Cherub Black Friday (15 page)

‘I have a lot of roast duck,’ Tamara said. ‘Amy, would you like to stick around for dinner?’

Amy had only had good experiences of Tamara’s cooking and smiled. ‘Absolutely.’

After stuffing themselves, Ryan and Natalka headed downstairs and Andre went to his room to watch TV. With her husband gone, Tamara led an isolated existence and seemed grateful for Amy’s company. The two women shared a bottle of wine over dinner and ended up sloshed as they stood in the kitchen stacking the dishwasher.

‘I know you’re more than Josef’s girlfriend,’ Tamara said quietly.

Amy looked startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I made a stupid mistake marrying Leonid Aramov,’ Tamara said. ‘But I’m not a stupid person. I overheard you speaking with Ryan. I know Irena went to America for cancer treatment. Josef can barely string three sentences together and you’re here to control him, on behalf of whichever government you work for.’

‘I see,’ Amy said. She wasn’t entirely surprised that Tamara knew some of what was going on, but she was curious to know why she’d chosen to mention it now.

‘You told Ryan that you wanted to catch Leonid,’ Tamara said.

Amy didn’t understand how this had been possible. You were either in the corridor, or you weren’t, unless  … 

‘Is there a listening device?’ Amy asked.

‘Leonid bugged most rooms on this floor,’ Tamara said. ‘You don’t need to worry. I’m the only one that knows about it.’

‘OK,’ Amy said, feeling a little shaken. ‘What is it you want?’

‘After the Aramov Clan is gone, I’ll be left with my son. I have little money and no home of my own. Leonid has wanted me since I was fifteen years old. If he’s alive he’ll come after me. Even when we divorced, he made me stay here because he didn’t want anyone else to have me.’

‘Relocating you would be possible,’ Amy said. ‘I’m not talking about a fortune, but new identities and enough money to get you on your feet.’

‘I have family in Russia,’ Tamara said. ‘Mother, brothers, nephews, nieces. Even if I disappear, Leonid can find me by threatening them.’

‘I don’t see how we can protect an entire family,’ Amy admitted.

‘I know you can’t,’ Tamara said. ‘But you want to get Leonid and I want him out of my life. I’m sure I can help you.’

Amy looked curious as Tamara picked a tub of dishwasher tablets out of a cupboard.

‘Do you know where Leonid is?’ she asked.

Tamara shook her head. ‘It won’t be that simple. But before Irena kicked Leonid out he was pressuring me to marry him again. If Leonid thought I needed help, I’m sure he’d reach out.’

‘What do you have in mind?’ Amy asked.

‘Maybe if I was in some sort of danger, or if Leonid heard I’d been kicked out of the Kremlin and had no money. Something like that.’

‘But you’d still have no way to let him know,’ Amy said.

‘Not directly,’ Tamara said. ‘Irena made sure that all Leonid’s people got kicked out of the Kremlin, but she didn’t know everything. Leonid was paranoid and there’s a guy he used to check up on his own people, to make sure they weren’t ripping him off. He’s still around, and if Leonid has a spy inside the Kremlin, I’d bet on it being him.’

Now Amy sounded keen. ‘So what’s this guy’s name?’

There were a couple of offices in use on the Kremlin’s fourth floor, but nobody worked weekends so Amy called Ryan up to see her there first thing on Saturday morning. They met in a cobwebbed operations room, dominated by a vast map table on which generals had once plotted the movements of the Soviet spy planes for which the airfield had been built.

‘You smell like wet dog,’ Amy said, as Ryan came in dressed in squelching Nikes, with a sweatshirt over a full tracksuit.

‘Outdoor weights and a five K run,’ Ryan explained. ‘Brutal in this cold, but I don’t wanna fail my fitness assessment when I get back to campus.’

‘You certainly don’t,’ Amy said, smiling. ‘I got lazy on one of my early jobs. Had to do two months of six a.m. fitness training before I got mission-ready status back.’

‘Speaking of lazy, have you swept
this
room for bugs?’ Ryan asked cheekily.

Amy smiled through gritted teeth. ‘My bad,’ she admitted.

‘We all make mistakes,’ Ryan said. ‘This one might even have helped us. At least I assume that’s why you called me up here.’

‘Igor Mutko,’ Amy began, as she slid a plastic document wallet across to Ryan. ‘This is the guy Tamara thinks has links to Leonid Aramov.’

There was a photograph of a typically Russian man on the first sheet inside the folder. He was in his early thirties, well built, fairly handsome, with a foppish blond fringe worthy of a boy band.

