CHERUB: Black Friday

by Robert Muchamore

‘So they make a lot of money?’

  ‘Galenka and Leonid paid sixteen million dollars for Lisson back in 1999. They sold assets worth at least six million, and Lisson now generates ten million dollars a year in patent revenues.’

  ‘I could live off that,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Lombardi’s law practice handles Lisson Communications’ legal business. They’re also used by Galenka Aramov’s computer security company, which has continued to do nicely since she died.’

  Ryan laughed. ‘So our buddy Ethan is a rich bastard?’

  ‘Certainly is,’ Amy said. ‘But it looks like a dead end as far as our investigation is concerned. All it shows us is that Galenka and Leonid Aramov pooled some of their money and made a shrewd investment.’

  ‘Lombardi has been sending money to Leonid Aramov under a false name though,’ Ryan noted. ‘That must be illegal.’

  ‘But I’d be astonished if a clever lawyer like Lombardi hasn’t been moving the money in a way that makes it impossible to trace it back to him.’

  ‘So we’re back to relying on whatever Andre and Tamara find out in Mexico?’ Ryan asked.

  Amy nodded. ‘And that’s a dangerous business. We’re giving them two weeks max, then we’ll pull them out whether or not they find anything incriminating on Leonid.’

  Apart from kids on punishment or in basic training, every cherub got a holiday between Christmas and New Year. After taking Boxing Day off, James got roped into driving a bunch of kids down to London for ice skating and shopping on the 27th.

  Two girls were over an hour late getting back to the meeting point, so it was ten when James drove the mini-bus through campus’ main gate, and he had a headache because his charges had been rowdy all the way home.

  James wanted to go up to his room and crash, but he’d had a text telling him to get straight to the mission preparation building on his return. Ewart Asker was waiting. He was CHERUB’s head mission controller and husband of chairwoman Zara.

  ‘How were the sales?’ Ewart asked, as he sat behind a large glass-topped desk.

  It had been nine years since James arrived on CHERUB campus as a twelve-year-old recruit, and Ewart had probably changed more in that time than any other staff member. Back then, Ewart was a junior mission controller, with pierced ears and ripped jeans. Now he had four kids, a receding hairline and a bit of a gut.

  ‘The less said about my day the better,’ James said. ‘I had two grey-shirt girls in tears when I said I’d report them for being late back to the bus, the motorway out of London was jammed and the kids didn’t shut up the whole three and a half hours.’

  Ewart laughed. ‘And it wasn’t so long ago that you were one of those kids bouncing around on the bus driving me mad.’

  ‘Makes me feel old,’ James admitted.

  ‘So, how’s your Spanish?’

  James looked confused. ‘The only time I’ve used it the last few years is when me and Kerry go to this little Mexican place near Stanford campus. But I’m sure I can get by.’

  ‘You hit it off with Andre, didn’t you?’

  ‘He’s a good kid.’

  ‘A senior TFU agent called Ted Brasker was supposed to liaise with Andre and Tamara when they got to Mexico. Unfortunately, he slipped on a step at his Dubai hotel, and he’s zonked on painkillers for however long it takes for his muscle to de-spasm. So, we’re looking for someone with varied field experience, who speaks Russian and Spanish. A rapport with young Andre would be an advantage and ideally we needed this person to be in position about six hours ago.’

  ‘Sounds a lot like me,’ James said warily.

  ‘Normally we’d have a team of three controllers on something like this,’ Ewart said. ‘But to start with it’ll be you and an undercover DEA agent who knows the turf. Brasker will join you when his health improves.

  ‘The situation in Ciudad Juárez is precarious. We don’t know what Leonid Aramov is up to, but we do know there’s a major drug war taking place. The police are so corrupt that the president gave up on them and deployed the army on the streets. I’ve already prepared some detailed briefing documents and I’ll e-mail you some more. Technically, you’re not a mission controller yet, so I can’t just send you. You have to agree.’

  ‘If that’s where you need me, I’ll go,’ James said, breaking into a slight smile. It was more than three years since his last mission as a CHERUB agent had ended and he’d missed the buzz of working undercover.

