12: Patent

Natalie was discharged from hospital on George's birthday, but her mum had already booked tickets to fly back to England with her. She'd given up her job at the Embassy and, according to Ewart, was planning to get a new job in the UK to try and give Natalie a more settled time. George wanted to go over and see Natalie before she left, but Ewart stopped him.

"I am not sure her mum is ready for that kind of thing," Ewart pointed out. "It might be better to just let things lie."

Without Natalie to go to his birthday dinner, Charlie also felt awkward and pulled out too, saying she had hockey training to go to. Then Will's dad decided to have a fancy dinner of his own and invited Jemima, and she thought it might be good for the mission if she went. That left just George and Ewart, but the whole thing with Natalie had made George feel down and when Ewart announced he needed to go out to help Jemima with her part of the mission, he gave up altogether.

"I don't fancy it," he told Ewart. "To be honest I just want to chill out here."

"We'll order something in when I get back," Ewart told him. "Sorry it's not really worked out."

George shrugged. "It was never going to be as good as being back on campus," he said. He'd opened a big pile of cards, some of them redirected from other countries via campus, from his mates that morning, plus Ewart had got him a nice pair of designer jeans and Jemima had baked him cupcakes. He took two of these cupcakes back to his room and left Ewart in front of the TV. Switching to his campus SIM card in his phone, a flurry of texts came through for him

HAPPY BIRTHDAY U OLD MAN

CONGRATS GEORGE DON'T GO TOO WILD ;)

HOP SOON :D

He looked at the texts from Letty, Rex and Beatrice and tried not to feel sad. He didn't usually feel homesick when he was away on a mission, but it was always harder on his birthday and he was missing his home comforts on campus. He sent a few texts back saying thanks, munching cake, and thought about Natalie, sitting on an aeroplane with her mum going back to England.

Will was a complete nerd, and when he wasn't hanging out with Jemima, he spent his free time on an internet forum for people who volunteered to fact-check Wikipedia articles. He half-claimed this was in some way good for his eventual applications to university, but Jemima couldn't work out what university would care about someone who spent their time obsessing over minor re-phrasing of a paragraph about nineteenth-century American politics. He'd learnt not to keep bringing this up in front of Jemima, because she wasn't really interested, so they spent most of their time together working through study guides. Will was really smart, easily smart enough to be a Cherub, and Jemima did kind of like him. He was nice to her and didn't care very much about what the other boys at school, like George, thought about him, which was a big change to the boys on campus who only seemed to care about beating each other on computer games or beating each other in the dojo.

"Will, Jemima, dinner's ready," Will's dad called up to them. Jemima was flicking through the next section of their biology textbook and let it fall shut, while Will was typing up an essay and got to the end of his paragraph before saving the document.

She'd abandoned George's birthday dinner because firstly, George had been moping around the apartment for the past few days, bored, and he was getting on her nerves. Secondly, it was a great opportunity to actually put the plan she and Ewart had been putting together into practice.

Dinner was nice and Will's dad asked them about their studying. She could see where Will got it from: Jemima found studying boring, but then being asked about it over dinner was practically driving her insane. In contrast, Will seemed to be enjoying himself, answering his dad's questions and getting into discussions where he could show off his knowledge. She steeled herself by telling herself that in a few weeks, she'd be back on campus.

"Okay, Jemima, do you know what time you're going home?" Will's dad asked when dinner was over and they were going to go back to Will's room.

"Maybe in a couple of hours or something. To be honest George has been really annoying me lately so I'm trying to stay out of his way," Jemima said, smiling a big smile at him. "I hope that's okay."

"Of course," Mr Swinson said in return. "Just let me know if you need anything."

"Thank you, I will," Jemima said, following Will up the stairs.

When Will logged back into his laptop, Jemima glanced at her phone. There was a text from Ewart.

READY TO GO WHEN YOU SIGNAL

Without trying to look suspicious, she kept her phone screen away from Will, who was absorbed in the computer anyway. She opened up the surveillance software which monitored Mr Swinson's internet traffic and listened as Will's dad padded up the stairs in his socks and shut himself in his home office. A few minutes later, the surveillance software started picking up activity, and as soon as she saw a notification pop up to indicate that he had logged into his secure email, she sent a pre-written text to Ewart.

GO NOW

Within ten seconds, she heard Ewart knock on the front door and then ring the bell. Will looked around, confused at who would be calling at the house at this time of night, and Jemima heard Will's dad get up and go to answer it.

Keeping her fingers crossed behind her back, she headed for the door.

