CHERUB: Guardian Angel (17 page)

They set off for the Kremlin just before eleven. The unlit road took them uphill, then broke down into a gravel-covered track for the final stretch into a valley basin illuminated by runway lights. Although the Aramovs mainly ran ex-Soviet military planes, it was a comparatively modern Boeing freighter that blasted over the pointed star on the Kremlin’s rooftop as the Toyota stopped outside the lobby.

‘You got our story straight?’ Kazakov asked.

Ryan raised one eyebrow and replied in Russian. ‘Sure thing,
Dad
.’

‘You stay here in the car,’ Kazakov told him, as he reached up and flipped the switch for the overhead light. ‘That’s so they can see you when I tell my story, but put your baseball cap on so they can’t see your face.’

The Kremlin lobby always had a couple of burly armed guards on duty, but there was no formal system with IDs and Kazakov almost thought he’d bluffed his way into the building when one of the guards stepped into his path.

‘Don’t think I know your face,’ the guard said, placing one hand on the compact machine gun slung around his neck.

‘You wouldn’t,’ Kazakov said confidently, as he reached out to shake the man’s hand. ‘I’m Igor Kazlov. I was at a bar in Bishkek and a guy told me there might be security work available here.’

The guard looked down his nose at Kazakov and made a kind of snorting sound.

‘You come here at this time of night to ask for a job?’

‘I worked security at an oil installation in Kazakhstan. My contractor did a runner just before pay day. So I’m running on fumes, you know? Got my boy sitting in the car. Only enough money to keep things running for a day or two.’

The guard looked fairly sympathetic, and looked to his gun-toting colleague. ‘Keep an eye on him.’

The guard headed past the fruit machines to the bar at the back of the lobby. There were plenty of people at the tables and vodka and beer getting consumed at a rapid rate, but the atmosphere felt as gloomy as the lighting.

Ryan looked on from the car as Kazakov stood waiting with his hands plugged into the pockets of his bomber jacket. After a couple of minutes, a chunky man wearing a bar apron strode back with the guard.

The barman’s tone wasn’t unfriendly, but the message wasn’t what Kazakov wanted to hear.

‘Hey,’ the barman began. ‘I understand your situation’s grim, but you’re out of luck here.’

‘I’m experienced in security and close protection,’ Kazakov said. ‘Excellent references. But I’m so hard up right now I’ll wash dishes if that’s what you need.’

‘We run a freight operation out of the airstrip,’ the barman explained. ‘Pilots, mechanics and the like are recruited in Russia or Ukraine. Menials like me are recruited locally, but jobs here are like gold and everyone comes in through personal recommendation.’

‘Right,’ Kazakov said dourly. ‘Well is there any chance I can kip down in the bar. My son’s got a bad chest and—’

The barman interrupted and his tone hardened. ‘This isn’t a flop house. The facilities are for clan employees and family members only. I’ve got customers waiting, so I must now ask you to leave.’

‘Just one night,’ Kazakov begged, but the barman was already turning away.

The bigger of the two guards now became aggressive, eyeballing Kazakov and putting a hand on his shoulder.

‘We’ve been friendly so far,’ the guard growled, ‘but now it’s time to leave.’

To emphasise this point, the other guard swung his gun around to face Kazakov’s chest.

‘No luck?’ Ryan said, as Kazakov made it through the drizzle and opened the driver’s door of the Toyota.

‘Chances of this working were never that great,’ Kazakov said. ‘What have you seen out here?’

Ryan pointed beyond the car’s bonnet. ‘There’s plenty going on down at the airfield, but I’ve not seen anything back in the hills.’

‘So you fancy having a go?’

Ryan nodded, as Kazakov started the engine and crunched the car into first gear. While the car drove slowly over the gravel in front of the Kremlin’s main lobby, Ryan unzipped the top of a small backpack, filled with handmade wire snare traps.

He rummaged beneath the traps, pulled out a small disc magnet and pushed it behind his ear. The magnetic field this created activated a tiny transceiver which had been tweezered into Ryan’s ear canal before he’d left the house.

‘Testing,’ Ryan said, as the car began moving slowly away from the Kremlin.

