CHERUB: The Syndicate

25: Reward

After catching up with everyone on campus, George got an early night and woke up at five, so he used the time to catch up on some PlayStation games he'd missed while he was away. Rose looked in after breakfast to let him know that he had a mission debriefing in the chairwoman's office at eleven, a prospect that filled him with equal measures of excitement and dread. After a successful five-month mission working without close supervision, he was confident of getting a navy shirt, but trips to the chairwoman's office were usually accompanied by some kind of criticism, and after spending so long away he was miles behind on his schoolwork and was expecting to be hit with huge pile of catch-up assignments. He didn't start lessons until the following Monday, giving him time to get over his jet lag and acclimatise to being back in the UK, which was much colder and wetter than he was used to.

One upside to a long absence was that his CHERUB uniform was all clean, so once he was dressed he looked smart in an ironed grey t-shirt and combat trousers, although he'd grown a couple of inches and the t-shirt was getting dangerously short, so he made a mental note to ask Rose to get him some of the next size up.

He was glad he didn't need to leave the building to get to Zara's office, since it looked frosty outside and he'd been feeling the cold more keenly after missing the entire winter. He'd left plenty of time to get there, since there'd been nothing to do in his room except to look up six months' worth of football results, which meant that he was waiting at the receptionist's desk with five minutes to spare before the meeting.

"Go straight in," she told him. "Her half past appointment just left, so I'm sure she won't mind."

George remembered to knock on the door before he barged in, getting flashbacks of the last time he forgot to knock, but Zara told him to come in and, when he stepped in, she was sitting behind the desk wearing all of her clothes, much to his relief.

"Hi George, take a seat," Zara said, snapping shut a plastic folder she'd been reading and putting it into her out-tray. "You're looking tanned."

"Thanks," he replied, smiling and sinking into the comfortable chair opposite the desk.

"Mint?" she asked, pushing a tupperware with mint imperials in it towards him. "I'm trying it out as a new tactic to make you kids like me more."

George felt that he couldn't refuse and sat there rolling the mint around his mouth while Zara pulled up the mission file on her computer screen.

"So," she began, "as you've probably guessed, Pete Graham is still in Australia and can't do your debriefing himself, so I'm stepping in.

"From the looks of the reports we've had on campus from him and from your ASIS controllers, this seems to have been a highly successful mission, don't you think?"

"Yes, miss," George replied politely.

"I'll say it now so it's out of the way; I think you did a fantastic job and my colleagues at ASIS think the same. I could sit here all day telling you what you did right, but in my experience, Cherubs have big enough egos as it is. So instead I'll focus on the problems."

Zara's expression wasn't particularly stern, but George still felt a sinking feeling.

"The main thing is that, in a few of Katie's reports, she says that you lost motivation for continuing the mission aims and were reluctant to carry out direct orders. Is this true?"

George shrugged. There was no point lying. "Yeah, sometimes. It was normally because I couldn't see how I was doing the mission any good, I think."

Zara nodded. "Often you just have to trust the judgement of your superiors. It must have been difficult to focus over the course of such a long mission early in your career, but if you don't stick at it, your efforts are normally wasted."