Rat Runners

by Oisin McGann

  There was a round, smoked-glass table in the middle of the circle. On the table sat a cuddly caterpillar with a green body, a large red head and multi-colored legs. That was new.

  “Got yor tools?” Move-Easy asked, gesturing her towards him.

  Scope nodded. She descended the three steps to the sunken floor and sat down beside her boss, opening the toolbox on the floor. Move-Easy was sitting on the couch opposite Punkin and Bunny. He had a bulbous, brutish face, a smutty grin and chilly blue eyes. His thinning, dyed black hair was slicked back in a widow’s peak from his orange brow. He was wearing an expensive white shirt and navy suit trousers, his wrists and fingers adorned with heavy gold bracelets and rings. A gold chain hung down over the shirt, the gray hairs of his orange chest sticking in a tuft over the open collar at the front. He made her skin crawl, and there were times that he terrified her, but she knew he liked her. As he often said, she was worth her weight in diamonds.

  “These two ’ave brought us a present, ’aven’t you, guys?” he said, not expecting an answer to his question. “Robbed a cash courier, comin’ from another Void. Some poor soul’s lost his profits for the week. Still, their loss is our gain, eh? Have to say, I’m impressed, Punkin. Didn’t think you had the brains to pull off a job like that, out among all the eyeballs, and get away with it. But my boys tell me you wasn’t followed or nuffink. So…had some ’elp, didya?”

  “It was all us, Mister Easy,” Punkin replied casually, throwing a smug smile at Bunny. “What can we say? We got the moves, y’know?” “You got the moves, eh?” the boss said thoughtfully, working his jaw. “Thing is, my lovelies, you was scanned when you came down, and we found a piece of electronics on you that you didn’t declare. Only reason you’re sittin’ here now is that it’s not transmittin’ any signals.”

  Punkin and Bunny looked nervously at each other. Everyone knew you got scanned when you came into Move-Easy’s place. It was a standard precaution in any Void, but he ran his place like airport customs. You had a better chance of getting on a plane with a machine-gun than you had of slipping an electronic device into his Void without him knowing. And the penalties for trying could be ugly and painful. Scope could tell from their expressions that they didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I’m tellin’ you, Mister Easy, we don’t know nothin’ about—”

  “Obviously,” the gangster growled, cutting him off. “You ’aven’t the balls. But neither of you has more brains than a bird, so I’m assumin’ you didn’t check to see if the cash had been rigged before bringin’ it here. Or did you just not want to check, in case you blew it? Was you just tryin’ your luck instead?”

  They exchanged glances again.

  “Was that wrong?” Bunny asked innocently.

  “Christ, but you’re a proper pair o’ wazzocks.” Move-Easy sighed. “Scope ’ere is goin’ to ’ave a look wiv her sneaky eye, and tell us what you’ve brought into my ’ome.”

  Scope was no longer paying any attention to the people in the room. She had work to do, and went at it with her usual fixed intensity. She had taken her inspection camera from her toolbox. This was a keyhole camera on a long flexible tube. She could manipulate the direction of the tube with her index finger, using the joystick positioned like a trigger on the handle. The front of the tube had a tiny camera, connected to a small screen at the on top of the handle. Laying the x-ray printout down in front of her, she switched the inspection camera on, took the lens end of the tube and inserted it into the mouth of the cuddly caterpillar. Then, keeping her eye on the screen, she slid the lens end further in.

  The image on the screen showed her what was inside the soft toy. She knew there was a tube filled with money, but that wasn’t what she was interested in. The camera was equipped with an ultrasound scanner. She switched it on and the screen filled with blue-white see-through forms against a dark background. Her attention was on the hard-edged shape near the mouth that stood out clearer than anything else on the image.

  “It’s a dye pack, sitting at the top of the money tube,” she said to Move-Easy. “Doesn’t look like there’s a transmitter, but I’d have to take it out to be sure. I’d say the trigger is a light sensor. If you’d tried to take it out of the toy, the lights in here would have set it off. But I can deactivate the mechanism with a magnet.”

