None of the early liberationist groups had a formal structure. They allowed anyone to set up and carry out an operation against whatever target they fancied. The trouble with this approach was that large organisations were rarely put under pressure and felt no serious effect beyond the damage caused by a single attack.
Quinn decided to set up a new group called Zebra 84 with a different method of operation. Ryan explained the meaning of the name in a television documentary made several years later:
‘A zebra is a basically a striped horse, but you’ll never see a man riding one because they’re too aggressive. If you try climbing on a zebra’s back, he’ll turn around and sink his teeth into your arse. What’s more, the zebra’s jawbone has a locking mechanism, which means that once it sinks its teeth in you’re not going anywhere unless you leave a piece of your arse behind in its mouth.’
Like the animal after which it was named, Quinn’s new group was going to sink its teeth into one organisation at a time and not let go until it was destroyed.
Zebra 84’s first targets were Scottish fur farms. Typically, Quinn and three or four associates would enter a farm’s premises, free as many animals as they could and then vandalise or set fire to the building in which they’d been kept.
Over the following weeks, Zebra 84 activists would ruthlessly harass anyone who had anything to do with the targeted farm. Strictly non-violent tactics ranged from vandalising delivery vans, stealing post, supergluing locks, sabotaging water and electricity supplies and generally making life hell for the farm’s owners and anyone who did business with them.
A farm or laboratory targeted by Zebra 84 was usually driven out of business in a matter of months, as other companies stopped delivering vital supplies and insurers refused to renew policies covering fire damage.
Over the next fifteen years, Zebra 84’s controversial tactics made it the most notorious and effective animal liberation group in Britain. Despite the success of Quinn’s tactics, he resisted the temptation to expand, always relying on a small band of loyal activists and never targeting more than one organisation at a time.
This elitist attitude enhanced the group’s standing and Zebra 84 steadily gained a reputation as the special forces of the animal liberation movement.
2001 saw Zebra 84’s biggest success. Following twenty arson attacks, dozens of student marches and persistent vandalism of construction equipment – including the toppling of a forty-metre-high crane – Quinn’s group successfully halted the construction of a £17 million animal experimentation lab being built by one of Britain’s most prestigious universities with funding sourced from cancer charities and the Ministry of Defence.
Puffed up from this success, Quinn decided that Zebra’s next target would be Malarek Research. With 1,100 employees at animal laboratories in Britain, Canada and the United States, Malarek is responsible for up to 10 per cent of all the animal experiments conducted in the world each year, including all of the experiments done by the world’s two largest manufacturers of consumer products (washing powders, shaving foam, hair dyes, etc) and many experiments done by the world’s biggest drug companies. Fourteen million animals per year die in its labs.
Quinn knew the campaign against Malarek would be the longest and most difficult of his life. But his small group did not have the resources to defeat a large multinational company, so he used his legendary status within the animal rights movement to form alliances with other liberationist groups in every country where Malarek does business.
More than a dozen groups came together to form the Zebra Alliance. Unfortunately for Quinn, one of the American groups he’d contacted had been infiltrated by the FBI. Video recordings made by undercover FBI agents in which Quinn told an anecdote about toppling the crane were sent to the British authorities.
Just weeks into the Zebra Alliance campaign, Quinn was arrested and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit a terrorist act and possession of illegal explosives. He faced life imprisonment, but after a six-week jury trial, Quinn was only found guilty on a single charge of arson. The judge sentenced him to six years in prison.
Many believed that the groups aligned against Malarek would crumble without Quinn’s leadership. While the American and Canadian campaign efforts were thoroughly infiltrated by the FBI and amounted to little more than a few heavily policed protest marches, the campaign against Malarek’s UK experimentation facility had a significant effect on its operations.
Many suppliers withdrew services to the company after being harassed. Customers and employees were intimidated by threats of property destruction and the company was unable to renew insurance cover on its buildings.