‘I’ve seen him around the Kremlin,’ Ryan said. ‘Always friendly, buys a
lot
of drinks. Kazakov played poker with him a few times.’

Amy nodded, as Ryan flicked through pages of printouts. She’d dug up some of Igor’s Russian military records, but there wasn’t much to show apart from national service and a rejected recommendation letter for a bravery medal.

‘No obvious reason why Leonid would pick this guy to be his spy,’ Ryan noted.

‘It’s possible Igor was in the FSB – the Russian Federal Security Bureau,’ Amy said. ‘We can’t get hold of FSB records. But if Leonid is using Igor, it’s safe to assume he’s good at what he does.’

‘What’s Igor’s official job at the Kremlin?’ Ryan asked.

‘That’s another reason why I’m convinced Tamara’s right about Igor being Leonid’s spy,’ Amy said. ‘He draws a salary as a member of a de-icing team.’

Ryan laughed: there was a constant battle to keep the Kremlin’s runway in service and stop ice building up on aircraft wings during winter. But while Kremlin pilots and mechanics were mostly Russian and Ukrainian, this menial job which involved hard labour in foul weather was done by a team of Kyrgyz peasants.

‘He’s nicely dressed whenever I’ve seen him,’ Ryan noted. ‘No way he’s a de-icing guy. That lot only come into the Kremlin to collect their wages and they’re proper rough.’

‘I suppose we should have been suspicious before,’ Amy said. ‘But I’ve never been through the Kremlin payroll in detail.’

Ryan shook his head sympathetically. ‘There’s over three hundred aircrew based here on and off. Plus mechanics, cooks, admin, maintenance, family members. At least seven hundred people in and out of the Kremlin at different times. You can’t track all of them. At least not without making it obvious that we’re spying on them.’

‘We need to find out how Igor gets in touch with Leonid,’ Amy said. ‘Communications inside the Kremlin are locked down tight: Internet restricted, phone lines tapped, no cellphone masts.’

‘There’s at least a hundred web cafés in Dordoi Bazaar,’ Ryan said. ‘More in the centre of Bishkek. And you’ve only got to drive a couple of kilometres out of the valley to pick up a phone signal.’

‘I asked around discreetly,’ Amy said. ‘Igor’s a man who tries to make friends with everyone, like any good spy should. Besides buying lots of drinks and letting people win his money at poker, Dan reckons he’s always offering to give people lifts and he’s happy to pick stuff up from the bazaar.’

‘Stuff?’ Ryan asked.

Amy shrugged. ‘You know, one of the aircrew has been away for a few days, so he picks up groceries for when they return. Takes clothes to be dry-cleaned. He takes a few som for petrol, or lets them buy him a drink. But it’s always handled like a personal favour, rather than a transaction.’

Ryan nodded admiringly. ‘It makes Igor seem like a nice guy, and gives him an excuse to ask the pilots what they’re up to.’

‘So, I got Dan to sound Igor out, saying he needed a part for his car and asking if he was going to the bazaar any time soon. Igor said he was going this afternoon. I want you to see what he gets up to.’

‘He’ll be suspicious if we follow him there,’ Ryan said. ‘But the bazaar’s so huge it’ll be impossible to find him after he’s arrived.’

‘Already thought of that. Dan gave Igor a broken windscreen wiper motor to make sure that he gets the exact replacement  … ’

Ryan finished Amy’s sentence. ‘You put a tracking device inside the motor?’

Amy smiled. ‘The tracker’s only the size of a shirt button. It’s only useful over a kilometre or so, but it should allow you to follow Igor around the bazaar without stepping on his heels. Hopefully Igor has been doing this long enough to get comfortable and fall into a routine. Maybe there’s a web café Igor uses, or a bar where he regularly connects to Wi-Fi, or a spot where he makes cellphone calls. Once we find that spot, we can intercept his signals, identify his phone and e-mail accounts, and with luck that will lead us to Leonid.’

‘What about searching his quarters?’ Ryan asked.

‘I’ll get that taken care of too,’ Amy said. ‘Though I doubt he’ll be stupid enough to leave anything obvious lying around.’

Three hours later, Ryan was wandering through Dordoi Bazaar, scoffing a freshly baked naan. Over two kilometres long and a kilometre across, Dordoi was the biggest market in central Asia. As well as serving locals, it was a trading hub for the entire region.

There were over eight thousand pitches. Most comprised stacked metal shipping containers, with the lower container serving as a shop and the upper one used for storage. Saturday was the bazaar’s busiest day and the crowds moved at a shuffle.

