Lone Wolf

by Robert Muchamore

  Fay reached towards the money. ‘We got fifty grand for the cocaine,’ she lied. ‘Your share comes to ten, but if you don’t want it . . .’

  Warren reluctantly grabbed the money, and actually looked impressed as he fanned the stack of notes.

  ‘Be careful how you spend it,’ Ning said. ‘People will ask questions if you start throwing money around.’

  ‘I’ll save it for university, if I live that long,’ Warren said.

  ‘So what about the other place where you said your cousin worked?’ Fay asked. ‘The grow house?’

  Warren shook his head. ‘Screw you. Hagar’s on the warpath and I’m keeping my profile so low that ants will be looking down at me.’

  ‘Why chicken out now?’ Fay asked. ‘If we pull another job, what’s Hagar gonna do that he’s not gonna do already?’

  ‘Why did the two of you rock up here?’ Warren blurted. ‘You could have called. We could have met up somewhere in town where nobody would see you.’

  Ning also felt that Fay was being reckless, but she was playing the role of naive sidekick so she hadn’t been able to speak up.

  ‘Next time, I’ll call,’ Fay said, acting like it was all a big joke. ‘Tell me about the grow house and I’ll make you a full partner. Even three-way split.’

  Warren finally felt calm enough to sit at the table. Fay glared across, but Warren looked at the stack of money like he was expecting it to give him an answer.

  ‘I need another job, Warren,’ Fay said. ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Hagar can’t cut your balls off twice.’

  Warren thumped the table. ‘Stop going on about my balls. This isn’t a game, you know?’

  Fay changed tack. ‘If you turn yellow on me, word might find its way back to one of Hagar’s people, about the carpenter with the big mouth and his little cousin.’

  Warren stood up. ‘Now you’re blackmailing me?’ he shouted.

  Fay stood up too, and sounded upset. ‘Hagar killed my mum and my aunt. You seem like a really nice guy, but I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get revenge.’

  ‘Why not just kill him?’ Warren asked. ‘You’ve got guns.’

  Fay shook her head. ‘I don’t just want to shoot Hagar. When he dies, I want him to know that he didn’t get away with killing Auntie Kirsten and my mum.’

  A tear streaked down Fay’s cheek. Ning couldn’t tell if Fay was putting on an act, but if she was she was making a good job of it.

  Warren stepped around the table and placed a hand awkwardly on Fay’s back. ‘I know he’s really hurt you and you must really hate him. But surely this isn’t what your mum and aunt would have wanted you to do?’

  Fay sobbed, and gritted her teeth. ‘I can’t live a normal life until Hagar’s paid for what he’s done.’

  Warren swept a hand through his hair and sighed. ‘I’ll tell you what I know, but it’s vague. Nothing like the info I had on the safe-house.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Fay said. She dabbed one eye with a tissue, before her tone regained its normal authority. ‘So are you gay, or what?’

  Warren sounded offended. ‘I’m not gay. What makes you even say that?’

  Fay smiled. ‘You’re always nicely dressed and you wear cologne. You could take me on a date some time if you like.’

  Ning cringed as she saw the torment on Warren’s face. He thought Fay was hot and didn’t have a girlfriend, but Fay was borderline mental and definitely dangerous.

  ‘One evening next week?’ Warren said, uncertainly.

  ‘You’re taking me out tonight,’ Fay said, before breaking into a laugh. ‘You get the cutest expression when you’re scared.’

  *

  Ryan had learned to love wet weather, because people don’t pay to have cars washed when the shine will get ruined. He’d started at half eight and worked through a couple of valet jobs for a nearby Volkswagen dealer. After that he’d been sent to McDonald’s to buy breakfasts, but by ten he’d been idle for a full hour.

  The forecast said rain all day, so Milosh had sent some of the guys home. The five that remained sat under the warped petrol station canopy reading newspapers and trading stories.

  ‘Need a shit,’ Ryan said, as he pocketed his mobile and stood up.

  ‘Have one for me while you’re up there,’ one of the guys joked.