Ted Brasker’s voice came from a strange place inside Ryan’s head. ‘Hearing you loud and clear, boy.’

‘We had no luck at the front door,’ Ryan told Ted. ‘Looks like I’m gonna have to go on a little hunting trip.’

‘Remember what we discussed,’ Ted said firmly. ‘No stupid risks. If you get caught, stick to your background story. Can you remember it?’

‘Ran out on my dad after a row. Hitched a ride out here to go hunting and then got lost in the dark.’

‘Perfect,’ Ted said.

Five hundred metres from the Kremlin a sharp uphill bend behind dense trees took the car out of sight of the lobby. Kazakov pulled over. If anyone had seen them, it would have looked like Ryan was getting out to pee in the bushes.

‘Good luck,’ Kazakov said, as Ryan slung his backpack over his shoulder.

Ryan’s boots crunched the undergrowth as he scrambled into the trees and set off towards the Aramov stable block, aiming to get hold of the USB stick that Ethan had plugged into Leonid Aramov’s computer.

Someone usually came and checked on Ethan in the middle of the night, but unless something out of the ordinary happened he’d have the next couple of hours to himself.

Breaking the length of black hose from the tap ten metres away was never going to be easy, but it was harder than Ethan expected because instead of pulling on the tap head, the hose just stretched.

When bracing against the bars failed, he stood up and pulled himself backwards with the plastic digging agonisingly into his wrists. He tried pulling and jerking the hose. Then he hit on the idea of stretching the hose as far as he could and knotting the end around one of the bars. Once the hose was stretched tight and tied to a bar at the rear of his cage, Ethan gripped the hose with both hands and pushed down with his entire bodyweight.

There was a whoosh, followed by a series of chimes as the hose clanked metal bars. Ethan dived back as the hose whiplashed, stinging his upper arm and narrowly missing his cheek as it flailed through the air.

There was the sound of water spattering the concrete up by the tap, but rather than snapping the hose from its joint with the tap, the hose itself had actually split into two pieces. All Ethan’s effort was wasted if he didn’t have enough hose to tie a loop and lasso the handle.

After a quick rub of the red welt where the catapulting hose had lashed his shoulder, Ethan pulled the hose arm over arm, counting lengths of one metre.

Luckily, the hose had snapped near to the tap and Ethan had enough hose to reach the lever. But he wasn’t sure how much extra length he needed to make the loop and tie a knot. After a couple of attempts it was clear that tying a knot in a rubber hose is bloody hard, and that he’d come up short by the time he’d made it.

But Ethan’s success in getting the hose had buoyed his spirits. He’d kept the chop bone he’d been served a couple of days earlier and had even sharpened the pointed end by scraping it across the concrete floor. He used this point to spear one of the cushions on his mattress. He then tore out a forty-centimetre strip of strong fabric and used it to knot a loop. But as he finished double knotting and gave the loop a tug to test its strength, a shaft of moonlight shot through the main door.

Ethan guessed someone had heard the noise and that he was about to get busted, but he still lifted his mattress and hastily crammed as much hose as he could underneath it.

Kessie lumbered into the cage block, for only the second time since Ethan’s arrival. He was as drunk as on his first visit and his safari trousers had an all-too-conspicuous damp patch around the crotch.

‘Who was in here last?’ Kessie asked furiously, in English.

Rather than looking at Ethan and the train of hosepipe sticking out of his mattress, Kessie stared angrily at the fluorescent lights, and the insects swarming around them.

‘Some boy,’ Ethan said weakly.

‘A boy who hasn’t seen my electricity bill!’ Kessie shouted. ‘That much I know for sure.’

And with that, Kessie flipped off the light switch and stormed outside.

While Ethan gasped with relief, Kessie stormed into the middle of the football match and began shouting that there would be no more parties on his ranch until people learned to turn off light switches and stopped wasting his money.

Ethan didn’t understand Kessie’s language, but he watched from the bucket as the lanky kid who’d left his lights on got grassed up by Michael. The terrified lad was dragged in front of Kessie, who choked him before knocking him cold with a knee to the head.

As the shocked ranch workers dispersed, leaving the lad sprawled unattended in the dirt, Ethan jumped down off the bucket and peered back into his now dark cell. He could see nothing at all, though he knew from experience that his eyes would soon adjust enough to see shadowy outlines.

