Black Friday

  Fear accounted for some of what Tamara did, but there also still seemed to be a basic physical attraction and Andre always felt betrayed when he saw a sign of it.

  The bedroom scene was a lot to take right after the beating from Boris, and he felt like crying again as he backed up to the door. A hand waggling in the dark gave him a start. He feared Leonid waking up, but it was his mother’s small hand making a come-here gesture in the flickering candlelight.

  Andre caught a smell of sweaty bodies as he stepped up to the bed, embarrassed at being so close to his mum naked. Leonid had fallen asleep with his body resting against Tamara’s and a hairy arm sprawled across her stomach. She was anxious not to wake Leonid up, so she silently mouthed to Andre while gesturing with her free arm.

  Andre realised she was pointing to the top drawer of a cabinet on Leonid’s side of the bed. He stepped over his dad’s trousers and a mound of cushions and saw his mum making a shush gesture as he neared the drawer.

  Mercifully, the drawer was on a smooth runner. Andre looked inside and saw Leonid’s main bunch of keys. It’s tough to grab keys without making any noise and the chinking felt like church bells as Andre clutched them in his hand.

  Andre didn’t need the hint, but Tamara was making a go, go gesture as he backed out. Boris loudly cursed at his video game as Andre darted down the hall to his room, and a relieved gasp set off a painful reminder of what his oldest brother had done to his stomach muscles.

  After flipping on a bedside light, Andre worked out that there were two keys that let you into the apartment, a burglar alarm fob, two small keys that looked like they opened a desk drawer or filing cabinet and a large gold key that had to be for the office.

  Andre felt a bit sick as he tried remembering what James had taught him. The first rule was to be sure where everyone was. Leonid was sleeping off food, booze and sex and it was unlikely he’d surface much before lunchtime. Alex and Boris were trickier. They wouldn’t emerge for the toilet because all the bedrooms had en-suites, but there was still a slight chance one of them would come downstairs for a drink or a snack.

  Andre didn’t think this would be a major problem because he’d make sure both brothers were upstairs when he walked past their rooms, and if they came down later he’d be behind the locked door of his father’s office.

  T-shirt and boxers weren’t ideal for concealing stuff, so Andre pulled on jeans and pocketed his dad’s keys and the tiny cellphone James had given him.

  He’d guessed right about which key opened the office and he pushed the door closed silently behind himself. The main light might shine around the edges of the door, so he flipped on a small desk lamp and aimed the beam behind a stack of files. Then he pulled back his earlobe and did the double tap that activated the microtransmitter in his ear canal.

  ‘James?’

  It took a few seconds before James answered, half yawning. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m mentally scarred after seeing my parents naked. The good news is, I’m in my dad’s office.’

  James sounded anxious. ‘You should have spoken to me first. Are you sure you’re safe?’

  ‘I’ve got time,’ Andre said. ‘My brothers never come in here. And my mum will warn me somehow if Dad moves.’

  ‘I’m setting up to record what you say,’ James said, as Andre heard a noise like bedsprings creaking in his ear. ‘You wouldn’t believe the dive I’m staying in. I’ve got mice and cockroaches.’

  ‘So where do I start?’ Andre said. ‘I’ve got two locked file boxes, but I think the little keys on my dad’s bunch open them. There’s a laptop and there’s a bunch of stuff on the desk.’

  ‘Recording now,’ James said. ‘Remember where everything was before you start moving things about. Let’s assume that your dad won’t trust computers again in a hurry. Take me through the papers on the desk first.’

  ‘There’s a stack of messages on light blue paper. They’re in Russian. They’re on the edge of the desk near the shredder. I guess he hasn’t got around to shredding them yet … Oh, there’s something else I forgot to tell you. Boris let slip that the place Leonid plans to move us to is in the Caribbean.’

  ‘Interesting,’ James said. ‘If that’s true, it rules out any plans for a return to the Kremlin. Are there other papers near the shredder?’

  ‘There’s a big stack,’ Andre confirmed.

  James thought for a couple of seconds. ‘I reckon anything lined up for the shredder is going to be fairly interesting. It’s most likely recent, and there must be a reason why he’s bothering to shred it.’

