Rat Runners

by Oisin McGann

  In the Hide in Brill Alley, FX sat on one of the chairs, face resting on the heels of his hands, his fingers clutching his hair. Scope watched him, her pale face making a lie of her attempts to reassure him.

  “What are we going to do?” he moaned. “God, they’re going to kill her! Move-Easy knows we’ve screwed him over for sure now. They’re going to put her through hell, and then they’re going to kill her.”

  “She’s still got a chance,” Scope said softly, struggling to hold onto the hope herself. “As long as they think she’s Veronica, they won’t hurt her—not for a while at least. Move-Easy will think she’s just a little girl he can scare into giving him what he wants.”

  “Yeah, but what happens when he doesn’t get it?” FX groaned through gritted teeth. “She’s got to let him have one of the brundleseeds. Can she do that? Can they take it out of her?”

  Scope didn’t reply, because he already knew the answer. The seeds had grown into implants, and they couldn’t be removed without an operation—even assuming a surgeon could work out how to separate one from her body. And it would be useless once it was taken out. And even that didn’t matter.

  Manikin’s disguise wouldn’t fool Move-Easy for long. And the mob boss would have ordered the deaths of the rat-runners by now. He might still spare Scope, but Manikin wasn’t getting out of there alive.

  “Where the hell is Nimmo?” FX snarled. “He should be back by now! If he’s cut out on us—”

  “There he is,” Scope said, pointing at the screen that showed the view from the doorway in the alley.

  Nimmo was approaching the door. Scope buzzed him in, and less than a minute later he was walking into the Hide.

  “I tracked the van to Move-Easy’s Void,” he told them, taking the black leather case from his backpack and laying it on the desk where FX was sitting. “As far as I could tell, they still think Manikin is Nica. So long as she doesn’t give them reason to check her fingerprints or her irises, that should keep her alive for a while.”

  “We need to take the case to them, try to trade it for her,” FX said, laying his fingers on the box.

  “That’s not going to work, FX, and you know it,” Nimmo replied. “Easy thinks we’re working for the law, or for Vapor. We’ve been marked, man. We have to get Manikin out of there some other way.”

  Scope shook her head and picked up the box. “Let’s see what all the fuss has been about,” she muttered.

  Taking a scalpel from her toolkit, she broke the resin seal around the edge of the case, and opened it. Inside the leather-lined walnut box were ten blue and gold cards held in a presentation velvet setting, each one with a credit chip embedded in it. Each card was emblazoned with the WatchWorld logo.

  “They’re boons,” FX said in a subdued voice, reading the RFIDs with his phone. “This is how everyone who gets brasted by WatchWorld gets paid. If you put on a good show for the screens, they give you one of these.” He looked at the readout. “But these are the highest denomination. Each card is worth twenty-five grand.”

  “Quarter of a million quid,” Nimmo murmured.

  “Small money, really, for what Brundle invented,” Scope commented. “But maybe it is enough to buy Manikin back. For this kind of money, maybe Move-Easy’d be willing to forget all about us.”

  “Enough to make him forget about the brundleseed?” Nimmo asked. “Because as long as he doesn’t have that, he’s never going to let us go. And d’you want to see his surgeons trying to dig one out of Manikin’s body?”

  Scope was looking closely at the box. “There’s something else here,” she muttered, picking up her scalpel again. “Somebody’s tampered with the bottom of this case.”

  Cutting around it, she peeled back the layer of leather that covered the walnut box. A hollow had been cut into the underside of the box, covered by a thin panel of the wood. Scope prized it open. Nestled neatly into the bottom of the box, held in place by clips, were five small plastic vials. Scope took one out and held it up to the light. Floating in some kind of clear solution was a dark speck, much like a small seed. As the others watched intently, Scope took a magnifying glass from her toolkit and examined the tiny object.

  “I think it’s a brundleseed,” she said, a look of wonder on her face. “We’ve got ourselves five more brundleseeds.”

  “We can get Manikin out!” FX exclaimed excitedly. “Bloody hell, we only need one, and we could trade it for her!” There were a few seconds of silence as they all considered this.

