Hey everybody! This chapter is a little longer than noraml but I'm sure you don't mind. Thanks to everyone who has been reviewing. My other stories will all be updated soon. I'll have some time to write next week, so check then. I'm like half way through the second chapter of Parental Unit so that's good. Also, I am planning on wirting that whole Laser Quest scene that was talked about at the end of One Strange Day so look for that. It'll be fun! Um, yeah that's about it. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I do not own Cherub or Alex Rider


Alex kept the two Cherubs in the corridor for two minutes before leading them through the exit and back to the front of school to blend in with the crowd of talking, texting, and evacuating students. The three ended up in the main parking lot with a perfect view of the main entrance to the school. Students began to chatter excitedly as a fire truck pulled onto the grounds a minute later, lights flashing.

"Is there a fire?" someone asked.

"I don't see any smoke," another kid said.

"Someone probably pulled the alarm," said a third.

As the truck got closer, Lauren gasped, immediately recognizing some of the firemen on the truck. Four, to be exact.

"Is that K-Unit?" she whispered to Alex and he nodded back with a smile.

"Seriously, Alex," James said trying to keep his annoyance at being 'out of the loop,' out of his voice. "What the hell is going on?"

"The most creative bust of your not very stellar career," Alex replied, his voice light. He turned back towards the school and watched as K-Unit and three other men entered the building with what could have been fire fighting gear, but Alex knew for a fact it was their guns plus another few necessary items. Guns in a school, Jack would flip.

The Cherubs didn't question Alex about what was going on as they'd finally gotten the hint that he wouldn't tell them anything. Although, they were close to figuring it out on their own.

"He pulled the alarm to evacuate the students," Lauren told James.

"So that they could get in without any casualties," James continued. "But how did the people in basement not know what was going on?" The two kept their voices low so no one would hear them but Alex, and the MI6 spy couldn't help but smirk at them. The Cherubs were smart, inexperienced, but not entirely dumb. It didn't shock him that they figured some of it out but it honestly wasn't that hard to piece together.

Tom managed to find the three of them and came over with a mischievous smile on his face. Lauren looked at him curiously and James looked a little wary. Alex had no idea why; Tom wasn't scary.

"Nice trick, Al," Tom said.

"Wait, he knows what's going on?" James practically blew up on the spot. Alex gave a little laugh at the Cherub's incessant anger; he really needed to work on that if he was going to get anywhere in this business.

"Who are you?" Lauren asked, not wanting to be left out of this loop.

"I'm Tom," the black boy told her. "Alex's friend since, like, the sandbox days."

"Tom, you wanted to play in the sandbox at the park just last week," Alex reminded him.

"Did not," Tom said but without any bite. "Who are you?" he asked Lauren but Alex answered first.

"She's James's sister, Lauren," he said then lowered his voice so only the four of could possibly hear it, as they were in a pretty closed circle now. "She's another agent." Lauren took the whole blown cover thing much better than James. She smiled at Tom and shook the boy's offered hand, taking everything in stride. Almost like a pro, Alex mused.

"So, does he know what's going on or not?" James interjected the small moment of relative peace.

"I didn't tell him," Alex said. "Although, I'm sure he's figured it out."

"How?" Lauren asked.

"I've known Alex for years," Tom said. "I know his tricks."

"What do you mean?" Lauren asked confused while James crossed his arms in what would had been a threatening manner had Wolf been the one to do it.

"Another mini-Bond shows up out of the blue, with Jack's surname, to do something involving Alex and the school. I'm not blind; Al more or less told me something was happening and with the big-shot science dude here today, it's obviously got something to do with him." By the Tom finished his short explanation the Cherubs had that dumbfounded look on their face that Alex was beginning to grow accustomed to. Tom was, by no means, someone who would make a good spy but he knew more about this school than Alex did. Tom's family had been going to Brookland since about three years after it had been built. When they had been little, Tom's great-grandfather would tell them stories about the crazy Headmaster who'd hidden the bomb shelter. The man had known so much about the school, and the Headmaster himself, and Alex was sure that some stories he'd never heard had been passed down through the Harris family. It wouldn't surprise Alex if Tom, or, at the very least, Tom's father, already knew the location of the bomb shelter.

"Do you know where the bomb shelter is?" Alex asked Tom suddenly, interrupting whatever James was saying, much to the Cherub's annoyance.

"Yes," Tom replied simply.

"Basement, entrance at the back of a store room, on the wall where the bricks are all lined up perfectly?" Alex rattled off the location quickly to his friend, who nodded with a smile.

