CHERUB: The Fall (26 page)

Lauren yelled into the phone. ‘John, the rats are leaving the sinking ship. You’ve got to stop them getting out.’

‘Are you sure they’re not armed?’

‘Pretty sure,’ Lauren said, as she waved her companion towards the staircase.

‘OK, keep safe,’ John said. ‘We’ve got cops on all sides of the building.’

‘I expect they’ll try getting out of the back gates in a car,’ Lauren said.

John yelled to someone standing close to him: ‘Get a vehicle parked across the back gates.’

Lauren realised that her companion had fled. She clutched the gun as blurry figures passed by in the corridor outside. The big red blur looked like Abby, but whoever it was, they weren’t interested in Lauren, just in getting away.

‘Girls coming out of the bar now,’ John shouted. ‘Cops are on their way in.’

‘You’d better get some ambulances,’ Lauren said. ‘I knocked one guy cold and stabbed another; he might even be dead.’

As Lauren said this, she heard the pounding music stop in the bar downstairs. The replacement noises were screams and the sound of boots racing up the metal stairs.

‘Put the gun down,’ a woman shouted.

Lauren rested the gun on the desk and the smeary black figure unbuckled her riot helmet as she stepped towards her. Lauren’s eyes still stung like hell, but her vision was improving.

‘There are more girls down there through the white door,’ Lauren said. ‘I think the staff all ran off.’

‘You heard her,’ the cop shouted, as she waved half a dozen colleagues by.

Lauren realised that she still had John on the phone. ‘Where are you?’ she shouted.

‘With you in a flash,’ John replied, before hanging up.

Half a dozen sirens were now squealing in the streets around the warehouse and Lauren heard a huge bang as the cops battered down the white door leading into the brothel.

‘You OK?’ John asked, as he stepped by the cop.

‘Can’t see much.’

John had grabbed a bottle of mineral water and some paper towels from the bar on the way up. ‘There’s blobs of pepper spray stuck to your top,’ he said, as he pulled a flick knife out of his pocket. ‘It might get in your eyes if we pull it off, so I’ll cut it; then we can start flushing out the pepper spray.’

John sliced a V in the neck hole of Lauren’s sweatshirt, before grabbing the two sides and tearing it down. Lauren was relieved to be safe and couldn’t resist making a joke.

‘You ought to be careful,’ she grinned. ‘You should see the state of the last bloke who tried ripping my clothes off.’

James heaved with relief as a chunky female figure came through the door, holding a Hoover and a can of furniture polish.

‘
Dana
, thank god it’s you.’

Dana was a fifteen-year-old cherub who’d been born in Australia. She’d trained with James loads of times and had accompanied him on a mission earlier that year.

‘Are you on crack?’ Dana gasped, when she saw James rifling through Ewart’s papers. ‘If one of the mission controllers catches you in here, they’ll boot your arse out so fast your feet won’t touch the ground.’

‘Desperate measures,’ James explained. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

‘What does it look like, brains?’ Dana said, as she put the Hoover down and jiggled her can of polish. ‘This little knob-end cut the queue in the dining-room. We got in a row and I ended up whacking him over the head with my tray. Trouble is, two teachers walked in as I was doing it and I copped a month’s cleaning duty.’

‘Injustice,’ James tutted bitterly. ‘Campus is crawling with it.’

‘I heard you went off on some special birthday weekend.’

James nodded. ‘Yeah, the girls did it to cheer me up. It was cool.’

Dana raised an eyebrow. ‘Thanks for the invite, mate.’

‘Oh, well … Umm … It was a surprise. Kerry and Lauren set it up and – no offence – but I never thought it was your cup of tea. You’re more of a lone wolf.’

‘Sitting alone in my room, reading
Lord Of The Rings
for the seven hundredth time while I boil frogs in my cauldron.’

‘Something like that,’ James said. He felt uneasy because Dana was holding all the cards.

‘I heard you got suspended after that Aero City thing,’ Dana said, as she looked at the three-year-old photo of James amidst the papers scattered over the floor. ‘Is this Ewart’s investigation?’

James nodded. ‘I’m here because I’ve got a nasty feeling that he’s trying to stitch me up.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I reckon the answer’s amongst this lot somewhere,’ James said, as he dug out the report on the video surveillance and waggled it in the air. ‘There’s evidence here that puts me totally in the clear. Ewart has had it for more than a week, but when I asked
two days
ago, he told me that he was still trying to get it from the CIA and that there was a realistic chance I could be forced to leave CHERUB.’

