CHERUB: Guardian Angel (20 page)

‘It’s Ethan. I know it’s early, but I need to speak to Irena and I can’t get through.’

‘She’s been sick,’ Josef said. ‘That crazy nurse, Yang, poisoned her. Is there a problem at your new school?’

‘Josef, this is really complicated. You said Irena’s been poisoned. Is she able to talk?’

‘She’s over the worst, but she’s still weak. And I don’t know what time it is in Dubai, but it’s five in the morning here.’

Ethan hadn’t thought about the time difference. But he hoped to spin it in his favour.

‘Irena always wakes up really early, Josef.
Please
, just go and wake her up. I
swear
she’ll want to speak with me.’

‘I’d get Leonid to speak to you, but he’s at the hospital.’

Ethan wasn’t sure he’d heard right. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Leonid’s OK, but some crazy intruder attacked Boris. His jaw is smashed, so they’ve taken him to the hospital in Bishkek.’

‘Wow,’ Ethan said. ‘But listen, Uncle, I really, really, need you to go wake up Irena.’

‘She’s a sick old lady,’ Josef said. ‘I’m not waking her up just because you’re homesick.’

Ethan heard a bleep, and saw
Low Battery
flash across the phone’s screen. He felt like screaming. ‘I’ve
got
to speak to her.’

‘I’ll take a message,’ Josef said. ‘I’ll make sure that Irena calls you as soon as she wakes up, but I’m not going to disturb her.’

Ethan reconsidered: maybe he
could
tell Josef what was going on, especially if Leonid wasn’t in the Kremlin. But he felt reasonably secure inside Amina’s apartment and decided that it would be less risky to wait for a couple of hours.

‘Have you got a pen and paper?’ Ethan asked. ‘Take this number, and promise me you’ll get Irena to call the instant she wakes up.’

Josef took a while getting the number down.

‘As soon as she wakes up,’ Ethan repeated, just before hanging up.

The phone gave another
Low Battery
warning, but Ethan had spotted the charger when he’d been searching for the phone pamphlet. Once he’d plugged the charger in he wondered what else he could do. Apart from the Kremlin, the only other number that Ethan had committed to memory was his old friend in California.

There probably wasn’t much Ryan could do, but Irena wouldn’t call back for at least an hour and Ryan might even have found something about what Leonid was up to in the hacked files he’d sent through before leaving the Kremlin.

Ethan calculated the time difference between Africa and California and reckoned that Ryan would most likely be sitting at home doing his homework after school. But the phone cut straight to voicemail.

‘Hi, you’ve reached Ryan Brasker’s mobile. I’m probably out with a hot chick or sorting out some science problem that NASA can’t solve. But leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I can.’

‘Ryan, I can’t help you if you don’t stop acting like a baby,’ Amy said firmly.

‘I’m not acting,’ Ryan shouted. ‘It bloody hurts!’

He was lying on the couch at the house the CIA liaison had rented. His hoodie was pulled up to his nipples and Amy loomed over his bloody abdomen with a pair of tweezers.

‘Shouldn’t a proper nurse be doing this in a hospital?’ Ryan asked.

Amy gave a cheeky smile. ‘The only decent hospital within two hundred kilometres is the International in the centre of town. But right now, it’s a safe bet that Boris Aramov is in the emergency room there. So unless you want to bump into him, shut up and keep
still
.’

Amy moved in with the disposable tweezers from the medical kit. She gripped the bloody end of a plastic shard roughly the size of a pen lid.

‘Hold your breath, and on three,’ she said soothingly. ‘One . . . two . . . three.’

‘JEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESUS Christ!’ Ryan screamed.

The pain made his legs shoot up and he almost kneed Amy in the head as a trickle of blood ran out of the splinter hole.

‘Can’t see any more splinters,’ Amy said, as she dropped the lump of plastic into a coffee mug, then dabbed Ryan’s wound with a cotton wool pad.

‘Are you sure my ribs aren’t broken?’ Ryan asked.

‘I don’t have an X-ray machine handy, but if your ribs are bruised the hospital would strap them up. If your ribs are broken the hospital would strap them up. So what’s the difference?’

‘I could have punctured a lung,’ Ryan said.

Amy smirked. ‘Ryan, if you’d punctured a lung you’d be coughing up blood, and you certainly wouldn’t have run a kilometre up the side of the valley.’

‘How’s the patient?’ Ted asked, as he stepped into the living-room holding a glass of clear, fizzing liquid.

