People's Republic

by Robert Muchamore

  The tide was going out and the sun dazzled off the wet sand as he peered down towards the harbour and ocean. The dinghy had been lashed to the underside of the harbour jetty. It was black, with a pair of chunky outboard motors. A woman knelt at the rear of the boat and she kept looking up the beach towards the Kitsells’ house. Everything Ryan saw confirmed Amy’s opinion of a professional crew up to no good.

  With the woman looking up the beach and most likely in radio contact with her two colleagues, Ryan realised they couldn’t approach Ethan’s house from the beach. As he threw the board back into the beach shower Amy yanked him back inside.

  ‘We’ll go up and out the front door,’ Amy said. ‘Ted’s gonna circle around the outside of the harbour. Dr D is calling the local cops for backup, but whatever’s going on is likely to be over by the time they get here.’

  ‘What about the guards on the main gate?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘Rent-a-cops,’ Amy said contemptuously as she handed Ryan an automatic pistol. ‘More likely to hinder than help, so hopefully they’re oblivious.’

  ‘Walther P99,’ Ryan said. ‘Like James Bond.’

  ‘It’s loaded, but if you use it, our cover is blown. So last resort only, OK?’

  Ryan tucked the P99 into the waistband of his shorts as Amy led him out of the front door. The land at the rear of the eight houses was mostly lawn, with a stretch of road leading from each house’s garages towards the security gates.

  Amy’s phone bleeped as they walked barefoot in front of house seven. Her voice rose an octave as she read the text to Ryan. ‘Ted’s made it over the dunes to the jetty. Says there’s a body floating in the pool.’

  ‘Rope,’ Ryan said, as he got close enough to see into the gap between houses five and six. ‘Threw up a grappling hook and climbed up.’

  Amy backed up to the garages of house six and waved Ryan back. ‘No further,’ she ordered. ‘They’re pros. They’ll be wearing body armour. Most likely carrying sniper rifles or machine guns. I’m not going up against that with handheld pistols in our beach shorts.’

  But as Ryan took his first steps back, Amy yelled, ‘Wait up.’

  A small window just above ground level had swung open and they both heard a frustrated moan.

  ‘That’s Ethan,’ Ryan said, ‘cover me.’

  Without waiting for Amy’s permission, Ryan bolted across the gap between houses, keeping low until he reached the small window. Ethan was red with frustration as he stood on top of a dryer, frantically trying to pull himself through the window with one weedy arm.

  ‘I’ve got you,’ Ryan said, as he reached inside and grabbed Ethan by his wrist.

  The cast on Ethan’s arm split as Ryan dragged him through the narrow opening, making him groan with pain.

  ‘He’s in the kitchen now,’ Ethan said. ‘He’s got a gun. I thought he was gonna kill me.’

  Ryan helped Ethan to his feet and they sprinted back towards the garages in front of house six.

  ‘Yannis and my mom are dead,’ Ethan said. ‘But I think I was their target.’

  ‘Is it just two bad guys in the house?’ Amy asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ethan said, clutching his broken plaster cast as his face twisted in pain.

  ‘Ryan, get him inside,’ Amy said.

  ‘What are you gonna do?’ Ryan asked.

  Amy looked annoyed. Ryan realised she didn’t want to say anything that might compromise their cover story around Ethan. As the two boys jogged back towards house eight, Amy called Ted on his mobile.

  ‘Two hostiles in the house,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got Ethan. Yannis and Gillian are dead.’

  ‘Right,’ Ted said. ‘I’m in the sand dunes. I’ve got my rifle and clear sight of the boat.’

  ‘You a good shot?’

  ‘I can kill ’em for sure,’ Ted said. ‘But Dr D’s instructions are not to shoot unless they’re an immediate threat to someone. She’s trying to get a chopper up to see where that dinghy goes and what it leads us to. Our priority is to seal off the murder scene, then get down in that basement room and see what Gillian’s been hiding.’

  25. SECRETS

  Ryan led Ethan through the front door and kicked it shut.

  ‘You’re safe,’ Ryan said urgently. ‘Just gotta do something.’

