Читать книгу Catch Your Death - Lauren Child - Страница 24

RUBY SHRUGGED AND WALKED ON DOWN THE PATH for all the world looking like a kid exploring Twinford Central City Park on a bright summer day.

She opened the gate to the toddler and children’s playground and pretended she was looking for an imaginary little sister. There were plenty of mothers and nannies all occupied with babies, wiping faces and pushing little kids on swings. No one was there to relax exactly; no one was reading a novel or simply hanging out in the sun, so the only way to blend in was to look like you might be minding a young child.

Ruby was right: the one place where it was possible for a concealed door to be hidden was, just as she had thought, inside the caterpillar pipes. She thanked the stars that there was no Wendy house – that would have been a humiliation too far.

Ruby fed herself into the wide metal tube like it was the most normal thing in the world. It was about twelve feet long and had other pipes wiggling off in different directions. It wasn’t at all dark because there were human-sized holes in the top of the tubes so the children could stick their heads out and call to mommy.

Right in the middle of the pipe’s curved wall was a little sticker of a fly. A small child was gently picking at it, trying to peel it off and no doubt eat it. (Little kids were always eating things that didn’t need to be eaten – survival camp would be a breeze to them.) Ruby surmised that access to Spectrum must be directly below the fly sticker and therefore directly beneath the sticker-eating kid.

The kid didn’t look like it was going anywhere; it seemed perfectly content sitting on its behind, mumbling away to itself.

It had been a long time since Ruby was a toddler, but one thing she still remembered was that little kids are easily bribed.

She took the packet of Hubble-Yum bubblegum out of her pocket and carefully placed a square of it in the kid’s view. The kid immediately began edging towards it, eyeing the gum greedily. It took a minute or so, but soon enough Ruby and the kid had switched places. Ruby felt around until she found the hidden latch; this she turned until a hole opened up big enough for her to fit through. She cautiously eased herself into it, half in half out, like a person getting into a cold pool, when suddenly she slipped, let go and fell down a long dark tube, the door clanking shut over her.

She felt like Alice in Wonderland must have felt as she tumbled and slid and finally fell out of the tunnel, landing in a pitch-black nowhere.

‘Oh brother,’ she whined.

‘You made it,’ said a voice through the dark.

Ruby shrieked.

‘I didn’t know you were afraid of the dark kid?’

‘You shouldn’t creep up on people like that man.’

Ruby was lucky that she couldn’t see him smile; that would have put her nose out of joint worse than it was already. Hitch took her arm and led her along while she fumbled for her torch – she needn’t have bothered. The corridor went from dark to light, from stone grey to vivid green in about five paces, and at the end was a door painted the exact same shade. Hitch punched in a code and the door swung gently open.

They stepped into the large Spectrum atrium with its spiralling black and white floor and its huge domed ceiling; on the far side was Buzz the telephone operator sitting within her circular desk, surrounded by a flock of coloured telephones.

‘Hey Buzz!’ shouted Ruby.

Buzz peered at her over her unfashionable spectacles, spectacles that had not become unfashionable, but just never had been and never would be. Buzz responded with a feeble raise of her hand.

‘Friendly as ever,’ remarked Ruby.

‘Ah, she’s not really a kid-person,’ said Hitch.

‘Is she even a person-person?’ said Ruby.

‘No, I wouldn’t call Buzz a put people at their ease type; that’s kind of the point of her really,’ said Hitch. ‘LB doesn’t want someone chatty; she wants someone efficient.’

They walked over to the desk and waited for Buzz to finish her conversation, if you could call it a conversation – it seemed to merely be a whole lot of yeses, noes and the occasional instruction.

Buzz replaced the receiver and looked up at Hitch. She almost seemed to smile, but it could have been an involuntary mouth twitch caused by the throat lozenge she was sucking.

‘LB has requested you wait outside her office,’ she said, picking up a red receiver. ‘She can give you four minutes.’ Buzz began speaking down the phone in Mandarin.

Hitch and Ruby made their way to the huge door beyond which lay LB’s office. They sat down on the stylish chairs arranged nearby and waited and then waited some more.

The intercom symbol flashed on Hitch’s watch.

He spoke into it, the voice came back in his ear and he winced, almost imperceptibly, but he did wince. He looked at her.

‘LB,’ he said. ‘She wants a word.’

Ruby stood up and waited for Hitch to follow, but he stayed right where he was. ‘You not coming?’

‘No, you’re on your own kid. She wants to see you alone.’

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ asked Ruby.

Hitch raised an eyebrow.

‘Oh,’ said Ruby. The eyebrow communicated a lot – it wasn’t going to be good news. ‘Does she want to congratulate me on my work in the training field?’