‘He could have just got it before he went off.’

‘It’s dated last week, Dana. And what do you mean,
went off
?’

‘Ewart left about an hour ago with an overnight bag. He stopped me and moaned that I wasn’t cleaning his office well enough. He said he wants me to do the window ledges properly and make sure that the water doesn’t spill over when I water his cactus. I’m sorely tempted to piss in his bloody plant.’

‘I’ve never liked him, to be honest,’ James said. ‘I had him on my second mission and he was a total pain.’

Dana nodded. ‘It’s the cool guy thing that annoys me. You know, Ewart goes around dressed like a surf bum with his tongue stud and ripped jeans, but he’s actually thirty whatever years old, with a Vauxhall Astra, two kids and a mortgage.’

‘Exactly,’ James said. ‘John Jones is an old baldie, but he’s actually a million times cooler than Ewart.’

‘I’ve worked with most of the mission controllers, and Ewart’s definitely my least favourite.’

James looked forlornly at his stack of papers, then up at Dana. ‘I have to know what he’s up to, but I can’t go through all this on my own. You couldn’t give us a hand, could you?’

‘This is some serious shit,’ Dana said, shaking her head uncertainly.

‘Please,’ James said, but immediately regretted it. Dana didn’t stand for any kind of nonsense and the plea made him sound pathetic.

‘Gimme a second to think,’ Dana snapped. Then after a pause: ‘Ewart’s not gonna be back until late tomorrow. How about we load all of those papers into a bin liner? We’ll have to be careful not to jumble them up. Some of those documents are tagged, so you’d set off the alarm if you went out the front way, but I can stick them on the cleaning cart and put them out with the rubbish. You wait around the back and grab them while I’m putting the real rubbish into the incinerator. We’ll go back to your room and start going through them; then I’ll put everything back early tomorrow morning.’

James broke into a big smile. ‘You might have just saved my life.’

Dana wagged her finger. ‘And you’d
better
remember it next time there’s free go-karting and fancy hotels being bandied about.’

*

Carrying a bin liner across campus might arouse suspicions, so while Dana finished cleaning, James ran off to grab a backpack. Within forty minutes, he was standing in his room with Ewart’s paperwork stacked on his bed.

‘Gotta do this by the book,’ Dana said, as she pulled on a set of disposable plastic gloves. ‘Ewart can’t know that we’ve been through the papers. If anything makes him suspicious, he’ll ask for the video footage from the corridor outside his office and we’ll be dead ducks.’

‘Only thing is, they might be a bit fingerprinted and out of order already,’ James replied. ‘I dropped some stuff when you came in and surprised me, but I reckon I can put it back more or less as it was.’

All cherubs are trained to speed read and taught proper procedures for going through documents. After removing all the junk from around James’ bed, Dana took a digital camera and snapped a couple of photographs so that they’d be able to reassemble the stack precisely after going through it.

‘Even speed reading won’t get us through all of this,’ Dana said. ‘We’ll take half each and try and identify key documents, especially anything written by Ewart that gives us some idea of his thought processes.’

James had been on the same espionage courses as Dana and only resisted the urge to make a comment about not being born yesterday because she was doing him a massive favour.

After breaking the stack of papers into evenly sized piles, James took the bottom half and found himself staring at MI5 personnel files for Boris and Isla Kotenkov.

‘Snidey,’ James said, as he held the document up to show Dana. ‘Here’s something else Ewart told me he hadn’t been able to get hold of.’

He was surprised to learn that as well as being husband and wife, Boris and Isla were also cousins. During the Soviet era they had risked death, or life imprisonment in a brutal labour camp, to pass valuable intelligence on Russian weapons technology to the West.

‘Listen to this,’ James said, as he read a section of the report that Ewart had highlighted. ‘
The Kotenkovs were financially well rewarded by British and American intelligence services. However, they lost everything trying to set up a Moscow based dry-cleaning business and offered their services to MI5 once again in 1998. They were able to use long-standing contacts within the Soviet weapons industry to set themselves up as illicit weapons dealers, but have griped constantly about their low wages, low status and the lack of pension provision
.’