  He rushed through to the kitchen where Dr D was on her mobile. He stuck his gun in a cupboard beside the cereal boxes and told Dr D to keep her voice down because Ethan was in the house. When he got back to the hallway, Ethan was leaning against a table. Tears streaked down his face and he was clutching his broken cast.

  ‘My gran is speaking to the cops, they’ll be here any minute,’ Ryan said. ‘You wanna come up to my room and lie down?’

  Ethan nodded. He was trembling and had pale sweaty skin, which Ryan recognised as symptoms of shock.

  ‘What if they saw us?’ Ethan asked. ‘What if those guys come over here?’

  ‘My dad’s got a gun, if they come near this house he’ll shoot them. You’re shaking so much, you have to lie down.’

  As Ethan moved towards the stairs he retched and threw up over the hallway tiles.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ethan sobbed. ‘I’ll clean it up.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Ryan said, as he tried not to catch the smell of puke in case it set him off too. ‘Can you make it up to my room? I’ll be right behind you.’

  ‘You’ve saved my life twice now,’ Ethan said. ‘You must be my guardian angel.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ryan said, laughing uneasily.

  As Ethan crept up the stairs, Ryan dashed back to the kitchen to get a cloth. Dr D was off the phone.

  ‘The hostiles are heading back to the boat,’ Dr D said. ‘I’ve tried FBI and local but they can’t get a chopper up in time, so we’ll hedge our bets: I’ve told Ted to take one man out before he gets in the boat. Amy’s circling around the dunes to act as his backup, and the local cops are trying to contact any civilian or coastguard choppers that might be in the air, in case one of them can help.’

  ‘What about our cover?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘As far as the media is concerned, Ted will be a have-a-go resident who pulled out his gun and shot a bad guy. California’s even got a law that enshrines your right to blast a burglar.’

  ‘Have we any idea why this has happened?’ Ryan asked, as he ripped off two squares of kitchen towel and wiped a blob of puke off the top of his foot.

  Dr D shook her head. ‘Not a clue. Stay with Ethan, see if you can open him up.’

  ‘He’s heading up to my room, but he spewed in the hallway. I was getting something to clean with.’

  ‘I’ll deal with that,’ Dr D said. ‘You get up there. He’s vulnerable and the next twenty minutes are crucial. Keep his brain ticking over. He’s just seen his mother and best friend killed. If you don’t keep his mind active he could go catatonic and then we’ll get nothing out of him.’

  ‘Right,’ Ryan said. ‘I’m on it.’

  The excitement had subdued Ryan’s cold, but the virus was fighting back. He was burning up as he dashed into his bedroom, but a fever and stuffy nose was nothing compared to some of what he’d been through during basic training.

  ‘You OK, mate?’ Ryan asked.

  He’d expected to see Ethan huddled on his bed but he stood by the windows, looking out to sea.

  ‘Your dad took out one of the bad guys,’ Ethan said, matter-of-factly.

  Ryan saw one of the intruders lying in the wash where the sea met the beach. He had a red splatter where his head should have been and the high-speed dinghy was blasting away from the shore in a cloud of spray. Ted and Amy were emerging from the sand dunes. Their manner seemed cool and professional and this would undermine their cover story about being a regular family if Ethan saw too much of it.

  ‘I don’t think you should see this,’ Ryan said. ‘You look like you’re about to puke again. You need to lie down.’

  Ethan sounded slightly aggressive. ‘Good on your dad,’ he said. ‘T
hat shit killed my mom.’

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Ryan said, before putting his arm around Ethan’s back and gently nudging him away from the window.

  Ryan was surprised to see a phone in Ethan’s hand. ‘Is that my cellphone?’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d mind,’ Ethan said.

  Ryan took a backwards glance at Amy and Ted as he took his phone back. They were heading up the beach towards Ethan’s house. The retired basketball player who lived at number six had also emerged into the sand, looking confused and a little scared.

  ‘Who’d you call on my phone, the cops?’ Ryan asked, as he helped Ethan settle on a trendy leather sofa in front of the wardrobes.

  ‘No,’ Ethan said, as Ryan sat alongside. ‘Some lawyer called Lombardi. My mom said I had to call him if anything bad ever happened. She even made me memorise the number. Like, so I could call even if I lost my phone and everything.’

