He passes all the entrance tests, and is then sent back to Nebraska House to decide whether or not he wants to join. Kyle reveals that he was sent to recruit new agents, and chose him. Upon returning to CHERUB, Kyle shows James his new room, and he meets his handler, Meryl Spencer. In her office, he chooses his new name, James Robert Anthony Adams (after Arsenal F.C. player Tony Adams). He is then given a physical assessment, and told to run 30km per week and learn how to swim. He is taught to swim by Amy Collins, a sixteen-year-old black-shirt CHERUB agent. A few days after arriving at CHERUB campus, Kyle sneaks him onto a one-day mission in London to visit Lauren; Kyle is reprimanded but James gets off with a warning. Three weeks after his arrival at CHERUB campus, he and seven other recruits begin Basic Training, a rigorous 100-day course designed to prepare CHERUB agents for missions, and is paired up with Kerry Chang, a recruit with two attempts at Basic Training under her belt. Despite nearly quitting after spending Christmas night outside in their underwear, they both pass. Shortly after arriving back on campus, he finds out that Lauren has joined CHERUB as well and Ron has been sentenced to nine years in jail for physically abusing her and selling contraband cigarettes. Two months later, Amy tells James that their swimming lessons are over, and they have a mission together. Overseen by mission controller Ewart Asker, they are to stay with Cathy Dunn at Fort Harmony, a hippy commune in Wales. There, they discover that brothers Fire and World Dunn are planning an anthrax attack against 200 oil executives and politicians, including the United States Secretary of Energy and the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, at Petrocon, an oil conference held in the nearby Green Brooke Conference Centre. They successfully prevent the attack, although accomplice Brian "Bungle" Evans manages to escape. For his exemplary job in the mission, James is awarded a navy CHERUB T-shirt. Development for both "The Recruit" and the CHERUB series as a whole began in 1999 when Muchamore was visiting his sister in Australia and found his twelve-year-old nephew complaining about the lack of any good reading material. In 2001, Muchamore began working on an unnamed novel, KN1 (Kids novel 1). This draft was more violent than the published version, with James slashing Samantha's face open with broken glass.