"Just need the loo," she told Will, who smiled back at her. She closed his bedroom door behind her, took three steps to the bathroom, switched on the light and then closed the door from the outside to make it look as if she was in there. Then she turned and silently went into Will's dad's office, hearing a rumble of Will's dad talking to Ewart downstairs. She went straight over to the computer, and when she saw that Will's dad had left it logged in and the screen on she felt a thrill of success. The secure email program was open in the background, and she memorised the exact way the computer had been left before using the mouse to open it up.

It was designed for use by military or defence services as an encrypted way to carry out routine email services without risk of data being intercepted. It didn't look like a normal email program, with an inbox and everything, but Jemima had seen similar things before in training and she was able to navigate through the menus to find the file depository. The program formed a secure environment, which meant that all data which went in or out was recorded, even if it was something as simple as the user saving an attachment to their hard drive. Jemima couldn't copy anything without the program noticing and flagging it, so her only way to get evidence of what Will's dad was doing was to open each file individually and take a photograph of the screen with her phone.

The file depository opened up and she was faced with a long list of files, all with dates attached. The ones at the top had been edited a few minutes ago, and the list went as far back as a week on the first page. Looking at the files, a lot of them were very small images, which she guessed was probably a logo or something from Will's dad's email signature. She used the filter option to remove these files, and then searched through, ignoring things which were obviously of no interest, such as a copy of Will's exam results that had been sent to Will's mum, and some weird-looking files full of random letters and numbers which Jemima eventually worked out had something to do with internet chess.

After two more rounds of filtering out objects of no interest, she was starting to think she should give up, but then she hit on a stack of compressed files. The email program automatically compressed attachments to save bandwidth and server space, so these had to have been compressed manually by Will's dad for some reason, probably because they were large files, unlike anything else she'd found. She filtered the files to only show these compressed files, and there was a list going back for years of hundreds of compressed files, all just named with the date they were sent. She clicked on the top one and a pop-up box asked if she wished to decompress the file. She clicked 'yes' and a little green bar popped up, telling her it had thirty seconds to go. As the seconds ticked down she could feel her heart beating hard, and she swallowed, hoping Ewart could stall Will's dad for as long as she needed. When the box came up with 'complete', the file opened, and Jemima found herself staring at a scanned version of an unfiled patent for a lightweight battery system. She didn't understand any of the dense technical language on the page, but she knew instantly that she'd seen the page before: it was a fake patent, brought to Japan by Jules Richardson from CHERUB. And Will's dad had illegally copied it and emailed it on to someone.

"Gotcha," Jemima said quietly to herself, taking a photo of the file on her phone. It would take ages to go through every single file on the system, so she chose two more at random, both dense documents written in English and Japanese, and as she was considering opening a third one from over a year ago, she noticed the light changing slightly.

"Why are you in there?" Will asked her, squinting at her through the doorway.

"Your dad's computer was beeping, like an alarm or something," she said, trying not to act shocked as she carefully returned the computer to how she'd found it. "I just wondered if I could shut it off."

"I didn't hear anything," Will said. "What kind of beeping was it?"

"I don't know, kind of like an alarm clock," Jemima said, walking over to him. "It's stopped now, anyway."

"Usually beeping means the computer has had an error, but it wouldn't be that loud…" Will wondered. "Did it start and stop?"

Jemima wanted to slap him to get him to shut up. "Not really," she shrugged. "It doesn't matter, I only went in there for a second."

"When Dad comes back upstairs I'll ask him," Will said as he followed Jemima back into his room. "Maybe it's a program he was running."

Now Jemima's phone was full of incriminating evidence, she just wanted to leave, so she started putting her school books back into her bag. "I'm actually gonna run," she said, and Will looked disappointed.

"We haven't started biology yet," he said, but Jemima ignored him.

"I'm feeling a bit tired and I think I might get an early night," Jemima said, leaning over his desk to give him a kiss on the cheek. "See you tomorrow?"

"Okay," Will said, disappointed, getting up to walk down to the door with her.

Jemima acted surprised when she came down and saw Ewart standing at the door. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Needed to talk to Will's dad about something that's come up at work," Ewart said, looking uncomfortable. "I think we're finished, though, so we can go back together."

"Well, I'll have it on your desk tomorrow, but I honestly thought it could wait until next week," Will's dad told Ewart, looking stressed. "Sorry, I must have misunderstood."

"No problem, don't worry," Ewart said. "See you tomorrow."

"Bye, Will," Jemima said as they walked away. They didn't say anything until they'd turned the corner and were halfway up the street.

"Did you manage to get anything?" Ewart asked.

"Hit the jackpot," Jemima grinned. "Will's dad has been naughty. He's got Jules's documents on there and tons more."

Ewart looked relieved. "I knew we'd get it," he said, punching the air. "You hero, Jemima."

Jemima was grinning all the way back to their apartment. All those hours of studying with Will and pretending she really liked him had paid off.