Chapter Text
“Okay, this is Smithers’ office, I will allow him to explain everything. He doesn’t know any details about the operation, other than what he needs to know, so please refrain from telling him anything about it.”
There was a chorus of Sure’s and yes sir’s before Crawley opened the door to the office. A man sat in a chair surrounded by wires, there was also a large briefcase on another table that was up against the right wall. The man looked like the type of person that was smiling or grinning more often than not. He was wearing a cheap suit, like the majority of the MI6 agents they had seen as they had walked through the building.
“Oh, you’re here already! My goodness what’s the time?” The man, presumably Smithers, lifted his arms over the cables and glanced at a watch on his wrist.
“It really is already 11 o’clock, sorry about the mess, I lost track of time. Please, do come in, have a seat.” The man paused for a second before he seemed to realise something,”Where are my manners, I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Smithers and I’ll be providing you with ‘gadgets’ for your mission, I haven’t been told much, but I understand that you will be undercover in Germany, so I’ve made sure that they are suitable for the environment you’ll be living in-“
“Wait, where is Alex?” Smithers interrupted himself.
“Mrs Jones is still speaking with him. Now, if you don’t mind Mr Smithers, I will leave our visitors with you. I have things I should be doing.” Crawley said, clearly not wanting to be there any longer.
“Yes, of course, I can’t imagine Alex being too happy about the situation.”
With that Crawley hurried out of the room, he looked like he might be starting to get a headache. The CHERUB’s also moved to sit down in various places around the room as Smithers tried to untangle himself from the mess of wires that seemed to want to keep him captive.
“Do you need some help?” Kerry said, using her sweet, polite-girl voice.
“Oh no, it’s ok. I’ve.. almost… GOT IT!” He exclaimed, almost proudly, in between grunts.
As the large man bundled the mess of wires into an empty corner in his office, a knock at the door followed by Alex walking in broke the awkward silence that had fallen upon the room after watching Smithers’ struggles.
“Hey Smithers!” Alex called out, looking far more happy than he had only a few minutes ago.
“Hello Alex, it’s good to see you’re still in one piece.” Smithers grinned at the teenager.
“Of course I am, you know me, luck of the devil and all that.”
“Ah yes, how could I forget. Have a seat, I have some stuff I’m sure you’ll like.”
“By the way I was wondering if you had an extra pair of those exploding earrings, I thought it might be good to have a pair even when I’m not on missions. You know, just in case.”
The moment Alex said exploding earrings almost everyone in the room’s mouths dropped.
“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll ask my assistant to bring a pair up.”
“Exploding earrings! What the heck! How would that even work? Wouldn’t it just blow up on your ears?! Isn’t that, like, super dangerous?” James shrieked, and if Lauren wasn’t frozen in shock she would have teased him about how he sounded like one of the little red shirts.
“Why would you even need exploding earri-“ Bruce questioned,”Wait a second you wear earrings?”
“1. I’m not going to tell you how it works. 2. No, it won’t just blow up on my ears. 3. Yes, of course it’s dangerous, it explodes. And finally, yes I do wear earrings, though normally only the exploding kind. They often come in handy when I’m on missions.” Alex replied to each of the questions, without even flinching.
Bruce continued his interogation by saying, “Why the hell would you need some miniature bomb on a mission? Do you just go around blowing up buildings or something?”
Alex raised one eyebrow at him as if he was stupid before replying,”No, I don’t just go around blowing up buildings. Planes, boats, helicopters and people maybe, but rarely buildings, and I don’t just do it for fun,” this time it was Ben’s turn to raise an eyebrow, ”and why I would need a ‘miniature bomb’ on my missions doesn’t concern you.”
“Well, actually, it concerns me quite a bit, I would hope that you aren’t just going to blow up our campus.” Zara replied, looking, as she said, quite concerned.
“I can assure you your campus will remain intact during my ‘visit’, I would rather not have Crawley drawling on about how much paperwork he has to do because I blew something up again. And I would definitely rather not be made to listen to another lecture on ‘what I should and shouldn’t blow up’ and ‘what is a valid reason for making something go up in flames’ again.”
Unfortunately, Alex’s words did little to comfort Zara and she was starting to wonder if he really needed to go to CHERUB campus, surely just the SAS camp would be fine. Daniels and Mr Smithers, however, seemed to find the situation hilarious, as both men burst into laughter only seconds after Alex had tried to assure Zara that CHERUB campus wasn’t about to be blown up.