  The toilet was a stinking beast in a cabin behind the former shop. But Ryan had seen a couple of blokes leaving the office and driving off about ten minutes earlier, and that was his true destination.

  Since Ryan started work at Kar Kleen he’d regularly seen Hagar, Craig and some of Hagar’s other senior people meeting up in the office. James had decided it would be good if Ryan could get inside and plant a couple of miniature video cameras.

  When the car-wash closed at night, Milosh or the duty manager would put a big chain and padlock on the office door, but in the day it was only secured with a straightforward door lock. Rather than risk carrying a lock gun, Ryan had already checked the make and model of the lock and a skeleton key had been sent down from campus.

  The CHERUB security department knew their stuff, but Ryan was still relieved when the key turned and the lock opened. The office had large windows along two sides, so he kept low as he walked inside.

  He unzipped his Kar Kleen-branded overall and pulled three coin-sized rubber disks out of his pocket. Two were the same size and contained video cameras. He’d already worked out the best spots to place them, and he quickly rested one on top of a curved security mirror and the other on a disused fire extinguisher. The cameras were designed to automatically point their lenses towards any sound, and if anyone found them, they just looked like bits that had fallen off of something else.

  The third device was even smaller: a limited-frequency microphone designed to pick up the sound of computer keyboards. This recent addition to CHERUB’s espionage gear was used with a piece of software capable of detecting the minuscule variations in the sonic signature of each key on a keyboard. Predictive software then determined which key corresponded to which letter of the alphabet, and meant that you could log every keystroke from several computers just by placing this microphone in a room.

  Once he’d stuck the microphone under the corner of a desk, roughly halfway between the room’s two laptops, Ryan backed out into the drizzle and found Craig strolling towards him.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Craig shouted.

  Like all good CHERUB agents, Ryan had an excuse ready. ‘I was looking for you,’ he explained calmly. ‘I wanted to know how many more hours I had to work to pay off my debt.’

  ‘How’d you get in the office?’

  Ryan acted innocent. ‘I thought you were in there. It wasn’t locked or anything.’

  Craig looked at the open door and seemed to accept Ryan’s explanation. ‘Who was in here last?’

  ‘The blond guy,’ Ryan said, not letting on that he knew the bloke’s name from surveillance photos. ‘And the chubby one who always wears a pullover.’

  ‘Right,’ Craig said. ‘They’ll be getting a rocket up their arses for leaving the office unlocked.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ryan said weakly. ‘So I was kind of wondering about my hours. Milosh said he’s not keeping track, and you’re only here now and then. So I was thinking I should make a log or something.’

  Craig didn’t seem to care. ‘Fine, you do that. Just don’t let me catch you cheating.’

  ‘I wouldn’t risk it,’ Ryan said.

  Ryan went for a piss in the toilet, but his stomach flipped when he stepped down from the cabin and found Craig on his case again. He gave Ryan a don’t move gesture, while rabbiting into the cheapo Nokia mobile at his ear.

  ‘Well . . .’ Craig said. ‘No . . . no, no. You tell him to stay and I’ll get it picked up
.’

  Ryan wondered if he’d left any evidence in the office, but the devices he’d planted looked completely innocent, so he couldn’t see how.

  Craig started losing it with whoever was on the other end of the phone. ‘I told Luke where and when,’ he yelled. ‘It’s not brain surgery, is it? And I don’t give a monkey’s if he’s sick. If Luke’s sick, he makes a call and someone will sort it out. But knowing that lazy shite, he’s been on the piss all night and can’t get his head off the pillow.’

  After a few more sentences and some serious swearing, Craig ended the call and glared at Ryan. ‘I need a job done. You know Kentish Town?’

  ‘Only vaguely, but I’ve got maps on my phone.’

  Craig nodded. ‘I need you to get up to Kentish Town Road and pick up a package from a man standing outside Iceland. Then I’ll need you to take it somewhere across town.’

  Ryan was intrigued, but made himself sound wary. ‘I haven’t worked off my debt, so I’d rather not risk getting robbed again.’

