The Recruit

The next day, James and Kerry navigate twisting rivers and tributaries toward the second checkpoint. When they get there, one of the other teams is there, and they learn the third team has been there and moved on already. To get to the third checkpoint, the kids have to travel about 15 kilometers in several hours. James thinks this will be easy until he realizes, “There’s going to be some kind of catch, isn’t there?” (193).

On the way to the third checkpoint, everything goes fine until the kids notice a camera flash from the shore. Afterwards, their boat’s engine starts to whine, and they realize the instructors rigged a bomb that was triggered by the flash. The boat explodes, forcing the kids to swim the last three kilometers to the third checkpoint, where they find fresh supplies and one of their instructors. The instructor advises them to eat and rest because the final checkpoint will be a race against time, and “if you fall asleep, you’ll never make it” (200).

James and Kerry make it to the final checkpoint with a half hour to spare, both exhausted and dehydrated. The instructors take the kids for one final test, claiming they’ll have to sit with the pain of a jellyfish sting for an hour. Kerry figures out the supposed jellyfish are actually squids, ending the exercise. The instructor congratulates the kids on completing their training, and James thinks “it was the first nice thing James had heard him say” (207).

When the kids get back to CHERUB headquarters, they move their stuff into a new dorm building for active agents. James helps Kerry, who confesses she would have quit CHERUB if she failed basic training a second time. When her old room is empty, she starts to cry because “this had been [her] room since [she] was seven” (210), and James doesn’t know how to react. On their way to the new building, Amy interrupts to bring James to a classroom where Lauren is learning Spanish. After James’s uncle punched Lauren in the face, she told a teacher at school. James’s uncle was arrested, and Lauren was recruited to CHERUB.

James gets his new schedule and is annoyed to find it contains 44 hours of classes and homework, plus teaching math to the younger kids. When he complains to Kerry about doing so much work, she tells him he’ll get used to it and to think about Lauren before resting her head on his shoulder. James isn’t sure Kerry’s right, but as it turns out, “four days into the timetable James realized he could live with it” (221).

Over the next two months, James continues lessons while all his friends go off on missions. On his last day of swimming lessons, Amy confesses she suspended him from missions until he improved at swimming and that she got him paired with Kerry to give him the best chance of passing basic training. James will go on his first mission with Amy because they look enough alike to pass as siblings. Despite the high-tech retinal scanner to enter the mission floor, the floor itself is full of outdated computers and old furniture.

The mission itself involves threats from Help Earth, an environmental activist/terrorist group, aimed at a convention of oil executives that will take place at Fort Harmony, a hippie settlement in Wales. At the behest of MI5, James and Amy will pose as children of the Fort Harmony community in the weeks leading up to the convention because “children will not be suspected of being intelligence agents” (234). Their mission objective is to find out who in the community is associated with Help Earth and how the activists plan to attack the convention.

James and Amy will stay with an older member of the Fort Harmony community. When their handler brings them to meet the woman, she can’t believe the government wants to thrust kids on her and threatens to back out of the deal. The handler flips out. Amy calms him down, and watching all of this makes being a spy real for James. Later, the handler explains he and Amy ran a good cop/bad cop situation, telling James, “Sometimes we have to do bad things to make missions work” (241).

The people of Fort Harmony build a hut for James and Amy to live in. On his first night, James tries to find the portable toilets, ends up peeing in the trees on a chicken instead, and falls into the mud, startled—all of which leaves him wondering “why this type of thing never happened to spies in films” (246). James will attend school while Amy works a local job to keep an eye on someone involved in the mission. The child of someone suspected to be a member of Help Earth takes a liking to James, allowing him to get on good terms with the family and understand their desire to save the environment from the effects of capitalism.

During one of the weekly Friday night parties, James leaves the festivities to tail two kids (Sebastian and Clark), brothers of two suspected Help Earth Operatives. Sebastian and Clark ambush James and try to beat him up, but James gets the upper hand. Sebastian and Clark are amazed at how well James fights and explain they hurt each other to stay tough. One shoots a pigeon down with an air pistol, and when the bird doesn’t die, he cuts off one of its wings. The bird thrashes about weakly. James asks the boys to put it out of its misery. One crushes it slowly, and “James realized he’d made friends with a couple of seriously twisted kids” (260).