‘That’s what I like to hear, a good positive attitude,’ said Hitch. ‘Think happy thoughts.’

Ruby beamed him a big fake smile. She turned to go.

‘Oh and kid, just remember: don’t make it any worse than it has to be,’ he warned. ‘I.e. I would suggest you lose the limp.’

‘Thanks for the advice,’ said Ruby, meaning it. She needed all the help she could get. ‘Wish me luck,’ she sighed, walking over to the large black door.

‘I wouldn’t rely on luck,’ said Hitch.

Ruby knocked, waited for the voice to call ‘enter’ and went in.

LB was sitting at her white desk, studying pieces of paper covered in dense notes. The all-white office gleamed; there was no colour at all in that room other than the red nail polish on LB’s bare feet, the red lipstick on her lips and the red perspex file on her desk.

The file related to Ruby – she had seen it before. It contained a lot of information, Ruby’s past and present, her talents, her successes, her faults and her failures, and it was, Ruby feared, her faults and failures that LB wanted to discuss.

‘So Redfort, I hear you screwed up.’

‘I think you’re putting a very negative spin on it,’ said Ruby.

‘Please feel free to convince me that there is a positive spin to your performance – based on the fact that you completed your task arriving thirteen hours late?’

‘Twelve hours,’ muttered Ruby.

LB checked the document again. ‘Oh yes, let’s be accurate: twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds late.’

That sounded worse.

‘I rustled the horse OK, I swam over the river, didn’t drown – I was just a little tardy is all.’

LB looked down at her papers. ‘Let me check that. . . no, here it would suggest, and I quote Agent Emerson’s words: “You completed your mission unnourished, ate nothing for almost two days and arrived bewildered and exhausted.”’ She gave the papers a second glance. ‘Oh yes, and: “You lost some valuable kit.”’

Ruby was about to speak, but LB held up her hand. ‘One moment,’ she said. ‘I see you are a stickler for accuracy so let me check which items you actually lost.’ LB read through the long list of missing kit before saying, ‘That’s right. Everything you were issued with.’

There was no mention of having been found injured, bleeding and unconscious by Sam Colt, no mention of him dropping her off just yards from base camp because she was barely able to walk. So Sam bent the rules. Ruby had suspected as much. She owed him one.

‘But I arrived, didn’t I?’

‘If crawling into camp is arriving, then I guess you did,’ said LB.

LB raised an eyebrow.

Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but LB clucked her tongue to indicate she hadn’t finished.

‘And, to cap it all, you got sick. How incredibly careless.’

‘I appreciate your sympathy,’ said Ruby.

‘Cut it out Redfort, and by the way I should warn you that I have a chronic headache so if I were you I’d keep it short and stick to explaining what in the name of stupid was going on.’

‘The thing is I wasn’t really hungry,’ said Ruby.

‘I think we all know that had there been a donut tree out there it would have been quite a different story,’ said LB. ‘You failed to forage, failed to eat, failed to nourish your brain, you lost energy and you couldn’t navigate your way back to base in the time allocated.’

‘Look, I wasn’t going to share this with you, but I sorta lost my glasses.’ Ruby hadn’t meant to bring this up, but she was getting desperate. Perhaps it would bring out LB’s sympathetic side.

LB looked at her quizzically. ‘Your judgement is way off Redfort, if you think that’s going to put you back in a professional light.’

‘Yeah, but the thing is, I’ve learned from my mistakes,’ said Ruby.

‘The point of the exercise is to prove that you don’t make mistakes,’ countered LB.

Ruby sneezed again. ‘But I rustled the horse pretty well. So I caught the flu. I made it back, didn’t I? Isn’t that the whole point – surviving?’

‘You nearly caught your death. What’s the point of a dead agent?’

‘But I didn’t, I survived.’

‘Only because Emerson waited around for twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds to bring you in – in my book that’s called getting rescued.’

‘Sometimes people need rescuing. You’re telling me you’ve never been rescued?’ said Ruby.

‘Not because I lost my glasses,’ said LB.

‘It doesn’t have to mean everything,’ argued Ruby.

LB looked at her hard. ‘In Spectrum’s book it means failure; maybe you’re just not cut out for this.’

Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but LB raised her hand.

‘You want me to make my decision now,’ she said, ‘or after I’ve had a cup of mint tea and swallowed two aspirin?’

Ruby kept her mouth shut.

‘If you’d prefer me to spend time evaluating your rather desperate performance instead of making a judgement here and now, then I’d keep your mouth shut, firmly shut, as in clamped, closed, zipped.’

Ruby said not a word. LB looked down at her files.