Black Friday

by Robert Muchamore

  Tamara did what she always did and soothed Leonid’s temper. After pecking him on the cheek, she spoke in her calmest voice as she poured whisky into a tumbler.

  ‘Forget the boys and this takeaway shit,’ she said. ‘Take this drink and go have a nice relaxing bath. I’ll clean this up and cook you a nice bloody steak.’

  Leonid smiled, and made a gesture like he was blocking Andre’s ears.

  ‘Why don’t you come join me in the bath?’

  ‘Eww!’ Andre said.

  ‘Run the bath and you might get lucky,’ Tamara answered.

  Leonid looked a much happier man as he tucked bits of cooked pepper in his mouth, before heading back upstairs.

  Andre was still vaguely disgusted at how vigorously his mum had thrown herself into her new relationship with Leonid. ‘Engaged?’ he said irritably, once his father had disappeared behind the double doors.

  Tamara raised her ringed finger and spoke in a much more abrupt tone than she’d just used on Leonid. ‘This cost forty thousand dollars. That’s two years of college for you.’

  Andre smiled as his mum touched his shoulder. ‘Have you spoken to anyone on com?’

  Tamara nodded. ‘I spoke to Lucinda briefly when I went to the toilet.’

  ‘I think we should leave after the New Year fireworks,’ Andre said. ‘Dad will probably go straight to sleep, and I doubt Alex and Boris will be back much before three a.m.’

  Tamara’s eyes narrowed. ‘But this isn’t what we agreed with Amy Collins.’

  ‘We’ve found Dad and they’ve worked out where the missiles are.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about missiles,’ Tamara said. ‘I agreed to do this because I wanted your father out of our lives for good.’

  ‘But they’ll get him after,’ Andre said.

  ‘Leonid’s clever and I want to be sure,’ Tamara said, shaking her head. ‘Turn on your com. Tell James to be ready to pick us up in fifteen minutes, but don’t say anything else. Then go to your room and pack up. One bag, only the important stuff.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What I should have done a long time ago. Now do as you’re told and get upstairs.’

  Andre felt shaky as he headed to his room. It came through in his voice when he spoke to James on the com.

  ‘What’s up?’ James asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Andre lied. He’d considered telling James the truth, but loyalty to his mum outweighed his friendship with James. ‘Just be ready to meet us in fifteen minutes. Alex and Boris are out, my dad’s about to have a bath. He’s always in there for at least half an hour, so we’ll make our move.’

  ‘If you’re certain,’ James said warily.

  Andre switched his com off, then grabbed his only backpack. He stuffed in as many of the new clothes and trainers Leonid had bought for him as he could, plus a couple of Xbox games and the Omega watch and gold chain he’d been given for Christmas.

  When Andre stepped back into the hallway, Tamara was walking into the master bedroom. Andre crept up to the double doors and watched as his mum picked Leonid’s pistol off the bed and expertly opened the chamber to make sure it was still loaded.

  ‘Are you in the bath?’ Tamara asked, using her sweetest tone.

  ‘Come and join me,’ Leonid said. ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘Close your eyes,’ Tamara said. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Tamara kept the gun poised and gave a girlish laugh as she approached the bathroom. ‘If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.’

  Andre opened the bedroom door a few centimetres to get a better view.

  ‘Get that lovely arse in here,’ Leonid said, laughing.

  ‘Keep ’em closed or you’ll get zip,’ Tamara teased, as she stepped into a luxurious bathroom with a sunken oval bath set in its centre.

  Leonid’s eyes shot open when he heard Tamara clicking the safety off. The bulky silencer was over a metre from his face: near enough that you can’t miss, but too far to make a grab.

  ‘What’s this?’ Leonid asked, grabbing the sides of the tub and making a big splash as he sat up.

  Andre crept into the bathroom doorway as his mother spoke, with the gun slightly trembling.

