Department 19

He looked up at his father, and the look on his face scared Jamie more than everything else that had happened so far.

Julian stepped away from his family and stood facing them. “I have to go,” he said, his voice cracking. “Remember that I love you both more than anything in the world. Jamie, look after your mother. OK?”

He turned and headed towards the door.

Jamie’s mum ran forward and grabbed his arm, spinning him round. “Where are you going?” she cried, tears running down her face. “What do you mean, look after me? What’s happening?”

“I can’t tell you,” he replied, softly. “I have to protect you.”

“From what?” his wife screamed.

“From me,” he answered, his head lowered. Then he looked up at her and, with a speed Jamie had never seen before, twisted his arm free from her grip and pushed her backwards across the living room. She tripped over one of the smashed legs of the coffee table and Jamie ran forward and caught her, lowering her to the ground. She let out a horrible wailing cry and pushed his hands away, and he looked up in time to see his father walk out of the front door.

He shoved himself up off the floor, cutting his hand on the broken table glass, and ran to the window. Eight men wearing black body armour and carrying submachine guns stood in the drive, the barrels of their weapons pointed at Julian.

“Put your hands above your head!” one of the men shouted. “Do it now!”

Jamie’s dad took a few steps and stopped. He looked up into the tree for a long moment before glancing quickly over his shoulder at the window and smiling at his son. Then he walked forward, pulled the pistol from his pocket and pointed it at the nearest man.

The world exploded into deafening noise and Jamie clamped his hands over his ears and screamed and screamed and screamed as the submachine guns spat fire and metal and shot his father dead.

TWO YEARS LATER

Chapter 1

TEENAGE WASTELAND

Jamie Carpenter tasted blood and dirt and swore into the wet mud of the playing field.

“Get off me!” he gurgled.

A shrieking laugh rang out behind his head and his left arm was pushed further up his back, sending a fresh thunderclap of pain through his shoulder.

“Break it, Danny,” someone shouted. “Snap it off!”

“I just might,” replied Danny Mitchell, between gales of laughter. Then his voice was low and right next to Jamie’s ear. “I could, you know,” he whispered. “Easy.”

“Get off me, you fat —”

A huge hand, its fingers like sausages, gripped his hair and pushed his face back into the dirt. Jamie squeezed his eyes shut and flailed around with his right hand, trying to push himself up from the sucking mud.

“Someone grab his arm,” Danny shouted. “Hold it down.” A second later Jamie’s right arm was gripped at the wrist and pressed to the ground.

Jamie’s head started to ache as his body begged for oxygen. He couldn’t breathe, his nostrils full of sticky, foul-smelling mud, and he couldn’t move, his arms pinned and fifteen stone of Danny Mitchell sitting astride his back.

“That’s enough!”

Jamie recognised the voice of Mr Jacobs, the English teacher.

My knight in shining armour. A fifty-year-old man with sweat patches and bad breath. Perfect.

“Mitchell, get off him. Don’t make me tell you again!” the teacher shouted, and suddenly the pressure on Jamie’s arm and the weight on his back were gone. He lifted his face from the mud and took a huge breath, his chest convulsing.

“We were just playing a game, sir,” he heard Danny Mitchell say.

Great game. Really fun.

Jamie rolled over on to his back and looked round at the faces of the crowd who had gathered to watch his humiliation. They looked down at him with a mixture of excitement and disgust.

They don’t even like Danny Mitchell. They just hate me more than they hate him.

Mr Jacobs hunkered down next to him.

“Are you all right, Carpenter?”

“I’m fine, sir.”

“Mitchell tells me this was some kind of game. Is that true?

” Over the teacher’s shoulder Jamie saw Danny looking at him, the warning clear in his face.

“Yes, sir. I think I lost, sir.”

Mr Jacobs looked down at Jamie’s mud-splattered clothes. “It certainly looks like it.” The teacher held his hand out and Jamie took it and pulled himself up out of the mud with a loud sucking noise. A couple of people in the crowd giggled, and Mr Jacobs whirled round, his face red with anger.

“Get out of here, you vultures!” he shouted. “Get to your next lesson right now or I’ll see you all for detention at the end of the day!”

The crowd dispersed, leaving Jamie and Mr Jacobs standing alone on the field.

“Jamie,” the teacher began, “if you ever want to talk about anything, you know where my office is.”

“Talk about what, sir?” Jamie asked.

“Well, you know, your father, and… well, what happened.”

“What did happen, sir?”

Mr Jacobs looked at him for a long moment, then dropped his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said. “You need to get cleaned up before next lesson. You can use the staff bathroom.”

When the bell rang for the end of the day, Jamie made his way slowly up the school drive towards the gate. His instincts were normally sharp, especially where danger was concerned, but somehow Danny Mitchell had crept up behind him during afternoon break. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

He slowed his pace, drifting in and out of groups of children ambling towards buses and waiting cars, his pale blue eyes darting left and right, looking for an ambush.

His chest tightened when he saw Danny Mitchell off to his left, laughing his ridiculous laugh and waving his arms violently around as he made a point to his adoring gaggle of sycophants.

Jamie slipped between two buses and across the road, waiting for the shouts and running feet that would mean he had been seen, but they didn’t come. Then he was into the neat, identical rows of houses that made up the estate he and his mother lived in, and out of sight of the school.

The Carpenters had moved three times in the two years since Jamie’s dad had died. Immediately after it happened the police had come to see them and told them that his father had been involved in a plot to sell intelligence to a British terrorist cell, classified intelligence from his job at the Ministry of Defence. The policemen had been kind, and sympathetic, assuring them there was no evidence that either he or his mother had known anything, but it didn’t matter. The letters had started to arrive almost immediately, from patriotic neighbours who didn’t want the family of a traitor living in their quiet Daily Mail-reading neighbourhood.