CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,18

borrow their phone, but it would mean showing his face in a public area and in an impoverished and crime-ridden city, the chances of anyone willingly handing their mobile to a well-built teenager who looked like he’d spent a night sleeping rough weren’t good.

James realised that he was going to have to mug someone. It wasn’t going to be nice for his victim, but it would be a tea party compared with what might happen if Obidin’s men got hold of him.

The grey streets of Aero City were about as far from thriving as you can get, but there were a couple of lively streets in the centre of town where the kind of people who could afford mobile phones shopped, ate and danced the night away inside the city’s only nightclub. But these businesses were mostly owned by Denis Obidin’s family and the area always crawled with cops.

James decided to pick his victim at the city discount store instead. The large metal shed was one of the few things to have been built in Aero City within the last ten years. He’d been there a few times with Boris and Isla and found it stuffed with everything from Chinese-made tracksuits through to canned food and cheap power tools.

There was a large car park, but few people owned cars and most shoppers walked their purchases a few kilometres through the snow in bags or trolleys. James sat on a low wall at the edge of the lot and staked out the entrance. He needed a customer who was alone and looked wealthy enough to own a mobile. At the same time, he tried not to attract the attention of a gang of tough-looking teenagers who were using a desolate area of the lot as a skate park.

James wasn’t exactly god’s gift to skateboarding. He’d made an arse of himself on the few occasions when he’d mounted a board and was impressed by their display; especially when you considered that they were performing on snow and ice, with nothing but hoodies for protection.

After watching endless pensioners and harassed, impoverished buggy-pushers, James noticed a young woman coming through the automatic doors holding a giant carrier bag with a set of pillows crammed inside. She looked about nineteen and wore tight jeans, black leather boots and a fur hat. But it wasn’t the kind of cheapo fur hat that all the old grannies wore and her brown leather bag had clearly come from some fancy Moscow boutique. It was definitely the kind of bag that had a mobile inside it.

Relieved that she didn’t head towards a car, James waited until the woman was on the unlit street alongside the giant store before standing up to go after her.

‘Careful, arsehole,’ one of the skateboarders yelled, as James almost knocked him flying. He’d been concentrating on the woman and hadn’t noticed the board clattering towards him.

As the first boarder struggled to keep his balance after swerving, another lad jumped off his board, pulled a flick-knife out of his jeans and flashed it under James’ nose.

‘You want trouble?’ the lad grinned.

He was smaller than James, but felt confident with a knife in his hand and his mates covering his back.

James backed away and raised his hands. ‘Sorry.’

He stuck to a single word, because the kids might have heard that the cops were looking for an English boy and his accent was a giveaway.

The kid who’d swerved was seventeen or eighteen and he’d circled back towards James, kicked his board up into his hands and was swaggering towards him.

‘This is our space, faggot,’ the big lad spat, puffing up his chest and bunching up his fists.

‘Sorry,’ James said again, as he backed up further and turned his head quickly to see if his target was still in sight.

The skateboarders all laughed as he backed away.

‘He’s pissing his pants.’

‘If we see you around here again, we’ll cut you up.’

But James didn’t give a damn about their attempts to bruise his ego. He wanted the girl, or at least the phone he hoped to find inside her expensive leather bag.

After leaving the car park, James took a couple of quick double steps to catch up with his target. She turned left behind the discount store into a wide street with a building site on one side. A faded sign said that 55,000 square metres of shops and office space would be ready by the end of 1998, but the grand scheme had only risen half a storey.

The young woman