Rat Runners

by Oisin McGann

  “I hear you,” Nimmo said. “It’ll be the safest hair in London.”

  The three teenagers were getting to their feet when Move-Easy added to FX and Manikin:

  “Oh, last thing. Just so the both of you know, Nimmo’s in charge. What ’e says goes.”

  “What?” Manikin looked at Nimmo and then at the gangster. She was pushing her luck and she knew it. But in their business, you couldn’t let yourself be walked all over. “That’s not how we work, Mister Easy. We’re freelance. Nobody’s in charge of us.”

  “I’m sorry, darlin’.” The orange-skinned mob boss leveled his cold blue eyes at her and leaned forward. “My ears are a bit funny these days. Gettin’ old, I suppose. Did you say summink?”

  Manikin met his gaze for a brief moment, before her nerve failed her. “No. No, sir.”

  “Didn’t think so. Go see Tanker. You’ve got three days to dig up everything there is to know about this girl and find that box. If she passes it on or sells it before we can get ’old of it, or if I ’ave to send in the boys to deal with it, so things get loud and messy, I’m not gonna be a happy camper. And we don’t want me losin’ the rag, now do we?”

  Nimmo, Manikin and FX all agreed, they didn’t want him losing the rag.

  CHAPTER 7

  DEATH BY MISADVENTURE

  FOUR TEENAGERS WANDERING around in the early hours of the morning could attract the wrong kind of attention, so once they’d checked in with Tanker to be briefed, Nimmo, Scope, Manikin and FX decided to stay in the Void for a few hours and grab some shut-eye until sunrise. After a quick look through the information on Veronica Brundle, they stretched out on some cots and slept until after sunrise. Then it was time to go to work.

  Nimmo stayed awake, his mind racing as he struggled to think through all the angles. He’d been hired to search for something he already had in his possession. This was Move-Easy he was dealing with. He should hand the bloody box over as soon as he could lay his hands on it. But he was damned if he would. At least, not until he’d figured out what was going on.

  The decision gave him some peace and his mind stopped whirling, allowing his thoughts to find some order. He grew drowsy, eager now for sleep. His mind drifted back to his interview with the police officer, back in his small flat next to Brundle’s lab.

  The man, Dibble, was a detective constable, but he fumbled through the questions like someone who hadn’t been in the job very long. As Nimmo had suspected, the police weren’t giving a high priority to Brundle’s murder.

  “So, Charles, you were next door when you heard the noise of a falling body,” Dibble muttered.

  “Call me Chuck,” Nimmo said in an overly nervous voice. “Everyone calls me Chuck.”

  “OK, Chuck. You say you heard a fight. Scraping, thumping, that kind of thing?”

  Nimmo nodded. This was the third time they’d been over this, but Nimmo knew that was standard procedure. Ask things a different way each time, see if the story changes. Dibble’s short-fingered hand made notes with a stylus on his web-pad. A pudgy young man, his cheeks were already sinking into jowls, and there were wrinkles around the small black eyes that perched close to each other over a sharp, pointed nose. He used the stylus to scratch an itch under his black hair and looked up at Nimmo again.

  “Yeah, and then I went out to check on ’im—Doctor Brundle, I mean,” Nimmo said. “And ’e was dead. Or at least, I thought ’e was dead. He was really still. And ’is eyes were open. And ’e never leaves ’is door open.”

  As Nimmo kept up the dull-eyed character of Chuck U. Farley, his mind went around the room, ensuring that nothing Dibble could see would make him curious enough to poke about. He had given the place the once-over before the police arrived, but you could never be too careful.

  “Right.” Dibble made another note. His tone remained uninterested. “At any point, did he cry out? Cry for help? Did he say anybody’s name?”

  “Nothin’ I could hear,” Nimmo said. “I ’eard him let out, like, y’know, a grunt. Like he was in pain? But it was all really quick.”

  “Right,” said Dibble, scratching his scalp again.

  Nimmo was beginning to wonder how much longer this would take when the detective’s phone rang. Dibble answered it and listened for a minute.

