‘But he’s two rooms away,’ Natalka said. ‘If he wants you dead it wouldn’t be hard.’
‘He has to do it subtly,’ Ethan explained. ‘If my grandma worked out that Leonid killed my mom, she’d kick him out of the clan. So she’s shielding me now, but I’ll be shit out of luck when she finally keels over.’
‘So how does hacking Leonid’s computer help?’
‘I’m not sure exactly what it will give us,’ Ethan said. ‘But information is power. Maybe I can find something I can use to blackmail him. Maybe I can stitch him up. There’s even an outside chance that I’ll find evidence that I can show to Grandma to prove that he killed my mom.’
‘Irena’s not stupid,’ Natalka said. ‘She must have her suspicions that Leonid killed your mum. Plenty of other people in the Kremlin reckon he was behind it.’
Ethan was surprised by this. ‘Really?’
‘For sure,’ Natalka said. ‘Quite a few of the pilots my mum knows have said as much.’
‘I hardly know anyone in the Kremlin,’ Ethan said. ‘I’m out of the loop on all the gossip.’
Natalka nodded. ‘Plus you’re Aramov, so they’ll avoid talking in front of you in case it gets back to Leonid.’
‘I think my grandma’s got a blind spot. Leonid’s her golden boy, or something. She covers up for a lot of his crazy shit, and even though they fight all the time, I’ve noticed that Leonid nearly always gets his way.’
Natalka nodded. ‘Like a lot of parents: she thinks the sun shines out of her kid’s arse.’
Ethan smiled fondly. ‘My mom used to argue with my PE teachers on parents’ night. She used to say they never gave me a chance. She could never accept that I’m totally uncoordinated and crap at sports.’
‘Speaking of school,’ Natalka said, ‘how’s the Dubai thing going?’
Ethan shrugged. ‘Nothing’s for sure and Grandma’s still annoyed that I was sneaking in to use her PC, but hopefully it’s on again – once I’ve served my time at the stables.’
‘Cool,’ Natalka nodded, as she threw the USB memory stick at Ethan. ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘So what’s your plan for getting it in the back of Leonid’s computer?’
*
The six CHERUB agents belted along the canal footpath with three cops in hot pursuit. The fattest cop didn’t keep up after the first couple of hundred metres, but the other two were an athletic black dude and a big-arsed woman who moved way faster than you’d have thought possible.
The crowds thinned out as they moved away from the market and Max led the way as the narrow canal-side path skimmed beneath their feet.
‘Split up,’ Chloe yelled, as she passed a couple of the heavier shopping bags over to Ning.
The cherubs had all been taught that cops have radios and will send more officers in a car to intercept you if you’re daft enough to run in a straight line.
Max and Alfie took the first escape route, jumping up to grab an iron road bridge crossing the canal, then swinging their bodies over the riveted beams. Chloe and Ning made an easier exit a hundred metres further along, running up an embankment and into an alleyway beside a bus depot.
This left Ryan and Grace on the canal path. Ryan had moved a good twenty metres ahead of Grace, who was the smallest and slowest. As he rounded a short corner he had the horrible realisation that the footpath only ran on for a couple of hundred metres.
The only way out was up a grass embankment and over a graffitied brick wall. The wall’s top had been cemented with glass shards to stop people climbing into the recycling depot on the other side.
‘Screw it,’ Grace said breathlessly, as she stopped running and spun around, seeking options.
They couldn’t see any cops, but they could hear boots on the canal path less than a hundred metres away.
‘I’ll give you a boost,’ Ryan said.
He went down on one knee and Grace hopped on to his shoulders as he stood up. Ryan was banking on Grace giving him an arm up, but she jumped straight down the other side.
‘Hey!’ Ryan shouted.
‘What?’ Grace asked. ‘Can’t you reach the top of the wall?’
By this time the big black cop was in sight. Ryan made a desperate jump at the wall, but his fingertips didn’t get within thirty centimetres of the top and there was nothing around that he could use as a step.
‘Get your hands where I can see ’em,’ the cop shouted.
Ryan looked about. He’d been kicked off his first mission in disgrace. Attacking a cop might get him kicked out of CHERUB for good, so he decided the best option was to jump into the canal and swim.
