Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  Unsurprisingly, it was where most of the guests seemed to be gathering, hammering the free drinks. Mostly it was a mix of older men and younger women, with bodyguards the size of wardrobes hanging back in the corners of the room, wires extending from shirt collar to ear. At first, we stayed close together, as a pack. Strength in numbers. But, one by one, the other three girls got picked off by gold Rolex men ranging from thirties to seventies, spiriting them away to the bar. In the end it was just me, feeling a little like a balloon that had just been popped. Clearly nowhere near as enticing as Christina, Katya and Irina.

  Standing on my own like an awkward loser, I chugged through my welcome flute of champers and accepted the offer of another from a waiter. Good for the nerves, I thought. Bad enough being at a party full of rich strangers, never mind a high-stakes mission.

  “How many of those have you had?” Philippe said in my ear.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, under my breath.

  “I can hear you hiccupping.”

  “Still on my first one,” I lied. “Got to fit in.”

  “Well make it your last. You need to stay sharp.”

  “Okay, Dad. Thanks for the lecture. I can handle my dr—”

  I wobbled a little on my heels, which were already starting to pinch. A fat, rough hand steadied me by the elbow. It belonged to a middle-aged bald man the shape of a barrel. He wore a pale grey suit and a gold chain inside a vile open-necked shirt the colour of beetroot. Crocodile skin shoes and chunky gold rings completed the doucheball look. It just went to show, money couldn’t buy you taste.

  “Steady,” he said, chewing on an unlit cigar. “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Yana.”

  “Yana. A wonderful name. The same as my mother, God rest her soul. Now, what are you doing all alone? We can’t have that. Not at one of my parties.”

  Dang. It was none other than Antonenko.

  His hand moved from my elbow to my lower back in a way I didn’t like. His warm clammy hand stuck to my skin, making me want to peel away. But I went with it as he guided me over to the bar.

  “Let me introduce you to some of my friends,” he said, pulling a stool out for me to perch on.

  I recognised two of them from Philippe’s memories. Yevgeny Sokolov, who stroked a hand on Katya’s pert bum, and General Yurkovich, who lined up some coke for Christina. She gladly hoovered it up off the bar, before wiping leftover powder off her dainty little ski-jump nose.

  Even Nikolai from the Mobutu exchange was here. He cut in, just as Antonenko was suggesting I help myself to refreshments. Or, in other words, a line or two of your favourite class-A drug.

  “Boss,” Nikolai said, “we’re almost ready for the viewing.”

  “Ah, excellent,” Antonenko said, patting Nikolai on the back.

  So Nikolai worked for Antonenko. Antonenko was besties with Sokolov and Yurkovich, who were bosom buds with our friends at JPAC. The world was getting smaller by the minute.

  “Gentlemen, ladies,” said Antonenko, making an exit.

  “Here, young girl,” said Yurkovich, teeing up another line. “Help yourself.”

  A line of coke? What did I do? I felt like everyone was watching me, waiting for me to snort it. There was peer pressure and then there was billionaire gangster pressure. As Katya and Irina took turns sniffing their lines, I was ushered off my stool and over to Yurkovich. Another skin-crawling hand on my back gently pushed me forward so that my face was over the line.

  Note to future self. Next time you’re on an undercover mission surrounded by leching granddads, remember not to rock up in a backless mini dress.

  “Go on,” Sokolov said. “Don’t be shy.”

  I leaned forward, holding my hair out of my face. Was I really going to do a line of coke? What if I went mental and couldn’t complete the job? Worse still, what if it gave me a heart attack? Even the thought of it going up my nose – gah! Still, I couldn’t hover over the stuff for long, and if I didn’t do at least one line I’d look like a faker. So I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, leaned in and …

  14

  Lifestyles Of The Rich And Dangerous

  I sneezed.

  Well, fake sneezed. As I squeaked out a semi-convincing achoo, I blew the coke out into a fine cloud over the barman’s black apron. I expected Sokolov and Yurkovich to go apeshit and tear into me for wasting what was bound to be the very best shit. Instead, they burst out laughing. Funniest thing they’d seen in ages, apparently. I stood up straight and pretended to look disappointed, the other girls shaking their heads at me. Before another line could be prepped, the hostess of the event clinked a spoon against a glass.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “the big moment is here. Would you please follow me to the gallery, where Mr Antonenko will unveil the Arina Diamond.”

  Murmurs of excitement surged through the room. Feet shuffled towards the door. Another hand guided me forward, this time Sokolov’s. This time on the back of my right thigh, under my dress. Ugh. I squirmed clear and deeper into the pack as we made our way up the stairs to the first floor. We were greeted by a set of wide double doors opening into a private gallery – a white-walled space displaying modern-art paintings on one side and another bulletproof glass wall on the other, which looked out over a decked roof terrace and infinity pool that seemed to drop right off the mountain. A hundred pairs of shoes trooped into the room as we arranged ourselves in front of a podium at the far end of the gallery. Antonenko stood proudly before a small cinema screen, next to a plinth draped in a purple silk sheet. White panels emerged out of the ceiling like blinds, covering up the glass walls and blocking out the sun. With the room darkened, the doors closed and heavily guarded behind us, the screen lit up with an image of the diamond and its new name.

