Cherub Black Friday (7 page)

Single staff quarters on campus were similar to the kids’ rooms on the upper floors, except there was a sliding partition between the bedroom and living area, plus a mini kitchen with oven and hob.

Bruce was on a sofa bed in the living-room and he yelled back. ‘It’s
your
phone.’

‘I know my own ringtone,’ James said irritably.

‘It’s coming out of
your
trousers.’

James huffed as he threw his duvet off, flicked on a bedside light and got up to investigate.

‘Told you,’ Bruce said, as James pulled the ringing iPhone from his jeans.

But not only did James not recognise the ringtone, he didn’t recognise the name
Dr D
flashing on the screen.

James pressed the
answer
button. ‘Hello?’

‘Amy, it’s Dr D. There’s a problem with Ryan and Kazakov. You’ll have to let Zara Asker know ASAP because this could turn bad.’

‘Hold your horses,’ James said. ‘Amy’s not here, but I can find her if it’s urgent.’

James had no idea that Dr D was Amy’s boss, but she sounded furious. ‘Why do you have her phone? Who are you?’

‘I know where she is,’ James said, ignoring Dr D’s question. ‘I’ll get her to call you right back.’

‘How’d you get Amy’s phone?’ Bruce asked, once James had hung up.

James started pulling on his jeans so that he could walk down the corridor to the room where Amy was staying.

‘After dinner me and Amy went skinny-dipping,’ James explained. ‘Amy said she fancied me, so we ended up bonking on a pile of swimming floats.’

Bruce tutted. ‘Right, James. In your dreams!’

James grinned to himself, because he’d told the truth knowing that Bruce wouldn’t believe it.

‘How can you be so certain?’ James asked.

‘First, Amy’s always gone for older guys,’ Bruce explained. ‘Second, Kerry’s got you on a tight leash, and third, you’ve always been a
colossal
bullshitter.’

‘Well argued,’ James said. But he’d lost his smile as he headed out of the door because Bruce had put Kerry’s name in his head and this was only the third time he’d cheated on her since retiring as a CHERUB agent.

Amy was four doors along the hallway and the door wasn’t locked.

‘You’ve got my iPhone,’ James said accusingly, as Amy rubbed her eyes. ‘Someone called Dr D rang for you.’

‘Shit, that’s my boss,’ Amy said, as she sprang up. ‘That must be your phone in the charger over there.’

James picked his phone out of the charging cradle as Amy called Dr D. As the call rang in her ear, Amy made a
shoo
gesture at James.

‘I’m sorry but it’s confidential,’ Amy said. ‘Do you mind?’

A double-trailer truck pulled up at the ranch house as Ryan stood by the mobile home’s open doorway. He felt trapped, by their predicament and by the sweaty T-shirt glued to his back. He needed sleep badly, but he got a mental image of Tracy’s blood spattered on cockpit glass every time he closed his eyes.

Kazakov knelt on the sofa at the bay window, peeking between filthy net curtains into the twilight. He caught the reflection on an aluminium air-cargo box as it got wheeled from the truck’s rear trailer.

‘Explosives?’ Ryan asked, as he came close to see what Kazakov was looking at.

‘Can’t see what else it would be,’ Kazakov said. ‘The timing fits: half an hour behind us.’

They watched for a couple more minutes and Ryan thought he recognised some of the guys who’d been at the landing strip. Kazakov had put a TV on, but the signal was poor and Ryan took a couple of seconds to make out the news anchor on screen with a burning plane in the background.

‘Did you turn the sound off?’ Ryan asked.

It was an ancient set with a knob for the volume and Kazakov demonstrated by raising his beefy arm and twiddling it.

‘Speaker cuts in and out,’ he explained. ‘Loose wire or something. I’ve read a couple of on-screen banners. One FBI officer dead when they tried boarding the 737, and the stadium got evacuated, in case there were further explosions.’

When the wavy TV images grew frustrating, Ryan looked out the window towards the ranch house. Elbaz was up there, out of pilot’s uniform but now looking even more Bollywood in a bright pink shirt with fat collar. There was no sign of Mumin, but there were about a dozen young men and a couple of girls helping to wheel the pallets of explosive into the six-car garage beside the house.

‘They seem happy enough up there,’ Kazakov said.

