sternly. ‘I’m your tutor and if you don’t concentrate you’re not going to pass your entrance exam.’
Mark broke into an evil smile. ‘I’ll tell my daddy it was your fault and he’ll punish you.’
‘Oh you reckon, do you?’ James scoffed.
Mark folded his arms. ‘My uncle Vladimir is the chief of police. He’s got his own police station and his own cells. He can do whatever he likes.’
‘Maybe he’ll put you in a cell if you don’t pass your exam.’
‘Nah, he loves me,’ Mark grinned. ‘He buys me all the biggest Lego sets. I don’t ever want to go to a stupid English boarding school. I like it here.’
‘At least the classrooms are nice and warm in England,’ James said, giving a shrug. ‘And the lights never go out in the middle of the day. Besides, we all have to do things we don’t like, kiddo. My aunt and uncle make me come here after school every day and teach English to a horrible smelly little boy. And all because they’re trying to be nice to your daddy.’
Mark got out of his chair, ran around the desk and tried looking mean as he bunched his fist under James’ nose. ‘I’m not smelly. You’re smelly.’
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
Mark smiled as he gently nudged his fist against James’ nose.
‘GRRRRR,’ James bellowed. ‘You’re dead, you chicken nugget.’
The little boy cracked up laughing as James scooped him off the floor and flipped him upside down so that his hair hung down in strands.
‘Now I’ll use you as a broom,’ James said, as he lowered Mark’s head towards the floor and swung him gently from side to side, before setting the youngster down on the edge of the desk.
‘Do that again,’ Mark squealed, giggling so much that he had spit bubbling out the corner of his mouth.
‘I’ll do it again, but only if you say I want to be a broom in English.’
‘Never in stupid English,’ Mark said indignantly, as he jumped off the table and crashed face first on to a beanbag by the window.
Both boys turned towards the door as it clicked open. Vladimir Obidin stood in the doorway. The powerfully built man wore the crisply tailored uniform of a senior police officer.
‘James, you’re leaving now,’ he said.
James looked at his watch as Mark sighed with disappointment.
‘It’s only twenty past,’ James said.
‘There’s a meeting here tonight,’ Vladimir said. He abruptly changed his tone to one of anger. ‘I don’t justify myself to children. When I say go, you go.’
Vladimir sent a shiver down James’ back. The man had worked for Russian military intelligence and had a reputation for extracting confessions from Aero City’s criminals with a set of dentist’s tools and a blow lamp. James tried not to feel intimidated as he said goodbye to Mark, grabbed his backpack and stepped out of the library.
‘I’ve got a long trek home,’ James said nervously. ‘Can I use the bathroom?’
Vladimir huffed as though James had just imposed some great burden upon him. ‘Quickly then.’
James stepped into a plush washroom, with a huge spa bath and beech-panelled walls. He slid off his backpack and – all too aware that Vladimir was on the other side of the door – quietly pulled a Nokia communicator out of the side pocket.
As James flipped it open, he noticed that the communicator had picked up some e-mails. Cellphone coverage in Aero City was flaky and his phone tended to receive a whole bunch of messages and missed calls whenever he passed through an area with good reception. But this wasn’t a good moment to read them. He switched to a wireless messaging application and tapped in a four-digit number to access a hidden menu.
James had dropped a dozen pinhead-sized listening devices around the Obidins’ house over the three weeks in which he’d been tutoring Mark after school. Rows of bright green signal bars on the communicator screen showed that they were all powered up and transmitting perfectly.
‘Shift it,’ Vladimir shouted, pounding his fist on the door. ‘I’m a busy man.’
‘Just shaking off,’ James said, as he shoved the communicator inside his pack and raced for the door. At the last minute he remembered to flush the toilet.
Mark gave James a friendly wave from one of the first-floor windows as Vladimir escorted him down the woodchip driveway towards the solid steel gate at the front of the Obidin compound.
‘All right, Slava,’ James nodded, as he passed a guard and stepped through a reinforced steel door cut into a half-metre-thick wall.
The bored and half