  “Yeah?” He sniffed, his eyes darting over to Nimmo. “No. Sure, I’m talking to him now. Charles U. Farley—‘Chuck,’ he says. No, it’s fine. OK. Yeah, I’ll see. OK, cheers.” He ended the call and slipped his phone into his pocket. Doing the same with his web-pad, he stood up.

  “Thanks for your assistance, Chuck. Looks like we’ve got things all wrapped up on this one.”

  “So, is that it?” Nimmo asked. He didn’t like the detective’s tone. “D’you know who did it?”

  “It seems Doctor Brundle didn’t have quite as dramatic an end as you thought, Chuck,” Dibble told him. “The coroner’s made an examination of the body, and believes your friend’s death was accidental—‘misadventure,’ they call it. You probably heard him stagger and fall, and mistook it for a fight. It’d explain why you didn’t see anyone when you came out. I don’t have any more details at the moment, but we’re no longer treating this death as suspicious.”

  The body had been taken away not long after the police arrived, less than an hour ago. There was no way they could have done an autopsy yet. How could they have decided this so quickly? Nimmo couldn’t hide his frustration.

  “But I heard another guy here! There was a fight! Someone was here!”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not uncommon for witnesses to make mistakes, or to misinterpret what they hear and see,” Dibble assured him. “You get hyped up or upset, and your brain starts twisting the facts to suit what you think has happened. Basic psychology, Chuck. That’s why we’ve got the Safe- Guards now. No more doubts about how things happened.”

  “Except ’e died after the Safe-Guard left,” Nimmo snapped. “Where was it when ’e needed it? It was in there with ’im for ages, and when I went after it and told it the man it had just left was dead, it did nothin’.”

  “Just bad luck, lad. What can I say?” Dibble shrugged. “Listen, we don’t know what’s happening with this building now that Doctor Brundle’s dead, but I doubt you’ll be able to stay here. Have you got somewhere else to go? You were on the street before he put you up, weren’t you? Got any family? We’ll need to find you somewhere to live, get you back into school. You’re too young for us to leave you on your own like this. I have to go, but someone from social services is on their way over. They’ll sort you out, OK?”

  “Yeah,” Nimmo murmured. “Yeah, sure.”

  With that, Dibble left. Less than half an hour later, the social worker arrived to find the flat empty. Chuck U. Farley was gone, having cleared out his cupboards and drawers, no doubt taking to the streets again. The social worker shook her head, lamenting another young man dropping out of society.

  Still bitter about the complacency of the police, Nimmo was back in Move-Easy’s Void again, tired but uncomfortable on the narrow, well-used cot in the small underground room. The others were sound asleep around him. Brundle’s building had not been Nimmo’s only safe-house, but it suited him and his identity as Farley. Living alone as a fourteen-year-old in a city riddled with surveillance was difficult. Brundle had taken him in, trusted him. As Nimmo lay there, he swore to himself that he’d find out the truth about Watson Brundle’s death.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE RAT RUNS

  IT WAS TIME to go to work. Scope was allowed to come and go from the Void as she pleased, but the others had to wear the blacked-out contact lenses again on their way out, and had to be accompanied by one of Move-Easy’s apes. Blinded as he was, Nimmo used his other senses. As he always did, he counted his steps as the troll led the four of them out through the hospital maintenance tunnels. He memorized each turn, and took note of the noises and smells around him, the sounds of each door and the types of floor that passed under his feet.
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  It was an almost unconscious process, and as they came out into a corridor whose sounds he recognized—the boilers for the hospital’s heating system were off this corridor—he thought about the bizarre situation he’d found himself in. It was the worst possible time to be teamed up with strangers, people he couldn’t trust. And there were few enough that he had ever trusted. He had to get clear of them as soon as he could.

  Once out of the tunnels, he and the others removed their blacked-out contact lenses, chewing them up and swallowing them. Manikin headed decisively for an exit that would bring them out into one of the alleys at the back of the hospital complex. Nimmo watched her, wondering if she was going to be a problem. He knew her by reputation—they’d even worked on the same job at one point—though he’d never actually met her.