  ‘I looked into scheduled flights, but the only way to Ciudad Juárez is via Amsterdam or Atlanta. Both routes involve long layovers and won’t get you in for more than a day. But I can have a long-range business jet pick you up from the nearest RAF base.’

  ‘When?’ James asked.

  Ewart glanced at his watch. ‘I can have a plane fuelled and waiting in two hours. Go pack a bag. I’ll make up a kit of surveillance equipment and get someone to create a diplomatic passport so you don’t get searched when you arrive in Mexico. We’ve got a passport machine here on campus now, so that’ll only take about ten minutes.’

  Ewart slid a wodge of paperwork across his desk. ‘Take this lot for in-flight reading. And you look beat, so I’ll have one of the black shirts drive you out to the airfield.’

  37. WARS

  **CLASSIFIED**

  CHERUB STAFF BRIEFING FOR JAMES ADAMS – 27/12/2012

  DO NOT PRINT THIS FILE OR SAVE IN UNENCRYPTED FORMAT

  PART 1 OF 6: MISSION BACKGROUND AND SUMMARY

  INTRODUCTION

  With 110 million citizens, Mexico is the world’s 11th most populous country. Its 3,600-kilometre land border with the United States is one of the world’s longest, and over a million people cross between the two countries every day. The length of the border has always made it difficult to police, despite the US Border Agency spending more than $10 billion per year doing so.

  EARLY DAYS

  From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, most of the cocaine smuggled into the United States was brought in by air or sea by powerful drug cartels based in Colombia. As the influence of these cartels grew, they expanded, growing huge quantities of marijuana and forming links in the Middle East that enabled them to supply heroin.

  When US President Reagan came to power in 1980, he declared a ‘War on Drugs’. Although the billions spent in the drug war did little to change the quantity of drugs available on America’s streets, the creation of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and increased anti-drug patrols in the air and at sea made it increasingly attractive to smuggle drugs overland from South America to the USA via Mexico.

  As US military and DEA operations in South America gradually diminished the power of the Colombians, a new generation of cartels began springing up in Mexico. By the early 2000s, the Mexican cartels had outmuscled their Colombian forebears and began taking control of drug production as well as smuggling.

  In Mexico itself, half a dozen cartels battled over smuggling routes. The most contested territory was along the country’s northern border with the USA. Brutal street battles between rival gangs turned Mexican border towns such as Tijuana from popular tourist spots for Americans into desolate no-go areas.

  At the same time as American tourists stopped coming, corporations who ran factories in northern Mexico to produce cheap goods for the US market began closing them because it had become cheaper to produce goods in China and Vietnam. This collapse of industry and tourism, combined with a wave of drug money, created a perfect storm of violence, corruption, unemployment and poverty.

  A police officer earning $6,000 per year could earn the same amount per week in bribes from a drug dealer, and officers who resisted found the drug gangs threatening their families. With corruption reaching the highest levels of Mexican politics and law enforcement and a murder rate seventy times greater than the USA, it is now predicted that some areas of this once rapidly developing country are on course for total collapse.

  MILITARISATION

  Besides an extraordinary level of brutality, another chara
cteristic of Mexico’s warring drug cartels has been the use of heavy weaponry and military techniques.

  Examples include a Mexican Special Forces unit that defected en masse to work for a drug cartel. The soldiers then executed the cartel’s leaders and took control themselves. Thousands of rural peasants have been kidnapped, forced to dig smuggling tunnels under the US border and then murdered when the job is done so that they cannot reveal the tunnel’s location.

  When Mexican President Felipe Calderon came to power in 2006, he quickly realised that police in many border areas were so corrupt that the drug gangs were running the show. More than 45,000 Mexican soldiers have now been deployed on anti-drug smuggling operations inside their own borders. In response, the drug cartels have become increasingly militarised in their fights with the government and each other.