"Yup," he said. Both of them were ignoring the other two who still looked somewhat shocked. "Never been in there though. I hate the basement; it's creepy, besides I didn't have the key."

"Key?" James asked a bewildered look on his face. It was difficult to tell what he was more confused at: Tom knowing the bomb shelter location, Alex apparently knowing Tom would know, the plan Alex had set in motion, or the entire situation in general.

"Yeah," Tom told him. "The crazy man who built the place had, like, this special key so only he could open the door. Nobody's seen the thing since they carted him off though."

"What's Marcy's last name?" Alex asked suddenly.

"Donahue," Tom told him and Alex let out a groan.

"As in, Tobias Donahue?" Alex asked wondering how he'd never seen this before now. Honestly, he was supposed to be able to figure these things out at the drop of a hat but he guessed it was because it had never been important.

"Oh," Tom exclaimed, figuring it out as well. Alex turned back to the Cherubs to answer the question he knew he'd get from them.

"Marcy was the Headmaster's niece," he told them. "Tobias Donahue is the name of the old Headmaster. She must have gotten the key from him when they took him away. Help Earth would have known that with a simple family tree. They killed her for that key."

"But K-Unit couldn't tell if it was foul play," Lauren said.

"That's why we need an autopsy," Alex said. "Some times it isn't obvious."

"There goes the fire guys," Tom said and Alex glanced over his shoulder. The truck was indeed pulling out and the students were trickling back in. Tom went in with the other students but James, Lauren, and Alex snuck back out towards the main road. Alex led them down the block and around a corner. He got into the front seat of Fox's car and the Cherubs climbed in the back.

"Well?" he asked. Fox gave him a grin.

"We got 'em," he said and pulled away from the curb.


Alex, Fox, and the Cherubs met the rest of K-Unit in Blunt's office thirty minutes later. A man Alex had never met was sitting in one of the two chairs with Wolf sitting in the other. He figured the man was from Cherub when he saw him give the two other kids nods in greeting. They returned them before going to stand by the window. The rest of K-Unit was standing by Wolf and Alex joined them. Blunt, as usual, was the first to speak.

"Alex, this is Ewart Asker," he said nodding at the man in the other chair. "He is a mission controller with Cherub."

"Alex," the man said in greeting and Alex gave him a nod. "Good work."

"Wasn't that hard," Alex said. "It's only been like, what? Two days?" Ewart gave a small smile at him and turned back to Blunt.

"So, are you ever going to tell me how you had them removed from the school?" Ewart asked and Alex saw James stand up a little taller hoping for an answer.

"It was Alex's plan," Blunt said. "I'm sure he could tell you." He felt all eyes on him and with a nod from Jones and Blunt that it was okay to tell them now, he started.

"Well, first I went in and placed cameras down the corridors leading to the location of the shelter so that K-Unit would know who was where," he said. "Then I slipped into the school's computer system control room and hacked the fire alarm system, cutting off the alarms in the basement so that they wouldn't hear, and I also cut off the signal going to the fire department. James and Lauren found me right after that, like Blunt had told them too. I didn't want them in their classes when the alarm went off. I pulled one of the alarms in a corridor that has no security cameras and we exited with the rest of the students. With the school empty and the Help Earth operatives still in the bomb shelter preparing, K-Unit and three Special Operative agents entered the building dressed as firemen, and subdued the terrorists in the basement. They snuck them out, also dressed as firemen just in case anyone was looking, and took them here."

"Eagle also took the device they were planning on setting off," Wolf said when Alex finished.

"What was it?" Ewart asked.

"A chemical bomb," Wolf replied confirming Alex's already strong suspicion that Help Earth was going to use something related to Caraway specifically. "We don't know what was in it but they were only just getting ready to charge it when we busted in."

"Where are the Help Earth operatives now?" Ewart asked.

"In our holding facilities," Blunt said and Alex just barely repressed a shutter. He hated that bright, white cell with a deep seated passion. "We will transfer them over to MI5 when we're done." Ewart didn't argue but Alex couldn't tell if it was because he was just outranked or if he really didn't care.

"Why didn't you want us in class when the fire alarm went off?" Lauren asked Alex from her spot by the window.

"I didn't want you to take it as an opportunity to sneak down to the basement and try to stop it yourselves," Alex said.

"Why would we do that?" James asked.

"It's something I probably would have done," Alex replied then looked away.