  “How could we know for sure he’d leave us be?” Nimmo wondered aloud. “The guy does treachery for a living. And then what about Vapor? Do we do the same for him? We don’t know anything about him, or how far he can reach. Even if we handed the rest of these over to him and made a run for it, how far would we get? And is this what we want to be doing with what could be the most dangerous technology on the planet? Givin’ it to the likes of Easy or Vapor? Seriously? This doesn’t solve our problems. If anything, we’ve just raised the stakes.”

  “I know it’s a crap choice,” Scope snapped. “But what else are we supposed to do?”

  “I’m tired of letting all these scrotes decide the rules of this game,” Nimmo said, a hardness setting in his eyes. “And I’m done bein’ on the defensive. Let’s take these bloody implants and use them to do like Manikin said—draw Easy and Vapor out. Let’s play this our way, and see what happens.”

  CHAPTER 31

  TO BE CONVINCING

  MANIKIN SAT IN the bare concrete cell, her back against the wall, her arms resting on her knees, her head resting on her arms. The only light came from the cracks around the steel door, which did not have a keyhole on the inside. Her wrists were bound by manacles, a twenty-four-centimeter chain between them, and another, longer one, attached to the ring in the wall over her shoulder. She had gone through the worst of the terror at her situation, and it had subsided to a cold dread, which at least allowed her to think clearly.

  The Turk had questioned her for a little while, intimidating her, but not hurting her. They still thought she was Veronica, and trusted to the abject fear she would doubtless feel to get the truth out of her. But she hadn’t been able to tell them anything useful, and sooner or later they were going to get impatient. Then they’d start hurting her. Manikin didn’t know what she’d say then.

  The cell was cold and damp, and she shivered, though it might not have been the chill that caused it. FX would be going out of his mind right now. Scope would be a bit more removed, trying to think it out. Had Nimmo come back? Manikin had her doubts. But even if he did, she couldn’t see how any of them could help her now. She had brundleseeds in her body, which meant that Move-Easy had them, even if he couldn’t use them when he took them out of her. If Nimmo had come back, then he and the others had the case, but that wouldn’t be enough. Manikin wasn’t kidding herself. Move-Easy wasn’t about to let her go—and if he found out who she really was, he wasn’t about to let her live.

  Manikin had one desperate play left, but if she blew it, she’d be dead for sure. For even the sliver of a chance of getting out of here, she’d have to time it just right. Her head jerked up as she heard footsteps in the corridor outside. A key turned in the lock, and the expression of fear on her face as the Turk walked in was not as fake as Manikin would have liked.

  “I have more questions,” he said to her, his gold teeth and his eyebrow piercing glinting in the dim light, that light also forming a cold halo reflected off the bald dome of his head. “In particular, I would like to know, please, your relationship with a girl called Manikin, and her rat-runner friends.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Manikin,” she replied automatically.

  “You know her as George, but that is just her play-acting,” he grunted, crouching down so that he could look into her eyes. “She was pretending to be your friend, fooling you to get what we are after. I need to know if she and her friends got this thing, the brundleseed. You can tell me. They will not harm you. They wil
l be dead soon, so there is no need to be afraid of them.”

  No, she should be afraid of him instead. But he didn’t have to say that.

  “How could I know if they have it?” she asked. “I don’t even know who they are.”

  “We cannot know this for sure,” he replied, shrugging. “You must convince me. If you do not, I must convince myself. Believe me when I say that you do not want that.”

  Nimmo heard the ringing tone and felt a tightness in his throat. This was it. Nearly four hours had passed since Manikin had been abducted. It had taken nearly half that time for FX to locate Paul Cronenberg’s phone number. The remaining two hours had been spent waiting for him to switch on his phone. A few seconds after it started ringing, he answered.

  “Cronenberg, you don’t need to know who I am, but I have what you’re looking for, so listen up. I’ve got the cards and one of the brundleseeds too—one that works.”

  There was a pause, no doubt so that the man could wave one or both of his mates over to listen in.

  “So why are you callin’?” he asked in his Northern Irish accent.

  “Because Move-Easy has a friend of ours, and he’s liable to kill her if we don’t get her away from him. We need your help to do that.”

  “Is that right? And whut are yeh offerin’?”