  She was supposed to be smart, quick and able to change her appearance and character with the ease of a seasoned actor. But she was also known for being a hot-head. Nimmo didn’t like working with people who were liable to get emotional. She was good-looking, but not beautiful, with an expressive oval face and wide, open features. Her athletic frame moved like a dancer’s, but there was a nervous energy about her too.

  Nimmo had also heard a lot about FX. At twelve years old, the younger lad was already an adept hacker—his imagination, inventiveness and sheer technical brilliance making up for his lack of experience. FX was less comfortable in the villain’s world than his older sister, but he had nerve and a level head, and that was enough to be getting on with.

  They were all following Manikin towards the exit. FX was trailing behind, checking his console to see if anybody had been interfering with it. Scope was walking alongside Nimmo. Like the two boys, she carried a small pack on her back, and all four put on shades as soon as they went outside. A baseball cap also covered much of Scope’s distinctive blonde cornrows. She was happy to be getting out for a bit, even if she was taking the risk of some peeper or copper asking why she wasn’t in school. Her parents hated the education system, the way the government ran things. They’d schooled her at home before she began work for Move-Easy, but it still felt strange being out in the city on a school day. Her job rarely took her outside, she spent little time at home any more, and didn’t have many friends, so she often got too wrapped up in her work.

  Nimmo was relieved to see Scope wasn’t wearing a piercing in her eyebrow.

  “You bugged?” he asked her quietly.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Move-Easy doesn’t normally bug any of the kids who work for him. He insists they stay free of illegal electronics—the less the Safe-Guards can find on them, the less reason they have to get in the kids’ way. He relies on sheer bloody terror to make sure they do what they’re told.”

  “That fits.”

  He had known Scope for a couple of years—as long as he’d been working for Move-Easy. She didn’t spend much time on the street, but then that wasn’t why Nimmo had asked for her. He needed her analytical brain—that incisive eye she brought to all her work. Despite her tender age, she had been outsmarting forgers, con men and the police’s forensic scientists for nearly three years, and making it look easy. Nimmo was hoping she could help dig him out of the hole he was in.

  “So what’s your line?” FX asked, as if he had been reading the older boy’s thoughts.

  “What do you mean?” Nimmo countered, though he understood well enough.

  “Mani does deception, I do tech,” FX said. “Scope does analysis. What’s your specialty?”

  “Avoiding responsibility,” Nimmo replied.

  Out in the alleyway, Manikin was waiting for the rest of them. It was eight o’clock in the morning. Around them, they could hear the sounds of rush hour. The streets would be filled with people on their way to work. She turned to Scope.

  “Is he cool?” she demanded, tilting her head towards Nimmo.

  “I trust him,” Scope responded. “And he can certainly keep his mouth shut. Nobody knows anything about the cagey sod.” She thumped his shoulder. “He’s got me out of trouble a couple of times. He was the one who helped us out with that thing that time—you know, with the accountant. Yeah, he’s cool.”

  “Okay … we’re going back to our place,” Manikin said to Nimmo. “Move-Easy doesn’t know where it is, none of the seniors do, and we want to keep it that way.”

  ‘Seniors’ was the term for anyone over sixteen. Anyone who could be followed by a Safe-Guard.

  “OK,” Nimmo said, pushing the pair of sunglasses up onto the bridge of his nose. “But right now, we’re standing around in a bunch in this alley. That’s looking for all the wrong kind of attention. We gonna move or what?”

  “Yeah,” FX grunted, as he pulled up his hood. “Try and keep up.”

  Manikin took off at a run, her mac streaming out behind her. FX and Scope were on her heels in seconds, following her as she turned a corner and bounded up over a parked van. The alarm went off, but like most alarms, it was ignored. Running along the roof, they jumped over a wall, landing on the top of an oil tank and sliding down its curving side into a small courtyard. Nimmo was close behind them as they crossed the square space, leaping to cling onto a chain-link fence and flipping themselves over it.