‘You think they’re suicide bombers?’ Ryan asked.

‘Possible,’ Kazakov said. ‘You can park a truck full of explosives outside a building. But driving into your target at speed is usually much more effective. On the other hand, there’s an awful lot of them.’

Ryan looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Even amongst fanatics, people don’t exactly line up to kill themselves. Most suicide attacks are one or two man operators.’

‘What about 9/11?’ Ryan asked.

‘There’s an exception to every rule,’ Kazakov said, shrugging. ‘So it’s getting pretty dark. How about I take my shower, and you go for that wander?’

‘Makes sense,’ Ryan said. ‘But we’re in the middle of nowhere and I’d bet the perimeter’s guarded. So even if we find out what they’re up to  … ’

Kazakov spoke before Ryan finished his thought. ‘One step at a time. Get information, then we’ll work out what to do with it.’

Ryan slid bare feet into his Converse, then did a double tap behind his ear to activate the com unit.

‘Hear me?’ Ryan asked.

‘Loud and clear,’ Kazakov said, after his own double tap. ‘Don’t overuse the com. The batteries are tiny and they can’t have much juice left.’

‘Gotcha,’ Ryan said.

The fourteen-year-old clanked down the mobile home’s front steps. The temperature had dropped with the sun and Ryan rubbed his arms as he walked towards the ranch house. The unloading seemed to be over and the bad guys and girls were heading inside.

From fifty metres out Ryan realised that the ten small trucks lined up in front of the ranch house were the same model. All had clean black tyre walls, shiny glass and none of the scrapes or dents you’d expect on a commercial vehicle.

The only difference between trucks was that they were painted in the liveries of several big US retail chains. There was a light on in the cab of a dark blue
Office Megastore
van and a tiny woman with a fat bum crawled about inside. She would have seen Ryan if she’d looked, but she was stretching for something in the footwell.

As the woman slid down from the cab, Ryan ducked behind a tree and unbuttoned his jeans so that he could say he was peeing if someone spotted him. The woman took a few backwards steps and flicked a switch on a control box, which made the truck’s headlamps come on.

Her next button-push set the engine running and as the mechanic backed off further, she pushed forwards on a control stick and drove the dark blue truck twenty metres forward. After coming to an abrupt stop, the woman reversed the procedure, backing the van into its spot between the others and switching the lights off.

Ryan resumed his walk as the woman headed into the garage, and was soon within hearing distance.

‘The battery wasn’t rigged right,’ the woman told a colleague as she headed into shafts of light coming through the huge garage’s raised doors. ‘It’s fine now, but we need to get all the others double-checked.’

Ryan cut across the pathway leading up to the ranch. From this side he got a view between two parked vans and a section of the garage. The crew he’d first seen at the airfield were taking pizza-box-sized slabs of explosive out of the cargo containers and slicing off plastic wrapping with craft knives.

At the rear, a pair of more skilled operators sat at workbenches, using magnifiers as they soldered components of what Ryan guessed was either the radio control system for the trucks or detonators for the explosives.

Ryan reckoned he’d been lucky, learning so much without getting within thirty metres of the house. But while it was now clear that the plan was to pack the ten trucks with explosive and use a radio control system to smash them into their targets, he didn’t know what the targets were or when the attacks would take place.

He’d heard Mumin telling Kazakov that they’d be held here for less than twenty-four hours, but was that when the explosive-packed trucks were going to be sent to their targets, or, seeing as America was a huge place, was the plan to distribute the vans all over the USA and attack days or weeks into the future?

Ryan would only learn more by getting nearer to the house, perhaps picking up snippets of conversation by an open window. After cutting between the vans, he had to choose house or garage, but it was clear what was happening inside the garage, so it made more sense to approach the house with his
needing a crap
excuse.

The giant ranch house was two storeys, plus converted attic. The previous owner had apparently gone bust in the midst of a grand refurbishment project. The exterior mixed new glazing and a marble porch with areas further along where windows were boarded and foundations laid for an unbuilt extension.

The front door was on the latch and Ryan stepped in purposefully, knowing that people are less suspicious when someone looks like they know where they’re heading.

There might have been people in any of the rooms, but all the noise came out of an open-plan kitchen diner. It was a no-expense-spared German job, but wires hung through holes where the ceiling lights should be.

