CHERUB: Guardian Angel (5 page)

‘You can get ciggies from the vending machine in the lobby,’ Ethan said.

‘You can get ciggies from the vending machine in the lobby,
if you have money to pay for them
,’ Natalka answered, as she opened up a fold-out brochure. ‘These kids all look
disturbingly
well behaved. They must put tranquillisers in their water supply.’

‘It’s just a brochure,’ Ethan said defensively.

‘So what made Irena change her mind?’

Ethan shrugged. ‘Maybe she just got sick of me whining. All I know is, I’m gonna get myself out of this bunghole as fast as I can.’

*

The trainees’ boots twisted in gravel as their bodies strained. The cast-iron cannon barrel made a grating sound as it moved from a position against a crumbling brick wall. It must have been in the spot for years, because the roots of weeds and moss had grown around it.

‘Step backwards,’ Ning gasped, all the tendons in her arms on show as she held up the fat end of the barrel, with Daniel in the middle and Leon at the muzzle.

While the three trainees were pleased to have pulled the cannon free, the same couldn’t be said for a large house spider who’d been living inside it. It crept out of the muzzle and one long black leg tickled the back of Leon’s hand.

‘AAARGH Jesus!’

As Leon sprang backwards, the weight of the cannon became too much for Daniel and Ning. The cast-iron tube tilted, then hit the gravel path with a clang, grazing fingers and narrowly missing toes.

‘What are you doing?’ Ning screamed, glowering at Leon.

‘Why’d you let go?’ Daniel added furiously.

‘It was massive,’ Leon said, as he pointed at the ground. ‘Bloody tarantula or something. I thought it was gonna bite me.’

Daniel and Ning both inspected the spider, which had decided that the best survival policy was to crawl into a tuft of grass and stay still.

‘It’s a house spider,’ Ning said.

‘You’re such a dick face!’ Daniel said, as he launched his boot at his twin’s arse. ‘That almost broke my toes.’

The kick wasn’t hard, but there was a nice fleshy slap as boot connected with buttock.

‘I can’t help being scared of spiders,’ Leon shouted bitterly. ‘And next time you kick me, I’ll kick back harder.’

Ning pressed the grass tuft under the tip of her boot, and twisted to kill the spider.

‘Now you don’t have to worry about it,’ she said. ‘Get back in place. This’ll be hard enough without you two acting like prats.’

There were two things that kept Ethan sane. Natalka was one, Ryan Brasker was the other. Ethan had first met Ryan in California a couple of months before his mum was murdered, a short period during which Ryan had twice saved his life.

The first time, Ethan had been knocked down by a car and swallowed his tongue. Ryan cleared his airway, saving him from suffocation. Weeks later when assassins killed his mother, Ryan helped Ethan escape through a tiny window before the killers got to him.

Ethan felt that he owed Ryan and jokingly called him his Guardian Angel. Now the two boys maintained a secret online friendship, but there was a
lot
that Ethan didn’t know about Ryan Brasker.

For starters, he was really Ryan Sharma – thirteen-year-old brother of Leon and Daniel and a qualified CHERUB agent. Ryan had been sent to California the previous autumn. His mission was to befriend Ethan and find out as much as he could about Ethan’s mother and her links with the Aramov Clan.

Secondly, Ryan was no guardian angel. His plan to befriend Ethan had involved turning a gang of bullies against him. The theory was that Ryan would step in and save Ethan’s butt, after which they’d become mates. But the plan went awry when the bullies chased Ethan into the path of a moving car.

When Irena Aramov arranged for Ethan to be snatched away from California child protection after his mother’s murder there was no plausible way for CHERUB agent Ryan to follow Ethan to Kyrgyzstan, but Ryan had maintained his friendship with Ethan in the virtual world, staying in touch by Hotmail and Facebook, playing online chess and speaking on Skype.

This relationship between a CHERUB agent and the grandson to the head of a major criminal network gave British and American intelligence a valuable window into Aramov Clan operations. But it was tough to maintain because Irena Aramov had told Ethan to cut off all contact with anyone he’d known in California, and a lack of fast Internet and mobile phone coverage in the remote valley around the Kremlin made this ban relatively easy to enforce.

