The Recruit

Back at CHERUB, James realizes the organization knows about the money he took from his mom’s safe and all his other secrets. The money will be split and put into savings accounts for James and Lauren. Additionally, James has to pick a new last name, and he uses soccer player Tony Adams’s name, making his new name James Robert Anthony Adams. James finds everything about CHERUB amazing, particularly that he has his own bedroom and bathroom. The only worry stems from the horror stories about basic training, which will start in a few weeks after James completes some other lessons. Kyle agrees the training will be the worst 100 days of James’s life, but “once you’ve been through it you’re not scared of much else” (101).

On his first day, James breaks down crying during his morning swimming lesson and is relieved when his instructor, Amy, isn’t mean about it. Next, he is given a physical fitness test, where the doctor concludes James is out of shape and orders him to run laps daily and stay away from desserts. On top of this, James will have to receive vaccines for 16 diseases, seven of which he gets that day. At his afternoon swimming lesson, Amy asks how his day has been. James details everything, and Amy smiles, saying, “Not a good day, then” (107).

Over the next few weeks, James improves and swimming and running. One day, during a rainstorm, James quits after 13 of his 15 laps. The athletics director makes him start over, and James learns the critically important lesson that “discipline at CHERUB was stricter than James was used to” (109). Amy invites James to a party in her room for her 16th birthday. The older kids get him drunk, and when the party moves outside, James loses track of everyone in the dark.

After falling into a muddy ditch, James wanders until he finds the sports changing rooms, where he tries to make himself presentable. Amy finds him and escorts him back to his room. When James thanks her, she says she’s doing it for both of them because “if you turned up drunk after half the school saw you at my party I’d be in as much trouble as you” (116).

The next morning, James pushes through his hangover when Kyle says there’s an opportunity for James to see Lauren. Though James lived in London his whole life before CHERUB, the city feels loud and crowded after a few weeks away. To James’s relief, Lauren is doing well and not being mistreated. While the kids are at a park, the bullies James faced weeks ago attack, and Kyle and James fight them off easily.

Later, James and his friends meet up with the rest of the group for a mission to infiltrate the home of a local millionaire. Kyle’s group will copy documents while James and others (including a boy named Bruce) vandalize the house to cover up what’s really happening. James is surprised the mission involves busting in the front door and causing mayhem, but his friends explain that “a CHERUB has to act like a normal kid” (128). Inside the house, the kids have a blast destroying things until a strange purple haze fills the room. James and Bruce get out, and Bruce guesses Kyle got nabbed by the police.

The purple haze was the result of the kids pushing a piano into the pool and cracking the bottom, causing the alarm system to short-circuit. In punishment, Kyle is sent away on another recruiting mission, and Bruce is suspended from missions for three months. James is let off with a warning, but Mac tells him he better be ready for basic training in five days because “I won’t be happy if you fail” (134).

Since James still hasn’t passed his swimming courses to start basic training, he’s brought to the diving pool, where two harsh instructors explain James isn’t leaving until he swims his required 50 meters. At first, James is terrified, and the instructors have to throw him into the pool. After a half hour, where James makes progress but gets progressively weaker, he’s allowed a 10-minute break, during which he decides “the prospect of being dragged about and forced back in the water seemed worse than drowning” (139). With this in mind, James manages to swim the 50 meters and thanks the instructors for being tough on him.

On James’s first day of basic training, he oversleeps and arrives two hours late to find the instructor has made the other seven recruits stand in a very uncomfortable position waiting for him. While being forced to stand on one foot with a bucket over his head, James listens to what his life will be like for the next 100 days—a mix of classes and physical challenges with little rest and no days off. The kids are divided into pairs, and James is put with a girl named Kerry, who’s been a CHERUB since she was six and broke her knee in basic training last year. Though she isn’t fully better, she lied to get back into basic training because she was sick of watching her friends go on missions without her.

Kerry promises to help James as much as she can, and in return, James promises to help protect her knee. After Kerry helps James run the obstacle course, she offers him half a protein bar since he didn’t get breakfast. At dinner, the kids are served rice and stir fry, except Kerry, who gets an empty protein bar wrapper. When she looks shocked, the instructor tells her she isn’t the first person to redo basic and “you may think you know all the tricks, but so do we” (151).

By the end of the first month, two recruits are gone, while the rest continue to suffer through being exhausted and cold every day. When not doing physical training, James learns about weapons, espionage, survival, foreign languages, and martial arts—James’s least favorite. On Christmas day, the martial arts instructor takes the kids to the main dining hall so they can watch the other kids eat while they do jumping jacks and push-ups. On the obstacle course, James is sore from running and from all the beatings he’s taken in martial arts from Kerry. He purposefully steps on her hand, and the two get into a brawl. The instructor breaks them up and sends them both to the medical center with the warning, “When you get back, you’re both in a lot of trouble” (162).

As punishment, the instructor makes Kerry and James spend the night outside in freezing temperatures and nothing but their underwear. The kids haul garbage to a dry tunnel in the obstacle course, dump out the garbage bags, and use them as clothes. Using the live electrical wires from a security camera, James starts a fire, and the kids fall asleep, warm and dry, in their shelter. The next morning, one of the other instructors finds them and congratulates them on surviving the night. The main instructor is going to be livid, though, because he lost the bet that he could make someone quit on Christmas day, and Kerry somberly announces, “After this he’s gonna make our lives even more miserable” (170).

For the final days of basic training, the kids are brought to Malaysia. Their flight is business class, and the hotel has all the luxuries, which feel like heaven after the last three months. James catches a look at his reflection for the first time since training started. He is amazed to see he has muscles and looks more grown up, concluding that “he was totally in love with himself” (174). The kids relax, go swimming, and just hang out, having fun for a whole day.