  Craig’s expression hardened. ‘I’m not asking, I’m telling,’ he barked. ‘I haven’t got the details for the delivery address, but I’ll get someone to text it to you.’

  As Craig said this, he pulled a wad of twenty-pound notes out of his jeans and gave three of them to Ryan.

  ‘That’s for a taxi if you need one.’

  ‘Right,’ Ryan said, as he unzipped his overall and started pulling off his trainers.

  ‘What are you fannying around at?’ Craig asked angrily.

  ‘I’m assuming you don’t want me carrying gear around London with the name of this place embroidered across my back.’

  Craig gave Ryan a respectful nod and a hint of a smile. ‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Brains seem to be in short supply in this organisation these days. There might just be hope for you, kiddo . . .’

  26. HUNT

  Warren reluctantly spilled the beans to Fay and Ning.

  ‘Back in the day, before Craig gave me my package and I started making real money, I did a Saturday job in my cousin’s carpentry shop. One week I got there and it was mayhem. My cuz and two guys who work for him were making these trellis things and wooden racks. Plus there’s an electrician there, wiring banks of lights on chipboard for hanging from a ceiling.’

  ‘Sounds like a grow house to me,’ Fay said. ‘What’s the address?’

  Warren smiled awkwardly. ‘That’s where it gets tricky. Like, me and my cousin all knew what the stuff was for, but Hagar’s people weren’t gonna blow the location. This geezer kept coming along in a van to pick stuff up as soon as it was finished. I don’t know where he went, but there’s a couple of decent clues.’

  Warren paused for dramatic effect, which made Fay look pissed off.

  ‘First up, the van was unusual. It was a white Transit, with two navy stripes coming up one side, across the roof and down the other. And it must have originally belonged to some company because you could see a name sprayed over.’

  Fay shook her head. ‘So it’s a white van. Hagar’s crew are bound to have sold it on or dumped it by now.’

  ‘Most likely,’ Warren agreed. ‘But if you stop interrupting, I’ll get to the juicy bit. The van was going back and forth, picking up stuff and delivering it to the grow house. But a few times that van made the round trip in ten minutes.’

  ‘Five minutes there, five back,’ Fay said thoughtfully. ‘At thirty miles per hour, that’s still a two and a half-mile radius from your cousin’s workshop.’

  Ning shook her head. ‘It’s not. Where in London can you drive at a constant thirty miles per hour for more than a minute or so? By the time you count for junctions, traffic lights, you’re not gonna get much more than a mile in five minutes.’

  ‘I guess,’ Fay said.

  ‘Most important, that van was fully loaded,’ Warren added. ‘It took at least ten minutes to load up with wood each time. It was probably faster unloading at the other end, but even if they drove flat out and had a team of guys unloading, they can only have driven two minutes maximum.’

  Ning pulled out her phone and opened the calculator app. ‘So,’ she said, as her fingers tapped the screen. ‘Two minutes’ driving, and let’s say the average speed was fifteen miles per hour. That’s a radius of half a mile from your cousin’s workshop.’

  Fay looked at Warren. ‘Get Google Maps on your laptop.’

  Warren seemed to have got over his angst about the girls being in his house as he led the pair from the kitchen to his bedroom.

  ‘Oooh, very nice,’ Fay said, as Ning did a 360, taking in a neat room, with a big LCD on the wall and framed photos of giant wooden rollercoasters.

  ‘Strange choice of pictures,’ Ning said.

  Warren sounded a touch embarrassed. ‘I’m a bit of a coaster geek. Like, going on websites where people talk about the biggest and fastest rollercoasters and stuff and I belonged to this club. I hardly do any of that stuff now though.’

  Fay wasn’t listening and had opened the lid on Warren’s laptop. ‘Where’s your cousin’s workshop at?’

  Once they found the workshop on Google Maps, Fay printed a page out and Warren got a compass from his school pack, worked out the scale and drew a half-mile circle around it.

  ‘Still a lot of streets,’ Fay said, dejectedly. ‘Searching them all would take days, and it’s not like a grow house is gonna have a sign out front saying, Spliff grown here.’