  ‘Right,’ Andre said, as he moved around to the pre-shredder stack at the edge of the desk. ‘There’s about twenty messages. RX 145-710 … And it’s all banks of numbers.’

  ‘Code,’ James explained. ‘Almost certainly his Russian friends. We’re already decoding their messages at source, so don’t get bogged down with them.’

  ‘The next batch look like receipts,’ Andre said. ‘Bausch Chemical, three thousand dollars. Houston Drilling Supplies, eight thousand four hundred.’

  ‘Could be digging a tunnel,’ James said. ‘Skip for now, we can come back later if we don’t find anything juicier.’

  ‘There’s some big papers,’ Andre said. ‘Like designs for some sort of rocket. A mortar maybe?’

  ‘Weird,’ James said. ‘I guess someone wants technical details of a weapon he’s trying to sell.’

  ‘Looks like it’s called PGSLM,’ Andre said.

  James found the initials oddly familiar. He’d not heard them for eight years, but when he placed them, he almost fell off his bed: Precision Guided Shoulder Launched Missile.

  When James was thirteen, he’d worked with his sister Lauren, busting a kid out of a maximum-security prison as part of a convoluted plot to track down a woman called Jane Oxford. Oxford was suspected of stealing a batch of advanced shoulder launched missiles, each one fitted with a guidance system that made it accurate enough to fly through a bathroom window from a range of five kilometres. James and Lauren had succeeded in finding Jane Oxford. But while she’d been sent to prison, the missiles were never recovered.

  ‘You might have struck gold,’ James said, trying not to let his excitement filter through and disrupt Andre’s concentration. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘A lot of the writing is in Spanish,’ Andre said. ‘I can’t understand it, but there’s notes on the edge of the plan in my dad’s handwriting: 74 x PGSLM @ $325,000 = $24.05 million.’

  James’ first thought had been that Leonid had somehow unearthed the six guided missiles that Jane Oxford had stolen ten years earlier, but apparently, Leonid had access to seventy-four of them.

  ‘OK,’ James said. ‘Maybe I can drop a camera when you go swimming and you can photograph some of the documents, but for now I want you to go through and try to find anything referring to PGSLM.’

  ‘Why’s that so important?’ Andre asked.

  ‘A PGSLM is about the size of a regular mortar. But while a mortar takes a skilled operator to hit a tank from three hundred metres, PGSLM is a smart weapon that uses GPS and terrain mapping. Suppose you’re a drug dealer and you want to wipe out the boss of a rival gang, or the local chief of police. You no longer need to go storming into enemy HQ with a dozen men, all guns blazing. You just need to know where your enemy is. You tap in the coordinates and launch your missile from the other side of town.’

  ‘Sounds nifty,’ Andre said, as he started flicking through the papers. ‘OK, let’s see what else I can find out.’

  41. PUZZLES

  Andre read James more documents about PGSLM and stumbled on details of bank accounts held by Leonid under false names. After ninety minutes, James told Andre to go to bed, then he typed up a short report and uploaded the audio recordings of everything Andre had said to TFU headquarters in Dallas.

  The information manager on duty passed everything on to Dr D, Ted Brasker and Amy Collins. As Amy wasn’t directly involved in the Mexican side of the o
peration the e-mail sat unopened in her inbox as she spent an afternoon on her laptop, organising logistics for the final plan to destroy the Kremlin.

  When Amy opened the message, she was intrigued by the fact that Leonid was planning a $24-million deal to sell guided missiles to a Mexican drug gang. But things got really interesting when she decided to do a Google search to find out a bit of background info on the PGSLM.

  The search tool on Amy’s Chrome browser used a mixture of Google’s database and Amy’s previous searches to guess what she was looking for. When Amy typed PGSLM into the search box, the dropdown box offered the option to search for PGSLM Lisson Communications.

  Amy was surprised as she hit search. After a bunch of adverts, the first link took her to a fifteen-year-old story from a defunct stock market magazine.

  LISSON COM GOLD TURNS TO RED INK AS SAT-NAV INNOVATOR DROPS 73% IN ONE DAY’S TRADING

  The article had been published a few weeks before Leonid and Galenka Aramov used their holding corporation to buy Lisson Communications. The in-depth article ran to two thousand words. Most of it told a story Amy already knew, about how Lisson had been brought to the verge of bankruptcy by disastrous sales of a new generation of in-car navigation units.