  ‘This is for all the times you slapped me around. For punching me unconscious. For raping me and breaking my jaw. For every night I sat on my own, knowing you were partying with fifteen-year-old Koreans. For the eighteen stitches when you smashed a vase against my back. But most of all, this is for saying that you’d torture and kill our son if I ever left the Kremlin, or looked at another man.’

  ‘Tamara,’ Leonid said. ‘I love you.’

  Tamara shook her head. ‘Well you’ve sure got a funny way of showing it.’

  Andre gasped as his mum pulled the trigger. A wave splashed against the tiled floor as Leonid’s body spasmed. After that it was surprisingly neat, with blood draining out the back of his head turning the water pink.

  Tamara hadn’t realised that Andre had crept in. Her hands and blouse were splashed with blood. She had a tear running down her cheek, but didn’t speak like someone who was crying.

  ‘I told you to pack,’ Tamara said. ‘Are you OK?’

  Andre nodded. ‘I’ll live.’

  ‘Then do as you’re told,’ Tamara said. ‘While I shower, you grab a bag. There’s Rolex watches and cash at the back of the wardrobe. Get my jewellery as well.’

  ‘Amy said her people would look after us.’

  Tamara sounded extremely cool as she yanked her bloody top over her head. ‘I’d rather have too much money than not enough. If James asks, Leonid tried pulling me into the tub with him while I was trying to leave and I had to shoot him. I won’t hear while I’m in the shower, so you’d better take the gun, just in case your brothers come back.’

  ‘What’ll happen to them?’ Andre asked, as Tamara unzipped her skirt and headed for her own bedroom.

  ‘I don’t really care, but they’re not that bright. They’ll wind up dead or in prison.’

  ‘Right,’ Andre said, impressed and a little scared by his mum’s sudden ruthlessness.

  ‘Get going then,’ Tamara said, smiling as she undid her bra.

  It took less than five minutes for Tamara to shower, spray deodorant and don a tracksuit. Andre waited for her by the front door, surrounded by a wheelie bag and two backpacks.

  ‘You’ve got everything?’ Tamara said, as she tousled Andre’s hair before taking the gun off him.

  Andre assumed they’d be walking out and meeting James at the front, but Tamara led him down to the basement and they drove out of the underground garage in the big Lexus.

  James was sitting in the Beetle looking towards the apartment entrance and got a surprise when Tamara rolled up alongside and blasted the horn.

  ‘More room in here,’ Tamara said.

  James had his own bag and the missile in the little Volkswagen, so while he hadn’t thought about using Leonid’s car, he was grateful for the extra space and there was never any harm in being bullet-proofed while riding around Ciudad Juárez in the dark.

  James threw the missile and his backpack on the plush rear seat and told Tamara to head to the highway and follow signs for the US border.

  ‘Leonid’s dead,’ Tamara said coldly. ‘Is anyone likely to have a problem with that?’

  ‘He went for my mum,’ Andre added.

  James half smiled. ‘Intelligence services aren’t supposed to go around assassinating people, but I can’t see anyone being too upset.’

  Tamara had only ever driven on the relatively quiet roads around the Kremlin. Her driving was erratic and she clipped a couple of kerbs before James told them to leave the highway and park at the gates of a construction site.

  Hao-Jing had programmed the factory coordinates into the PGSLM. After resting it on the roof of the car as the missile’s computer booted up, James transferred it carefully on to his shoulder, making sure he had it po
sitioned upwards, with twenty metres of clear air in front of him.

  With the missile balanced, he used his free arm to tap in the launch code – which was a factory default 000000. After that he pressed a red pre-launch button, which set a hydraulic pump hammering in his ear. After twenty seconds the pressure light came on and he squeezed the launch trigger.

  The first second of the flight was powered by compressed air. This gave the missile a chance to clear its launch tube before the rocket came alive with a sharp crack, blinding light and enough heat to suck moisture out of the air in James’ next breath.

  The rocket-powered missile shot upwards, accelerating to four hundred metres and 1,100kph in under ten seconds. At this point the rocket only had enough fuel to run for twenty seconds, but that was enough to fly up to five kilometres, then make a corkscrewing downwards glide and accurately hit a target the size of a sofa.