‘I’m warning you,’ the cop shouted, as Ryan hesitated.
As the cop ripped something off his belt, Ryan sprinted down the embankment, preparing to jump in. The water was going to be cold and filthy, but he was a strong swimmer and it was his best shot at not getting caught.
Two steps from the water, Ryan felt an enormous jolt as the cop fired a Taser barb into his thigh. He fell sideways with his body sprawled across the footpath, legs twitching and his head hanging over the water. At the same moment a police siren whooped in a street not too far away.
‘I warned you,’ the cop shouted, as he strode purposefully towards Ryan’s shuddering body.
Ryan was face down, so he didn’t see what happened next, but he did hear an almighty crash, followed by a splash as the cop hit the water.
When Grace jumped off the wall, she’d found herself balanced on a mound of old kitchen appliances. As the cop pulled his Taser, she’d grabbed a sturdy metal-sided toaster, clambered to the highest point of the mound and used a two-handed overhead throw to lob it at the policeman’s head.
Ryan’s leg muscles twitched from the Taser blast, but he’d been zapped several times in training and knew that the effects would only be temporary as he pulled the metal barb out through his jeans.
‘You OK?’ Grace shouted anxiously, as she balanced on the mound, leaning over the wall. ‘I’ve got a fridge door you can use as a step up.’
As the cop pulled himself furiously out of the water, there was no sign of his female colleague, who must have broken off to chase Chloe and Ning. Ryan hobbled up the embankment and by the time he reached the wall Grace had grabbed a fridge door and lobbed it over the wall.
‘Just you wait!’ the cop roared.
As the cop came up on to the embankment, dripping filthy canal water and crippled by the weight of soggy body armour and cop equipment, Ryan used the fridge door as a makeshift step, positioning his hand carefully to avoid the jutting glass atop the wall as he swung over into a crunching mound of discarded inkjet printers, food mixers and LCD screens.
‘Nice move with the toaster,’ he told Grace, smiling warily as they scrambled down the unstable mound looking for a quick way out of the recycling yard. ‘But if we get caught after you whacked a cop we are in so much trouble.’
11. HORMONES
‘Hellloooooo!’ Tamara Aramov said. ‘Good to see you, Ethan, and it’s Natasha, isn’t it?’
‘Natalka,’ Natalka corrected, as she eyed the petite smiling woman who was Andre’s mother and had been Leonid Aramov’s second wife.
While Leonid was still legally married to a third wife, who’d returned to live in China, his second wife Tamara had never left the Kremlin. She remained close to Leonid, more for Andre’s sake than out of any lingering affection for her thuggish ex-husband.
‘Leonid says excellent things about your mother,’ Tamara told Natalka. ‘One of his best pilots.’
As Natalka found herself hunting for something to say, Andre came out of the living-room wearing pyjama bottoms and a Mighty Ducks hockey shirt.
‘Oh, hi,’ he said, marginally surprised by Ethan, who he invited regularly but who rarely visited, but utterly shocked to see Natalka. ‘What do you guys want?’
‘Bored,’ Natalka admitted, as she came through the door of Leonid’s apartment. ‘Ethan said you had a heap of Wii games.’
Andre’s face lit up, but then he looked awkwardly at his mum. ‘We were kind of watching a movie.’
‘The Jungle Book,’ Tamara added. ‘His favourite!’
Andre was ten, but often seemed younger. ‘Mum!’ he said, embarrassed. ‘It’s not my favourite.’
Normally Natalka would have ripped into Andre, but they needed to get into Leonid’s room so she shrugged and said, ‘Cool movie. Baloo cracks me up.’
‘Why don’t you all come in?’ Tamara said. ‘I can make some hot chocolate. If you want to play games we can finish our movie another time.’
They walked down a short hallway, past Leonid Aramov’s living-room and into the titchy space that Andre had as a bedroom. It was slightly wider than his single bed. The end wall was stacked with shelves of video games and there was an obscenely large telly screwed to the wall.
‘I’m getting rid of this,’ Andre said, embarrassed again as he flung a Ben 10 duvet cover off his bed.