“Really, Alex? You’ve blown up so many things over the years that Crawley gave you a lecture about ‘what you should and shouldn’t blow up’. Honestly I feel kinda sorry for the guy, maybe you should go easy on him, Alex.” Daniels suggested sarcastically after he had recovered from his laughter.
“I think the fact that you draw the line at blowing up buildings rather than people is the best part.” Smithers said.
“That isn’t even true though, when you were in Bangkok you ended up causing the collapse of that building by the river.” Daniels cut in.
“Hey! That wasn’t my fault, in fact that was kind of your fault. You’re the one who just went in and started shooting people!”
By now Daniels and Smithers were both laughing again, Smithers had his elbows propped on his desk and his face in his hands. Both men’s eyes were glistening with tears of laughter and they were starting to struggle to breathe. As the rest of the room took in the scene in front of them they all started to laugh uncontrollably, all earlier discomfort forgotten.
“Ok, ok, guys, we need to focus. What have you managed to make for us Smithers?” Alex said as the laughter started to die down once more.
“Well let’s see, could you pass me that briefcase?”
Alex walked over to the right wall and picked up the briefcase before carrying it over to Smithers. The man opened it up to reveal an array of seemingly normal, random objects. The first thing Smithers pulled out was a stack of iPhones, all different models.
“All of these phones function as any normal phone would except for the fact that they all have a few ‘hidden functions’. The first one can be accessed when you go on the app With a Mind to Kill, the screen should show where the hidden dart is pointing and then you just have to aim where you need the dart to go and tap on the screen. The dart is filled with a drug that is strong enough to knock out an adult male for around 20 minutes so make sure you don’t accidentally shoot yourself or anyone else on our side.” Smithers then went on to show them where the dart was and some of the other features.
If you went on the app named ‘Super amazing soldiers’ a distress signal would automatically be sent to MI6 and backup (a team of SAS men) would be sent to the location as soon as possible. The phone could also be turned into a listening device when you played the song, ‘What does the fox say?’ on Spotify. All of the features only worked with their owners fingerprint so they weren’t going to accidentally be activated by a civilian and any enemy operatives would have a hard time accessing them. The phones also already had each other’s numbers in the contacts, so they would be able to talk to each other. The iPhones were obviously all encrypted and secure so nobody would be able to listen in on what was said or see the messages.
“Okay well that’s all for the phones,” Smithers said after explaining what they could do,”I also made this necklace that when you press on the diamond in the middle it will start to record whatever is being said, it would be too risky to put bugs in Ida Grendel’s house in case they were discovered, but with this necklace you can record things whenever you hear something that might be of interest to us.”
“Really? That’s pretty smart, Mr Smithers.” Kerry said, still using a polite tone.
“Yeah, that’s sick!” Rat screeched.
“Thank you,” Smithers replied,”You will all also be provided with this pencil case, Alex you are already familiar with most of the items, but the rest of you aren’t, so let me explain. This eraser is a memory stick-MI6 wants you to try and download some information from Mrs Grendel’s computer. The pencil sharpener’s blade is diamond and should be able to cut through almost anything, this calculator is actually a camera jammer for in case you need to remain out of sight. Alex will show you how it works.”
Bruce raised his hand as if he was in a school and Smithers nodded his head at him signalling for him to ask Smithers his question.
“Why would we need a blade at school, actually, why would we need a camera jammer at school too? I mean it’s just school, even if it is with the children of terrorists, it’s pretty harmless.”
“Alex,” Smithers said as he turned towards the boy, ”Do you want to explain that?”
“Okay, well you see there’s these people called assassins, basically an assassin is someone who kills people-“
“Yeah we know what an assassin is, we aren’t idiots, but what exactly does that have to do with anything?” James interrupted.
“Well if you’d let me finish maybe I could explain, and sorry but I just thought that maybe I should dumb it down a bit since you all seem to know absolutely nothing about being a spy.”
“Hey!”
Alex ignored them and continued,”The main thing is that it is possible that SCORPIA will send an assassin while you are at school and you will need to defend yourself, I mean you will still have an extremely low chance of beating them but at least with a knife there’s a possibility your death won’t be too bad. Also you might need it at there house to cut into something,” or out of something, he thought absent-mindedly, “The camera jammer is probably more for Ida’s house rather than for school, you might need to make sure she can’t see something that you’re doing. Try and be careful with the camera jammer though, only use it when necessary because I imagine they would get kind of suspicious if one or two of their cameras just magically stopped working.”