  James lobbed the lightweight metal launch tube over the building-site fence and had one leg back inside the Lexus as a huge bang erupted four kilometres away.

  ‘Hell yeah!’ Andre shouted, as he turned back to give James a high five. But James looked uneasy. ‘What’s the matter?’

  James didn’t answer until the boom of a secondary explosion ripped across the city.

  ‘How many people were in there?’ James asked. ‘Hopefully just a few security guards, but it might be a lot more if they’re still producing missiles.’

  James’ phone started ringing as Tamara started driving. It was Dr D.

  ‘CIA had an infrared satellite camera targeting the site. Congratulations, James, it looks like the factory’s been ripped out of the ground.’

  James ended the call quickly because Tamara was pulling back on to the highway and needed directions. Once they were on course, James went into his backpack and handed Andre a pair of US passports.

  ‘One for you, one for your mum,’ James explained. ‘I’ve got to make one quick call to get this car cleared for the priority channel. The border’s less than three kilometres. I’ve booked us a hotel in El Paso and with any luck we’ll be in our rooms in time to see in the New Year.’

  46. GIRLS

  Word of Leonid Aramov’s death reached the Kremlin a few days into 2013, but from a population that once topped seven hundred, less than thirty were there to hear the news. The last aircrew left the following day, flying three dilapidated planes to a breakers’ yard in India, before taking commercial flights onwards to uncertain futures in Russia and the Ukraine.

  A dozen-strong American demolition crew arrived hours later. Only a small team keeping the runway deiced and a few Aramov security men stood watch as they began drilling holes and filling them with sticks of dynamite.

  The Kremlin was built of prefabricated concrete sections that the experts predicted would collapse with minimal explosives. The real work was in destroying the airfield, tearing up metre-thick runways so that nobody could resume operations from this near-perfect smuggling den.

  Ryan’s mission had ended with Igor’s death, but Amy stuck to her word and let him stay on, marking his time with Natalka, counting in days, hours, then minutes. The night of January 9th was a blizzard and he sat up cuddling Natalka and hating the sight of her two packed wheelie bags by the door.

  Ryan ought to have been looking forward to campus. To his mates, to paintballing, Xbox tournaments, corridor parties, football matches and trips to the mall. But all he could think about were the little details of Natalka that he’d never see again.

  Her walk, her nose. The split green Converse where a little toe poked out the side. The cigarette burns on her pillowcases. Natalka thought Ryan was going to the Ukraine to live with a distant cousin. She thought they’d stay in touch, but Ryan was forbidden from contacting anyone he’d met while working undercover. Natalka’s text messages and e-mails would bounce off dead accounts and, no doubt, that would poison her memory of him.

  ‘Don’t come to the airport,’ Natalka said.

  Ryan had counted five and a half hours until he saw Natalka for the last time, but not going to the airport cut it down to three and he felt like he’d been kneed in the guts.

  ‘I want to,’ he gasped.

  ‘No big scene with everyone watching,’ Natalka said. ‘I want to say goodbye properly, in private.’

  She’d started pulling her jeans on, and Ryan realised he’d never see her legs again. Falling in love with Natalka was one of the most amazing things that had happened in his life, but losing her like this was excruciating.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want me to come?’ Ryan asked, hoping the lift would break down as they trundled to the ground floor.

  The fruit machines still blinked in the bar, but they’d not eaten a coin in days. As a fourteen-year-old whose mother was in prison on the opposite side of the world, Natalka couldn’t fly on any reputable airline without a chaperone. The balding man who shook her hand in the lobby wore the logo of Russian national airline Aeroflot on his lapel.

  Ryan choked up as Natalka followed him to a blue Mercedes, with her wheelie bag cutting lines in the fresh snowfall. He was horrified at the idea that she’d get straight in, but Natalka turned back for one final hug.

  ‘I got you these,’ Ryan said, as he pulled two packs of cigarettes out of his hoodie. ‘The last Marlboros in the vending machine.’

