Free CHERUB: The General by Robert Muchamore Page A

us the tape, Bethany,’ Lauren snorted.
    While Lauren pinned the guard to the floor and bound her wrists and ankles, Bethany spotted a marker pen beneath a whiteboard used for the security team’s shift rotas and used it to draw a smiley face on the bucket.
    When Lauren saw it she started laughing so hard that she could hardly breathe. ‘Oh god,’ she snorted. ‘I’m gonna die.’
    Bethany wasn’t laughing quite so hard, but still had trouble standing up straight as she wrapped a giant length of tape over the top of the bucket and looped it under the woman’s armpits so that it wouldn’t come off.
    ‘I’m such a bitch,’ Bethany shouted triumphantly. ‘Don’t you just love being evil?’
    ‘You can’t leave that on,’ Lauren said, trying to be serious between the howls of laughter. ‘She could be pregnant, or have asthma or something.’
    ‘Spoilsport,’ Bethany moaned, snapping a picture on her mobile before pulling off the bucket.
    The woman let out a piercing scream before Bethany made a proper gag the way she’d been trained: a loosely wrapped ball of tape that would depress the tongue but not induce choking and a single strip of tape over the mouth, being careful not to block the nose.
    ‘We shouldn’t laugh,’ Lauren said, as she pulled out her phone and tried to calm down slightly before calling Rat. ‘But that bucket looked so damned funny.’
    The guard was spluttering words into her gag and Lauren was pretty sure that they weren’t nice ones.
    ‘What’s so funny?’ Rat asked, when he answered his phone.
    ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Lauren sniffed, rubbing a tear from her eye. ‘How you doing?’
    ‘It’s below freezing out here, so we’ve dragged all the guards into the shed under the radar tower. Now we’re waiting on you.’
    ‘I’m sitting on the last guard,’ Lauren said. ‘So get your worthless male butts inside, it’s time to trash this joint!’

10. DIALOGUE
     
    ‘The question is, can we do business?’ Rich said, as he pulled a set of long velvet curtains and invited Bradford to sit at a circular table set in the hotel suite’s bay window. James took a bottle of mineral water from the mini-bar and handed it to the bodyguard who was still down on the floor. He accepted it grudgingly, before swishing it around his mouth and spitting bloody water out on the carpet.
    ‘Where’d you learn your tricks?’ he asked, as James gave him an arm up.
    ‘My dad was a Thai kickboxing champion,’ James lied. ‘Taught me moves almost from the day I could walk.’
    ‘I could have had you, kid,’ he said, half smiling as he stared down at his dislocated thumb. ‘Just never expected it.’
    James didn’t want another ruck, but wasn’t impressed by the attempt at camaraderie from a man who’d patronised and pulled a gun on him five minutes earlier.
    ‘All these phone calls, all this mystery,’ Bradford said, as he stared at Rich across the table. ‘You said something about a cache of Russian weapons.’
    Rich grabbed a pair of ice cubes and dropped them into his whisky tumbler before nodding. ‘There’s still plenty of IRA kit floating around, but I can also get better things: plastic explosive from eastern Europe, Italian grenades, Israeli machine guns … The problem is it all costs and judging by that car you came in, you and your little bunch of anarchist friends aren’t exactly swimming in money.’
    The conversation was just getting interesting, but James’ priority was to plant the tracking device inside something belonging to Rich. Busting Rich before anything was known about his organisation would be like cutting off a weed at the stem: if you don’t destroy the roots, it just grows back in a different shape.
    ‘Mind if I take a leak?’ James asked.
    Rich turned and smiled. He clearly found the green-haired thug amusing. ‘Go for it,’ he nodded.
    ‘Don’t lock the door,’ the bodyguard warned.
    That wasn’t ideal, but James pushed the bathroom door