Cherub Series: Class A Part 23

John Jones explained. 'As soon as Zara heard about your little holiday, she contacted me and I rushed over here.'

'Why is me going on holiday such a big deal?' James asked.

'Miami is the centre of the world drug trade,' John explained. 'It's no coincidence that Keith Moore has a home there. The saying goes: If you want a gram of cocaine, stand on any street corner. If you want a ton of cocaine, stand on any street corner in Miami.

'There are twenty smaller gangs snapping at the heels of KMG. Keith has to get his hands on fresh supplies of cocaine and get KMG working again. A lot of his top people have been arrested and he won't know who he can trust, so he'll be brokering the deal himself.'

'So what can I do?' James asked.

'We know KMG has a long-standing relationship with a Peruvian drug cartel called Lambayeke,' John explained. 'To pay Lambayeke, Keith will have to transfer millions from his overseas bank accounts. If we can find out what bank and country Keith's money is coming from, we'll have a lead that could help us unravel the whole financial structure of KMG and maybe even Lambayeke as well.

'Keith can't keep every detail of his business in his head. He'll be going to Miami carrying some piece of information that links him to his money. It might be a bank account number, or the phone number of a bank, or a file on the hard drive of his laptop. Whatever it is, you're going to be in Keith Moore's house for seven days. You're never going to get a better opportunity to grab information than that.'

James smiled. 'So much for b.u.mming around on the beach all day.'

'As soon as this meeting is over, I'm driving you back to campus for two days' emergency training,' Ewart said. 'There's a lot you need to learn, but we don't want you away from the Moore family for more than a few days.'

'What excuse will we use for me not being at school?'

'We'll tell everyone you were planning to visit your aunt and cousin Lauren during half-term, but we brought it forward because of your trip to Miami.'

24. FACTS.

James slept better than he had for ages. His bed in Luton was cramped and had springs that jammed in your back; plus on campus there was no Kyle squirming in the top bunk and no 300-seater jets whizzing overhead. The plumbing worked better as well. James put on a Metallica CD and rocked out in his shower, without having to worry about getting scalded every time someone touched the tap in the kitchen.

When he was clean, he put on CHERUB uniform. The rooms and corridors in the main building reminded James of a hotel. As he waited for the lift down to the dining-room, he reflected that the only thing lacking was room service.

He loaded up a plate with bacon and hash brown and ate bits with his fingers while one of the staff cooked him a mushroom omelette. Most kids had gone off to first lesson, but Amy was sitting at a table dipping a finger of toast into a soft-boiled egg.

'You're wearing a white T-shirt,' James said, taken aback.

You got the white shirt when you retired as a cherub.

'My undercover days are over,' Amy said.

James looked sad. 'But ...'

'I'm seventeen, James,' Amy said. 'I took my A-levels in the summer. I'm working here as an a.s.sistant dogsbody to earn some cash, then I'm off to see the world before I start university in January.'

'Where are you going?'

'Cairns, in Australia. My big brother lives there.'

'That's the other side of the world,' James said miserably. 'I'll probably never see you again.'

'You've only got to hop on an aeroplane. My brother set up a diving school when he finished university. He took me up to the Great Barrier Reef a couple of weeks ago. It's so beautiful there.'

'So you're training me up for my Miami trip?' James asked.

Amy nodded. 'And you better behave. Now I'm staff, I'm allowed to dish out punishments.'

'Cool,' James grinned. 'Who have you nailed?'

'Only one kid,' Amy said. 'I was covering for one of the Judo instructors. This horrible little red-shirt boy kept giving me lip. He got a week cleaning up the changing room near the cross country trail.'

'It always gets really muddy in there,' James smiled. 'How old was this kid?'

'Eight,' Amy said. 'He started bawling his eyes out, but I didn't back down. After that, all I got from the other kids in the cla.s.s was, Yes Miss, No Miss, Of course Miss.'

'So what have I got?' James asked.

Amy slid a heap of books across the table. They were all weighty. One was called The Ultimate Hackers' Reference and was over ten centimetres thick.

