Ethan erupted into a coughing fit while the plane touched down, with only the tiniest jolt as wheels touched tarmac. As soon as the aircraft steps were down, Kessie stood in the doorway shouting orders to a group of young men and women who’d sprinted after the plane as it taxied.
A lad of about seventeen came aboard and undid Ethan’s cuffs. His shirt was unbuttoned, exposing a powerful torso, and he wore grubby tracksuit bottoms and rubber boots with a thick coating of muck.
Ethan’s thirst was desperate and he risked upsetting this new guard by swiping a half-drunk Evian bottle left on Kessie’s seat.
The youth gave Ethan a hurry-up shove, but let him gulp the water. The air was nowhere near as hot as it had been at their night-time refuelling spot and as the grassland on which Kessie’s animals were grazing seemed quite lush, Ethan reckoned he’d crossed the equator and had reached southern Africa.
None of Ethan’s luggage had made it and the youth walked him briskly over dry paths between farm buildings. The morning air swarmed with flies, attracted by the powerful aroma of dung.
‘You stay here, you stay quiet,’ the youth said, speaking in stilted English as he slid a bolt across the door of a tin-roofed shed built with lines of uneven breeze blocks.
The inside was divided into six empty cages. Heavy bars and the empty gun rack near the entrance suggested that these pens had been built to hold something a lot more vicious than a skinny thirteen-year-old.
The youth slid a barred door and told Ethan to get inside. The empty enclosures had been well hosed and there was a smell of a lemony disinfectant, but there were still crusts of dried manure in the corners and in the open drainage channel that ran along one edge.
There was a big bucket to serve either as a toilet or a seat if you turned it upside down, a yellowed mattress on the floor and some cushions.
‘My name’s Michael,’ the youth said. ‘I don’t want to be a bad guy, but the boss has told me to beat you if you cause trouble. I’ll get you a cup and a toothbrush. One of the girls from the kitchen will bring your food. OK?’
‘Fantastic,’ Ethan said sarcastically, as he looked around and saw that the only light came through cracks in the tin roof and a tiny slot window just above his eye level. ‘So what is this place anyway? I mean, those aren’t farm animals out there.’
Michael shook his head as he backed out of the cage. ‘I’m not supposed to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Kessie will peel my skin off if I do.’
*
Ning felt weird as she ate breakfast. It was a Sunday and DESA’s new term didn’t start until tomorrow. So while most pupils wouldn’t even arrive until the evening, Ning was already thinking about her exit strategy.
There was no point being at DESA if Ethan wasn’t coming, but Ning knew CHERUB would make her stick around for a week or two, just so that the school didn’t get suspicious about three newly arrived pupils who either didn’t arrive or immediately disappeared.
As she ate rubbery scrambled eggs and tried to decide if she liked the Halal beef bacon, Ning hoped Amy would ask her to get expelled and let her be creative about how she did it: setting off the fire alarms, flooding the bathrooms, booting a basketball at a teacher’s head.
‘What’s on your mind?’ Alfie asked, as he sat down across the table dressed in jeans and a Lacoste polo shirt. His hair was slicked back and he had a pair of wraparound sunglasses balanced on top of his head.
‘I was thinking that we could get kicked out if we climbed the big tree out front and egged the headmaster,’ Ning said.
‘Nice,’ Alfie said. ‘Why are you in uniform?’
Ning shrugged. ‘I didn’t realise. I thought we had to wear it all the time.’
‘Have you spoken to Amy?’ Alfie asked, as he stuffed an entire hash brown in his mouth.
Ning shook her head.
‘Hot!’ Alfie spluttered, as he spat a mound of greasy potato flakes back on to his plate. ‘MFFF!’
‘Gross,’ Ning said, turning away as Alfie gulped orange juice to cool his mouth. ‘You looked cool with the trendy shirt and sunglasses, but the food gobbing kind of spoiled it.’
‘I’m dressed for golf,’ Alfie explained. ‘Met a couple of guys last night and they invited me for a round at eleven.’
‘I’ve never heard of golf at school,’ Ning said, smiling. ‘Can you play?’
‘Badly,’ Alfie said. ‘But Ethan’s not here, so what else am I gonna do all day?’
