Black Friday (CHERUB) - Robert Muchamore Page 0,85

she said. ‘Everything OK?’

‘Natalka’s miserable,’ Ryan said. ‘Is there really nothing we can do about her mum?’

Amy laughed. ‘Dimitra spent ten years as a pilot in a heavy-duty smuggling ring. We can’t get her out because you’ve got the hots for her daughter.’

‘We fitted her up though.’

‘On that one last mission,’ Amy admitted. ‘But what about all the drugs, guns and weapons she smuggled in the decade before that?’

‘Can’t we at least try—’

Amy cut Ryan dead. ‘You need to focus on Igor,’ she said firmly.

‘I signalled him at the bar,’ Ryan said. ‘He’ll be coming up the back stairs in a minute or two.’

‘Better get going then, hadn’t you?’

The Kremlin’s five floors were all linked by stairs, but the Aramovs had fixed it so that everyone accessed the top floor via a single lift. There were always two armed guards on duty at the fifth-floor lift exit and the armoured stair door could only be opened from inside.

Ryan moved to this door, which was located at the rear of a small room that had once housed Irena Aramov’s nurse. After a couple of minutes squatting on a single bed, he heard Igor’s knuckles tap the outside.

As Ryan yanked the heavy door, Igor pulled a huge pistol fitted with a silencer and scope.

Ryan grinned. ‘Are you sure that’s big enough?’

Igor shrugged. ‘It’ll make a mess of Josef Aramov, that’s for sure.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘Leonid doesn’t give a shit about Amy,’ Igor said. ‘He wants Josef dead for messing with Tamara. But I don’t want her running around screaming her head off until I’m well clear, so if she’s there I’ll kill her too.’

‘Pity,’ Ryan said. ‘Amy’s got fantastic tits.’

Igor stifled a laugh. ‘I really like you, Ryan. It’s a shame about your dad, but you’re a survivor.’

‘Especially with a hundred thousand som in my pocket to get me and Natalka out of here.’

Igor took the hint and pulled a roll of money. ‘You’ll have to trust me, there’s not time to stand around counting it.’

‘When’s your flight?’

‘I’ve got time,’ Igor said, avoiding a direct answer. ‘So how do we get up to the other end without the guards on the elevator seeing us?’

Ryan led Igor out of the nurse’s room and across Irena Aramov’s lounge. The large space was full of ornaments and family pictures that hadn’t changed since she flew to the US for cancer treatment. A sliding glass door threw in a blast of cold as Ryan opened it. When the curtain was pulled back, he revealed three balconies stretching the length of the building, each separated by half-metre gaps.

‘It’s icy,’ Ryan warned. ‘But Andre told me Alex and Boris used to jump them all the time for a dare. The third balcony ends at the entrance to Josef’s apartment. I’ve already crept up there and made sure it’s unlocked.’

‘The guards didn’t notice?’

‘The guards are used to me,’ Ryan explained.

‘You’d best leave,’ Igor said. ‘Once news gets out that this ship has no captain, things could get pretty nasty. Looting, chaos.’

‘I’m already packed,’ Ryan lied. ‘We’re heading for the bus station.’

As Ryan walked back to the nurse’s room, Igor moved out on the first balcony. The gap between the first and second balconies was half a metre. The handsome Russian snapped sheet ice off the rusted railings before hopping across.

Igor took care not to look down until his foot was flat on the springy plastic of a snow-covered garden chair. As he hopped off, he had no idea that Amy had rigged a heat-sensitive detonator to 250 grams of plastic explosive packed into an outdoor light fitting.

The blast hit Igor at shoulder height, blowing a large hole in his neck. As the first mist of blood erupted, the upper half of his body sprawled across the metal railing, then teetered momentarily before the weight of his torso dragged his legs over.

Igor’s end was messy. He was briefly impaled on anti bird spikes before a sheet of snow thrown loose by the blast gave him a final nudge to the ground. Amy had shaped the charge so that the explosion funnelled out and hit Igor like a punch, but the shock wave still shattered several windows and dislodged large quantities of snow on the Kremlin’s roof. The snow sheets piled on top of Igor until only his dead right arm poked out of the mound.

40. WIRE

Andre wore jeans and a smart black going-out-to-dinner shirt as he rode a lift from the basement car park to their third-floor apartment. Leonid had