Dana nodded. ‘Sounds like the sort of people who’d take a bung to bump off Denis Obidin.’ Then she burst out laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’

Dana read an extract written by a health visitor seven years earlier: ‘
James Choke is a bright and thoughtful eight-year-old, although he does have difficulty controlling his temper at times. Unfortunately, James’ bedwetting problem persists and this is not helped by his younger sister, Lauren, who teases him mercilessly and refers to him as Mr Piddle Pants
.’

‘Hey,’ James gasped. ‘Gimme that. You’re supposed to be going through Ewart’s stuff, not my personal file.’

‘I’ve got to be thorough,’ Dana giggled.

‘Dana, I could be kicked out of CHERUB and you’re making jokes.’

‘I know it’s serious, piddle pants. It might have escaped your attention, but I’m running as big a risk as you.’

Dana couldn’t stop laughing as James turned sourly back to his paperwork.

‘Is your laptop switched on?’ she asked, a couple of minutes later. ‘I need the internet.’

‘Sure. Are you on to something?’

‘Maybe; I’ll tell you in a minute. What do you know about Hilton Aerospace by the way?’

James shrugged. ‘Not a huge amount. It’s a British company, but it has massive contracts in Aero City, refurbishing Russian airliners and stuff.’

‘Contracts with Denis Obidin?’ Dana asked.

‘Absolutely,’ James nodded. ‘The Obidin family practically owns the whole town.’

‘Both dead,’ Dana said, as she frantically tapped at James’ laptop.

‘Who’s dead?’ James asked as he put his paperwork down on the carpet and shuffled over to the computer on his knees.

Dana held up a handwritten list of names. Ewart had scrawled arrows, numbers and question marks between them. Dana pointed to each name in turn: ‘Denis Obidin, dead. Boris and Isla, dead. Lord Hilton, still alive but if I’m reading this diagram right, Ewart thinks he used a holding company to pay Boris and Isla fifty thousand dollars. Then there’s this guy, Sebastian Hilton; I’m not sure where he links in but I guess he’s Lord Hilton’s brother, or son, or something.’

‘Just saw a photocopy of his
Who’s Who
entry in my pile,’ James said. ‘He’s Lord Hilton’s son, a Member of Parliament and the new junior intelligence minister.’

‘And the plot thickens,’ Dana grinned, as she tapped another search into Google.

‘So what are these four other names?’ James asked, as he looked at the bottom of the piece of paper.

‘Clare Nazareth,’ Dana said, reading a local newspaper report from the laptop screen. ‘
Research scientist Clare Nazareth died tragically from carbon monoxide poisoning in her Hertfordshire home. The fifty-eight-year-old mother of two had worked for Hilton Aerospace for more than thirty years and had published more than eighty scientific papers. Her most notable work was in the field of ceramic jet engine technology
.’

‘Does it say when she died?’ James asked.

‘Two weeks yesterday.’

‘That’s just after I got back from Aero City.’

Dana had a Google search on another name running in a different tab. ‘Oh,’ Dana gasped. ‘Another one bites the dust.’

James looked at an image of an elderly woman on his laptop screen as Dana read aloud: ‘
Seventy-three-year-old Madeline Cowell was found dead in her Hertfordshire home. Two sons, recently widowed
, blah, blah, blah,
possibly confused over her medication. Police believe there are no suspicious circumstances
.’

‘Who was she?’

Dana clicked on a couple of different links, but didn’t find anything new. ‘Maybe we’ll pick something up in the documents.’

‘So what about these two other names at the bottom?’ James asked. ‘Jason McLoud and Sarah Thomas.’

Dana pointed to a sheet standing in the out tray of James’ printer. ‘Looks like McLoud is a scientific journalist. I did a search for his name and it came up with hundreds of articles, so I narrowed it down by doing
Jason McLoud Hilton Aerospace
.’

James pulled the piece of paper out of his printer. The article was from the online edition of
Aerospace World
magazine.

NO SURPRISE AS CERAMIC JET TECHNOLOGY
FACES ANOTHER SETBACK

By Jason McLoud

Since the dawn of the jet age, engineers have tried replacing metal components inside jet engines with ceramics. Theoretically, the thermal properties of a ceramic engine should enable it to spin faster and produce significantly more power than a metal equivalent, but reality has consistently failed to live up to the hype.

The latest blow is the decision by Hilton Aerospace to stop funding its ceramics research facility in Aero City, Russia. This correspondent travelled to Aero City to speak with Denis Obidin.