Free Divine Madness by Robert Muchamore

him look any older than you.’
    Kerry looked up with a needy little expression that James recognised as her   I want you to kiss me   face. There were more than a dozen cherubs and staff sitting at the next table, so it wasn’t exactly discreet, but James realised it might be his only opportunity in months.
    They both leaned forward. It started off with a standard kiss, but they got quite excited and James ended up with his hands around the back of Kerry’s head and his T-shirt dragging through the runny yolk of a fried egg.
    It took a barrage of bread rolls and butter pats to break them apart.
    ‘Get a room,’ Kyle shouted.
    Lauren deepened her voice, mocking James. ‘I don’t know why you keep going on about me fancying Kerry. We’re just good friends now.’
    James and Kerry both smiled guiltily at their mates before looking back at each other.
    ‘So, I’ll try and keep in touch,’ James said. ‘You know, e-mail and that.’
    Kerry held her mug of tea up to her face, looking sad. ‘Yeah.’
    *
     
    Six weeks of getting up early for ACC training with a full day of school afterwards had left James bruised, aching and run down. He usually struggled to sleep on aeroplanes, but this one had sleeper seats that reclined into flat beds and the attentive staff fetched you pillows and a duvet as soon as you showed any sign of nodding off.
    When he was awake, James played on his PSP, ate junk food, chatted to Abigail about the Australian lifestyle and skimmed some books John had got hold of on cults and mind control. The books looked stuffy, but James was amazed by some of the facts and got quite interested.
    He’d never devoted any thought to cults, but had always assumed you had to be a whack job to join one. According to the books, the truth was different.
    People recruited into cults tended to be thoughtful and intelligent. Their backgrounds were normal, although they were usually recruited at a time in their lives when they were lonely and ill at ease with everyday life. Typical cult joiners were people who had recently divorced, or lost their jobs, university students living away from home for the first time and older people who’d recently been widowed.
    According to one of the books there were 7,000 known cults with more than five million members around the world. They ranged from dirt poor groups of a few dozen people who lived in tents and ate out of dumpsters, to billion-dollar corporations with their own TV networks and branded products.
    Lauren was in the next seat to James. She’d got interested in the books too and they kept reading bits to each other, especially the more lurid stuff about cults that had assassinated politicians and kidnapped judges, and especially about mass suicides.
    ‘Here,’ Lauren said, ‘listen to this:   There have been more than seventy recorded incidences of mass cult suicide. The largest was the People’s Temple, where leader Jim Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide, resulting in nine hundred deaths. Babies and small children who were unable to take their own lives were given bottles laced with cyanide . Then further down it says,   Cults based around an apocalyptic vision are usually the most destructive .’
    James smirked. ‘Well, that’s reassuring.’
    *
     
    February is high summer down under and Australia greeted James with a thirty-eight-degree blast of heat: the muggy kind that makes your shirt stick to your back three steps out of an air-conditioned building.
    John and Chloe headed off to check into a hotel in the city. Abigail and the three youngsters took a yellow Toyota taxi. Brisbane was clean and modern, but there were road works on the way out of the airport and they spent three-quarters of an hour tangled in traffic.
    While they crawled, the sky darkened and giant globs of rain began drumming the metal roof, while lightning exploded behind the tall buildings in the city centre. Once they got past the jam, they hit a hundred and twenty kph