CHERUB: People's Republic (16 page)

‘I ordered you to pick them up the instant they stepped off the plane,’ Leonid shouted. ‘And the scuffle in the bar? What if my mother hears about it?’

‘Boss,’ Kuban said, badly winded. ‘Just let—’

But Leonid wasn’t a fan of complete sentences. This time he picked up the laptop screen and belted Kuban around the head with it. ‘You will pay for its replacement. And why spray juice in her eyes, you idiot? What if she needs to read a computer screen?’

Kuban groaned as Leonid doubled him over with another punch, then brought his knee up and smashed his nose.

‘Go home, you useless drunk,’ Leonid roared. Then he addressed the two henchmen and the teenager. ‘There’s a box of electrical cords in the manager’s office – one of you fetch it, one make me some hot black coffee, and boy, you smash the girl’s foot.’

As the henchmen hurried out, the teenager stayed still, looking scared and awkward.

‘What’s your problem?’ Leonid shouted, as he pointed at Ning. ‘Do as I say, now.’

Ning scuttled back towards the mirrors as the heavy-built teenager moved in. He stamped down, but Ning pulled her socked foot out of the way. With cuffed hands and tightly bound legs, she could only shuffle into the nearest corner.

‘Get on with it,’ Leonid ordered. ‘Stop messing about, boy.’

Ning’s corner darkened as the youth loomed over her. He pinned Ning’s ankle under his filthy trainer, then rolled her foot on to its side and shifted his weight, so that Ning had seventy kilos crunching the bones in her toes.

After watching Ingrid resist for almost an hour, Ning didn’t want to show weakness, but the pain was excruciating and she couldn’t help making a low moan.

‘You like seeing your daughter suffer?’ Leonid asked. ‘Or shall we have an adult conversation?’

Ingrid’s head still rolled around from the punch, and her eyes were streaming.

‘Get some cold water to bring her around,’ Leonid told the teenager. ‘She’s knocked out, she can’t see. Why must I work with idiots?’

Ning gasped with relief as the bulky teenager moved off her foot. As he left the room, one of the henchmen leaned nervously in the doorway.

‘Sorry, boss, I can’t find the box.’

‘It’s a big wooden crate,’ Leonid yelled. ‘How can you miss it?’

‘Maybe it’s been moved,’ the henchman suggested.

As Leonid stood in the doorway facing the henchman, Ingrid stopped rolling her head and looked at Ning, apparently not as unconscious as she’d led her tormentors to believe.

‘You both stay still,’ Leonid shouted. ‘I’ll be one second.’

‘Get here,’ Ingrid whispered.

Despite her pain, Ning quickly shuffled three metres towards Ingrid sitting at the desk.

‘I think my toe’s broken,’ Ning said.

‘I grabbed this when I tipped the desk over,’ Ingrid said, as she held out the pocket knife Kuban had used to cut her cheek. ‘You’ve got to understand: if Leonid gets our money he won’t want anyone knowing what has happened, which means he has to kill us.’

Ning nodded.

‘If I’m letting them hurt you, it’s because I love you. But I’m going to try getting you out of this room. Use the knife, use your boxing or whatever you can to try and escape.’

‘Where to?’ Ning asked. ‘I don’t even know where we are.’

‘Babes, I don’t have all the answers. But Bishkek is the capital, so there must be something. Try finding an embassy, or a tourist place. Not the police, the Aramovs probably own them.’

Ning still had her hands cuffed, so Ingrid tucked Kuban’s knife into the front pocket of her stepdaughter’s jeans.

‘I love you, sweetheart,’ Ingrid said.

‘Love you too,’ Ning said.

Ingrid reached across to wipe a tear off Ning’s cheek, but the teenager had stepped back into the room. He placed a Pyrex bowl and a roll of kitchen towels on the desk in front of Ingrid.

‘Mr Aramov say you must wash out eyes,’ he said in broken English, before grabbing Ning under the armpits and pulling her back to the mirrored wall.

The teenager then leaned across Ning. For an instant she thought he’d seen Ingrid concealing the knife, but to her surprise the youth pushed a small key into her cuffs and loosened each side a couple of notches before speaking quietly.