  Ning sounded more enthusiastic. ‘We know it’s a big building,’ she said, as she turned to Warren. ‘How much space do you reckon all of that trellis would take up?’

  ‘More than would fit in a normal-sized house,’ Warren said. ‘And there were forty-eight banks of lights.’

  Ning nodded. ‘We should be looking for a commercial building. Disused factory, warehouse, or something like that.’

  ‘I’ll scan the Google sat view and see what comes up,’ Fay said.

  ‘They were picking up and dropping that trellis and banks of lamps in broad daylight,’ Warren noted. ‘So I reckon they must have been able to park the van on a secluded driveway, or reverse into a garage.’

  Fay switched to satellite view and zoomed in on a street in the top-left corner of Warren’s circle. The view was full of the roofs of terraced houses. She dragged the map downwards until she came to a T-junction.

  ‘I’ll mark off the streets on the printout,’ Ning said, picking up the printed map, before grabbing a pen off Warren’s desk and stripping the cap with her teeth.

  Over the next couple of hours, Warren, Fay and Ning huddled over the laptop screen. When they found a large building, they’d switch from satellite to street view. They inspected churches, schools, shops and police stations, but amongst these unlikely locations for a marijuana grow house, they found sixteen places that seemed large enough and had a secluded driveway.

  Saturday night was peak time in the drug trade, so Warren had to go out and sell his package. Fay and Ning drew a wonky line down the map and decided to head out on the street and check eight possible grow house locations each.

  *

  Ryan’s first job took him out east to Canary Wharf, delivering fifty grams of cocaine to a hot Russian in a thirty-fourth-floor penthouse. He assumed he was done, but over the following five hours the bargain basement Alcatel that Craig had given him rang at least twice per hour, with unknown voices on the other end telling him where to go next.

  He picked up multiple packages from a woman in Chinatown and took them to the offices of a nightclub security firm just off Leicester Square. He dropped more cocaine in Soho and a huge block of weed to a van in an underground car park. When there was too much cash to pocket, he began stuffing it in his backpack.

  Just after five, Ryan got told to await further instructions. He sat on a street bench scoffing a pepperoni pizza sli
ce when a message came through saying it was all good and to bring the wodges of cash to a minicab office behind Finsbury Park bus station.

  As he headed towards the one-storey cab shack behind the bus station, Ryan caught sight of a fat bloke standing hands on hips at a car-wash place across the street. He was tired and his first thought was that his brain was playing tricks, but the harder Ryan looked the more certain he was that he was looking at one of the three men who’d robbed his money and slapped him around earlier that week.

  Suddenly excited, Ryan changed track, heading away from the minicab office and joining a bus queue. Hidden amidst passengers, Ryan watched the man over by the car-wash. He seemed to be bossing around staff, who wore blue overalls like the ones he wore at King’s Cross.

  Ryan wasn’t sure how to handle the situation, so he pulled his phone and called James.

  ‘Hi,’ James’ voice said. ‘My cell must be out of signal area and I can’t take your call. To connect to the mission control building on campus, press five.’

  Ryan was about to press five when the fat dude waved goodbye to no one in particular and started heading uphill, away from the station. Ryan pocketed his phone and set off after him.

  The guy wore a too-tight polo shirt and cargo shorts that afforded you a glimpse of a pimply arse crack. A break in traffic allowed Ryan to jog across the main road, as his target turned into a side street and pulled a car key from his shorts.

  Ryan lost sight when the man turned the corner, so he sped up. When he got a look down the side street, his target stood in the road, unlocking a Peugeot people carrier. Snug clothing meant there was no way that the guy could be carrying a weapon, and in the absence of any advice from James, Ryan figured he could earn serious brownie points with Craig if he nailed the man who’d robbed his gear.

  The guy had most of his bulk inside the car when Ryan broke into a run and slammed the driver’s door on his trailing leg. Ryan swiftly rounded the door, yanked it open and kneed the man in the face.

  ‘Rob me now, golden balls,’ Ryan said, as he landed two quick punches. One cracked the guy’s nose and the knee had already bloodied his bottom lip.