'It's gonna be a busy couple of days,' Amy said. 'I'll try and get you through techniques for hacking Keith's computer by this afternoon. Then we'll make a start on international banking.'

'What's that in aid of?' James asked.

'Suppose Keith was on the telephone and he mentioned a euro CD and an order party. Unless you know about banking, you wouldn't be able to tell whether Keith is on the phone to a Russian money laundering syndicate, or organising a disco.'

'Sounds like this is gonna be a real riot,' James said, flipping through one of the giant books as he tucked in a fork-load of bacon.

Amy ignored him. 'MI5 are preparing a dossier on the Lambayeke cartel. They'll e-mail it here and we'll work on that tomorrow morning. Tomorrow afternoon we'll finish up by testing out your hacking skills on real computers.'

James and Amy studied into the evening. You normally got at least two weeks on the background material for a mission, but everything had to be crammed into a couple of days. When it got to eight o'clock, Amy finally let him off.

'I feel like a swim,' she said. 'Coming?'

CHERUB had four pools. The learners' pool was the smallest and least attractive, but Amy had taught James to swim there the year before and they both wanted to go back for old times' sake. There was n.o.body else around. Most kids preferred using the main pool, which had diving boards and water slides.

They had a ten-lap race. James kept up with Amy until they made the last turn, when she blasted off into the distance. They got out and sat on the edge. James felt like his lungs were about to burst.

'You're getting stronger,' Amy grinned, not even short of breath. 'You might be able to give me a real race when you grow a bit bigger and shed the puppy fat.'

James' heart sank when he realised Amy had been toying with him.

'I'll definitely come and visit you in Australia when I'm older,' he said, circling his big toe through the water. 'If that's all right.'

Amy smiled. 'Of course it's all right. My brother has mates from his CHERUB days turning up all the time.'

'It's weird,' James said. 'I never even think about the kids I knew before I came to CHERUB, but I feel really close to the kids I know here.'

'It's a defined psychological phenomenon,' Amy said.

James looked mystified. 'You what?'

'All humans have a basic need to share their lives with someone,' Amy explained. 'Children with their parents, adults with their wives, husbands, or whoever. Because the kids at CHERUB have no parents, they make very strong bonds with each other. There's a big reunion on campus every couple of years. You'd be amazed how many cherubs end up marrying each other.'

'Sometimes it really gets on my nerves how smart-a.s.sed everyone at CHERUB is,' James grinned. 'I mean, how come you know stuff like that?'

'I'm doing psychology at university,' Amy said. 'They gave us a list of books to read before the course starts. Besides, James, you're not exactly dumb yourself. CHERUB wouldn't even sniff at a kid who wasn't way above average.'

'When I'm at a normal school, I'm always one of the cleverest,' James said. 'But I'm just kind of ordinary here.'

'So anyway,' Amy said. 'When you arrived at CHERUB a few months after your mum died, it was natural that you formed a strong attachment to any girl who played a big part in your life.'

'Like you, because you were teaching me to swim.'

Amy nodded. 'And Kerry, because she was your partner in basic training. Have you asked her out yet?'

'G.o.d! Don't you start,' James moaned. 'It's bad enough Kyle always going on about it.'

'But you and Kerry are always so sweet together. I love the way you two pick at one another like some old married couple.'

James didn't want to hear it. He slipped off the side of the pool and began swimming towards the deep end.

The dossier that arrived from MI5 on the Lambayeke cartel ran to over three hundred pages, though a lot of it was photos and maps. James and Amy spent Tuesday morning in one of the mission preparation rooms, skimming through the chapters and marking the most relevant stuff with highlighter pens. James could take the books on computer-hacking back to Luton for study, but the Lambayeke dossier wasn't allowed off campus.

After they'd worked through the dossier, Amy got five laptop PCs out of a storage room and lined them up on a desk. She set an ancient wind-up timing clock to count down from fifteen minutes.

'Each one of these PCs has a list of stolen credit card numbers hidden on the hard drive,' Amy explained. 'You've got to hack each one inside the time limit, without leaving any footprints behind.'

'Which one first?' James asked.

'Doesn't matter,' Amy said, leaning over and starting the timer. 'Go.'