‘Just got the last splinter of BlackBerry,’ Amy said. ‘I’ll give it ten minutes for his wound to clot, then I’ll wipe off the worst of the blood and put some strapping on.’

‘Stitches?’ Ted asked.

Amy shook her head. ‘It looks a mess, but it’s nothing major.’

‘Nothing major!’ Ryan spluttered. ‘I’m in agony here.’

‘Tip this down your throat,’ Ted said, as he passed the glass across.

Ryan took the glass and gave it an experimental sniff.

‘Soluble Neurofen,’ Ted explained.

‘Isn’t there morphine in our medical kit?’ Ryan asked.

Ted and Amy both burst out laughing.

‘Ryan, you are officially the
worst
patient ever,’ Amy said. ‘Morphine’s basically heroin. I might give you a shot if you’d had your legs blown off, but regular painkillers will do for what you’ve got.’

Ted was smiling, but gave Ryan a reassuring tap on the shoulder. ‘You did great out there, fighting off those two apes.’

Ryan took an experimental sip of the drink. It didn’t taste as nasty as he’d expected.

‘The night was hardly a huge success,’ Ryan said. ‘Plans A
and
B failed. We haven’t got the USB stick and I almost got killed. And don’t accept
anything
that your pal Dan tells you from now on.’

‘Dan’s OK,’ Amy said. ‘You were unfortunate to run into Boris the psycho instead of a regular Aramov security guard.’ She dipped a hand into their first-aid box and came out with a packet containing another pair of sterile tweezers.

Ryan recoiled. ‘I thought you were done.’

‘Turn your head to face the wall,’ Amy said. ‘I’ve still got to get the com unit out of your ear.’

*

Ethan had spent ninety minutes hovering nervously around Amina’s little apartment, with her snores as the soundtrack. He was waiting for Irena to call back, but the only time the Samsung rang it was an incompre-hensible rant, presumably from the dude Amina had stabbed with the hand fork.

If Kessie’s people hadn’t missed Ethan already, they would do soon, and while the apartment was safer than being out on the street there was a rickshaw driver and a man with a stab wound who’d know where to look if word got round that he was searching for a white boy.

While Ethan waited for his call he took off his trainers and squeezed as much stinking river water out of them as he could. Amina was stockier than him, but she was about the same height and he put on a pair of her dry trainer socks.

Replacing his puke-spattered T-shirt was trickier because most of Amina’s stuff had girly designs and was shaped to stretch over her bust. But he dug out a
Johannesburg University
sweatshirt that didn’t look too absurd when he pulled it over his head, and hoped Amina wouldn’t be too pissed off if she woke up and saw him wearing it.

When he was sick of pacing about, Ethan crashed on Amina’s cushion-covered bed and stared at the Artexed ceiling, trying to get his head straight. The most intriguing thing to come out of his conversation with Josef was the fact that someone had beaten Boris up, and Leonid being at the hospital with him.

The idea of calling Leonid’s apartment would normally have been absurd, but if Leonid, Boris and – hopefully – Alex were all at the hospital there was a good chance Andre was home alone. And as Andre worked hard at being Ethan’s friend and had a close relationship with his grandma, he might be the one person who’d go and wake Irena up for him.

The clock on the Samsung told Ethan that he’d now been waiting two and a quarter hours for Irena to call back, and a four-hour time difference meant it would already be getting light in Kyrgyzstan. So should he wait and see if Josef came through, or risk calling Andre?

First he called Irena’s number again and got no answer. Josef’s line went to answerphone, so Ethan took a deep breath and punched in
00
to go back to the Kremlin switchboard, then hesitated briefly before tapping the extension number for Leonid’s apartment.

On the fourth ring, Ethan almost chickened out and pressed
end call
. On the fifth Andre picked up, as he’d hoped.

‘Hello?’

Ethan didn’t want Andre to blurt his name, so he put on a deep voice. ‘I’d like to speak with Leonid Aramov.’

‘He’s at the hospital. If it’s urgent I can pass a message.’

‘Is there another adult home?’ Ethan boomed, convinced that he was doing the worst
grown-up
voice in recorded human history.

‘I can go downstairs and get my mum,’ Andre said.

Ethan dropped the accent. ‘Andre, it’s me, Ethan.’

‘Hey!’ Andre said brightly. ‘How’s your school? I really wanted to call you, but Dad said nobody’s supposed to speak to you in the first few weeks, to stop you from getting homesick.’

