Floods 9 (13 page)

He not only knew that Mordonna had two distant cousins in Mongolia and that they owned The Jolly Gulag Yak Kebab Shoppe, but he also knew how many pairs of socks each of them owned and what colour they were. He knew that Surge was allergic to thistles and had an inside leg measurement of eighty-seven centimetres on his left leg, but only eighty-five centimetres on his right leg, which meant that when he got drunk on Old Kremlin Ale, he always walked
round in circles until he tripped over himself.

He knew that Alexeye was married to the All Mongolian Heavyweight Wrestling Champion, Tattyana Khan, who was a direct descendent of Ghengis Khan and owned two-and-a-half pairs of socks, all a dark shade of grey. Most of the information Aubergine had stored in his head and on three massive computers was completely useless, but you never knew when some little detail might make all the difference between ending up with fifteen cents or fifteen million dollars.

So as the plane lumbered towards Ulan Bator, which his computers told him was home to thirty-eight per cent of the Mongolian population, twenty per cent of whom lived on less than $1.25 per day, Aubergine sifted through Surge and Alexeye's details to see if there was anything that might be to his advantage.

There was.

It turned out the two brothers had their very own illegal yak farm right up in the far north of the country. It was hidden deep in thick pine forest in the
second largest land-locked country in the world.
⁵³
Because the two brothers were wizards, albeit not great wizards like their Floods cousins, they were powerful enough to create illegal six-legged yaks. As everyone knows, the leg is the tastiest bit of the yak and absolutely the best part for making yak kebabs.

We will go to their yak farm,
Aubergine wrote to his wife,
and transplant Winchflat's bug into one of their six-legged freaks and we will then take it across the Russian border and set it free in the most massively huge, mind-numbingly, boringly repetitive pine forest in the world where it will never be seen again.

Is there any way you could make copies of the tracking bug?
Chrysanthemum wrote back.
If there is, we could put one in the yak, another in an eagle and one in each of the Kebab brothers.

Brilliant!
Aubergine wrote, falling in love with Chrysanthemum yet again, which meant he was now in love with his wife three times at once.

He could just make out the slight bump the bug made underneath his lead head shield. He concentrated, summoning all his magic powers, and focused on the bump. He could feel it wriggling under his skin and suddenly there were two of them. He focused again and then there were four. He hoped that Winchflat would just think the distance the bug was transmitting over was causing some sort
of shadow and not suspect that anyone had actually cloned the device.

Sure, he is the cleverest wizard in the family of cleverest wizards,
Aubergine thought,
but he just thinks he's so clever that no one else would ever be able to copy any of his wonderful devices.

Sure enough, when the plane landed in Ulan Bator, one of the few places on earth that sounds as if it's been spelt backwards, the two Floods cousins were waiting. Surge and Alexeye had disguised themselves as each other – which, considering they were identical twins, was a bit pointless – and were dressed as Belgian tourists. This had been a really stupid thing to do because Mongolia gets so few visitors that anyone who does go there for a holiday is instantly surrounded by newspaper reporters, opticians who assume they must need glasses, a very small crowd of screaming children and a very large crowd of screaming sheep.

The chaos at the airport allowed Aubergine and Chrysanthemum to slip through Immigration virtually unnoticed, especially when Aubergine
showed the officials his I-Am-From-An-International-Charity-That-Is-Thinking-Of-Giving-Your-Country-A-Huge-Amount-Of-Money-Card. Outside, the terminal was almost deserted apart from a three-legged yak tied to a broken-down old cart.

‘Excuse me,' said Chrysanthemum to the yak driver, ‘would you mind moving? You're standing in the taxi rank.'

‘I am the taxi rank,' said the driver. ‘Where do you want to go?'

‘Take us to a nice, quiet hotel, please,' said Aubergine in a clear, steady voice so that Winchflat wouldn't miss a word.

‘Hotel? What's that?'

‘It's the place where visitors stay.'

‘Ahh, you mean the pig sty,' said the yak driver. ‘Bit of a problem there, I'm afraid.'

‘Why is that, then?'

‘Well, there is an international beetroot convention in town and all the beds are taken.'

‘International?' said Aubergine.

‘Indeed, sir, people have come from far and wide,' said the driver. ‘Some as far as right down the end of the road past the big rock, and they are all wide.'

‘Would this help?' said Aubergine, pressing a fifty-tugrik note into the driver's hand.
⁵⁴

‘Oh my,' said the driver. ‘So the rumours are true. There is such a thing as a fifty-tugrik note.'

‘So can we get a room?' said Chrysanthemum.

‘For such wealth I will sell you my house,' said the yak driver. ‘My wife and fifteen children and I will move into my mother's cave. Well, I call it a cave. It's more of a hole in the roots of a big tree.'

‘We only need it for a few days,' said Chrysanthemum. ‘You can have it back then.'