  Natalka swept hair off her face and looked determined. ‘I’m giving up,’ she said, as she cracked a smile that would live in Ryan’s head for as long as he breathed. ‘I’ve heard those bloody things can kill you.’

  ‘Kerry?’ James said warily, as he stepped into a hallway.

  The small detached house was less than a mile from Stamford University’s main campus and had been James’ home for the past two and a half years. After tapping in the burglar alarm code he picked a bunch of flyers and letters off the bristle mat, then gulped as he stepped through an archway into an open-plan kitchen/living area.

  There were marks on the carpet where Kerry’s bookcase had been. Shelves half empty where her CDs belonged and no pots hanging from the rack over the hob. The tap had been left dripping and as James leaned over to shut it off, he saw a note held on the fridge door by his Viva Las Vegas magnet.

  James’ handwriting was a scrawl even when he tried hard. He’d always admired Kerry’s perfect letters, and the circles she drew to make dots above her is.

  James,

  I’m sorry about last week’s fight on the phone. I’m sure we both said things we didn’t really mean.

  I’ve cleared my stuff out. I think I’ve done it right, but if I’ve taken anything you think is yours, let me know. I’ve also taken heavy stuff like saucepans and laundry detergent because you can’t ship that back to the UK.

  I know I said I’d be around, but Mark and I have decided to go away for a few days before term starts.

  I don’t think I’ll ever completely stop loving you, but we fell in love when we were twelve and now we’ve grown apart.

  Kerry

  XXX

  P.S. String, tape and scissors in left-hand kitchen drawer. I bought too many boxes and heaps of bubble wrap. It’s in the garage. I’m all cleared out, so use whatever you like

  James put the note down and looked around the room. It sparked a hundred memories, from snuggling on the couch the night he and Kerry moved in, to cops charging in to break up his graduation party and the big stain on the wallpaper from the time Kerry lobbed a ketchup bottle at his head.

  James had a flight back to the UK booked for the following evening, so he only had a day and a half to pack up his stuff, ready for collection by an international removals firm. He’d barely slept on the flight from El Paso to San Francisco, but reckoned he’d end up sleeping for half the day if he lay down, so he headed into the garage to grab some boxes.

  He smiled when he saw his black leather jacket, hanging up alongside the Harley Davidson that he’d bought himself after his most successful trip to Vegas. Shipping the bike back to the UK and paying im
port taxes would be too expensive. He’d already arranged for a dealer to sell it on commission, but he reckoned one last ride, cutting across the university campus and grabbing steak and eggs with strong black coffee at a little diner he knew, would kick his body clock into gear.

  The garage door had always been a pain and he had to give it a good kick to get it whirring. It took a while getting gloves and jacket on, but he wasn’t planning to ride far enough to bother with his full bike leathers.

  James had inherited plenty of money from his mum and made more scamming the blackjack tables in Vegas. He’d already been online sorting out the big Triumph he was going to buy when he started his new job on CHERUB campus, but there was something unmatchable about the combo of California’s broad highways and a big low-revving Harley.

  The old girl who lived next door was coming out on to her front lawn and James gave her a friendly wave as he rolled the big bike down his front drive and opened up the throttle. A minute later he was up an on-ramp and cutting across highway lanes, hitting 85mph with January chill blasting up his cuffs and morning sun on his back.

  47. STAR

  One of the demolition men had decided to cut the red star off the Kremlin roof and take it home for a souvenir. Ryan roamed the offices on the fourth floor and found an aluminium model of a Soviet-era spy plane that he thought would look cool in his room on campus.

  Baser instincts took hold when someone broke the lock off the Kremlin bar and set free crates of whisky and vodka. Demolition crews and Kremlin staff all joined the fun and Ryan spent his final night in Kyrgyzstan getting absolutely smashed and head banging to Led Zeppelin until 3 a.m.

  Amy was worried about the amount he’d had to drink and walked him up to a spare bed on the fifth floor where she could keep an eye on him. He fell asleep sobbing helplessly for Natalka and woke up with the first proper hangover of his life.