Ryan felt his phone vibrate. He tucked an ear bud in with his gloved hand before answering. Natalka sounded annoyed.

‘Where’d you go?’ she moaned. ‘It’s Saturday, I thought we’d do something
together
.’

Ryan had sneaked out of the Kremlin and jumped into one of the battered taxis that usually ranked out front. He’d assumed she’d call and had his excuse prepared.

‘Sorry,’ Ryan said sadly. ‘I was in my room thinking about my dad. I needed to get out of there.’

‘Poor you,’ Natalka said. ‘Where are you?’

‘At the bazaar. I’ll bring you back a present.’

‘Cigarettes?’ Natalka said brightly.

‘I’m not feeding your habit,’ Ryan said, half-jokingly.

‘I could jump in a cab and meet you.’

‘No offence, Natalka, but I really feel like being alone. We’ll eat together later.’

‘OK,’ Natalka sighed. ‘My mum’s not back until tomorrow. We could reheat some more of her soup.’

Ryan laughed. ‘It was nice of her to think of me, but frankly I’d rather eat my own toenail clippings.’

‘There’s four litres of it left,’ Natalka said cheerfully. ‘We could probably sell it to someone who needs to paint the underside of a boat.’

Ryan was distracted by a beep from the tracking device inside his coat.

‘You’re breaking up,’ he lied. ‘I’ll see if I can buy a DVD to watch tonight. Love you!’

‘Love you,’ Natalka said, but Ryan had already hung up.

He backed into a gap between two stacked containers, then took off one thick glove before pulling his iPhone out of his jacket. The tracking receiver in his coat pocket was connected by Bluetooth and he touched the display to open a tracking app.

Although Igor was Ryan’s only target, there were two dots on his phone’s screen. Dordoi’s rows of metal containers were reflecting the low-powered radio signals and his target was either two hundred metres east, or four hundred north-east. That distance would normally be a minute’s walk, but in Dordoi on a busy Saturday even the most ardent pusher-and-shover got nowhere fast.

The bazaar’s traders tended to clump together, so all the computer stalls were in one part of the market, all the ones selling pets in another and so on. Ryan caught a break, finding an alleyway specialising in watches and jewellery that was less crowded and enabled him to pick up his pace.

He’d been to the bazaar at least once a week in the seven months he’d lived at the Kremlin, but the rows of containers looked identical and he got disorientated every time. Beyond the jewellery area, wheeled food carts were set along one of the bazaar’s main thoroughfares.

The two blips on the iPhone screen mercifully merged as Ryan closed in. The screen said he was less than ten metres from Igor. He glanced about, anxious not to walk into his target, but there was no sign of him.

Finally, Ryan noticed a sign offering haircuts. Traders commonly had family members offering an extra service, like barbering, shoe repair or a nail salon. Often these secondary trades had no connection with the main business, and Ryan spotted his target deep inside a container specialising in teddies and party gear.

Igor had a red-and-white chequered cloth draped over his shoulders as an elderly Kyrgyz man worked his blond head with fast-moving scissors. Ryan backed into the crowd, then leaned against the corrugated side of a container biting chunks of his naan, and occasionally glanced at his watch like he was waiting for someone.

Igor hit fresh air ten minutes later, rubbing a napkin around an itchy neckline before sliding his outdoor coat up his arms and merging into the flow of bodies. The tracker gave Ryan the ability to follow his target out of visual range. But Ryan needed to see what Igor was up to, not just where he was going.

After buying a large bag of fruit and vegetables, Igor grabbed tea and a pastry and ate on the move as he headed to a part of the bazaar that Ryan had never visited. The stalls here were all run by Chinese. Rather than offering actual goods, these traders were wholesalers, who filled their glass display cabinets with samples of everything from 2013 calendars to Hello Kitty alarm clocks.

The crowds were thinner, mostly men in business suits, smoking and haggling. Ryan didn’t like it because people his age didn’t come here. Everyone stared and he had to drop further behind Igor and rely on the tracker.

After a couple of hundred metres, the wholesale zone merged into an area where over fifty traders sold auto parts. The containers had car company logos painted on the doors and hubcaps swinging precariously from wires strung across the alleyway.

Ryan got close as Igor backed out of a container that sold reconditioned Lada spares. He was baffled when he saw Igor move while the tracker blip stayed still, but Igor was laden with bags and Ryan realised that he must have dumped the faulty wiper motor with the tracker inside, or traded it when he purchased the replacement.