‘When you’ve finished pigging yourself we should go back to my room—’
Alfie interrupted and put on his thickest French accent. ‘And make wild passionate love!’
‘Double gross!’ Ning said. ‘And shut up. I’m trying to be serious.’
Ning looked around to make sure nobody else was nearby before continuing. ‘We need to call Amy and see what’s happening.’
Ning’s room was a couple of minutes’ walk from the dining-hall. Despite being modelled on a traditional English boarding school, with big oak doors and gabled windows, DESA’s buildings were only three years old. The corridors felt sterile and hummed with air-conditioning units fighting off the blazing heat outside.
‘Mine looks out over the playing fields,’ Alfie said, as he stepped inside and looked at Ning’s room, and her half-unpacked stuff sprawled over the desk and bed.
Ning pushed her door closed, called Amy and put her iPhone on speaker so that Alfie could hear. She sat on the edge of her bed, and Alfie wheeled the chair over from the desk to be close.
‘So we’re stuck here for a bit,’ Ning said, after all the boring hello stuff was out of the way. ‘What happens now?’
‘I’m trying to work on a strategy with Ted Brasker,’ Amy said. ‘It’s not just that we’ve lost Ethan, he was also our best window into Aramov Clan operations.’
‘And if Leonid’s got Ethan, or had him killed, he must be about to make a move against Irena,’ Alfie said.
‘For sure,’ Amy said.
‘This may sound crazy, but what about Dan?’ Ning asked.
‘Who’s he?’ Alfie asked.
Amy knew the story because she’d debriefed Ning when she’d first arrived on CHERUB campus, but Ning told a short version for Alfie’s benefit.
‘Leonid Aramov and his goons kidnapped me and my stepmum. He tortured us both. Killed my stepmum once he’d forced her to transfer several million dollars out of her bank accounts, but by that time I’d managed to escape with Dan’s help.’
‘So Dan works for Aramov?’ Alfie asked.
Ning nodded. ‘He’s only sixteen – seventeen now I guess. He works for the clan because it’s the only work he can get. But he hates it and he risked his life to save me.’
‘Interesting thought,’ Amy said. ‘We’ve been concentrating so much on Ethan that I’d not even considered trying to use another source inside the Kremlin.’
‘I was holed up in Dan’s apartment for a couple of weeks,’ Ning said. ‘I did have his mobile number and I called from the Czech Republic to tell him I was safe. But when I tried from Britain a few weeks later his number was dead.’
‘Mmm,’ Amy said, before a pause. ‘If Dan does Leonid Aramov’s dirty work, he probably has to change his mobile phone regularly to stop it being tracked. What about his address?’
‘I don’t know the exact address, but if you let me play with Google satellite maps for a while I’m sure I could narrow it down.’
‘I’ll have to speak to Ted Brasker and my boss, Dr D,’ Amy said. ‘But we urgently need to know what’s going on inside the Kremlin, so we should definitely look into your idea.’
17. PERSUASION
Ethan’s cage was only lit by a couple of shafts of moonlight. As soon as it got dark the stone floor of his cell came alive with cockroaches, and once in a while he jolted at the sound of something bigger – either a rat or some weird African equivalent that he’d never heard of.
The slim girl who brought Ethan plates of rice, spiced meat and fried banana was no olde
r than fourteen. She spoke no English, but her smile was kind and when he’d quickly drunk the water in his jug she’d immediately gone to the tap to refill it.
In his desperate state, this small act of kindness had brought tears to Ethan’s eyes. When he heard the door of the cage block open in the middle of the night he thought that the girl had come to check on him again, but when Ethan rolled on his mattress he saw a much larger body moving in the shadows.
‘Not sleeping tonight?’ Kessie said, laughing loudly.
He held a two-litre plastic beer bottle, and was absurdly dressed in wellington boots, striped pyjama bottoms and a Hawaiian shirt.
‘I’ll kill you quickly when the time comes,’ Kessie said. ‘As long as you’re a good boy.’
Ethan couldn’t see the point in being cowardly when it looked like he was going to die no matter what. ‘What’s your deal with Leonid?’ he asked.