‘Probably best, before you start having chicks over,’ Natalka said, unable to resist teasing. ‘So where are the gorillas?’
‘Boris and Alex went out with my dad,’ Andre explained. ‘Partying with some new Chinese girls.’
Natalka shuddered. These ‘new’ girls were part of a regular trade bussed in from the rural provinces of western China. They’d spend a few days in a dormitory close to the airfield, before being flown off to Europe or America with false passports.
Most had left China with the promise of well-paid factory jobs, but would end up being forced into prostitution. And while Andre was remarkably innocent, Ethan and Natalka knew that his older brothers’ idea of a party with vulnerable young girls wouldn’t be the kind that involved cake and candles.
‘So they won’t be back for a while,’ Ethan said. ‘Have you got that boxing game? The mad one where you’re all in those kind of wheelchair things and you get power ups and end up with massive boxing gloves?’
‘Wii Sports,’ Andre said. ‘It’s really old. I’ve got way better games than that.’
‘Pick something where I don’t have to remember what eight different buttons do,’ Natalka said, instinctively knowing that being a hot girl in the company of two younger boys gave her the right to be bossy.
‘I need a piss before we start,’ Ethan said.
As Ethan headed back into the hall, Natalka stood in the doorway and kept watch. Leonid Aramov might have been a billionaire, but his apartment was still just four sets of officers’ quarters knocked into one, and he was certainly no aficionado of interior design, with junk from skis to cigar boxes piled in every available space.
‘What you looking at?’ Andre asked Natalka, as the Wii gobbled a silver disk.
‘Just seeing how your mum’s getting along with the hot chocolate,’ she lied. ‘She might need a hand carrying the mugs.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Andre said.
Ethan cut into Leonid Aramov’s office, which was actually a dead section of hallway created when some walls got knocked down. If anyone saw him, he’d claim to have got confused and gone the wrong way.
The computer was a chunky old Toshiba laptop, but it had a printer and stuff wired up and the build-up of dust on the desk around it indicated that the machine never moved off its spot. Ethan reached quickly around the back of the machine, where he was relieved to find a pair of empty USB ports.
He jolted at a flash of light, but he’d only nudged the mouse, making a screensaver pop up.
‘Done,’ he whispered to Natalka, when he got back into Andre’s room. ‘So what game are we gonna play?’
*
It was a Saturday, so the recycling depot was busy with cars dropping off junk. Getting on to the street involved a brisk walk past a couple of council workers in orange high-vis jackets and a young mum unloading the rear of a people carrier while two brats squawked in the back.
Ryan and Grace jogged until they were certain the soggy cop had given up. But there were sure to be other cops looking for them, so Ryan was delighted by the orange for-hire light of a black London taxi and put his arm out to hail it.
The driver pulled over but looked wary. ‘Where are you kids going?’
‘I’ve got dosh,’ Ryan said, pulling a twenty out of his pocket and waving it.
‘We’ve been out, but we’ve forgotten our keys,’ Grace explained. ‘We’ve got to go to my mum’s office.’
‘And where’s that?’ the driver asked.
‘The one that’s shaped like a gherkin,’ Grace said, coming out with the only London office block she could think of. ‘It’s dead famous, do you know it?’
‘Thirty St Mary Axe,’ the driver said. ‘In you hop.’
Ryan and Grace took a few seconds catching their breath in the back seat as the taxi pulled away, then exchanged relieved smiles.
‘That was kinda cool with the chilli sauce,’ Ryan said. ‘I’m glad you stood up to those dicks.’
‘Cheers,’ Grace said. ‘But I’m not sure that’s how the campus staff will see things if they find out.’
Ryan nodded warily. ‘If any of us get busted, it’ll take Meryl about four seconds to work out who else was involved. You try calling Chloe. I’ll get Max.’
Ryan pulled his phone out, but instead of doing the same, Grace kept smiling at him.
‘What?’ Ryan asked. ‘Did I say something stupid?’
‘I shredded the sole of my shoe on the glass on top of that wall,’ Grace said, as she lifted her leg off the floor of the taxi.