The yak driver was speechless. He had been impressed when he had seen that the two visitors actually had all their teeth, but the idea that the two foreigners would pay fifty tugriks just to borrow his house for a few days was beyond belief.

When they have gone,
he thought,
I will call the
Guinness Book of Records (Mongolian Edition).
Though I doubt they will be believing such wealth and extravagance.

‘And when we leave,' Chrysanthemum added, ‘we will give you two more fifties. One for your inconvenience and one to forget you ever saw us.'

This will probably get into the
All of The Russias Edition, the yak driver thought before he fainted.

When he regained consciousness, he drove them to his house and led them inside. He loaded his wife and children onto the cart and took them away. Fifteen minutes later the yak came back, pushed the
door open and went to sleep in the kitchen. The driver had explained that this might happen as the creature was a Homing Yak.

‘But do not worry,' he said. ‘He does not snore, though I would advise you to keep the windows open.'

A strange bit of advice as the house did not so much have windows as holes in the wall through which the cold Mongolian wind whistled a sad, plaintive air, a seriously-cold-thirty-degrees-below-freezing plaintive air that made the two travellers grateful for the soft clouds of warm steam coming from the piles of yak dung that covered the kitchen floor.

So we need to remove the four tracking bugs from your head,
wrote Chrysanthemum.

Can you do that sort of thing?
Aubergine wrote.

No problem,
wrote Chrysanthemum.
I was in the Girl Guides.

So Aubergine drank seven bottles of Old Kremlin Ale, including the lumps, and passed out.
When he came round he felt as if he had been kicked in the head by a yak, which he had because Chrysanthemum had done the operation on the kitchen table, right next to the sleeping yak, which was thrashing about in its sleep due to a nightmare involving a giant beetroot and a short-circuiting electric balalaika. Its thrashing had knocked the table over, which had hit Aubergine on the left side of his head, and then its flailing feet had hit him on the other side.

‘All done, my darling,' said Chrysanthemum, wrapping Aubergine's head in a bandage and mopping up the blood. ‘I've put the bugs inside the bandage so they will appear to be in the same place.'

Aubergine Wealth was not an electronics expert. In fact, he found torches rather confusing. However, as every five-year-old knows, it doesn't require much time or skill to build a wi-fi multi-channel transponding auto-tracking remote control, and in five minutes Aubergine had bodged together such a device out of a toilet roll tube, a bent hairpin and some lichen. The device allowed him to control
which one of the four tracking bugs would be sending out a signal.
⁵⁵
He then deactivated three of them. Of course, Aubergine could have simply destroyed the original bug, but he had always resented Winchflat's vastly superior brain and this way he could prove he was just as clever as any of the Floods.

Back at the airport, Mordonna's two distant cousins were clever enough to realise that spying on Aubergine by hiding behind a tree and watching him would not work.

‘He will see us,' said Surge, who was the brain of the operation.

‘This is true, brother,' said Alexeye, who left the difficult stuff like thinking to his brother. ‘And we will see him.'

‘We're supposed to, stupid, but he is not supposed to see us.'

‘Oh.'

‘But do not worry, for I have a foolproof plan,'
said Surge. ‘I have tied a ball of red wool to the taxi. All we have to do is follow it and we will know where they have gone.'

Like all taxi drivers the world over, the yak man had taken a long and complicated route to reach his destination. He had taken so many turns and returns and fresh turns that the wool ran out right outside the kebab shop, long before he had delivered the travellers to his house. The wool had, however, woven itself into a rather nice bathmat.

That evening Aubergine and Chrysanthemum disguised themselves as two peasant girls by rubbing yak dung in their hair and wrapping their feet in wet
felt and went to The Jolly Gulag Yak Kebab Shoppe just as the two brothers were closing up for the night.

‘Hello, boys,' Chrysanthemum said in a Mongolian peasant flirty voice that sounded like a rabbit being dragged through sharp gravel. ‘Fancy a beetroot?'

She waved a bunch of beetroots at the brothers and lured them into a dark alley, where Aubergine was waiting to greet them with unconsciousness caused by a bang on the head with a gigantic world-record-winning beetroot he'd stolen from the international beetroot convention down the road.

It only took a moment to implant the tracking bugs into their skulls and when they came round a few hours later, they assumed it had been the sight of the world's largest beetroot that had made them faint.

The eagle wasn't quite so easy. For a start, eagles don't like beetroots,
⁵⁶
but they do like rats, and as there were more rats in Ulan Bator than beetroots it didn't
take long to catch a couple. However, attracting an eagle's attention is quite difficult. You can't just wave a rat in the air and shout, ‘Here birdy, birdy.'

Oh look, a human waving a rat about,
the eagle will think.
Now what shall I do, fly down and try and get it, or simply grab one of the ninety-six other rats I can see that haven't got a human attached to them?