‘I hope more comfortable,’ he said.

Ning was grateful, but wondered if his kindness was part of some grand manipulation. As feeling came back to her fingers, one of the henchmen walked through the doorway with a wooden crate, followed by Leonid, who now held a steaming coffee mug.

‘So Mummy is a tough nut,’ Leonid said cheerfully, as he stepped towards Ingrid. ‘But how much will she let her little girl suffer?’

19. MALMIN

Gillian and Ethan weren’t workout fiends, so the basement room that was a gym at Ryan and Amy’s place had been converted to a home cinema. The huge projector screen was complemented by speakers built into the side walls and electrically reclining seats. There was even a bar area up back, with a popcorn maker and hot dog grill.

‘Mate,’ Ryan shouted, as a scene from
Iron Man 2
played up on the big screen. ‘Can you pause it, I need a piss?’

Ethan hit a button on an iPad to pause the movie. ‘You know where to go?’ he asked.

‘Same as my house I’d guess, next to the beach shower?’

‘You got it,’ Ethan said. ‘Grab me some M&Ms on the way back.’

Ryan walked back between three rows of cinema seats and out into a hallway with
coming attractions
posters along the wall. He’d now spent over five hours at Ethan’s place, and his only major worry was that he might forget some of what he’d found out.

Ryan genuinely needed to pee, but he made it quick and skipped washing his hands because he was intrigued by a small room behind the cinema. The first oddity was that the hallway wall bulged out, suggesting that it had been reinforced. The room’s door had an outer layer that matched the other doors in the hallway, but when Ryan rapped on it he heard the distinct ring of metal beneath the walnut veneer.

But it was the lock that really made him curious. It appeared to have two key slots, one above the other, along with a fingerprint panel. Ryan only had a few seconds, so rather than study it he pulled his phone from his shorts and snapped a picture of the front, and a second shot capturing the detail of the markings on the side.

He pocketed the phone and walked back to the cinema, but as Ryan grabbed the door handle Ethan made him jump by opening it from the other side.

‘Letting Yannis in,’ Ethan explained, before shouting up the stairs. ‘I’m down in the cinema.’

Within seconds Yannis was huffing on the stairs. ‘How you doing, Ethan? You should have been at school, man. Sal’s expelled, Guillermo’s suspended for a week. Everyone’s asking how you are. So I said you’re OK, but I didn’t say you were out of hospital in case the teachers tried passing on work.’

Yannis looked confused as he reached the bottom of the stairs and saw Ryan.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Yannis said sniffily.

‘Well, I was me the last time I looked,’ Ryan said. He couldn’t stand Yannis, but had to try getting along if he was going to stay friends with Ethan.

‘We’re watching
Iron Man 2
,’ Ethan said. ‘It’s just coming up to the massive ruck at the end.’

Yannis shook his head. ‘I thought we could get your robotics stuff out.’

Ethan raised his cast slightly. ‘You see me doing any soldering with this on?’

Yannis clearly didn’t want Ryan around. ‘Why weren’t you in school?’ he asked bitterly.

‘Asthma attack,’ Ryan said. ‘Doctor said I should rest.’

‘You don’t look very ill,’ Yannis said.

Ryan laughed. ‘I’m
not
very ill. But I’ve got an excuse to miss a couple of days of Twin Lakes tedium, and I plan to make the most of it.’

‘Well, if you’re watching
that
film, I might as well go home and do my homework. I just wanted to see if you were OK.’

Ethan looked mystified. ‘Yannis, why are you being a dick? I’ll put the hot dog grill on for you, we can chill.’

But Yannis was heading back towards the stairs. ‘I only like seeing a whole movie,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you don’t enjoy it properly.’

Ethan hobbled after Yannis and yelled up the stairs. ‘Why do you always act up if anyone else is around?’

‘I’m not acting like anything,’ Yannis said, his voice sounding all stressed and high-pitched. ‘I thought we were friends is all. We usually do things together.’

Ethan was exasperated. ‘We asked you to come in, watch a movie and eat hot dogs. It’s not like we’re throwing you out.’