"Why not just let Blunt pull them out completely like he wanted to?" Ewart asked.

"They needed to see it," Alex said vaguely. He was trying to tell the Cherubs something; his first few attempts had not worked so well. James had ended up on the floor and Alex had seemingly walked off a mission. The Cherubs would be leaving soon, tomorrow morning at the latest. He may not like them or even really respect them, but he didn't want them dead. Having the Cherubs see that they weren't the big-shot, high-ranking, state secrets that they thought they were was the only reason Alex had insisted they stick around a little longer. For all their training, and all the boasting their organization had done on their behalf, Tom had come closer to figuring out what had been going on in the last two days than they had.

The Cherubs had met everything that had happened over the last two days with confusion, anger, and ineptitude. James and Lauren had missed details about the mission that had proved vital. The history of the school, the fact that Brookland was broke, how the water pipes had been replaced and some had been left behind, how the PA system no longer worked, and most importantly, how nothing should be overlooked. The mission itself was not hard, and had the Cherubs had maybe month or so, Alex was sure they'd have figured it all out on their own. But the truth was, they hadn't had a month and if Alex had not been in on this from the start, everyone in Brookland would have been poisoned by now. Even if they weren't students, the Cherubs should have been able to their job much better than this.

"Where's Caraway?" James asked cutting into Alex's thoughts. The conversation had gone around him while he'd been thing about the Cherubs.

"He evacuated with the rest of the school and continued his speech as planned," Jones said.

"You didn't take him somewhere?" Lauren asked sounding a little shocked. "What if somebody slipped past K-Unit and managed to kill him another way?"

"All the operatives Alex saw and fought yesterday were in the bomb shelter," Jones told her, and that was that. Alex knew MI6 had placed people inside the school in disguise as the press to make sure nothing would happen.

"The donation was important," Alex said, once again feeling a little guilty for all the trouble he caused for Brookland. "The debt was approaching critical and since it's a private school the state could only help finance so much. Brookland wasn't going to lower its standards and it put the school at risk of closing permanently. Caraway's donation changed that."

"It's just a school," James scoffed.

"It's my school," Alex said defensively. "It's survived a lot in the eighty years it's been around. World War II, gangs fights, riots, terrorist threats, exploding science buildings, greedy fat cats. There's a lot of history to that place and had it been closed, it would've been turned into shopping mall."

"You don't know that," Lauren said. "If Caraway had been killed it would have made everything worse."

"True," Alex acknowledged. "But a buyer already asked the alumni to sell and that was his plan for the place. Marcy died because of that damn key but I'd bet everything I own that she'd never have just given it to them. Even with her life at stake."

"Why?" Ewart asked. "What's so special about this school?"

"Like I said, there's a lot of history to this school. That bomb shelter was rumored to not have even been a bomb shelter at all."

"What are do you mean?" Wolf asked roughly. Blunt and Jones had fallen silent for this part of the conversation but they did look faintly interested. "You've been calling it a bomb shelter for the past two days!"

"There was a theory that Headmaster Donahue, the man who built the shelter, had somehow come across very sensitive information during his tour in Germany. Apparently, the shelter was built to house whatever it was he found and that the government wanted it so bad they discredited him as insane and carted him off. He passed the key to his niece Marcy, whose kept the secret ever since."

"Does anyone know what was in the shelter?" Ewart asked.

"Nothing," Eagle said. "It was just the terrorists and that device. Besides, does it really matter?"

"Depends on what he found," Blunt said and Alex would have rolled his eyes but he had too much of a professional sense to do that. Stolen sate secrets; that was all Blunt took away from that.

"It'd be a little old now to matter though wouldn't it?" Alex asked.

"Depends on what was found," Blunt repeated. "But for now it's just an interesting story."

"Seems like that these last few days have made for one interesting story," Ewart said.

"Indeed," Blunt replied glancing at the Cherubs. "Although, I must ask that your agents go through some more extensive training."

"The training is fine, Mr. Blunt," Ewart said defensively and Alex was strongly reminded of the scene form a month ago.

"Are we done?" he interjected.

"Go see Mr. Crawley," Jones told him. "He will debrief you all of you more extensively." K-Unit, the Cherubs, and Alex all left the office and Alex wondered how much Blunt knew about the many legends Brookland had. He hadn't liked the man's wording. Had Help Earth found something done there? If the theory was true, what had cost Donahue his reputation and Marcy her life? He guessed Blunt was right and it all depended on what was found.


Next Chapter: The conclusion