaccines hadn’t been tested on animals. Activists who broke into laboratories, vandalised equipment and released animals now frequently stood accused of wrecking valuable research that could have saved thousands of human lives.

But most importantly, the liberationist campaign lost its shock value. Media interest waned, as people who were horrified by their first sighting of pictures of animal experiments became blasé the fourth or fifth time they saw them. And while the public was sympathetic when liberationists campaigned against activities that most of them did not take part in – animal experiments, wearing fur and fox hunting – support fell dramatically when liberationists targeted more common activities such as eating meat, drinking milk, fishing and wearing leather.

These setbacks caused a crisis within the animal liberation movement. Many of the less committed activists buckled under police pressure and gave up the fight. Some were arrested and imprisoned for up to ten years on charges of theft, arson and criminal damage. Others became radicalised by the setbacks and decided that using violence was the only way forwards.

All of the early liberationists were against violence. Their argument was simple: humans and animals are equal. Therefore, violence to humans is just as unacceptable as violence towards the animals they were campaigning to protect.

But a new band of more radical liberationists put forward a different argument: if humans and animals are equal, then is it not right to kill or threaten one human in order to save the lives of many animals?

Ryan Quinn was one of the first animal liberationists. Born in Belfast in 1952, Quinn refused to eat meat from the age of ten when his father’s car hit and killed a sheep during a family outing.

Soon after becoming a student at Bristol University he took part in what many regard as the first large-scale liberationist raid, when sixty-eight rabbits were freed from a laboratory conducting electric shock experiments on their spinal cords.

Quinn was arrested, and while the police dropped charges for lack of evidence, he was one of twelve student liberationists expelled from the university.

A quiet figure, who was happier working in the background than making grand speeches, Quinn steadily got to know almost all of the hundred or so hardcore activists within the British animal liberation movement. He gained a reputation as an expert in planning sophisticated raids and was involved in setting up camps that trained hundreds of liberationist volunteers from all around the world.

In September 1984, Ryan Quinn was released from prison after serving a three-month sentence for stealing videotapes of animal experiments while working undercover at a Royal Navy research laboratory. Quinn had used his time inside to consider the future of animal liberation and decided that its big problem was a lack of focus and organisation.