The pilots and staff who worked for the Aramovs had access to a couple of public computers on a slow Internet connection, but these terminals were in the Kremlin’s ground-floor lobby and their usage was monitored by Aramov security teams. More usefully, Ethan had discovered three private computers on the sixth floor which were used for Aramov Clan business and linked up to a reasonably fast satellite-based Internet connection.

One computer was in the quarters of Ethan’s uncle, Josef Aramov. Irena’s oldest son was a man of limited intelligence who was basically a glorified caretaker around the Kremlin. But Josef kept his rooms locked and Ethan had never got within two metres of his computer.

The second computer was in Leonid Aramov’s rooms. Ethan’s friendship with Leonid’s son Andre meant he could get near, but Uncle Leonid wasn’t the kind of man you wanted to piss off, especially as Ethan suspected that he was behind the killing of his mother.

Luckily for Ethan, the third computer belonged to his grandma Irena and was easy to access. Irena was rarely awake after 8 p.m. Once the old lady went to bed her nurse, Yang, would gulp several glasses of wine and sit watching Chinese TV with the volume up so loud that she never heard Ethan walking along the hallway and cutting into her boss’s unlocked office.

A couple of hours watching
Pineapple Express
with Natalka and the prospect of moving to a school in Dubai or Bahrain put Ethan in a better-than-usual mood as he jogged furtively along the sixth-floor hallway on socked feet.

Irena’s computer was an aged Windows box, surrounded by overstuffed paper trays and yellow books:
Internet for Dummies
,
Windows for Dummies
,
Excel for Dummies
. The machine had a network password, but Irena had her login scrawled on a strawberry-scented notelet taped to the bottom of the monitor.

Ethan had always been more comfortable with virtual worlds than in the real one and felt a sense of longing as Windows 98 booted up. Having a mouse in his hand and clicking on the ‘e’ to open Internet Explorer felt good, but this was illicit activity and he thought how great it would be to have a laptop in his room so that he could spend hours watching YouTube clips, downloading music and playing online games like when he’d lived in California.

Ethan logged into MSN under his American name, Ethan Kitsell. He only had seven names in his contact book and two of those – former best friend Yannis and his mother – were dead. Of the surviving five, four were kids Ethan had met at chess tournaments and the last was Ryan Brasker, who was showing as online.

Ethan opened a chat window. He typed fast but Ryan got in first.

Ryan
– UR on late tonight.

Ethan
– Watched a movie with Natalka. BIG NEWS!

Ryan
– She let you feel her titties?
J

Ethan
– Better! My gran got me school brochures. I might FINALLY be getting out of here, at least for term time.

Ryan
– Sweet!!!!!

Ethan
– I’ll send your chess move through tomorrow. Can’t chat long tonight. Wanna look at the websites for those schools.

Ryan
– Remember what you asked about hacking Uncle Leonid’s computer?

Ethan
– 4 sure.

Ryan
– I did some surfing like U asked, hacking sites & stuff. I’ve downloaded a little app that hijacks a computer.

Ethan
– Does it work?

Ryan
– Seems to. I tested it on Amy’s computer.

Ethan
– If you got any naked pictures of your sister, send ’em on over
J

Ryan
– PERVO! All you do is load the app on a USB stick and plug it into the PC. The program loads up in the background when the computer gets turned on. Couple of days later you pull the stick out and it’s logged everything that’s been typed and copied any files that have been opened.

Ethan
– Trouble is Leonid and my two older cousins are SCARY bastard steroid heads.

Ryan
– FFS! I spent hours online finding this out for you & now UR too chicken!

Ethan
– Gotta be careful. I’m 75% sure Leonid killed my mum and wants me dead too.

Ryan
– Why RU so sure?

Ethan
– Can’t prove Jack shit, but he’s the kind of guy who’d kill his own sister. My mum got murdered a month after Grandma asked her to get involved in clan business, and Leonid wanted to run the show.

Ryan
– At some point U have 2 man up.

Ethan
– Easy 4U 2B brave with your butt safe in California. People who cross Leonid Aramov die SLOW painful deaths.

Ryan
– So you do nothing? THE GUY PROBABLY KILLED YOUR MOTHER and will come after you again once your gran dies and can’t protect you.

