CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,15

goons were knocked out and Vladimir Obidin was shot in the thigh.’

‘So did James get away?’ Lauren asked.

‘We have absolutely no idea. With Denis dead and Vladimir helicoptered to a private hospital in Moscow, other members of the Obidin family are jockeying for power and nobody really knows who’s in charge or what’s going on. There are rumours that James has been captured, but we’ve also heard that the police are still running a giant manhunt.’

‘But he hasn’t communicated,’ Kerry said, stifling a sob for Lauren’s sake. ‘If he was OK, he surely would have contacted the emergency desk by now.’

‘Did he have a mobile?’ Lauren asked.

Zara nodded. ‘He did and even if he’d lost it, I’m sure there are call boxes and other facilities in the city. We can’t be certain, but he’s probably been captured by Obidin’s henchmen.’

‘They could be hurting him,’ Lauren gasped. ‘They … He might even be dead already.’

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ Zara said, as she grabbed Lauren out of her chair and pulled her into a hug. ‘Until we know for sure, you’ve got to stay calm and try not to think the worst.’

‘Oh god,’ Lauren bawled, as she squeezed Zara tight. ‘Please don’t let him be dead.’

Zara was crying too as she rubbed Lauren’s back. ‘James didn’t have a mission controller in Aero City because he was being looked after by the MI5 agents, but Ewart helped to set the mission up. He’s already on a flight to Moscow and should be in Aero City by this evening. There are other MI5 officers based in the area and they’re going to liaise with Ewart and try to locate James.’

But Lauren wasn’t taking anything in. She was sobbing so hard and breathing so fast that she was starting to feel light-headed. She remembered feeling the same way on the night her mum had died, three years earlier.

‘It might be OK, Lauren,’ Kerry sniffed. ‘You know James, he’s got a habit of wrangling his way out of things.’

‘But he would have called by now,’ Lauren screamed desperately. ‘Why wouldn’t he have called?’

7. COMMUNICATION

After escaping from the Brezhnev Apartments, James made a stop at one of the city’s twenty-four-hour grog shops. These illegal enterprises were mostly run out of shacks or ground-floor apartments and catered to the cravings of the Aero City’s addicts, selling cigarettes, alcohol and glue.

He spent the few roubles in his jacket on a stack of chocolate bars – easy to carry and packed with energy to fight off the cold – as well as a box of matches, four cans of Coke and a small bottle of vodka.

After that, James set off for the edge of town, with the gun tucked in his jeans, keeping an eye out for a telephone booth as he jogged. But he knew he was unlikely to find one outside of the heavily policed city centre.

The lack of telephones was down to a quirk of history. Aero City had been built during the cold war as a closed city, with all forms of access tightly controlled by the Russian air force. Until the nineties, non-residents had to apply for a permit to visit and foreign citizens were banned. Private telephones were not allowed and anyone wishing to make a personal call had to spend half a day queuing inside City Hall.

Although these restrictions on telephones had been lifted years ago, the city government was desperately short of money and only a few streets near the centre of Aero City had ever been wired up for telephones. If James wanted to make a call, he’d have to get hold of a mobile.

The eastern edge of town had once housed the tens of thousands who worked in the giant production plants. But the young and healthy had long since abandoned Aero City in search of work, while the vulnerable citizens they’d left behind had been moved into blocks nearer the city centre.

The result was a ghost town: dozens of empty blocks, stripped of anything valuable and slowly crumbling back into the earth. James picked one at random and spent the night in a second-floor apartment. Without heat and with most of the doors and window frames stripped out for firewood, he found refuge in a bathtub, with a plastic shower curtain trapping the heat around his body and making a surprisingly effective blanket.

He could have started a fire to keep warm, or run back into town and broken into an apartment in the hope of stealing a mobile, but CHERUB