New Guard (CHERUB) by Robert Muchamore

Author:Robert Muchamore [Muchamore, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781444914139
Publisher: Hachette Children's Group
Published: 2016-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

24. SMART

Five days later

James had spent the night at Kerry’s thirtieth-floor apartment in London’s Canary Wharf. She’d complimented him on his suit, helped pick his tie and told him he had nothing to worry about, before kissing him good luck. But James wasn’t a suit person. He hated the tie clamped around his neck. Smart shoes scraped the back of his ankles and the trousers itched.

It was peak rush hour as James came off the tube at Westminster. He made the short walk to the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall, picked up a lanyard at reception and got a security guard escort to an office on the seventh floor. The narrow room had one-way glass, looking over a large conference table in the next room.

‘You look the business,’ John Jones said, as he got out of an armchair and gave James a handshake, followed by a little man-hug. ‘Nervous?’

‘A little,’ James admitted. ‘First time I’ve presented an intelligence briefing. Feels like my first day at school.’

‘What’s to worry about?’ John teased. ‘It’s just the intelligence minister, the defence minister, a full colonel from the SAS, the heads of MI5 and MI6 and a few experts on the oil industry and Radical Islam. Coffee?’

‘Water,’ James said, clutching at his throat.

James shook a few hands as he stepped into the conference room, then practically swallowed his tongue when the intelligence minister came into the room accompanied by the deputy prime minister. It felt like he had a voice in his head yelling, This is a big deal, over and over, but he got a grip once he started speaking.

Since everyone in the room was senior enough to know that CHERUB existed, James gave a brief rundown on his mission in Sandy Green. He then explained how he’d spent the last few days researching the disappearance of Kam Yuen and Gordon Sachs.

‘The pair haven’t been sighted in the UK for over six months,’ James explained. ‘Over the past week I’ve pieced together evidence that Martin Jones – more commonly known as Uncle – paid to have Yuen and Sachs smuggled out of the UK on a privately owned launch and then transferred to a cargo vessel carrying recyclables to North Africa.

‘An electronic monitoring request to GCHQ and the CIA has enabled me to track down several e-mail references to faults at oil installations using OME equipment and controlled by Islamic State. Yuen and Sachs weren’t named in any of the communications, but it does seem that there is a network of engineers working for Islamic State who are capable of sourcing spare parts and repairing equipment at oil wells in Islamic State-controlled areas. Some of these people may be working willingly. Some, like Yuen and Sachs, appear to have been kidnapped and are being forced to work against their will.

‘I then worked with Morag Henderson. We made a list of eighty-three active oil wells that are controlled by groups affiliated to Islamic State, and are still believed to use OME pumps and control systems.

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