  “Welcome everyone,” Antonenko said, through a microphone. “And now for a short film.”

  A video played on the screen. What the—? He’d commissioned a documentary? This was world-class douchery. We’re talking old crackling footage. Diamond mines. The Austrian Crown Jewels. Famous peeps who’d owned the diamond in the past. And brand-new footage from the bid. Antonenko shaking the hand of the auctioneer, flashbulbs chattering and the whole auction house applauding. Still photos of Antonenko and his wife together. The oddest of odd couples. An old man and a Barbie lookalike. Their wedding. Honeymoon. And, now, the diamond itself. Filmed from different angles. Sparkling in the light. The screen and the room went dark, leaving just a spotlight shining on the plinth.

  “And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for,” Antonenko said, bringing his wife up on to the podium. “I give you … the Arina Diamond.”

  Antonenko and Arina whipped off the sheet together, revealing the diamond in the centre of a glass display case. Light bounced and twinkled off it from every angle, dazzling the audience. A collective ahhhh from the room quickly escalated into rapturous applause. The panels over the glass wall rose slowly back into the ceiling and we were invited to queue up and view the diamond in an orderly fashion, armed guards lining up either side of the podium.

  “Oh, and please don’t open the display-case door and try to touch the diamond,” Antonenko said. “The case is alarmed on the inside and I wouldn’t want you to spill your champagne.”

  Antonenko’s billionaire humour bounced right off me but got the room chortling as we queued up to see the diamond. One by one, the rich and the fabulous jazzed their Armani smalls over it, before filing out of the gallery and back to the party. I was towards the back of the line and I didn’t gawp at it for long. It was a classy rock and all, but I didn’t see what the big deal was. The hostess stood at the doors to the gallery, telling us that food was ready for anyone who fancied a nibble. Seemed like the oldsters where more interested in getting their hands on the girls.

  I wondered where some of these men’s wives were. Shopping in Harrods probably, with a toy boy on the side, totally non-fussed that their husbands were feeling up young women at a party. Arin
a didn’t protest once at her darling betrothed eyeing up Christina, the top of his balding head not much higher than her mini mountains, shown off to the max by her red dress, plunging all the way down to Belly Button Valley.

  If only I could wear one of those outfits.

  That’d be one way to make everyone puke, said by inner devil.

  Just as I was wallowing in the comforting familiarity of my own body horrors, I felt an arm around my shoulders. It was Sokolov again.

  “Sorry,” I said, wriggling out of his grasp. “I need to, you know—”

  “Of course,” Sokolov said. “Don’t be long.”

  He winked at me and joined Yurkovich in strolling down the stairs.

  “Along the hallway, turn left, then right,” the hostess said to me.

  “What? I mean, pardon?”

  “The nearest bathroom,” the hostess said, standing at the entrance to the gallery. She pointed the way to the toilet with a polite smile.

  “Oh yeah, thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I walked along the hallway, past a room where the door was half-open. A guy around my age sat on the end of a bed, playing a zombie shoot-’em-up on a big flat-screen. Our eyes connected.

  “What are you staring at?” he said, up his own arse. What a dick.

  I moved on and found the bathroom. More fricking marble. More gargantuan proportions. Just the one toilet, but three gold-tap sinks and the other girls in there. Irina sat peeing on the toilet. Katya and Christina were at the sinks, touching up.

  “Hey, Yana,” Katya said. “You got a customer yet?”

  “Customer? You mean a creepy old coffin dodger?”

  “Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” Katya said.

  “How can you smile and flirt with those perverts?” I asked.

  “Smile and you’ll live longer,” Irina said, pulling up her knickers and flushing the toilet. “Or do you want to end up tied to a mattress, drugged out of your mind?”

  “Don’t you get it?” Christina said, leaning into an enormous mirror and applying more devil-red lipstick. “The bosses will cut your fucking head off if you don’t play nice.”

  “Murder your family too,” Katya said.

  “Shit,” I said. “How old are you all?”

  “Seventeen,” they all chorused.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “Same as you. Same as everyone,” Katya said, pausing mid-eyelash curl. “Taken from our homes in Ukraine.”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, playing along. “So how long do you think they’ll keep us for? Beyond today, I mean.”

  “Until we get old. Nineteen, maybe twenty,” said Irina. “Then, who knows what?”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Irina said.

  “If worst comes to worst, it’s easy to poison yourself,” Katya said, totally matter-of-factly.

  “Doesn’t anyone try and get out?” I asked. “Get back to Ukraine?”

  “With what?” Irina said. “No money. No passport. A minder always there to take you to the salon or the next party and that’s it.”