Ethan appreciated the dose of luck, but throwing the loop of hose around the handle was going to be much harder in the dark. Once he’d fed the hose through the bars, he pushed his arm through, and for once in his life he was grateful for being skinny.

He began by whipping the hose gently until he could feel it laid out straight in front of his arm. Then he made a much stronger movement, pulling the whole hose backwards and sending it cracking forwards with a whipping motion.

By the third crack he was getting a feel for the kind of swing it took to make the hose flick up into the air. But in the near dark the only feedback he got on where the hose was landing was the difference in sound between the pipe hitting the floor and clanking off the metal bars.

After each crack, Ethan would tug the hose hoping that he’d snagged the lever. After thirty attempts the metal bars were cutting into his chest and his arm and shoulder ached. But his life depended on this, so he ignored the pain.

Forty minutes later he was still going. The sound of the hose slapping the concrete after each unsuccessful throw tormented him, and his arm hurt so bad that he had to take a break, lying on the mattress and moaning as he tried to ease the pain by massaging himself.

After ten minutes on his mattress, dripping with sweat and wishing that he’d had the sense to run some water into the bucket before breaking the hose apart, he gave it another go.

Cloud cover had moved away from the moon, giving him slightly better light. His third attempt made a tantalisingly different sound. Ethan realised that one edge of the loop was balancing on top of the lever, but when he pulled the hose it fell back to the floor.

Despite increasing pain in his arm, Ethan’s throws were improving. The next time the loop caught the end of the lever he didn’t pull back. With his heart in what was now a very dry mouth, Ethan made a little upwards flick with his wrist. It was enough to send a ripple along the snagged hose and make it move forward.

‘Please, God,’ Ethan whispered, as he tugged the hose and felt it pulling against the lever.

Success felt good, but there wasn’t time to wallow in it. If the handle had had to be pulled towards him he’d now be on easy street, but it had to travel at an angle near perpendicular to the hose and he had no idea if the lever would budge when he pulled.

Ethan used the same brute force technique he’d devised when ripping the hose off the tap: stretching the hose back by winding the ends around his wrists and bracing his feet against the cell bars.

It seemed far more likely that the piece of cloth holding the loop of hose together would break this time, rather than the hose itself. There was a terrifying ripping sound, followed by a sudden slip, but as Ethan thought the loop was about to break there was a metallic thunk.

The sudden movement of the hose made him slip and as he lost his grip it lashed away through the bars, burning his right wrist before slithering across the concrete floor and out of reach. But Ethan was sure he’d reached the lever and he ignored the blood drizzling down his arm as he rolled on to his chest and crawled towards the cage door.

His palm squished a cockroach, but that didn’t deter him as he reached his cell door. The door was designed to open automatically, but the spring that made this possible was furred up with dried-out animal waste, so Ethan still wasn’t sure whether he’d pulled the lever far enough to set himself free.

The hose was out of reach, so there was no second chance. His heart banged as he tugged a bar and felt a shudder up his arm as the rusty mechanism moved freely. Ethan found his feet quickly and stepped out of the cage, half convinced that he was dreaming.

The piece of hose still attached to the tap had created a big puddle at the opposite end of the block and he picked it up and splashed his face before drinking four big mouthfuls of water. Being free gave Ethan a huge rush, but he was also overwhelmed by his situation. His body shook with a mix of fear and exhaustion as he took a deep breath and mumbled to himself.

‘What now?’

*

After getting kicked off his first big mission, Ryan was keen to prove himself. Dan had confirmed that local kids occasionally dared one another to venture into the valley around the Aramovs’ airbase, and never received anything more than a few slaps, unless they’d been caught stealing or vandalising.

But despite this reassurance, Ryan still felt well out of his comfort zone as he scrambled through the dark. Any kind of advanced equipment would make him seem like something other than a kid who’d stormed out of home to go hunting, so apart from his bag of traps and a water bottle he was relying on his BlackBerry for GPS navigation and the hidden ear-canal transceiver for communication.

‘You good?’ Brasker asked, through the earpiece.

‘Bit soggy,’ Ryan whispered as branches sprang back spraying water over his face.