  This was another reason criminals were turning to kids for some of their work. Not everyone could use the ‘rat-runs.’ These were the routes through the city that were not covered by normal surveillance. It took speed, agility and nerve to make your way along these routes, to stay clear of all the eyes and ears that kept watch in the city. The rat-runs were ruled by the young, often known by their bosses—and the public at large—as ‘rat-runners,’ or simply just ‘vermin.’

  Most of the main streets in London were covered by scan-cams, or ‘eyeballs’—cameras that could record normal visuals, or film in infra-red, or backscatter x-ray. These images were analyzed using software that could recognize your face, even the way you walked. Directional microphones could record conversations hundreds of meters away, and put names to voices using speaker identification software. RFID scanners could read the radio frequency ID tags on clothes, in phones, cars and many other things that people used every day.

  And then there were the Safe-Guards. They could wander at will, enter people’s businesses and homes without permission, and they were equipped with rigs that included miniature versions of the technology that could be found on the watch-towers or camera installations. There was no telling when you might cross the path of a peeper while traveling along the rat-runs, but kids benefited from one of the few limits to WatchWorld’s surveillance. Unless a minor was engaged in a crime, they could not be stopped or followed by a Safe-Guard. When WatchWorld was introduced into London, even a population petrified by terrorism and crime could not tolerate the idea of their children being followed around by the faceless figures.

  So while normal people—the civvies—buckled down, struggling to accept the new limits forced on their lives by this all-pervasive regime, professional criminals set about finding ways to beat the system. The WatchWorld slogan was: “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear.” The problem was, most people had things they wanted to keep quiet about. And any unusual behavior, any attempt to keep your business private, would bring a Safe-Guard to your door.

  Those with something serious to hide were more likely to have the skills to keep it hidden.

  WatchWorld had a consumer-friendly face too. The city was littered with large screens, one on the corner of nearly every major street junction, with selected, edited feed from the system’s cameras. They were interspersed with ads that used myriad ways to catch the eyes of passers-by. The same feed could be found online, and on several television channels. Scenes that were considered newsworthy, interesting, or just entertaining were broadcast to the world.

  Manikin set a relentless pace, but they had to stop a couple of times to wait for Scope, who had trouble keeping up. Nimmo stayed with her; she was strong and agile enough, but lacked the stamina of the ot
hers, the result of too much time spent indoors. Together, the four ran through alleyways, apartment blocks, climbed walls, cut under railway bridges and through derelict buildings, jumping over or ducking under obstacles, and timing their runs past the sweeping cameras that watched nearly every street in London.

  When they finally reached an abandoned warehouse on Brill Alley, near Canary Wharf, Manikin and FX were tired and out of breath. Scope needed to sit down and rest her shaking legs. She took a surreptitious blast of her inhaler, always self-conscious of the weakness that was her asthma. Nimmo was already breathing normally, taking their surroundings in with interest.

  “Shouldn’t rush so much,” he said as he looked around. “The Safe-Guards can get curious if they see someone breathing too hard. The mikes in the streets are tuned to pick it up too.”

  “Yeah…yeah,” Scope panted. “We should… should definitely slow…slow it down a bit next time.”

  “Or just breathe quieter,” Manikin retorted, pulling out a loose brick beside a very solid-looking steel door to reveal a hidden keypad. “This is us.”

  CHAPTER 9

  LIFE IN THE MOVIES

  WIDE ARCHED WINDOWS, secured with sturdy steel bars, were spaced sparsely along the three-story-high, brown-brick walls of the warehouse. It was situated in an industrial district that had been on the up just before the Noughties Recession hit, crime skyrocketed, and one business after another in the area began to collapse. Now Brill Alley was surrounded by empty buildings, beyond which modern apartment blocks jutted into the sky. Those apartments, bought in better times, now looked out on an ugly, neglected, industrial landscape. This was the place Manikin and FX called home.

  FX used his phone to send an encrypted message disarming the security system, before Manikin keyed in a code that unlocked the steel door. Nimmo looked on in approval. Two separate systems. And phoning the signal in meant neither Nimmo nor Scope could guess where the security console was when they went inside. Manikin and her brother took their privacy seriously.