  Taking a small magnet from her toolbox, she slid her hand into the caterpillar’s mouth and pressed it against the wad of money she could see on her screen. Then she pulled out the bound bundle of notes and held it up in front of Punkin and Bunny:

  “You brought a dye pack in here. Banks use them to foil armed robberies. If you’d tried to take out the money, the first wad of cash you’d pull out would be this one. It’s hollowed out. Inside, there’s a device that, when exposed to the light, would spray a bright pink aerosol dye all over you, while burning at two hundred degrees Celsius.”

  She taped the magnet to the wad of money and tossed it into her toolbox.

  “An’ if I got painted, or if I even had to repaint this place ’cos of you monkeys …” Move-Easy sniffed as he pulled the meter-long rubber tube of cash out of the caterpillar’s mouth, “you’d be the ones swallowing this.”

  The two small-time crooks went pale, but Move-Easy had already thrown the tube to Tanker, who took it from the room. The cash would be checked, sorted, counted and absorbed into the business. There had to be thousands of pounds there, but the gangster had hardly given it a second glance.

  “Now,” the orange-skinned boss said, lounging back on the couch, as Scope packed up her toolbox and stood up, “you’ve bought yourselves a few minutes of my time. What exactly is you two looking for, in return for this charmin’ act of goodwill?”

  “We’d like to join your organization, Mister Easy,” Punkin said, leaning forward. “We wanna move up; we’re done just bein’ rat-runners. I know we’d have to prove ourselves, but we’ve got a line on a big score. I got myself an implant the other day, at a clinic in Soho. It’s an underground operation—the surgeons there only deal in cash …”

  He paused, and glanced up at Scope. Move-Easy looked up at her and tilted his head towards the door. She took the hint and headed out of the room. As she was leaving, she heard her boss say:

  “And you want to knock it over, right?”

  “The money’s there for the stealin’, Mister Easy. All we need is…”

  Scope couldn’t hear any more without pausing beyond the door, and she had learned long ago not to be curious about these things. Move-Easy was as paranoid about his own people as he was about the police. As he said himself, “You can never trust criminals.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE CREW

  ONE OF THE keys to Move-Easy’s success, reflecting the length of time his Void had survived undiscovered, was the confounding means of getting inside. Unless you were part of his inner circle, you didn’t get in without being invited. Most of the day-to-day business was done by his people on the outside, whom the boss monitored closely. If you did get invited in—and it was unwise to refuse such an invitation—you entered the maintenance tunnels beneath the massive hospital by a door chosen randomly on the day. You were given blacked-out contact lenses that effectively acted as a blindfold. An actual blindfold would have looked suspicious if you ran into any hospital staff or other civvies who might happen to be in the tunnels at the time.

  You were then led by a member of the gang to one of the steel- and lead-lined doors that opened into the nest of old wartime bomb-shelter corridors that formed the core of his Void. Each time you visited, you were taken in through a different door. Each of these doors was disguised in a different way, and their use was also dictated at random. Even the boss’s own people had to change their routes constantly. The WatchWorld computers loved patterns. The hospital complex was monitored twenty-four hours a day, and every member of the hospital staff and every frequent visitor was on file. Anyone else seen going in or out of the hospital on a regular basis would event
ually attract suspicion. Move-Easy had built a career on avoiding suspicion.

  Manikin was still wearing her mac over black jeans, but had changed to a bobbed red wig. FX was in his usual combats, hoodie and trainers. Blinking over the contact lenses that blinded him, he felt someone take his console bag from him at the security checkpoint, but didn’t protest. It would be held until he was leaving. He suspected they’d try and have a look through the console, but was quite certain even Tanker would not be able to break the encryption that protected its contents. There were hackers in Britain who were better than FX, but he knew most of their names, and none of them worked for Move-Easy. It was more his physical safety that concerned him. These gangsters scared him, and whenever he and Manikin came here, he let her do the talking, because he had a habit of mouthing off when he was nervous. Around someone like Move-Easy, that could be a dangerous habit.

