Black Friday (CHERUB) - Robert Muchamore Page 0,88

was to be sure where everyone was. Leonid was sleeping off food, booze and sex and it was unlikely he’d surface much before lunchtime. Alex and Boris were trickier. They wouldn’t emerge for the toilet because all the bedrooms had en-suites, but there was still a slight chance one of them would come downstairs for a drink or a snack.

Andre didn’t think this would be a major problem because he’d make sure both brothers were upstairs when he walked past their rooms, and if they came down later he’d be behind the locked door of his father’s office.

T-shirt and boxers weren’t ideal for concealing stuff, so Andre pulled on jeans and pocketed his dad’s keys and the tiny cellphone James had given him.

He’d guessed right about which key opened the office and he pushed the door closed silently behind himself. The main light might shine around the edges of the door, so he flipped on a small desk lamp and aimed the beam behind a stack of files. Then he pulled back his earlobe and did the double tap that activated the microtransmitter in his ear canal.

‘James?’

It took a few seconds before James answered, half yawning. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m mentally scarred after seeing my parents naked. The good news is, I’m in my dad’s office.’

James sounded anxious. ‘You should have spoken to me first. Are you sure you’re safe?’

‘I’ve got time,’ Andre said. ‘My brothers never come in here. And my mum will warn me somehow if Dad moves.’

‘I’m setting up to record what you say,’ James said, as Andre heard a noise like bedsprings creaking in his ear. ‘You wouldn’t believe the dive I’m staying in. I’ve got mice and cockroaches.’

‘So where do I start?’ Andre said. ‘I’ve got two locked file boxes, but I think the little keys on my dad’s bunch open them. There’s a laptop and there’s a bunch of stuff on the desk.’

‘Recording now,’ James said. ‘Remember where everything was before you start moving things about. Let’s assume that your dad won’t trust computers again in a hurry. Take me through the papers on the desk first.’

‘There’s a stack of messages on light blue paper. They’re in Russian. They’re on the edge of the desk near the shredder. I guess he hasn’t got around to shredding them yet … Oh, there’s something else I forgot to tell you. Boris let slip that the place Leonid plans to move us to is in the Caribbean.’

‘Interesting,’ James said. ‘If that’s true, it rules out any plans for a return to the Kremlin. Are there other papers near the shredder?’

‘There’s a big stack,’ Andre confirmed.

James thought for a couple of seconds. ‘I reckon anything lined up for the shredder is going to be fairly interesting. It’s most likely recent, and there must be a reason why he’s bothering to shred it.’

‘Right,’ Andre said, as he moved around to the pre-shredder stack at the edge of the desk. ‘There’s about twenty messages. RX 145-710 … And it’s all banks of numbers.’

‘Code,’ James explained. ‘Almost certainly his Russian friends. We’re already decoding their messages at source, so don’t get bogged down with them.’

‘The next batch look like receipts,’ Andre said. ‘Bausch Chemical, three thousand dollars. Houston Drilling Supplies, eight thousand four hundred.’

‘Could be digging a tunnel,’ James said. ‘Skip for now, we can come back later if we don’t find anything juicier.’

‘There’s some big papers,’ Andre said. ‘Like designs for some sort of rocket. A mortar maybe?’

‘Weird,’ James said. ‘I guess someone wants technical details of a weapon he’s trying to sell.’

‘Looks like it’s called PGSLM,’ Andre said.

James found the initials oddly familiar. He’d not heard them for eight years, but when he placed them, he almost fell off his bed: Precision Guided Shoulder Launched Missile.

When James was thirteen, he’d worked with his sister Lauren, busting a kid out of a maximum-security prison as part of a convoluted plot to track down a woman called Jane Oxford. Oxford was suspected of stealing a batch of advanced shoulder launched missiles, each one fitted with a guidance system that made it accurate enough to fly through a bathroom window from a range of five kilometres. James and Lauren had succeeded in finding Jane Oxford. But while she’d been sent to prison, the missiles were never recovered.

‘You might have struck gold,’ James said, trying not to let his excitement filter through and disrupt Andre’s concentration. ‘Tell me more.’

‘A lot of the writing is in Spanish,’ Andre said. ‘I can’t understand it, but there’s