  CIUDAD JUÁREZ

  Lying on the US/Mexican border, midway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Ciudad Juárez and its twin city El Paso on the US side of the border have seen some of the most vicious fighting of the Mexican drug war. The three crossings between the two cities are among the busiest on the whole border. More trucks pass between the US and Mexico via Ciudad Juárez than at any other point, making it a prime spot for drug trafficking.

  At various times smuggling through the city has been dominated by three different cartels, but after years of bitter fighting both inside cartels and between them, there is currently no clear picture of who controls what.

  The city has also been particularly badly hit by the collapse of Mexican industry. Although the centre of town is relatively safe during daylight hours, the entire city is dangerous at night and outlying industrial areas where poverty and unemployment rates are above 50 per cent should be considered absolute no-go areas unless accompanied by a guide with excellent knowledge of local conditions.

  ARAMOV CLAN INVOLVEMENT

  During the 1980s, the Aramov Clan worked in close partnership with the Colombian cartels in flying heroin from the Middle East to South America or the Caribbean. The volatile situation with rival Mexican cartels, and US military presence in Afghanistan where most of the world’s heroin is produced, caused clan matriarch Irena Aramov to step back from large-scale heroin smuggling in the early 2000s.

  However, the clan continued some drug smuggling operations for Mexican cartels, and is believed to have sold mortars and other heavy weaponry to the Mexican cartels.

  LEONID ARAMOV

  When Leonid Aramov was disowned by his mother and forced to leave Kyrgyzstan, it was assumed that he would retreat to Russia or the Middle East. Although we currently have no idea what Leonid Aramov is up to in Mexico, he has no ties to the country and some kind of involvement in the drug war seems to be the only explanation for his presence.

  Leonid does not have the cash or manpower to take on the Mexican gangs. It is most likely that he is using his extensive global contacts to obtain heavy weapons for the warring cartels.

  MISSION STRUCTURE & GOALS

  Leonid’s former wife Tamara and youngest son Andre have agreed to work for TFU (Transnational Facilitator Unit) and are now living with Leonid Aramov in a luxury apartment complex in an affluent suburb of Ciudad Juárez.

  The mission controller’s goals are as follows:

  1. Travel to Ciudad Juárez and liaise with DEA agent Lucinda Alvarez.

  2. Safely make contact with Andre and/or Tamara Aramov.

  3. Try and establish what Leonid Aramov is doing in Mexico.

  4. If it is safe to do so, take action against Leonid, either alone or in conjunction with Mexican authorities.

  5. Given Leonid’s volatile personality and the dangerous situation in Ciudad Juárez, Andre and Tamara will be pulled out after two weeks, even if no progress is made with the mission goals.

  38. CONTACT

  Most locals thought it insane to use the communal pool in fifteen-degree weather, so Andre had it to himself. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but swimming was something he always enjoyed and as he wasn’t enrolled in school and had no friends within five thousand kilometres, a few lengths were his best shot at a break from his family.

  A fifth length was over-ambitious, so he pulled to the side of the pool and caught his breath at the two-metre marker. A man’s legs coming along the poolside put an image of Boris in his head, but this dude wore the khaki shorts and green polo shirt of the apartment complex’s maintenance and cleaning crews.

  ‘James,’ Andre gasped, before looking back to see who was around.

  ‘Swim back to the shallow end,’ James said, speaking fast because their encounter had to look casual. ‘I’ve slid a com set and a few other things in the pocket of your robe.’

  ‘Right,’ Andre said.

  ‘And stop glancing around. If anyone asks, I asked you if the pool was hot enough.’

  James backed away from the pool, grabbed the handles of a janitor’s cart and started moving. The pool was in a large rectangular garden, with individual staircases feeding from several dozen apartments. It seemed idyllic, until you noticed that every staircase had been beefed up with steel gates, spiked grilles, CCTV and occasionally an armed guard.

  Although Leonid’s apartment didn’t have a guard, there was a chance he had associates living in other apartments who did. The brief conversation with Andre might have got their attention and even with a cap on, James’ blond head and fair skin made him distinctive in a country where a more Latin appearance was the norm.

  A stringy old creature taking a jog blocked James’ path. She pointed and spoke angry Spanish too fast for James to keep up with.