  Ryan realised this info was gold, but his fever made it hard to concentrate. ‘Sounds like your mum was expecting something to happen,’ he said finally.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Ethan said, and left it at that.

  Ryan struggled to find the line to get him talking again. ‘Is it something to do with her business?’

  ‘Family,’ Ethan said, as he ran the back of his good hand across his tear-filled eyes. ‘Mom swore me to secrecy, but now she’s dead I guess it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone, I swear,’ Ryan said. ‘And it might help to get it off your chest.’

  ‘My mom’s real name wasn’t Kitsell, it was Aramov,’ Ethan began. ‘My grandma Irena runs an airline. But not an eighty-nine-dollar return ticket to Miami type thing. She bought up a bunch of old cargo planes when the Soviet Union collapsed and uses them for every kind of dodgy op you can imagine.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘You name it,’ Ethan said. ‘Gunrunning, cocaine, fake Hermès handbags. My mom used money off my grandma to set up her software company, but she never wanted anything to do with the family business.

  ‘Then last year my grandma got sick with cancer. She’s already lasted longer than the doctors expected, but it’s incurable. My mom’s got two brothers. Josef is the oldest, but he’s a little simple. My other uncle, Leonid, is apparently a stone-cold psycho. Leonid always assumed that with my mom in America and Josef a retard, he’d take over the family business when my grandma died.

  ‘But when she started getting sick my grandma said she wanted my mom to come back into the business, because Leonid is too hot-headed to run things on his own. Mom didn’t really want to. I mean, would you want to give up what we have here to go live some place where they eat sheep’s eyeballs for breakfast? But it was her dying mother’s wish.’

  ‘Wow,’ Ryan said. ‘And I thought my family was a bunch of lunatics. So you think it’s Leonid who sent those guys to kill your mum?’

  ‘Has to be,’ Ethan said. ‘I heard one guy say, I’ve killed both targets, mother and son. Now it’s possible my mom had another enemy, but only Leonid would target me as well, because if I’m alive my grandma might still leave me a share in the family business.’

  ‘They think you’re dead,’ Ryan said.

  ‘For now,’ Ethan said. ‘But when they read the news they’ll find out it was Yannis.’

  Keeping Ethan talking had helped with his state of mind. He had some colour back and now sounded more frightened than shocked.

  ‘How can this lawyer protect you?’

  ‘Not exactly sure,’ Ethan said. ‘I expect my grandma’s involved somehow. The only certainty is that Leonid will come for me if I stick around here.’

  ‘So what did this lawyer say?’

  ‘Just to keep my head down, and that he’ll be in contact very soon.’

  Ryan planned to suggest that maybe police or FBI protection would be more useful than some random lawyer, but as Ethan said soon there was a humongous bang. The whole house felt like it had been thrown to the right. There was the sound of car alarms, shattering glass and bits of furniture toppling over.

  ‘Christ,’ Ryan said, seeing a crack in his bedroom ceiling as he rushed towards the window. ‘Was that an earthquake?’

  Ethan shook his head. ‘I think it was my house. I forgot all about the second guy going downstairs. He must have rigged explosives in my basement.’

  ‘What was down there?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘Something my mom was working on for Grandma Irena.’

  But Ryan lost interest in Ethan’s words as he remembered that he’d last seen Amy and Ted walking up the beach towards the house that had just exploded.

  ‘Stay right there,’ Ryan said, as he raced out of the room and sprinted down to the ground floor.

  Dr D was down in the hallway. She was trying to get the front door open, but the explosion had made the house flex to such an extent that the door had become wedged in its wooden frame.

  ‘Where are they?’ Ryan yelled, as he pushed Dr D aside and used all his strength to rip the door open.

  ‘You’ve got no shoes on,’ Dr D shouted, as Ryan shot through the door and sprinted down the side of the house towards the beach. ‘The sand could be full of broken glass.’

  But Ryan didn’t care. ‘Amy?’ he shouted. ‘Amy, where are you?’