While a $4,000 Swedish-made oven sat by the sliding doors cased in polystyrene, a lively crowd surrounded a veiled teenager who grabbed pieces of chicken from a bucket of marinade and threw them on to a line of disposable charcoal barbecue trays.

‘Ryan,’ Elbaz said, coming out of some sort of cupboard under spiral stairs leading up to the first floor. ‘Did Mumin not ask you to stay in the mobile home?’

It came across more like a straight question than a rebuke, and Ryan had his excuse ready.

‘My dad always takes
years
in the shower. Flying so long and not eating properly has done my stomach in.’

Elbaz laughed. He didn’t seem like the arrogant man who’d flown out of the Kremlin with them a day and a half earlier. Ryan figured that the change was down to growing confidence as IDoJ’s operation drew nearer to completion.

‘Toilet’s across the hall,’ Elbaz said. ‘Do you go everywhere with your father?’

Ryan nodded. ‘My mother died when I was a baby. Since then we’ve come as a package.’

‘And people don’t suspect you’re a smuggler when you’ve got the kids in tow,’ Elbaz added.

‘We’ve got out of a few tight spots like that,’ Ryan agreed, before pointing at the toilet door. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Better in there than out here,’ Elbaz joked.

Ryan felt tense as he entered a large marbled toilet cubicle with the face of a young Clint Eastwood etched into one mirrored wall. After bolting the door, he sat on the toilet lid and stayed there for about as long as he’d normally take to have a dump. He made things seem real by flushing and washing his hands before exiting.

He walked across to the kitchen, with a backup excuse of wanting to thank Elbaz. But Elbaz had vanished and nobody stopped Ryan striding to the heart of the huge kitchen and standing by the central island between one of the terrorists who’d travelled with them on the plane and the moustached teenager who’d driven the taxi from the landing strip.

‘Grab some chicken,’ the teenager said warmly. ‘It’s good.’

Ryan smiled as he reached across the countertop and grabbed a paper plate and a drumstick stained with the orange marinade. After eating nothing but tinned food and sandwiches for thirty hours, fresh-cooked spicy chicken hit the spot and he followed up by grabbing two lamb skewers off a passing tray.

‘I saw your money when the suitcases arrived,’ the teenaged driver told Ryan.

‘Not
my
money,’ Ryan said, as he tried the lamb. ‘Wish it was, but I’m just the delivery boy for your couriers.’

There was a lull in the conversation, and although Ryan had worked out that it wasn’t going to be a suicide raid, he thought it might be a good way to open a conversation.

‘So, are you mad bastards gonna be blowing yourselves up?’ he asked.

The teenager scoffed at the suggestion. ‘Yeah, we’re all suicide bombers.’

‘Sorry,’ Ryan said. ‘Just  …  me and my dad saw all the trucks.’

On the other side of the counter, two guys who were twenty at most recognised each other before exchanging a hug. They called one another cousin and started a
How have you been, what time did you get here
kind of conversation. Both looked Arab or possibly North African, but their accents were pure Texan drawl.

As Ryan finished his second lamb skewer the taller of the two cousins said, ‘My aunt’s after a sixty-five-inch LCD for Black Friday. I paid a guy to steal her car so that she can’t go out in the morning.’

The other cousin laughed. ‘This your aunt in Houston?’

The guy nodded. ‘Rescued me from foster home when my mom went AWOL. I don’t want her near any shops tomorrow morning.’

‘What about her car?’

‘Gave the guy a key. He’s gonna drive it a few blocks. If nobody finds it before I get home, I’ll tell her I spotted it on my way to visit her.’

Ryan picked up a ton of information about the two cousins, but the thing about the car was crucial: it confirmed that IDoJ would be attacking shops tomorrow morning, that at least one target was in Houston and that at least one bomber planned to be alive after the attack.

As Ryan turned to leave, Elbaz touched his shoulder from behind. He carried a foil tray stacked with barbecued meat, plus salad, rice, serviettes and plastic cutlery. However, his voice had become firm.

‘It’s not appropriate you being in here,’ Elbaz said. ‘Grab a carton of orange juice and take this tray back to share with your father. I must ask you
not
to leave the mobile home again.’

Ryan acted grovelly. ‘Sorry, boss,’ he said. ‘I came out of the shitter and the smell of food drew me in.’