Lone Wolf - Robert Muchamore Page 0,2
him with enough electricity to make him sob like a pussycat.’
‘How long until the morning shift arrives?’ Fay asked, following a script she’d practised with her aunt.
‘Eleven and a half hours,’ Kirsten announced. ‘These suits take one or two blasts to break the biggest, meanest men on earth. Now, young Jake, I’m gonna shoot you with a tranquilliser and you’ll wake up wearing that underwear. Then I’ll have all night to zap your tiny little balls. Or, you can be a sensible boy and go open those two safes right now.’
Jake raised one finger and flipped Kirsten off. ‘I’m not scared by a couple of chicks,’ he spat.
Fay instantly responded by whipping out an extendible baton and smashing Jake in the back of the neck. As he sprawled across sticky carpet, the thirteen-year-old planted the heel of her trainer between Jake’s shoulder blades, then expertly grabbed his arm and yanked it up behind his back.
‘Jesus, nooooo,’ Jake screamed.
‘Eleven hours,’ Kirsten said, her eyes narrow slits through the hockey mask. ‘We may be chicks, but we like to play rough.’
‘Stop it,’ Jake moaned breathlessly.
‘Will you open the safes?’ Fay asked.
‘If you leave my arm alone.’
Fay let go and allowed Jake to crawl towards the twin safes. As the first one popped open Fay began loading the wodges of vacuum-packed notes into a nylon bag.
‘Five hundred and twenty-eight grand in cash,’ Kirsten said. ‘Plus eighteen kilos of cocaine, which we can offload for another eight hundred.’
‘One point three million,’ Fay said, as she cracked a smile. ‘Not a bad night’s work.’
Once the bags were packed, Kirsten jabbed Jake with enough sedative to take him offline for a few hours.
They drove away in Jake’s Vauxhall Astra, abandoning it behind St Pancras Station. Once they’d stripped off their black clothes, they picked a taxi off the station rank and took a short ride to a flat in St John’s Wood.
2. APARTMENT
Fay cut a striking figure, running along Regent’s Park’s Outer Circle amidst lawns crisp with morning frost. She was slim, but not skinny. Hazelnut hair and bright green eyes. The thirteen-year-old moved quickly, on battered Asics trainers that had pounded this route a hundred times before. At the end of two laps, she stopped her runner’s watch. She was a minute outside her best time, but that wasn’t bad considering the stress of the night before.
St John’s Wood is one of central London’s top neighbourhoods. Luxurious apartment blocks house bankers and wealthy artists, while houses are the preserve of multimillionaire CEOs and pop stars. There’s a heavy foreign contingent, which was one of the reasons why Fay could run around the park on a weekday without anyone stopping to ask why she wasn’t in school.
Fay stopped in a patisserie to buy croissants and a walnut loaf, before a doorman opened her path into the smart lobby of the apartment building they’d lived in for the past few months. The open-plan twelfth-floor apartment had large windows with a beautiful view over the park.
Kirsten greeted her niece with a smile, but spoke stiffly. ‘Do your stretches properly, then take your shower.’
Fay dumped the bread on a kitchen cabinet and stepped out of her trainers.
‘I’ll make you hot chocolate,’ Kirsten said. ‘Then you need to hit the maths books.’
After dumping her sweaty running gear into a laundry basket, Fay stepped under a hot shower. Her cheeks and fingers were numb from being out in the cold. Her body was toned and quite muscular, but bore a few bruises from regular kickboxing sessions with her aunt.
‘Don’t take all day in there,’ Kirsten shouted.
Fay peered through the steamed-up shower door to make sure the bolt was across, and decided to take as long as she liked.
After dressing in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, Fay came out expecting a rebuke from her aunt. Instead she found walnut bread, cheese and diced apple, set out on the dining-table alongside hot chocolate with marshmallows and a three-centimetre stack of stapled printouts.
‘What are these, Auntie?’ Fay asked, though she could see that they were from school websites.
‘We got lucky, hitting the safe-house when there were drugs and money inside,’ Kirsten said.
Fay nodded thoughtfully as she stabbed a cube of Cheddar with her fork. ‘Hagar will be paranoid that it was an inside job. Which should take the heat off us.’
‘Hopefully,’ Kirsten agreed. ‘We’ll launder the cash through our usual route. I have a contact in Manchester who’ll give us a fair price for the cocaine. And that puts us over the edge.’
‘Over what edge?’
‘I’ve