Kessie slugged from his big bottle before speaking. ‘I was a poor boy. Came up from dirt! This place was nothing. I built it with my own hands and Leonid’s planes move everything in and out.’
‘So what happens here?’ Ethan asked. ‘I mean, they’re not farm animals.’
‘You want an animal, Kessie will get it for you. Dead, alive, stuffed or skinned. Ivory, leather, even powdered rhino horns for randy Chinamen! And then there are the game reserves. Rich men are too lazy to go into the bush and spend three or four days hunting an animal, so we breed in captivity and sell them to game parks. They stuff the parks so full of “wild” animals that even the fattest American ends up with a trophy to hang on his wall.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got a good business,’ Ethan said. ‘And I suppose selling the animals to game parks makes the smuggling side look more legitimate.’
Kessie smiled. ‘You’re a smart boy, Ethan!’
‘Leonid’s not so smart,’ Ethan said. ‘People fear him, but my grandma’s got more brains in her big toe. And she may be a sick old lady, but when she finds out she’ll hammer you.’
‘This has been planned carefully over months,’ Kessie said, waving his arm dismissively.
‘Give me a phone,’ Ethan said boldly. ‘I’ll speak to my grandma. We’ll give you double whatever Leonid’s paying you to keep me down here. And my Grandma’s gonna know by now, because I didn’t turn up at the school.’
Kessie found this extremely funny. ‘Leonid has the educational consultant in his pocket. The school will be told that you are sick and that you will not arrive for two to three weeks. Your grandmother will be told that newly arrived pupils are discouraged from contacting their families while they settle into a new school. So unfortunately, Ethan, nobody at the Kremlin will miss you until it’s too late.’
Ethan was disheartened, but tried to keep it out of his voice. ‘You should think about what you’re doing. You’ve still got a chance to save yourself.’
Kessie found this so funny that he had to clutch his shaking belly. ‘Oh, I will torture myself with worry,’ he laughed. ‘I will have nightmares. Here, have the rest of my beer. You deserve it for giving me a laugh!’
Kessie had to squash the plastic bottle to get it between the bars. When he threw it into the cage, it hit the concrete floor and the gassy beer foamed out over the floor.
‘Sweet dreams, Ethan Aramov!’ Kessie said, as he swaggered out of the shed. ‘Sweet dreams!’
*
After his drunken chat with Kessie on the first night in the cage, Ethan’s next four days were dominated by boredom and a dodgy stomach. His only visitor had been the girl who brought his food and water, and when Michael entered the cage block in the afternoon of his fourth day, Ethan backed up, fearing that Leonid had finally sent down the order to have him executed.
Oddly the prospect didn’t scare him, because after days of hopelessness, dying just seemed like being put out of his misery.
‘Your friend from the kitchen is right,’ Michael said, masking his face with the top of his T-shirt as a much smaller lad took one step inside before rushing out.
Ethan looked baffled. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘You stink this place up,’ Michael said accusingly. ‘Girl in the kitchen is refusing to bring your food down. Two-tonne hippos make less stink than you!’
Ethan spoke angrily. ‘What do you expect? No clean clothes. No way to wash or clean out my bucket and the food hasn’t been agreeing with me.’
‘Back way up,’ Michael said, as he unlocked the cell. ‘You carry the bucket. I’m not touching your filth.’
Ethan quickly pushed his grubby socks into trainers and picked up his shit-and-puke-splattered bucket as Michael slid the barred gate. He’d kept little food down over the last couple of days and felt shaky as he walked out of the cage.
A greater shock came when he stepped into bright sunlight. After four days in twilight his eyes burned and he wrapped an arm over his face.
Michael gave the younger boy orders. ‘Hose everything out with bleach, then go back to the house and get the stuff.’ Then he looked at Ethan. ‘Keep your distance.’
Ethan didn’t see much for the first couple of hundred metres. But when his eyes began coping with the light, he found himself walking towards a fast-flowing river roughly ten metres wide. On the opposite bank a dozen men worked around huge open casks filled with chemicals, while fully cured animal hides and fur pelts were drying on wooden frames.
