fist in the air as the tracksuits and trainers merged with the dreadlocks and donkey jackets of SAG activists.
‘SAG!’ the crowd of close to a hundred chanted back.
James’ heart sped as a fellow protestor caught the heel of his boot.
‘Sorry mate.’
The crowd was tight and the cops now had bodies swarming around them. SAG had assembled the same toxic combination of hardcore anarchists and local youths looking for aggro that had kicked off the riot in Birmingham seventeen months earlier.
‘Oggy, oggy, oggy,’ Bradford shouted.
‘SAG, SAG, SAG!’ the crowd shouted back.
Another fifty marchers had joined the fray by the time James stepped on to the Strand and turned right. A huge drum was booming across the street and the shaven-headed drummer was leading a crowd of protestors out of an alleyway that ran up from the riverbank.
The cop nearest to James had spit running down his back. His baton was drawn but the officers were afraid to break formation and lash out because they were heavily outnumbered.
An amplified chant went up through the police megaphone. ‘We’ve just nicked your megaphone; we’ve just nicked your megaphone, la-la-la-la.’
Everyone laughed as the drummer and his crew cut through snarled traffic and moved to the front of the march, but the next chant had a nastier edge.
‘Let’s stab all the coppers; let’s stab all the coppers, la-la-la-la.’
A vast roar blew up as James glanced around and saw that the cops had changed tactics and dropped behind the protestors. Sirens wailed in the surrounding roads as the march merged with another large group of SAG sympathisers pouring out of a bendy bus.
There were more protestors than pavement and bodies spilled into the road and mingled with the crawling traffic. Horns blared and an impatient cab driver lost his door mirror and got his side window kicked in.
A gap between the buses enabled James to see across the street where more protestors were coming up from the riverbank, as the front of the march headed for Trafalgar Square.
James had lost track of Chris Bradford and all the other SAG members he’d got to know over the last seven weeks. He felt disorientated and was surrounded by a bunch of thuggish lads not much older than himself. They cheered, chanted and egged each other on, as the BBC cameraman balanced precariously on a concrete bollard, trying to film the chanting crowd from a high vantage point.
‘Told you it was worth coming down here,’ the lad next to James grinned, swigging from a can of beer as more glass smashed in the distance.
‘Bloody ‘ell,’ his mate laughed. ‘That was a big one. Someone’s done a shop.’
His friends nodded. ‘It’s kicking off, man,’ one said, before another chant of ‘SAG, SAG, SAG!’ ripped through the crowd.
Less than five metres from James, two Goth girls – who looked like the last people on earth to start a riot – pulled the metal liner out of a litter bin and hurled it through the front window of a sandwich bar. The crowd started clapping and a shout of ‘Down with sandwiches,’ went through the stolen megaphone.
The action of the two women embarrassed several testosterone-fuelled males into action. Four more shop windows caved within seconds and a man in a flash suit was dragged out the back of a taxi and given a slap before being relieved of a wallet and a Rolex.
James couldn’t see over the crowd, but could hear hundreds of triumphant voices and the crunch of broken glass under his boot. Things were about to kick off, big time.
2. TWINKLE
‘Will you all stop jabbering and shut the hell up!’ Lauren Adams yelled, as the thirteen-year-old wrapped her hands over her ears.
She was in her eighth-floor room on CHERUB campus. Her bed had been tipped on its side to make space for the maps and diagrams spread across the carpet and she sat studying them with six fellow CHERUB agents: her boyfriend Rat, her best friend Bethany, Bethany’s eleven-year-old brother Jake, Rat’s best friend Andy Lagan and two eleven-year-old cherubs she barely knew called Ronan Walsh and Kevin Sumner.
‘If we’re gonna get picked to go to Las Vegas next month, we’ve got to get our plan straight and pull off this security test,’ Lauren continued firmly. ‘The ATCC is a new facility with state of the art security. We’ve got to get into the heart of the building and cause damage in the main control room.’
Kevin was the smallest kid in the room and he looked at the maps nervously. ‘Which