CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,69
to wait until they were inside a building, so her plan was to bide her time until they arrived, then pull her knife and grab Keith’s gun before running off down the street with Anna.
The plan would have worked if they’d stopped outside a house, but to Lauren’s horror they pulled through a set of electrically operated security gates at the back of a Victorian warehouse. She looked around the yard as the gates clanged shut behind them. The high walls were topped with coils of barbed wire and clusters of CCTV cameras hung from metal brackets.
Lauren reckoned she could still grab Keith’s gun, but with no clear escape route it would be a risky move. She’d probably end up having to shoot someone in order to escape and might even end up on the wrong end of a bullet herself.
‘Inside,’ Keith grunted, giving Lauren a shove as Roman pulled on the handbrake.
The warehouse had appeared old as they’d approached, but as Lauren stepped out of the car and looked inside, she realised that it had recently been refurbished. The brickwork was clean, there were double-glazed windows and the back door had trendy metal fittings.
The inside continued in the same vein, with stripped wooden flooring and a red staircase that rose up through the centre of the building. Music thumped as they passed the entrance to a concrete-floored storage area stacked with crates and bottles. Lauren glanced through a set of doors at the back of this space and saw a lively bar, with leather and chrome fixtures and customers dressed in their work clothes.
As they clanked up to the first landing, a scowling woman emerged from a small office. She was tall, with a red dress stretched over a lumpy frame and a pair of severely battered Converse sneakers on her feet.
‘What is this?’ she growled, pointing at Lauren. ‘Another mistake?’
‘The one with the phone,’ Roman explained. ‘We had no choice but to take her.’
‘The heat we’ll get on this will be unbelievable,’ the woman shouted. ‘Nobody would have made much fuss about a Russian quietly disappearing from a kids’ home, but you muppets decide to snatch two girls, on a main road, in the middle of the afternoon. The police are going to be all over this.’
‘Don’t sweat it Abby,’ Roman said. ‘They won’t track us back here. We rang Nicky boy and switched cars.’
‘And I’m out of pocket for a burned-out Toyota,’ Abby snapped. ‘We can’t keep them here for long. The customers can’t see them. I don’t even want the other girls seeing too much of them. Take them upstairs and put them in separate rooms.’
As they passed by, Lauren glanced inside Abby’s office at banks of LCD screens showing everything that was going on inside the building, including the bar and a deserted nightclub. As Roman led the way towards a white door at the end of the corridor, Lauren was surprised to find herself being tapped on the bum.
‘What’s sticking out of there?’ Abby asked.
Lauren cringed. She was wearing leggings and the phone had steadily slid down her bum, leaving an obvious bulge.
‘Mobile phone,’ Lauren said.
Abby glowered angrily at the two men. ‘Didn’t you search these two?’
Neither man had the balls to answer. They looked like small boys being told off by their mum.
‘You knew she had a mobile phone,’ Abby screamed, snatching it from Lauren. ‘You know you can track them. Have you got one brain cell between you?’
She pulled off the battery before flipping it open and breaking the two halves apart. ‘If the cops got hold of her number and tracked her here, we are totally in the shit,’ she yelled. ‘Now search them.’
Roman told Lauren to raise her arms in the air and began turning out her pockets. He got the pepper spray and the small penknife that Lauren kept on her key ring, but he didn’t notice the knife strapped to the inside of her thigh when he patted her down.
‘Where’s this from?’ Abby asked Lauren, as she suspiciously pulled the cap off the pepper spray. It wasn’t the kind of thing you expected to find in a twelve-year-old’s pocket and Lauren knew it was illegal to sell pepper spray in Britain.
‘There were a lot of attacks going on near where I used to live, so I bought it off this boy,’ Lauren lied. ‘He brought it back from his holiday in America.’
Abby raised the can and squirted it at Roman. Cherubs carried an extra-strength brand designed to stop