In contrast to Kessie’s neat animal pens and modern farm buildings, the river was a dark brown mass, with debris from soggy newspaper to plastic pots clumped around the riverbank and chemical foam bubbling on the surface.
Ethan’s destination was an open-air shower block, adjacent to a dormitory used by some of Kessie’s workers. The showers were built over the riverbank, so the water drained through gaps between the slippery plastic sheeting that formed the shower floor.
‘Wash good,’ Michael ordered, as he pointed out grubby soap slivers on a wooden shelf. ‘Scrub your clothes and clean out your bucket in the river.’
The process was awkward, with no towel and limited privacy. Ethan decided the best thing was to rinse the bucket out first. But as soon as he moved it towards the shower Michael turned angry.
‘Are you stupid?’ he shouted. ‘You don’t tip that out in our shower! Take it down the bank and empty it in the river.’
Still feeling shaky, Ethan stepped over uneven rocks as he crept down towards the churning water. The current almost knocked him down when he dunked the bucket in the water.
Michael was extremely irritated and shouted, ‘If you fall I’m not coming after you!’
But Kessie had ordered Michael to look after Ethan, so despite his harsh words Michael scrambled over the rocks and snatched the bucket.
‘Get up there and shower,’ he ordered, giving Ethan a gentle rap over the back of the head.
Ethan stripped and threw his clothes in a pile at his feet before pulling a cord to start the shower. The shower was fed with water from a rooftop tank, and warmed only by sunlight. With tepid water the grubby bar of soap didn’t lather, but the shower was still the first thing in days that made Ethan feel like a human, instead of a caged animal.
By the time he’d lathered up his hair and let the foam run down his body, Michael had come back up the rocks with the rinsed-out bucket, but instead of looking at Ethan, Michael’s eyes fixed on an attractive girl in her mid-teens.
As Michael spoke to the girl, Ethan began washing out his clothes. He couldn’t understand their language, but Michael’s smile and open stance, and the girl’s hand on hip and over-the-top laugh, was obviously the body language of two people who fancied each other.
They were so into each other that Ethan looked about. Could he run away from the riverbank, cut between the two dormitories? Hop into his trousers and maybe find a bike or a car?
Ethan’s escape plan was short-lived because one of the farm workers had come out of the dorm with a towel over his shoulder. He shouted something to Michael as he threw his towel
over a hook.
Ethan was paranoid and assumed it was a warning about him looking around for an escape route, but it was the girl who looked upset and began hurrying away.
A brief conversation ensued in which the only word Ethan grasped was Kessie. The girl had been quite well dressed, and by the end of the conversation, Ethan was fairly sure that the girl was Kessie’s daughter and Michael was being told to stay away from her.
‘I’ve wasted enough time with you,’ Michael said, scowling as he grabbed Ethan’s soggy jeans off the plastic shower floor. ‘Put these on and grab the bucket.’
Back at the cage block, Ethan found that the younger boy had not only swept out his filthy cage, but rather than moving him back into the cage with the wet floor, he’d moved Ethan’s mattress into a different one.
The light in this cage was slightly better and a length of hose had been rigged up so that he could get water whenever he liked. There were also a couple of new personal items, including the toothbrush he’d been promised since he first arrived, soap, a towel and two pairs of badly frayed but freshly laundered undershorts.
‘Now you’ve got no excuse to stink,’ Michael said, still moody after his telling-off at the shower block. ‘You’re lucky I’m not beating you.’
Ethan looked at the younger lad. ‘I couldn’t help getting sick.’
But the boy didn’t understand and moments later Ethan was plunged back into semi-darkness. He felt feverish as he sat on the mattress, preparing to peel off his wringing wet jeans and hang them over the bars to dry properly. Apparently he had a few more days to live, because surely they wouldn’t have bothered taking him for a shower if he was about to get a bullet through the head.
18. CHANCES
Amy and Ning could have hopped on a plane and reached Bishkek within a few hours of having the idea to find Dan, but there was a big difference between a routine make-friends-with-Ethan-at-a-boarding-school mission and the much more dangerous prospect of working undercover in Kyrgyzstan, where the Aramov Clan owned enough cops, soldiers and politicians to operate beyond the law.
Cherub: Guardian Angel: Book 14 Page 11