But as Ryan leaned forwards to look, Grace gave him a peck on the cheek.
‘You’re all red and sweaty, but you’re cute,’ she said, machine-gunning the words like she was scared to say them.
Ryan looked stunned, but before he could respond his phone rang and the screen flashed Ning Calling.
‘Are you guys OK?’ Ning asked.
‘Bit of a close shave but we’ve grabbed a taxi,’ Ryan explained. ‘How about you?’
‘Back in the market, blending into a crowd. We saw Max and Alfie too, but we split cos there’s less chance of being recognised.’
Chloe spoke in the background. ‘We should probably stay apart for the rest of the day, just to be on the safe side.’
‘Chloe says—’
Ryan interrupted. ‘I heard her. I guess I’ll stay with Grace then. See you back at the bus this evening. And I’d try putting some more distance between yourselves and the canal.’
‘That’s what we’re doing,’ Ning said. ‘We decided that Camden Town tube’s too obvious, but once we’re away from the market we’re getting on the first bus we can find.’
Ryan gasped with relief as he pressed end call on his phone.
‘So it’s you and me with six hours to kill,’ Grace said, smiling sweetly as she shifted across the bench towards Ryan. ‘What do you fancy doing?’
Grace had proved to be extremely clingy and a bit of a lunatic during their previous brief relationship, but even though Ryan knew he was opening himself up to a world of neediness and flying macaroni, Grace had a cute face and nice legs. Also her boobs were bigger than they’d been six months earlier and Ryan liked the idea of getting a feel.
‘We could go for a coffee or something,’ Ryan said, trying to sound mature when he was actually completely flustered. ‘Then maybe somewhere quiet like a park. We can talk, or whatever . . .’
‘I can think of some things we can do in a park,’ Grace said, as she put her hand on Ryan’s jeans and studied the dot of blood where the Taser barb had snagged him.
12. SCHOOLS
28 March (11 days later)
It was quarter to eleven on a Wednesday night and every surface in Ryan’s bedroom was covered with torn-out magazine articles, hastily scribbled notes and web printouts, plus tape, glue and scissors.
Alfie was crawling around the floor in a grubby Karate suit, cutting out a picture of bashed-up cars floating down an overflowing river. As he glued it to a big sheet of paper with ‘Freak Weather’ writ
ten at the top in marker pen, Ryan came through the door holding a plastic A3 folio case.
‘I got Grace and Chloe’s project!’ Ryan said excitedly.
Like Alfie, Ryan was in Karate kit and the lads stood over the end of Ryan’s bed to study the folio’s contents.
‘Finally something useful out of you getting off with Grace.’
Ryan looked anxious. ‘She’s on that late night training thing. So I swiped it and she’ll murder me if she knows we’re copying her stuff, so let’s not hang about.’
Ryan opened the folio’s plastic catch and was simultaneously awed and irritated by the girls’ weather project. The first page was a carefully drawn cartoon of a hurricane with dustbins, stick-men and stick-dogs getting blown around in the vortex.
‘They’re such swots,’ Alfie complained. ‘Our project’s gonna look so crap compared to this.’
Ryan shrugged. ‘Who gives a damn about humanities? Let’s just glue some shit on, rip off a couple of the girls’ articles and try getting to bed before midnight. I don’t care what mark we get as long as there’s a bunch of pages we can hand in to old cock face tomorrow morning.’
‘I’ve got fitness training first thing and we’re supposed to be going to the cinema tomorrow night,’ Alfie groaned. ‘I will be shattered.’
‘You’ll have to try catching up on your sleep during lessons,’ Ryan joked.
Ryan had left his door slightly ajar and twenty-two-year-old Beatha Johannsson leaned into the room. The sturdy brunette was a former CHERUB agent, whose career ended at age fourteen when a mission led to her face being all over the national news. She couldn’t work undercover after that, but after a forced exile in Switzerland and university in Canada she’d recently returned to campus to work as a carer.
‘Why aren’t you two in bed?’ Beatha asked, stepping in and then hurriedly wrapping an arm over her nose. ‘Jesus, it reeks in here. Open the windows, then take showers!’
CHERUB: Guardian Angel Page 7