  26. DEAD

  The houses had been built to withstand a California earthquake, but no engineer had ever modelled the effect that a huge explosion would have on several tonnes of water in the glass swimming pools. Gillian Kitsell’s corpse had been flung up more than thirty metres and now lay in the middle of the beach, while the retired basketball player had been decapitated by a flying slab of fifteen-centimetre-thick pool glass.

  It was like a giant sick version of a bug splattered on a car’s windscreen and Ryan probably would have spewed if his mind hadn’t been focused on Amy.

  ‘Hello?’ Ryan shouted, as his feet ran through sand warmed by the blast.

  Ethan’s house had been utterly wrecked. All that remained were shreds of reinforced concrete attached to a twisted steel frame. The heat coming out of the basement had turned sand to glass, which now steamed from the water that had landed on top of it.

  ‘Ryan,’ Amy shouted, as she appeared from the far end of house one.

  He broke into a huge smile, but Amy was waving her arms urgently.

  ‘There might be a secondary,’ she shouted. ‘Get back.’

  Ryan swung away from the house as he bolted past and then ran into Amy’s outstretched arms. The two homes at this end had no obvious damage, though the terrace on top of house two was home to smouldering chunks of Yannis and BMW.

  ‘I thought you were dead for sure,’ Ryan said, as he pulled Amy into a hug.

  Ted stood alongside. Several cop cars were parked on the lawn out front with a fire truck close behind.

  ‘Luckily I went straight for the basement,’ Ted explained. ‘Saw a dozen sticks of mining explosive near the bottom of the staircase and told Amy to run for it.’

  ‘Another thirty seconds and we’d have been toast,’ Amy added.

  ‘That basketball player is dead,’ Ryan said. ‘He was pretty famous, wasn’t he?’

  Ted nodded. ‘Famous enough that you’ll have every news outfit in California camped out here for the next two days. I’d better head off those cops and tell them it’s a Federal matter before they mess with our crime scene. You two stay in the house. Keep doors shut, blinds down and don’t speak to anyone.’

  Ryan walked back to house eight with Amy and ran up to his room.

  ‘Ethan, mate?’ he shouted.

  Ryan’s heart skipped as he saw the room was empty. He thought Ethan might have disappeared, but then he saw that the bathroom door was shut.

  ‘Are you OK, mate?’ Ryan asked, as he tapped on the door. ‘Can I come in?’

  The door wasn’t locked and Ryan found Ethan sitting on the toilet lid sobbing helplessly.

  ‘My mom is all I had,’ Ethan said. ‘I loved her
so much.’

  Ryan stood close and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘My grandma’s gonna want me to live with her,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t know anyone out there. I can only speak a little bit of Russian and my mom always said she’d never go back because it’s really horrible.’

  ‘Well maybe you don’t have to,’ Ryan said. ‘I don’t know how it works, but I don’t think a granny who you’ve only met once can take you out of the country without any say-so.’

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have called that lawyer,’ Ethan said. ‘But Mom always drummed it into me.’

  ‘We have to leave,’ Ryan said. ‘The fire department want all eight houses evacuated until they’ve been inspected by an engineer. There could be unseen structural damage, or gas leaks. I’ve got to pack an overnight bag. You can borrow some of my clothes and stuff. The FBI want to question everyone, so we’ve all got to go to a motel down the road.’

  ‘Is everything in my house wrecked?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Shit,’ Ethan shouted.

  He knocked Ryan back as he shot up and swung his fist at the mirrored cabinet over the sink. Fortunately for the mirror, Ethan was weedy and instead of smashing the glass he only succeeded in hurting his hand.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Ethan screamed. ‘I’ve got nothing. I might as well be dead.’

  ‘You need to calm down, mate,’ Ryan said, as Ethan kicked a toilet roll holder and cursed his injured fist.

  Ryan grabbed Ethan, pinning his arms to his side and walking him backwards out of the bathroom.

  Ryan pushed Ethan over his bed. ‘You’re going to hurt yourself. You need to take deep breaths and calm down.’

  ‘My mom’s dead,’ Ethan sobbed. He was trying to break free, but Ryan was much stronger.

  ‘I need a hand up here,’ Ryan shouted. ‘Can anyone hear me?’

  Dr D was first up the stairs, with Amy close behind.

  ‘In my wardrobe, second door along,’ Ryan said.