CHERUB: Guardian Angel Read Free

‘They’re even worried that breathing other people’s smoke will give them cancer.’
    Natalka laughed. ‘Everyone here drinks themselves to death long before they’re old enough to worry about cancer.’
    By now they’d reached a main road a couple of hundred metres from the school, where the Kremlin Bus was waiting for them.
    The Kremlin was the nickname given to a large, mostly residential, building at the edge of the airbase from which the Aramov Clan ran their operations. The locals had named it after the Russian president’s Moscow fortress because the Aramovs and most of the pilots and mechanics who lived there were Russian or Ukrainian, rather than native Kyrgyz.
    Most Kremlin residents were men working away from home. But some had school-age kids, including Natalka’s mum who was a tough-as-boots Ukrainian-born cargo pilot.
    All Kremlin kids made the half-hour drive into Bishkek to attend US11 where lessons were taught in Russian, rather than one of the rural schools where lessons were in Kyrgyz.
    The little Kremlin kids got out of school twenty minutes before the older ones, and were already bouncing around the bus, bored off their heads. The twenty-four-seater was a quarter of a century old and was actually a crude Soviet design that wasn’t so much a bus as a truck with a corrugated aluminium hut welded on the back.
    The driver was Alex Aramov, the sixteen-year-old son of Ethan’s uncle Leonid. He stood by the doorway with his nineteen-year-old brother Boris, both of them swigging bottles of Dutch beer.
    Ethan had nothing in common with his two cousins, who’d both abandoned education at fifteen and now dedicated their lives to pumping weights on the massive outdoor stack behind the Kremlin, riding horses, chasing girls and generally using the Aramov name to act like big shots.
    Once his empty beer had been smashed on the dirt road, Alex got behind the wheel. His driving style was about what you’d expect from a drunken teenager, and like everyone in Bishkek he drove with one hand on the steering wheel and one hovering over the horn, giving a blast every time he got near a junction, a sharp corner, or a fit woman.
    The bus was only half full so Ethan and Natalka each got double seats and sat sideways with their trainers on the bench and their heads resting against the window. They didn’t bother talking, because it was too much effort competing with horn blasts, five little kids crawling under the seats throwing pistachio shells and the glassy-eyed stoner daughter of a Belarusian mechanic who had some kind of heavy beat coming out of her iPod.
    ‘Get me out of this zoo,’ Natalka groaned.
    Ethan nodded in agreement as his teenaged cousin drove a corner way too fast. As Bishkek’s shabby low-rise streets passed by Ethan noticed that Natalka had undone two buttons on her plaid shirt, giving him a top-notch view down her cleavage.
    ‘Hey,’ a boy said, in English.
    For an instant Ethan thought he’d been caught staring, but it was his little cousin Andre. It was hard to believe that this angel-faced ten-year-old was the son of Leonid Aramov, and brother of thuggish Alex and Boris.
    ‘Put your feet down,’ Andre said, as he squished on to the seat beside Ethan. ‘I want to practise my English on you.’
    Andre had a certain charm which enabled him to be bossy without you really minding.
    ‘I’m kinda beat,’ Ethan said. ‘Maybe later, in my room?’
    Natalka liked teasing younger kids and shouted in Andre’s ear, ‘Give me your cigarettes.’
    ‘I’m not dumb enough to smoke,’ Andre said indignantly. ‘It’s bad for your health and it makes you smell like an old sock.’
    ‘Are you saying I smell?’ Natalka growled, as she bunched her fist. ‘Gimme your ciggies or I’ll bash you.’
    Andre gave Natalka a pitying look to show that he wasn’t intimidated and spoke to Ethan in English. ‘I read a joke and I don’t understand.’
    ‘Go on then,’ Ethan said wearily.
    ‘What’s