Black Friday (CHERUB) - Robert Muchamore Page 0,46
crowds were thinner, mostly men in business suits, smoking and haggling. Ryan didn’t like it because people his age didn’t come here. Everyone stared and he had to drop further behind Igor and rely on the tracker.
After a couple of hundred metres, the wholesale zone merged into an area where over fifty traders sold auto parts. The containers had car company logos painted on the doors and hubcaps swinging precariously from wires strung across the alleyway.
Ryan got close as Igor backed out of a container that sold reconditioned Lada spares. He was baffled when he saw Igor move while the tracker blip stayed still, but Igor was laden with bags and Ryan realised that he must have dumped the faulty wiper motor with the tracker inside, or traded it when he purchased the replacement.
Either way, Ryan now had to rely on his eyes. It would be too risky to follow Igor in visual range for long, but Ryan didn’t want to go back to the Kremlin with nothing, so he decided to take a chance and follow Igor for a couple of minutes.
Igor had a backpack and two big shopping bags. Ryan realised he was heading for his old Toyota wagon. But instead of driving off, the Russian locked the shopping in the back before crossing the car park and entering a shabby café alongside the bazaar’s metal-canopied bus station.
Once Ryan was sure Igor was staying, he headed inside himself. The café’s strip lighting was dazzling after the outdoor cloud. There were fifty tables, but only six customers.
All were men and Ryan got a shock when he noticed a stage at the back with a couple of not-very-attractive women dancing and vaguely making threats to take their tops off. There was also a bar where more women stood about in short skirts and too much make-up. Most were so skinny that Ryan reckoned they had to be drug addicts.
Igor was at a table off to the side of the stage, speaking with another blond Russian who could have been Igor’s brother, though he was bigger and had a squashed-up nose. Before Ryan could learn any more a buxom waitress came over and spoke words she’d clearly said a million times before.
‘I’m Lulu your hostess, can I get you something to drink?’
‘Coke,’ Ryan said warily.
‘Right you are, sweetie,’ Lulu said, jotting something on her pad and pointing towards the bar. ‘Any of our girls catching your eye?’
‘I just thought it was a normal café,’ Ryan explained. ‘I don’t have to … I mean, can I just have a drink while I wait for my bus?’
‘Free country,’ Lulu said, before crouching down and winking. ‘Don’t be shy. Call me if you want a girl to come over.’
‘Really, I’m great,’ Ryan said. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend.’
He felt like adding, a girlfriend who isn’t a prostitute.
Once the waitress had cleared off, Ryan tried working out what Igor and the squashed nose were up to. They didn’t have much to say to each other, but Igor slid some papers across the table and a roll of money in an elastic band went the other way.
Ryan had been looking for some form of electronic communication, but Leonid Aramov had lost most of his fortune when TFU hacked into his online banking. After being bitten once, it made sense that Leonid would revert to more traditional face-to-face communication for his Kremlin spy.
‘Coke,’ the waitress said, as she banged a bottle and glass on the table, along with a bill for three times what it would have cost in any café that didn’t have ugly women dancing about.
Ryan wanted a picture of Igor’s companion. The iPhone would be too obvious, but he had a sugar-cube-sized spy camera in case something cropped up. As Ryan raised the bottle of Coke to his lips, he simultaneously aimed the tiny camera and clicked off three pictures of the Russian.
He only just got them in time. As a belch rose up Ryan’s throat from the Coke bubbles, Igor and squashed nose parted with kisses on the cheek. The big dude headed off behind the bar as Igor went for the exit. But before he made it, he took a swerve and came for Ryan.
His tone wasn’t angry, but wasn’t friendly either. ‘I saw you in the mirror when I was having my hair cut. Then again in the parking lot.’
Ryan’s guts flipped, but he kept his voice casual and changed the subject to sidestep a was I or wasn’t I following you