Ethan
– Tell me something I don’t know. Just not sure what hacking Leonid’s computer proves? It’s not like he’s gonna have ‘
Tuesday, kill sister and nephew
’ written in his Google calendar.

Ryan
– Who knows what you’ll find? Maybe passwords or payment details. INFORMATION IS POWER! Hacking Leonid’s computer could put U1 step ahead of anything he’s up to.

Ethan
– *BIG SIGH* UR right, I have to try SOMETHING. Uncle Josef’s no good and my mum’s dead. I’m the only barrier to Leonid and his boys taking over the Aramov business and inheriting Grandma’s entire fortune when she dies.

Ryan
– U seen Grandma?

Ethan
– After school today. The cancer is supposed to be incurable but she’s clinging on. If anything she’s stronger than when I arrived here a few months back. I don’t think she’ll be dying anytime soon.

Ryan
– Anything else U want me to look into? If U can get hold of a small USB stick, that program I found will do the rest 4U.

Ethan
– I’m scared, but I can’t sit back and wait for Leonid to come after me. I can buy a USB stick in the bazaar. If I can prove to Grandma that Leonid killed my mom, she’ll protect me.

Ryan
– URA CLEVER BASTARD WITH COMPUTERS. I KNOW U CAN PULL THIS OFF!!!!!!

Ethan
– Better go. Wanna look at these school websites and can’t sit in this office all night.

Ryan
– I’ll upload the hacking programs to an FTP
*
site and send you a link. Speak tomorrow!

Ethan
– Thanks. Good to know my guardian angel is STILL looking out for me
☺

ETHAN KITSELL has logged off

RYAN BRASKER has logged off

*
FTP – File Transfer Protocol.

*

The trainees got the cannon across the island with a mixture of rolling, dragging and carrying. It wasn’t warm, but by the time they’d reached the cliff edge Ning had sweat streaking down her face and palms scraped raw by the rusty surface of the cannon.

Daniel threw the glass slab over the edge of the shallow cliff, much to the distress of several large gulls. Then he scrambled down after it, reaching a narrow strip of shale beach with hands and clothes streaked white with bird lime.

‘You OK?’ Ning shouted from the cliff top, eight metres up.

‘Tide’s coming in,’ Daniel shouted back. ‘We need to get on with this.’

Daniel pulled a shard of metal they’d found near the cannon from his pack. He wedged it pointing upwards between two rocks, then balanced the glass slab so that its centre leaned on the metal. By the time he’d done this, the biggest waves were getting close to his heels.

‘We’re only gonna get one shot at this,’ Daniel shouted up. ‘Tide’s close and there’s no way we can haul the cannon back up the cliff without ropes.’

Ning nodded from up top. ‘Help us line up.’

As Ning and Leon grabbed either end of the cannon, Daniel stepped back until the sea was near the brim of his waterproof boots.

‘You’re close,’ Daniel shouted. ‘Maybe a quarter-step to the left.’

As Ning and Leon adjusted their position, Daniel stared at the glass slab. He’d just lived the hundred toughest days of his life and didn’t think he could go through it all over again. Either the falling cannon smashed the glass and released the T-shirts, or his CHERUB career was over.

‘I think you’re OK!’ Daniel shouted.

The cannon was too heavy for Ning and Leon to hang about. They both groaned as they threw it. As it fell, Daniel had an alarming feeling that it might bounce off the cliff face and flatten him so he took some quick backwards steps along the shoreline.

As the cannon landed, Daniel trod awkwardly on to a rock and lost balance. He splashed down in water less than ten centimetres deep, but within a second a breaking wave had completely engulfed him.

Daniel’s head snapped backwards as freezing Atlantic water poured down his neck. His whole body shuddered from the cold, but his mind stayed focused on the glass-encased T-shirts. He quickly found his feet and began wading towards them.

‘Bull’s-eye!’ Leon shouted, as he looked anxiously down over the cliff face. ‘What’s it like down there?’

Ning was too anxious to wait for Daniel’s prognosis and was scrambling down a gently sloped section of the cliffs, pebbles tumbling as she shuffled ungraciously on her bum.

The cannon had hit the glass slab with enough force to knock a huge lump off one of the boulders on which it had been set. The slab itself had slid down into surrounding pebbles, but when Daniel brushed them away he felt like he’d been kicked in the guts.