  But the journalist had clearly done detailed research and deep within the article was a brief reference to another setback Lisson suffered in its military division. The company had apparently been involved in bribery allegations after a failed bid to develop guidance technology for the US Army’s latest generation of PGSLM shoulder launched guided missiles.

  It seemed like a mighty coincidence that Leonid Aramov part-owned a company that had worked on the PGSLM missile, and was apparently now in a position to sell seventy-four of them to a gang of Mexican drug smugglers.

  Amy’s cellphone didn’t work inside the Kremlin, so she routed an Internet call to Dr D, using TFU’s secure communication network. When Dr D didn’t answer she tried Ted Brasker, but it was Ethan who picked up the phone.

  ‘Amy,’ Ethan said. ‘Long time no speak. How’s it hanging?’

  Amy thought it best not to go into the fact that her day had begun by blowing Leonid Aramov’s Kremlin spy off a fifth-floor balcony and just said, ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘I take it you want Ted?’

  ‘Is he there?’

  ‘He is,’ Ethan said. ‘But he’s on muscle relaxants for his back and they leave him a bit spaced out.’

  ‘I’ll try talking to him anyway.’

  Amy heard some yelling and a mini row between Ethan and Ted’s college-aged daughter Lyla on whether to wake Ted up. But eventually the familiar Texan drawl came down the line and he didn’t sound too bad.

  ‘Boredom’s weighing me down,’ Ted said. ‘The US government’s got rules coming out of its ass these days. I’d rather be working, but I can’t go near headquarters till the doc signs a piece of paper.’

  Amy heard Lyla mutter, ‘You can barely walk, Dad,’ in the background.

  ‘Your joints get fragile in extreme old age,’ Amy teased. ‘I’ve read the e-mail from James Adams and I think I’ve found a connection between Lisson Communications and the PGSLM missiles.’

  Once Amy had explained everything and Ted had yelled at his daughter to fetch his laptop and reading glasses, he resumed speaking.

  ‘Lisson Communications had three directors,’ Ted said. ‘Galenka Aramov is dead; Leonid is our target; the third director and company secretary was their lawyer, Lombardi. If anyone knows how Leonid Aramov came to be in Mexico selling seventy-four guided missiles, it’ll be him.’

  ‘True,’ Amy said. ‘But Lombardi’s a lawyer. If we arrest him, he’ll keep his mouth shut and pull every legal trick to stop us questioning him or searching his property. And when we do question him—’

  Ted interrupted brusquely. ‘We have to get information before Leonid sells these missiles, banks his twenty-four million and disappears.’

  ‘Andre gave James the impression that it’s not long until Leonid pulls off the deal and moves to the Caribbean.’

  ‘Legal methods won’t get anything useful out of Lombardi within our timescale,’ Ted said. ‘But seeing as I’m getting bounced into retirement when this is over, I’m prepared to take a few risks.’

  ‘You could lose your pension,’ Amy warned.

  ‘I could go to jail,’ Ted said. ‘But I’ve got my Marine Corps pension and my Marine Corps spirit. I may be an old geezer with a bad back, but I will not let a smartass lawyer and a bunch of due-process bullcrap stop me from making one last attempt to do the right thing.’

  Amy laughed. ‘You could always defend yourself by saying the back pills are making you loopy.’

  ‘And besides all this missile nonsense, I’ll bet Lombardi knows more than we do about why Leonid killed Galenka. I’ve got fond of Ethan since he’s been living here. That guy deserves to know the truth about his mother.’

  ‘So I’ll leave this with you?’ Amy said.

  ‘Ted’s on the case. And don’t you go worrying about your next pay check either, Amy Collins. You’re a good agent and I’ve got plenty of friends.’

  Ethan Aramov, previously Ethan Kitsell, now lived in Texas as Ethan Brasker. He’d set the alarm for an early start on the last Sunday of 2012, met up with two school friends and spent the day at a speed chess tournament in central Dallas.

  ‘No trophy?’ Ted said, when Ethan got home mid-afternoon.