  “There is no way out,” said Katya. “Only further in.”

  “Look, you’re obviously new to this,” said Christina, putting both hands on my arms like a big sister. “Have lots of champagne. Do a little coke. Don’t ask questions. Just smile and find somewhere to go in your head. I go to the beach. Katya back to her family on Christmas day. And Irina—”

  “A date with my boyfriend,” Irina said. “Ex-boyfriend,” she sighed, checking her hair in the mirror.

  My God, this was horrible. These girls were sex slaves. And these were the high-class ones. The ones they treated relatively well. There were other girls even worse off. Kidnapped from their families and shipped off to play sex dummies for rich old men who wanted a guaranteed shag with a nubile young thing.

  And no chat-back, or else.

  “Okay, show time,” said Christina. “If anyone wants me, I’ll be flat on my back on the beach.”

  How could she be so casual about it? This was sex trafficking we were talking about. Maybe she’d become immune. Like I feared I was becoming immune to the blood and the violence of battle. The first time makes you puke. The second makes you feel queasy. By the third or fourth fight, you feel numb. And you want to feel numb.

  The other two girls left the bathroom. I took a pee and straightened myself out. It was show time for them and show time for me. I had to find that diamond. The longer I was there, the more on edge I was becoming. What if I got trapped in this airless world of carefully choreographed sex parties? A lot of things in life looked so shiny on the outside, but peel away the plastic wrapper and there was dirt underneath. So much fucking dirt.

  I came out of the bathroom to see Katya enter one of the many guest bedrooms with Sokolov. He shut the door behind her. No prizes for guessing where the other girls had got to. I trod carefully along the hall, as quietly as my heels would let me. The gallery had cleared out and the guests were downstairs hitting the booze and the fancy buffet. The podium was also empty. Where had they put that diamond?

  Right on cue, Philippe chipped in. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” I said.

  “Leave it for later. Where are you?”

  “I’m upstairs,” I whispered. “First floor. Where the hell are you?”

  “I’ve got eyes on the nest.”

  “The what?”

  “The nest. The house.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “They’ve moved the d—” I almost forgot. “Baby Blue has been moved.”

  Baby Blue was our codename for the Arina Diamond. A bit obvious, I thought, but what did I know?

  “My guess is underground,” Philippe said. “There’s a couple of basement levels. Try down there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But just one thing … what’s the deal with the high-class sex hooker thing? Did you know those girls were being forced to—”

  “Get a move on,” Philippe said. “Tell me when you see it.”

  I screamed in silence before composing myself. I grabbed the banister and headed down the stairs.

  15

  The Heist

  “I think I found it,” I whispered.

  The radio crackled in my ear. Philippe couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t hear him. I was officially on my own. I’d wandered through the party towards the back of the house and found a staircase down to a lower level. There, I’d found a long, softly lit corridor. I’d slipped off my shoes and padded along the heated terracotta floor tiles, past a large gym and a home office to the right, before skipping down a second staircase and pushing through a heavy door into another corridor running alongside a subterranean swimming pool and spa area. Steam rose from the pool, the reflection of the tortoise-blue water shimmering on the roof. The corridor sloped downwards to another door, through which I’d found an enclave hosting a circular door to Antonenko’s walk-in vault, bored into the mountain rock below the house. It was wide open. Antonenko stood inside, supervising four security guards as they set the display case down on the plinth in the centre of the vault, which also featured a series of letterbox-shaped lockers and an eye-watering block of shrink-wrapped bank notes on a wooden pallet.

  As I watched on from around the corner, Antonenko stepped out of the vault with his men. Two of them teamed up to swing the door shut. It was a foot thick and looked like it could take a nuclear blast without sweating it. One of the men rotated the giant lock shut. Antonenko waited a second while the men turned their backs. He punched in a code on a holographic keypad built into the wall. The vault blipped three times and a blue light came on above the door.

  “Okay,” I heard Antonenko say. “Two men. Ninety-minute shifts. You two take first shift. You two, come and eat something.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” came the replies.

  God this guy was careful. It wasn’t enough that the Arina Diamond was locked up in an u
nderground mega-vault. He had to have two armed ex-special forces standing watch outside. Before my position could be compromised, I slipped out through the door behind me and ran back up the sloping corridor past the pool and up the stairs to the first basement level. I hid inside the door of the office as Antonenko and chums strode by. I followed them at a distance up the staircase into the main party. I stole a flute of bubbly off a passing waitress and snuck on back down the two flights of stairs. I put my shoes on, took my phone out of my bag and breathed deep. I opened the door and staggered in like a drunk, giggling to myself and taking selfies as I went, slugging half the champagne.

  I stopped in the middle of the enclave and turned to see the guards staring at me, dressed in their matching black uniforms and caps. One had a bushy black beard with specks of grey. The other was a skinhead with tatts creeping like ivy up his neck.

  “Oh, hiii!” I said.

  “What are you doing here?” Tatts asked.