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through a tiny window before the killers got to him.
    Ethan felt that he owed Ryan and jokingly called him his Guardian Angel. Now the two boys maintained a secret online friendship, but there was a lot that Ethan didn’t know about Ryan Brasker.
    For starters, he was really Ryan Sharma – thirteen-year-old brother of Leon and Daniel and a qualified CHERUB agent. Ryan had been sent to California the previous autumn. His mission was to befriend Ethan and find out as much as he could about Ethan’s mother and her links with the Aramov Clan.
    Secondly, Ryan was no guardian angel. His plan to befriend Ethan had involved turning a gang of bullies against him. The theory was that Ryan would step in and save Ethan’s butt, after which they’d become mates. But the plan went awry when the bullies chased Ethan into the path of a moving car.
    When Irena Aramov arranged for Ethan to be snatched away from California child protection after his mother’s murder there was no plausible way for CHERUB agent Ryan to follow Ethan to Kyrgyzstan, but Ryan had maintained his friendship with Ethan in the virtual world, staying in touch by Hotmail and Facebook, playing online chess and speaking on Skype.
    This relationship between a CHERUB agent and the grandson to the head of a major criminal network gave British and American intelligence a valuable window into Aramov Clan operations. But it was tough to maintain because Irena Aramov had told Ethan to cut off all contact with anyone he’d known in California, and a lack of fast Internet and mobile phone coverage in the remote valley around the Kremlin made this ban relatively easy to enforce.
    The pilots and staff who worked for the Aramovs had access to a couple of public computers on a slow Internet connection, but these terminals were in the Kremlin’s ground-floor lobby and their usage was monitored by Aramov security teams. More usefully, Ethan had discovered three private computers on the sixth floor which were used for Aramov Clan business and linked up to a reasonably fast satellite-based Internet connection.
    One computer was in the quarters of Ethan’s uncle, Josef Aramov. Irena’s oldest son was a man of limited intelligence who was basically a glorified caretaker around the Kremlin. But Josef kept his rooms locked and Ethan had never got within two metres of his computer.
    The second computer was in Leonid Aramov’s rooms. Ethan’s friendship with Leonid’s son Andre meant he could get near, but Uncle Leonid wasn’t the kind of man you wanted to piss off, especially as Ethan suspected that he was behind the killing of his mother.
    Luckily for Ethan, the third computer belonged to his grandma Irena and was easy to access. Irena was rarely awake after 8 p.m. Once the old lady went to bed her nurse, Yang, would gulp several glasses of wine and sit watching Chinese TV with the volume up so loud that she never heard Ethan walking along the hallway and cutting into her boss’s unlocked office.
    A couple of hours watching Pineapple Express with Natalka and the prospect of moving to a school in Dubai or Bahrain put Ethan in a better-than-usual mood as he jogged furtively along the sixth-floor hallway on socked feet.
    Irena’s computer was an aged Windows box, surrounded by overstuffed paper trays and yellow books: Internet for Dummies , Windows for Dummies , Excel for Dummies . The machine had a network password, but Irena had her login scrawled on a strawberry-scented notelet taped to the bottom of the monitor.
    Ethan had always been more comfortable with virtual worlds than in the real one and felt a sense of longing as Windows 98 booted up. Having a mouse in his hand and clicking on the ‘e’ to open Internet Explorer felt good, but this was illicit activity and he thought how great it would be to have a laptop in his room so that he could spend hours watching YouTube clips, downloading music and playing online games like when he’d lived in California.
    Ethan logged into