  ‘Finished eighteenth out of seventy-four,’ Ethan said cheerfully. ‘Which isn’t bad, because I was one of the youngest and there were six grandmasters in the field.’

  ‘Did you get beaten by that nine-year-old again?’

  Ethan smiled. ‘That little smartass wasn’t in my pool, but he beat my mate Josh and finished about tenth.’

  ‘You’ll get him one day,’ Ted said, keeping one hand on his painful back, as Ethan moved into the kitchen and grabbed a Dr Pepper from the fridge.

  Ethan laughed and shook his head. ‘Your faith is encouraging, sir, but that kid’s a prodigy.’

  Texas was warm even in December and Ethan had unbuttoned his shirt and stepped through to the living-room where he was surprised by the two enormous men on the couch.

  ‘Joe and Don,’ Ted explained. ‘Ex-professional wrestlers. A couple of recent vehicle felonies will be overlooked, provided they help us deal with our pal, Lombardi.’

  The two giants made Ethan feel exceptionally puny as they offered crunching handshakes.

  ‘Chess,’ Don said thoughtfully. ‘That’s the game with the horsey that moves like an L.’

  ‘You got it,’ Ethan said, deciding it was best not to tell a man with a spiked fist tattooed on his neck that the piece was actually called a knight.

  ‘So I’ve scrounged up an FBI jet at Fort Worth,’ Ted said. ‘The plan’s fairly unsophisticated. We should get to California by about ten tonight. Then we drive out to the vineyard where Lombardi’s spending his Christmas vacation. We knock on Lombardi’s door, tell him you’re Ethan Aramov and that you want to know the truth about Leonid and your mother. If he’s any less than forthcoming, Joe and Don will use their persuasive skills to make him open up.’

  As Ethan and Ted set off, James checked the spyhole in his dingy rented room and was pleased to see Lucinda on the other side of the door.

  ‘I’m not responsible for the smell in here,’ James told her, as she stepped in. ‘It was like that when I got here.’

  ‘I’ll believe you, millions wouldn’t,’ Lucinda said cheerfully. ‘Heard any more out of Andre?’

  ‘Nothing worth knowing,’ James replied. ‘He’s stuck home playing video games. Pissed off that his mum and dad are being all lovey-dovey. Though it looks like Tamara’s mainly doing it to help our cause.’

  Lucinda nodded. ‘Tamara’s attracted to him. A lot of women go for the Neanderthal look.’

  ‘Does that include you?’ James asked.

  He was trying to be funny, but Lucinda glowered at him. ‘What if it was the
other way around?’ she snapped. ‘If you were undercover and you slept with a female target, it would be a big joke. Ha, ha, I nailed the bitch! Why can’t a woman enjoy sex for its own sake? Why must a woman who has sex either be a victim or a slut?’

  James had already worked out that Lucinda had a short fuse, but this was a strong reaction even for her.

  ‘OK, don’t bite my head off.’

  ‘I’m not mad,’ Lucinda said. ‘You’re a bit of an asshole, that’s all. The good news is, I stopped at the market and bought you gifts.’

  She passed James a carrier bag, which contained bug spray, and half a dozen mousetraps.

  ‘Chocolate or peanut butter makes the best bait,’ Lucinda said.

  As James inspected a plastic trap, Lucinda unrolled a map on the bed. It was made from sheets of A4 paper, printed off Bing Maps and crudely taped together.

  ‘I plotted the sixteen locations from the sat-nav in Leonid’s Lexus,’ Lucinda explained. ‘Airport, shopping malls, a big industrial unit up near the border. Most interesting, there’s two locations out of town, close to the secure compound of the Talavera Brothers. I’d guess that’s who Leonid is selling his missiles to.’

  ‘Can those guys afford twenty-four million?’ James asked.

  ‘They’re a new force here in the north. They’re muscling in on the smuggling routes and have powerful southern groups backing them,’ Lucinda said. ‘I also found a report on an anonymous blog about a large explosion, taking out the leader of one of the Talavera Brothers’ main rivals about ten days back. The report describes witnesses seeing a missile corkscrewing downwards, taking a right turn over the heads of a security detail and slamming through the front window of a restaurant where the victim was having lunch.’