But eighteen months into Quinn’s prison sentence, the Zebra Alliance appeared to have hit a brick wall. Malarek UK had been granted special insurance cover by the British government and its parent company had just announced increased profits.
Two days after the profits were announced, Malarek’s UK chairman, Fred Gibbons, was lying in bed when four masked women burst into his bedroom. The women grabbed Gibbons and beat him severely with aluminium baseball bats.
Gibbons suffered sixteen broken bones, including a fractured skull. His wife was also badly beaten as she tried to fend off the attackers with a golf club.
The Zebra Alliance was quick to distance itself from this attack. Quinn emphasised that the Alliance was a non-violent coalition and condemned the assault on Gibbons. A note left behind at the scene of the attack left a stark warning:
The Animal Freedom Militia (AFM)
Cordially invites Mr Frederick Gibbons
To stop working for Malarek Research
Because next time we’ll kill you!
P.S. We know where your children live too!
Fred Gibbons spent two months recovering in hospital and resigned from Malarek Research on health grounds, but the Animal Freedom Militia was only beginning its campaign.
Over the following months there were eleven more violent attacks on Malarek employees in the Avon area. A courier who made a delivery to the site had his home set on fire and a senior employee of a merchant bank that lent money to Malarek was blinded after acid was thrown in his face.
Meanwhile, Ryan Quinn was stuck in prison, watching the non-violent, high-pressure strategy he’d pioneered with Zebra 84 being undermined by ultra-extremists. Quinn’s first chance for parole was coming up and he believed there were links between more extreme members of the Zebra Alliance and the Animal Freedom Militia.
Quinn wanted the AFM destroyed before it permanently tarnished the reputation of all animal liberation groups, but he was powerless while he rotted in prison. Quinn put out feelers to a contact within the intelligence service and made her an offer: if he was granted parole and released from prison, Quinn would help the intelligence services to infiltrate the Zebra Alliance and try to unearth the AFM suspects from within.
Quinn’s only condition was that MI5 destroy all evidence relating to acts of sabotage carried out by members of the Zebra Alliance who opposed violence.
The offer of cooperation was a huge surprise and the security services were keen to pursue it, but the FBI sting operation that had infiltrated numerous American liberationist groups was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and members of the Zebra Alliance were naturally going to be very suspicious of any newcomers. It was thought that, even with Quinn’s assistance, it would be virtually impossible for an adult to infiltrate the Zebra Alliance and uncover members with links to the AFM.
Senior officials realised that cherubs would be the only intelligence agents who might stand a chance of successfully unearthing members of the Animal Freedom Militia.
In the four months since Ryan Quinn agreed to cooperate with the intelligence services, he has been visited by Zara Asker on a regular basis. She has been posing as Zara Wilson, an old schoolfriend who got back in touch with Quinn when she learned that he was being held in a prison close to her home.
As soon as Quinn leaves prison, he will announce that he has fallen in love with Zara and is getting engaged. The couple will move into the village of Corbyn Copse, less than a mile from the Malarek Research facility, along with three CHERUB agents who will be posing as Zara Wilson’s children from her previous marriage.
Kyle Blueman will play the role of Kyle Wilson. His age will be advanced by six months to seventeen so that he can carry a driving licence. James Adams will fill the role of James Wilson, a Year Nine pupil. The third member of the Wilson family will probably be younger and female, preferably in Year Seven or Eight.
In order to fit in with any animal rights activists they encounter, the cherubs will have to adhere to a vegan lifestyle. This means not eating meat, fish or dairy products, or wearing garments made from animal-based materials such as wool or leather.
The children will attend the local comprehensive school, while attempting to involve themselves with the Zebra Alliance and unearth information about the Animal Freedom Militia.