  When they got the nudge, Manikin and FX plucked out their blacked-out contacts and handed them to the man who had guided them in. They found themselves standing in the gangster’s audience chamber. He was sitting in the circle of couches, beaming up at them. There was another kid there, about Manikin’s age, with a slightly blank bony face, but intelligent eyes, and a gray woolen hat, which covered hair that was cut close to his scalp. Dressed in trainers, jeans, T-shirt and a weathered black leather jacket, he was tall and looked impressively fit. He did not seem at all nervous in Move-Easy’s presence—unusual for someone his age.

  “Manikin, FX, meet Nimmo,” Move-Easy said, waving them over. “I’m puttin’ a crew togevver for a new job, and you’re it.”

  The three nodded to each other, but said nothing. FX and Manikin sat down on the couch next to Nimmo and waited. There was one other man in the room, standing by the bar, making himself a Martini. He was an Oriental guy with an expensive hairstyle, a sharp light-gray suit with a cravat instead of a tie, and a set of wireless earphones in his ears. The dapper man had the dead black eyes of a shark. This man’s name was Coda, and he was the most dangerous of Move-Easy’s enforcers. And he was the only one who didn’t wear a piercing in his eyebrow—the means by which the boss monitored his people. Nor did he ever carry anything that could be recognized as a weapon. Rumor had it that Coda only ever killed with his bare hands, or with whatever happened to be lying around. FX eyed the man anxiously. He had heard that Coda had once tortured and killed someone using only a pair of spectacles. FX could only guess how.

  Move-Easy stared at the three kids for a minute, with a fatherly smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He had been one of the first gangsters to start using specially trained teenagers for some of his dirty work, and had several on his payroll. The three in front of him were freelancers, but that didn’t make much difference. If you lived in London and Move-Easy wanted you to take on a job, you took it. As you were underage, it was easier for you to operate within the WatchWorld system. The system could watch you, but it was forbidden to assign a Safe-Guard to follow you until you were sixteen, and even then there were limits to what they could watch until you were eighteen.

  That was why Move-Easy used kids on a lot of his jobs.

  “You owe me money,” he said to Manikin and FX. “This job will wipe the debt clean. That’ll be your payment. Nimmo, you’ll be paid on your usual terms. You’re all good little players, and as of now, you’ve got one very simple task. I want you to find this box.”

  He lifted a remote, pressed the touch-screen surface, and an image appeared on the cinema screen. Manikin, who was discreetly watching Nimmo, trying to measure him up, noticed the slightest change of expression in his eyes as he saw the picture. He was hiding something. The image was of a tall, long-limbed man with a mess of black hair and protruding features. The photo had been taken at night at the back of a tall building, with wheelie bins in the background. It was monotone, slightly blurred and a bit grainy, probably taken with a night-vision camera. But they could make out a slim black box in the man’s left hand. It was roughly the size of the kind of presentation box used to hold a necklace.

  “So what’s in it?” Manikin asked.

  “Ten credit cards,” Move-Easy replied. “Blue and gold in color—you don’t need any more details. Either they’ll be in the box or not. The geezer in the picture is the previous owner. Name’s Watson Brundle, an’ he’s dead. He was a civvie. A scientist, engineer or summink—had some private project going, workin’ on RFIDs and the like.”

  “How’d he die?” Nimmo asked.

  “You don’t care,” Move-Easy assured him. “What you care about is that box. We know it was in his lab yesterday, because we saw ’im go in with it, and ’e didn’t come out again before ’e died, which was early this evenin’. Bit of a hermit, he was. The old bill went in about an hour after ’e died, and after they were gone, I sent a couple of boys in to fetch it. It wasn’t there. If the cops’ve got it, I’ll find out through my people. But I don’t think they have. There was some kid who lived up on the same floor as Brundle, ’parently did some work for ’im. We’ve not had a good look at ’is face yet, but he’s the law-abidin’ type. Went runnin’ right up to a peeper when the murder ’appened. ’E was questioned by the bill today, but we can’t find ’im now. We will. That’s not your job either.”