Yannis didn’t answer. The front door slammed. Ethan and Ryan looked at each other.

‘Did I do something to piss him off?’ Ryan asked.

‘He gets jealous if you have
any
friends apart from him,’ Ethan said. ‘He’s the same at chess club. But it’s his problem. Let’s watch the rest of the movie.’

*

The bloody-nosed henchman grabbed Ning off the floor and threw her down on the desk in front of Ingrid.

‘How can you let this happen to your daughter?’ Leonid shouted, as Ning stared up at the ceiling tiles. ‘What kind of mother are you? What kind of mother lets her own daughter suffer, just for money?’

‘Chaoxiang will find out what you did,’ Ingrid shouted. ‘He knows you have a daughter. Anything you do to Ning, he’ll do to her.’

Leonid laughed. ‘Chaoxiang upset some very important people. He’s nothing but a corpse in a Chinese prison uniform.’

Ingrid leaned forward, so that her bloody face was less than half a metre from Ning’s, and spat at Leonid’s face. Leonid backed away, wiped up, then pulled up Ning’s T-shirt and tipped his steaming coffee over Ning’s stomach.

‘No,’ Ingrid shouted, as Ning screamed in pain.

As the hot liquid scalded Ning’s skin, Ingrid tried to stand and one of the henchmen shoved her back down in her seat.

‘How can you do that?’ Ingrid shouted. ‘She’s just a little girl.’

Leonid sensed he’d hit a weak spot and looked at the teenager. ‘Apparently she doesn’t like her little girl getting burned. Go make me another nice
hot
cup of coffee.’

‘OK,’ Ingrid shouted, as she ran her bloody hands through her hair. ‘You win. I’ll give you the account details.’

‘Good,’ Leonid said. ‘But you’d better play it straight, or it’ll be more than a cup of coffee that I burn her with.’

Ingrid pointed at the water she’d used to rinse out her eyes. ‘Give that to her.’

The teenager grabbed the jug and tipped some of the water over Ning’s burn. Leonid didn’t seem to approve, but he was more interested in getting information out of Ingrid than in yelling at the boy.

‘I don’t remember the numbers by heart,’ Ingrid said. ‘In my luggage there’s an address book and diary. I can access some accounts by computer, some only by telephone.’

One of the henchmen spoke to Leonid in Russian.

‘Kuban already went through her diary and address book,’ one of the henchmen said. ‘There were no bank details.’

Ingrid snorted. ‘Do you think I write them down for any idiot to find if I lose them? They’re written in a simple code that Chaoxiang taught me. I’ll also need a pencil and a calculator.’

As Ning sobbed from the pain in her burned abdomen, Leonid told the teenager to go and find Ingrid’s stuff, and bring a replacement computer so that she could access the internet.

‘I’m cooperating now,’ Ingrid said. ‘Can you at least make Ning more comfortable? Take her cuffs off, give her something for the burn.’

‘You are not in a position to make demands,’ Leonid said sharply.

‘I need to concentrate to extract the numbers
and
sound relaxed when I call the banks to make your transfers. How can I do that with my daughter in agony?’

Leonid saw the logic in this and gave a slight nod. ‘She can be made comfortable,’ Leonid told Ingrid. ‘Food, toilet, a few clothes.’

Ingrid nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘Take the girl out,’ Leonid told the bloody-nosed henchman. ‘But no further than the next room. I’ll need her back here if her mother tries any funny business.’

Ning stretched when her cuffs were released and the bindings on her legs cut off. For the first time in almost six hours she was able to move freely, but she hurt all over. The skin around her belly button was blistered, she had a broken toe, bloody wrists, and a dark scab where her chin had hit the gravel.

Ning’s newly appointed guard waved her towards the door. The room outside had been fitted out as a break area for the staff who worked in the club. There were a few random chairs, a sink, a grubby-looking fridge, chipped mugs and wobbly tables. There was a toilet off to the side and Ning headed straight for it.

The henchman insisted on standing in the doorway, but at least had the decency to look away as Ning peed. She then stood by a mirror and washed quickly. Her chin and neck were bloody.