James had a mini heart attack before grabbing a laptop, flipping up the screen and tapping a couple of keys.

'What do I do?' he said to himself, drumming his hands on the desk in front of him.

'Turning it on would be a good start,' Amy smirked. 'Don't forget to read the BIOS screen before Windows starts.'

James read the figures aloud. 'Two-fifty-six meg of memory. Windows ME. The hard drive isn't part.i.tioned. If it's ME it uses a FAT32 file system, so if I press F8 and enter DOS, I'll be able to open any file, even if it's pa.s.sword-protected.'

James hunted around the desk for a floppy disk. He waved it at Amy.

'This is the disk with the utility on that lists every file on the PC, isn't it?'

Amy nodded. 'I'm not supposed to be helping you.'

James looked around the side of the PC for somewhere to slot the floppy disk.

'Oh ... This b.l.o.o.d.y thing doesn't have a floppy drive. Is there an external drive for this somewhere?'

Amy shook her head.

'Well, what do I do?'

Amy shrugged and looked at the timer. 'You've got twelve minutes left to figure it out.'

James fiddled hopelessly with the laptop for another three minutes. He could happily have chucked the clicking timer out the window.

'Nine minutes left.'

'Tell us, Amy,' James begged. 'I'm totally stuck. How can I get this floppy running?'

'The computer has a network interface on the back,' Amy said. 'You could wire it up to one of the other laptops that has a floppy drive. Then you could go into the network properties on the second laptop and change it to a networkable floppy drive. Then the floppy drive on the second PC will work as if it's attached to the first one.'

'I'm never gonna get all that done in nine minutes,' James gasped.

'You might if you hurried. But why not try something much simpler?'

'Like what?' James asked.

'What's the first thing I taught you about computer hacking? The first golden rule?'

'The weakest link is the human link,' James said.

Amy nodded. 'You're trying to find a back door into the operating system before you've tried the front door. Never a.s.sume the information you're looking for is encrypted or hidden. For all you know, you can open the doc.u.ment you want just by clicking on it.'

'You're telling me I've just wasted six minutes?'

'Nearer to seven now,' Amy said, smirking.

James switched off the computer and started from scratch. The computer only had a few programs installed and the doc.u.ments were all in one folder. James opened up the list and spotted one called Card Numbers. He double-clicked the mouse to open the file. A single line of text popped up on the screen: You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?

James was in too much of a state to see the funny side. He looked at the long list of doc.u.ments on the screen in front of him. There wasn't time to open every one, but James realised he was looking for a list of numbers, which meant the file would be fairly small. He changed the view, so the computer showed him the size and format of each file. He skipped down the list, opening any text file that looked likely to be the list of numbers.

'Three minutes left,' Amy said. 'Better get your skates on, cowboy.'

James started opening up files as fast as he could. A few demanded a pa.s.sword before they'd open. James dragged these into a separate folder. When he ran out of doc.u.ments that didn't need a pa.s.sword, he decided to try and guess the pa.s.sword of the encrypted ones.

A pa.s.sword can be any combination of letters and numbers, but James knew the second golden rule of computer hacking: Over 75% of pa.s.swords are easily guessed. He started working down the list of the most commonly used pa.s.swords that Amy had made him memorise the day before. Things like pa.s.sword, open andsecurity.

After these failed, James tried to find personal details about the man who owned the laptop. He remembered that one of the doc.u.ments he'd opened had been a letter to a school. He clicked on the file and skimmed through it. It was signed off by a man called Julian Stipe and mentioned the names of his three children. James tried the name Julian in the pa.s.sword box, then Stipe. ThenJulianStipe with and without a s.p.a.ce in between.

'Ninety seconds,' Amy said.

He started trying the names of Mr Stipe's kids and hit the jackpot when he typed Jennifer. The doc.u.ment opened, only it wasn't the credit card numbers. The other protected doc.u.ments opened with the same pa.s.sword and James got a ma.s.sive rush when a sheet of sixteen-digit credit card numbers popped up on screen.

'Bingo,' James shouted.

'Fifteen seconds,' Amy said.

'I've got them,' James said. 'What are you on about?'