Genius Squad by Catherine Jinks Read Free Book Online Page B

had been ‘accidental’, despite what Mace said. As far as Cadel was concerned, they had been hostile acts.
    So he set about robbing Mace of his most prized possessions.
    These happened to be a set of dirt-bike magazines sent to Mace by his elder brother, who was in prison. Cadel had been forbidden to touch them, of course. He knew, however, that Mace kept them near his bedroom window. He also knew that their covers were very sticky, because Mace would often read them while he was eating sweets. And he knew that Mace’s room had once been invaded by ants when a glass of soft drink had been left on the window-sill.
    Knowing all this, Cadel could make some fairly detailed calculations, using a series of complicated probability algorithms that he had developed himself. Though his method was by no means perfect, it had served him well enough in the past. And this time, too, it was successful.
    All he had to do was swap Mace’s packed lunch with Janan’s. Then, after his two foster-brothers had left for school, he laid a trail of sugar particles from Mace’s bedroom window-sill to his treasured magazines. Once these two steps were accomplished, Cadel had no further active role to play in the process. He could simply sit back and watch events unfold, from a discreet vantage point.
    He had a while to wait. Hazel never collected any discarded clothes from the bedrooms until she had finished her data-entry work, at about midday. So Cadel entertained himself by answering the NSA’s list of questions. He could have gone out, but it was threatening to rain – and besides, he wanted to be on hand. It was very, very important that the timing was right. Any variations would have to be dealt with at short notice. (By delaying Hazel with a brief talk, for instance.)
    Cadel found it hard to concentrate. He was restless, and couldn’t settle, making many trips to the kitchen and bathroom during the course of the morning. On one of these trips, he noticed something that made him do a double take.
    Frowning, he approached Hazel’s computer – and crouched in front of it.
    Had he imagined that flash? Were his eyes playing tricks on him?
    Hazel had taken a phone break. He could hear her chatting to her sister in the kitchen. Her computer, meanwhile, had lapsed into ‘sleep’ mode. Yet he could have sworn he’d seen the little light blink on her hard-drive.
    For a while he squatted, motionless, waiting for another hint. Another clue. It came just as Hazel appeared in the kitchen doorway: the light blinked again. ‘What is it, dear?’ Hazel asked.
    ‘Oh – nothing.’ Cadel leapt to his feet. ‘I thought I saw a spider.’
    In fact, he’d seen a different kind of bug. An invader. Something running on the system that shouldn’t have been there. But he couldn’t do much about it – not while Hazel was working. So he wandered back to his room, where he occupied himself with mental arithmetic until the moment of truth arrived. Lying on his bed, he heard Hazel enter Mace’s room. She must have seen at once that the dirt-bike magazines were crawling with ants; there was a shriek, followed by a slapping noise that may have been the sound of Hazel hitting the magazines with a dirty sock or a pair of underpants. As Cadel had predicted, she then rushed back out to the laundry, where she grabbed a can of flyspray. The hiss of it was audible in Cadel’s bedroom as Hazel covered most of Mace’s belongings with a fine layer of insecticide.
    After that, she picked up the magazines and took them out of Mace’s room, heading for the garden. Here she was probably planning to shake and swat the infested journals until every ant clinging to them had dropped into an empty flower bed. But she was halfway to the door when the phone rang – at which point she set her burden down on the hall table so that she could pick up a nearby telephone receiver.
    Cadel, who was watching from behind his bedroom door, heaved a sigh of relief. His calculations