THE CHERUB ETHICS COMMITTEE UNANIMOUSLY ACCEPTED THIS MISSION BRIEFING. ALL MISSION CANDIDATES SHOULD CAREFULLY CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING FACTORS:
(1)
This mission has been classified MEDIUM RISK. Although the AFM is not a top-tier terrorist group like Help Earth, they do have a reputation for infighting and violence. Any suspected AFM members should be treated with extreme caution.
(2)
Agents are likely to be confronted with graphic images of animal experimentation in laboratory and factory farm environments. Agents who are squeamish may prefer not to be involved with this mission.
The following Sunday, James, Kyle, Lauren and Zara drove to Cambridgeshire to meet Ryan Quinn. He’d kept his nose clean for three and a half years, earning himself the right to spend the last four months of his sentence in a minimum security prison.
It was a sunny afternoon as Zara drove up to a striped barrier in a small BMW. She waved visiting papers out of her window at a tubby prison officer stepping out of his kiosk.
‘Shan’t be seeing you again,’ he said to Zara, as he gave the papers a cursory glance. ‘Mr Quinn’s heading out next week isn’t he?’
‘I certainly hope so,’ Zara nodded. ‘We’re supposed to be getting married.’
‘Oh, well done,’ the guard smiled. ‘Whose are all the kids?’
‘All mine.’
The guard held his gut and boomed with laughter as he squinted through the back window at Lauren and James. ‘A few weeks living with that lot and he’ll probably be begging us to let him back in here.’
Lauren smiled at the guard, but her expression changed once Zara had driven them through the gate and out of the guard’s earshot. ‘There he goes,’ she said caustically, ‘the funniest man in the world.’
Kyle burst out laughing. ‘Who rattled your cage?’
‘I can’t stand men who talk down at you like you’re a five-year-old,’ Lauren tutted.
They cruised over speed bumps towards the car park, passing flowerbeds and a couple of bare-chested inmates pushing Flymos over the grass.
‘Call this a prison?’ James carped, as he stepped out of the car and studied the lines of magnolia-painted dormitories where the inmates slept. ‘Looks more like a holiday camp to me.’
Zara led the way past the lines of cars towards the visiting block. It was a single storey building and the mixture of plastic stacking chairs and prisoners’ artwork on the walls reminded James of the classrooms at his old primary school.
Because it was a nice day, most inmates had taken their visitors outdoors to sit in the sun. The only company for the lonely-looking attendant was a couple snogging madly in a dim corner.
Ryan Quinn had been allocated one of the private rooms where inmates met their solicitors. Zara led the kids in and grabbed a seat at the table. There were only three chairs, so James and Kyle leant against the wall.
James thought Quinn looked more like a drama teacher, or someone who worked for the council, than a criminal. He wore naff looking plastic sandals, drainpipe jeans and a stonewashed rugby shirt that came straight out of the 1980s. He was the type who must have been skinny in his prime, but middle age had granted him a gut and great tufts of hair that bristled out of each nostril when he exhaled.
‘So this is the government’s secret weapon,’ Ryan said, smiling wryly at the kids as he spoke in his heavy Belfast accent. ‘The most outrageous example of state fascism I’ve ever encountered, all logoed up for the benefit of Nike, Metallica and Arsenal Football Club.’
‘Nice to meet you too,’ Kyle said, leaning forward to shake Ryan’s hand. ‘That was very cutting. I do what I can to keep the multinationals grinding the jackboot of oppression down on the developing world, though I’ve actually got a bit of a sideline as a gay liberal.’
Quinn was surprised by Kyle’s knowing response and his startled expression made Zara laugh.
‘One of the reasons cherubs do so well, Ryan, is that people like you underestimate them,’ she grinned. ‘Kyle plans to study Law at Cambridge when he leaves CHERUB. James just aced his maths A-level four years early, after studying for less than ten months. Lauren is a second dan Karate black belt, she’s practically fluent in Russian and Spanish and last year she almost killed a man four times her size with a hotel Biro. All three have received advanced espionage training and their capabilities are in line with adult special forces.’