‘Listen, Andre, something really bad has happened and I’ve got to talk to Grandma right now. Do you know if she’s awake?’

‘She always moans that she can’t sleep and gets up really early,’ Andre said. ‘Did you hear that her crazy nurse gave her the wrong drugs? She was unconscious for two days.’

‘I got a message saying that she was sick,’ Ethan said. ‘How is she now?’

‘Almost back to normal when I saw her last night,’ Andre said.

‘So do you think I can speak to her? I know it’s early but it’s really important.’

‘Dad had her moved into your room so we could keep an eye on her until a new nurse arrives. Hang on a second.’

Ethan heard doors and footsteps as Andre walked out into the hallway. It was ironic that Irena might have picked up if he’d called his own extension and a relief when the next voice he heard was his grandmother’s.

‘You’re not supposed to be speaking to me yet, are you?’ Irena said brusquely.

Irena had always defended Leonid, so Ethan had to phrase his next words carefully.

‘Grandma, I never got to the school in Dubai. Leonid diverted my plane. I’m in a place called Kanye in Botswana.’

Irena sounded shocked. ‘Kessie’s place?’

‘Yes,’ Ethan said. ‘They’ve been keeping me in a cage on Kessie’s ranch but I just escaped. Leonid’s planning to take over the clan. I don’t think your nurse poisoned you, I’m sure it was Leonid.’

Irena was struggling to take all this in. ‘No . . . He wouldn’t.’

Now Ethan spoke firmly. ‘Grandma, I’m
in
Botswana. If you don’t believe me, call the school in Dubai and they’ll tell you that I never arrived. Leonid killed my mum. He tried to poison
you
, and he’s sent me down here so that he could blackmail you if something went wrong.’

‘Blackmail how?’ Irena asked.

‘All I know is that he’s trying to get control of your money.’

Irena’s tone suddenly changed. ‘Is he?’ she yelled furiously. ‘I could never understand the mistake with my dose. Yang was a sweet nurse and I’ve had the same pills for months. The doctor said the overdose should have killed me. Luckily that medicine makes me nauseous and I vomited before most of it got into my system.’

‘Leonid had to make it look like an accident,’ Ethan said. ‘A lot of your people don’t like the idea of working for him after you’re gone, and he’d have real problems taking over the clan if everyone thought he’d murdered his own mother.’

‘And ironically, I’ve been telling those very people that Leonid’s bark is worse than his bite,’ Irena said. ‘The evening before the overdose, he badgered me into signing a whole bunch of documents as I was trying to go to sleep.’

‘Did you sign them?’ Ethan asked.

‘Yes,’ Irena said, sounding distressed. ‘I’m
exhausted
, Ethan. This never would have happened before I got sick. And your mother . . . You suspected Leonid all along, didn’t you?’

‘Don’t worry about that now,’ Ethan said, as he heard his grandmother sob. ‘We need to act fast, especially while Leonid’s away from the Kremlin at the hospital. Do you think you can help me get out of here?’

‘I know people in the diamond racket in those parts,’ Irena said. ‘But if Leonid has taken control of my bank accounts . . .’

‘I was suspicious about what he’s been up to, so I put a spy program on both his computers,’ Ethan said. ‘With any luck they’ll have recorded information on where the money’s gone. If we can get his banking details we can transfer the money back to you, or change passwords to lock Leonid out of his own accounts.’

‘Get them how?’ Irena asked.

‘There’s a stick in the computer in Leonid’s office, but I think the important one is in his computer at the stables,’ Ethan said. ‘Send Andre, nobody will suspect him. An FTP site is used to distribute files online. If you upload, the files will be waiting for me as soon as I get somewhere with a fast Internet connection.’

‘It will be done,’ Irena said.

‘But I need to get out of here before I can help you,’ Ethan said. ‘I’m a white kid in a black town and Kessie’s got teams out searching for me.’

‘I know a couple of good bush pilots,’ Irena said. ‘Just keep your head down. My hands shake too bad to write much, so Andre’s going to take your number and I’ll call you back when I’ve made arrangements.’

‘One last thing,’ Ethan said. ‘I’m not sure if you can trust Josef. I asked him to get you to call me a couple of hours back, but he didn’t.’

‘Let me think on that one,’ Irena said. ‘I’m passing the phone over.’

Andre sounded confused. ‘I’ve got a pen,’ he said. ‘What’s my dad done?’

‘Speak to Grandma,’ Ethan said. ‘But don’t act all innocent. You know what a bastard he is and Alex and Boris bully the shit out of you.’