  He touched his remote again, and a new picture appeared on the screen. This one showed a teenage girl, possibly about fifteen or sixteen. She was wearing a blue, gray and white school uniform. The picture looked as if it was a still from a surveillance camera in a school corridor. Tanker had probably hacked in and lifted it from the school’s files. The girl’s left hand was running through her dark hair, revealing that her sallow-skinned face was tainted by a port-wine birthmark that went from above her left eye, across her cheek, almost to her ear. Manikin was sure that the girl normally covered as much of that mark as possible with her hair. It spoiled what was otherwise quite a pretty face. With hips like that, she wasn’t exactly model material, but there was something very attractive about her. She had a spirited expression, and the posture of her small figure suggested a confident personality.

  “Veronica Brundle, the boffin’s daughter,” Move-Easy announced. “The person he trusted most in the world. He was mad about ’er, but separated from the mother. The girl lives with the mother. She visited ’er dad last night. The handbag she had with ’er could have held the case, but we didn’t ’ave anyone on the buildin’ when she left—there was a Safe-Guard on the street by then—so she could have walked off with the box in her bag without us knowin’.

  “Now, her dad told her about us, so if she’d any sense, she’d have brought us that box by now. But she ’asn’t. I want you to suss ’er out, check ’er ’ouse and the school. Is she connected? Is she protected? Does she ’ave the contacts to sell the cards? If she’s gonna try an’ run, I want to know before she does. There’s no guarantee she’s got ’em, but I think she’s our best bet. Tricky bit is, she lives in a two-floor apartment in the Barbican and goes to a private school.”

  Manikin rolled her eyes towards the ceiling and FX groaned. The Barbican Estate was a mass of concrete structures containing over two thousand flats, some as part of three massive residential towers. It was a maze, and it was riddled with security cameras. And even though primary and secondary schools could not be observed by the WatchWorld system, they all had their own security measures. Private schools were usually the most paranoid and had higher quality systems.

  “I presume these cards are worth a lot of money to someone who can use them,” Manikin spoke up. “Would she leave something like that in school?”

  “Might, if she didn’t want her mum findin’ it,” Move-Easy told her. “Leave no stone unturned, that’s what I say. Tanker will give you all the details we ’ave on the girl. You’ve got three days to find out for sure whether she ’as it or not.”

  He glanced up at the well-dressed man standing at the bar, who was leaning there with his eyes closed. With those earphones in his ears, it was impossible to tell if
Coda was listening to them or not.

  “I don’t want to ’ave to send in Coda here, or set any of the boys on ’er and the mother unless there’s no other way,” Move-Easy said. “Let’s keep this quiet and hands-off for now.”

  “If it’s OK with you, I’d like to bring Scope in on this as well,” Nimmo said.

  Manikin glanced at FX, who shrugged. They both knew Scope and trusted her. She wouldn’t get in the way, but they couldn’t see what they needed her for out on the street.

  “What d’you want her for?” Move-Easy asked, frowning. “You’ve got all the skills you need right here.”

  “I don’t want to go to all the hassle of doing the job, gettin’ my hands on those cards,” Nimmo told him, “and then find out they’re fakes. That’s one of the jobs she does for you, isn’t it? She spots counterfeit merchandise. Better she do it on the spot than have us bringin’ fake gear back here.”

  “Awright, she can go with you. But look after ’er, Nimmo. If summink ’appens to my Little Brain, I’d be most put out. Worth her weight in diamonds, that girl is. She’s like a friend’s daughter to me. Not a hair on ’er ’ead, boy, y’hear me? Not a hair on ’er ’ead.”