  ‘Are you hosing out my rubbish area today?’ she snapped. ‘I reported the dead rat three days ago and nobody has been near.’

  ‘I’m new,’ James said, shrugging and trying to sound thick. ‘I’ll ask the supervisor.’

  ‘You guys were keener when you knocked for Christmas tips.’

  ‘I just started today,’ James said. ‘I’ll find disinfectant and a shovel.’

  ‘Make sure you do,’ the woman snapped, before setting off again.

  As the old battleaxe jogged off, James was aware of Andre climbing out of the pool fifty metres behind. He sped up the cart, rolling it back the way he’d come, going through swinging black doors into a bare concrete storage area filled with pool chemicals and gardening kit.

  After reaching down into the cart’s tool area and retrieving his automatic pistol, James tucked the gun into the back of his shorts and peered into the supervisor’s office. The grey-haired man was slumped across his desk fast asleep. The spray James had administered would keep him that way for at least another half hour and he hoped he didn’t get caught sleeping on the job.

  Four flights of musty stairs, a door and a twenty-metre walk took him to a mesh gate at the rear of the apartment complex. After hitting a button to unlock the gate he walked fifty metres over badly cracked paving and jumped into the front passenger seat of a VW camper van.

  A frizzy-haired Mexican-American named Lucinda Alvarez sat in the driver’s seat. She was a DEA field agent, who knew as much about Ciudad Juárez and its drug wars as anyone, and Dr D had called in a favour to get her temporarily assigned to TFU.

  ‘Did you make contact?’ Lucinda asked.

  ‘Three hours of nothing,’ James said. ‘As I was about to give up, Andre comes strolling out in a beach robe and swimming shorts. The com only has a range of a couple of kilometres, so best if you drive somewhere just out of sight.’

  As Lucinda set the camper’s elderly diesel engine clattering, James stepped between the front seats into the rear compartment and squatted on a skinny foam mattress covered with a crocheted blanket. He pulled the gun sticking into his backside, then peeled off the green polo shirt he’d stolen from a locker in the storage area.

  As Lucinda came out of the alley into slow-moving traffic, James found a backpack filled with espionage gear and grabbed a tiny receiver and a circular Perspex box with his com unit inside. Dropping it into his
ear was a delicate operation that had to wait until Lucinda drove a few hundred metres and parked in an alleyway behind an abandoned pharmacy.

  ‘Andre, you hear me? Andre?’

  James repeated the call a couple of times before Andre spoke in a panic.

  ‘Gimme a minute, I’m drying off.’

  ‘Find a quiet spot, make sure nobody can hear you talk.’

  ‘I’m in my bathroom,’ Andre said. ‘There’s two closed doors between me and anyone else.’

  ‘Great,’ James said. ‘So how’s it been?’

  Andre ignored the question and spoke exuberantly. ‘I’m so glad it’s you. I was told it was gonna be this old guy called Ted.’

  The gushing tone made James smile. ‘I think you’re gonna be the founder and sole member of the James Adams fan club.’

  ‘Journey was shit,’ Andre said. ‘It’s been three days. I tried finding another way to communicate, but there’s no landline and I couldn’t get my hands on anyone’s mobile.’

  ‘We’ve got com now,’ James said. ‘And there’s a tiny cellular unit in the pocket of your robe as well. It’ll work wherever you can get a phone signal.’

  ‘It’s not been too bad,’ Andre said. ‘Dad’s being sickeningly nice to my mum because he wants to get inside her pants. Alex is acting human. Boris is still a massive dick, but spends all his time with this Mexican called Silvia. It’s actually kinda funny when you hear them screwing in his room.’

  James smiled. ‘Any clue what your dad’s up to?’

  ‘He’s definitely got stuff on,’ Andre said. ‘Like, he’s been across the courtyard a couple of times for meetings with this guy in apartment seventeen. And he’s got a little office set up and he’s always on his phone. He tries speaking in Spanish, but he’s really bad at it and you hear him losing his temper when people don’t understand.’