He gave James and Bruce a look that quite clearly showed that he thought all of that was obvious. James scowled a bit, still offended at the fact that Alex had practically called them stupid.
“Anyways,” Smithers shot out the word, breaking the tension between the teenagers,”There is one other thing in the pencil case, the sellotape is already cut up in to small pieces, each piece is a tracker that you can stick on to practically any surface. The device will send a signal to MI6 whenever it moves more than a few meters, it is completely see-through and shouldn’t be very noticeable. You can maybe try and stick it on to a piece of clothing or a bag or something else that could lead us to SCORPIA.”
“Also, Alex, Mrs Jones asked me to give you a gun this time. I do hope you’re familiar with the Beretta 92FS Inox, I heard you have had training on how to use a gun.” He questioned pulling out the weapon.
Alex immediately thought back to his time at Malagosto, he supposed it was kind of ironic how he was going to use the skills SCORPIA taught him against them. He felt slightly uneasy thinking about it, what would the CHERUB’s say if they knew he had once worked for the enemy? That he had defected from MI6? That he had tried to kill Mrs Jones? He doubts they would be any nicer. They probably wouldn’t ever trust him again-that’s not to say that they do trust him but it is still possible they might in the future.
“Yes, Mr Smithers, of course I know how to use a gun.” Alex rolled his eyes sarcastically, “It’s pretty hard to be a spy and not, at one point or another, learn at the very least the basics of how to use a gun, Smithers.”
Already, Zara could tell that Alex still acted very much like any other teenager, at least most of the time, when his eyes weren’t dead, looking years older than the rest of him . He seemed like he might be a nice kid, relatively smart, mature, funny, the sort of things that they looked for in their agents. Although Zara thought he might be hiding something, she had, after all, noticed the slight tensing of his shoulders when Mr Smithers had mentioned his training on how to use a gun. He didn’t seem like he was tense because he was a bad shot, or as if he was lying entirely, more as if it had brought back bad memories. Perhaps she might be able to find out, of course she wouldn’t push him or anything but she couldn’t help being curious.
Smithers chuckled a bit at Alex’s remark, glad to see the boy still hadn’t lost his spark, even if at certain points it had faded until it was almost gone. He packed all of the ‘Gadgets’ back into the briefcase and handed Alex the Berretta 92FS Inox. Ben Daniels took the case and Alex gave him a glare that definitely meant ‘What? Do you not trust me to carry a case with high tech gadgets inside, some of which explode, even though you know I wouldn’t do anything bad with them’ and Daniels simply gave him a look of his own that showed that he knew that wasn’t entirely true and that he had definitely heard the rumours about ‘a pyromaniac of a teenager’ who ‘loves blowing up everything he sees’. Alex gave him one final glare before giving up, it’s not as if he genuinely wanted to have to carry a huge briefcase all the way to his house anyway.
Alex turned towards the CHERUBS, he still didn’t really seem to like the idea of having to do a mission with a group of teenagers, despite being one himself.
“Well, come on then, I imagine MI6 will have a car waiting for us, if you came by car you can probably pick it up tomorrow or something. We should really go soon so you can unpack and we can set up the beds.”
They all shuffled out of the room, following Alex’s lead down the corridor and into the elevator. It was a bit crowded with all ten of them in there but luckily the lift was larger than most. They got a few weird looks from other staff when they reached the car park, the MI6 operatives were confused as to why there was a group of around ten children walking through MI6’s private car park and towards a large black van with a driver waiting at the door.
The driver’s suit was just as bland and grey as all the other people who work at the Royal & General’s are. He looked bored, as if he didn’t want to be there (which was most likely true) and he paid barely any attention to the people getting in to the van other than one questioning look at Ben. The drive was spent in silence, luckily Alex’s house wasn’t that far from the bank, and nobody really felt the need to speak. Everyone was just trying to have a moment to think, the CHERUBS had been stunned after seeing Alex arguing with Mrs Jones. It had been even more confusing when only minutes later he had been making jokes and laughing with them, none of them were entirely sure what to think. Lauren and Kerry both thought that maybe the boy wasn’t so bad but the Rat, James and Bruce were convinced that Alex was just a show off.