  “You can have the lot, pretty much. We just want to take a couple of the cards for traveling money, and we want out. We’ll leave London—the whole bloody country if we have to. We’re out of our depth and we know it. We just want out. But we’re not leaving without our friend.”

  “And whut? You want us to take dine Move-Easy for you? Yer jokin’, right?”

  “No. We have a way to get in, and get her out. What we need is for a couple of fake coppers to show up at just the right time … just to distract your competitors for a few minutes, so we can get clear. Do that and you can have the cards and the brundleseed.”

  “How do we know you even have the seed?”

  “You don’t. You’ll just have to take the chance.”

  There was another pause—a longer one this time. Then:

  “All right, let’s hear it. Where and when?”

  When Nimmo finished his call, he put the phone’s handset down in its cradle and looked at Tubby Reach, who was regarding him with amusement.

  “Well played,” Reach chuckled, his belly starting a wave of shakes that rose all the way to his soft jowls. “My people are almost done with Scope and FX. You ready for your turn?”

  “No,” Nimmo replied in a tense voice. “To be honest, I’m still not sure I want your bloody surgeons putting me under.”

  “Hey, it was your idea. Don’t you got no faith? I ain’t tried to take one of these seeds off you, ’ave I? And you know I could if I wanted—but your old man saved my life once, so you get special dispensation. Besides, I like what you got goin’ here. You got trust issues, boy. Where’s the love? You’ve known me your whole life.”

  “That’s why I’ve got trust issues.”

  “Ooh, that stings! OK, enough stalling. I’m doin’ this on the house ’cos you’re takin’ on my biggest competitor and I’m happy to sponsor the match. Now, what is it the Yanks say? ‘Get your game face on,’ boy. You gotta get tooled up.”

  Nimmo nodded and took a deep breath.

  “How do you rate our chances, Tubby?”

  “You must be goin’ soft, Nimmo, to be askin’ me questions like that. But since you ask, I’d say it’ll be like throwin’ three hamsters into a pit of hungry dogs. Still … should be good for a laugh, eh?”

  CHAPTER 32

  A BREACH OF TRUST

  WALKING ALONE INTO Ratched Hospital, Scope made her way down into the maze of utility tunnels in the basement level, where she was intercepted by one of the many sentries who wandered around in the guise of porters, security guards or cleaners.

  She was handed a pair of blacked-out contact lenses before being led inside, as if she was a stranger to the Void. Putting the first one into her left eye, she made to put the second one in and dropped it, cursing, and looking around the floor for it.

  “Ah, sod it,” she grumbled. “I’m not using it if it’s dirty anyway.”

  The troll frowned at her and went to take another set from his pocket, but she gave him a pained look and gestured to her right eye.

  “Look, I’m blind in this one, remember? Easy’s made his point—I’m on probation, OK? Come on, let’s go.”

  With her left eye covered, she shouldn’t have been able to see a thing, so she let herself be led as if she was blindfolded. As they walked, she tested the extraordinary zoom lenses of the camera that had grown inside her right eye socket. With perfect clarity, she watched, and recorded, the troll as he tapped in the four-digit access code that unlocked the door to the Void. The numbers 9491. But there was so much more that she could make out in her surroundings. She could tell where she was by the smells around her. She could identify the functions of the rooms they passed, even the kinds of cleaning fluids that had been used to clean them, right down to their chemical make-up, along with anything else she breathed in through her nose.

  As she walked, a read-out appeared in the vision of her right eye, detailing a complete breakdown of her guide’s breath and body odor, his aftershave, deodorant and hair gel. The chemical analyzer that had formed in the roof of her mouth could give her a comprehensive analysis of any concentration of molecules it found in the air. This new digital ‘sense of smell’ made her a human bloodhound—or at least it would, when she learned to use it properly.

  All the corridors into the Void linked up and channeled you through the security checkpoint. She was stopped there, as her body was being scanned, x-rayed. They would be searching for any hidden means of recording information of any kind, any way of transmitting signals. This was where she felt her first real cold dart of fear. If her new implants were going to be spotted, it would be here and now. It took every bit of self-control she had not to tremble as they walked her through the scanners.

  But then she was ushered on, down the echoing corridor. The pungent aroma of cigar smoke was thick in the air of Move-Easy’s audience chamber. Waiting until she was instructed to do so, she took out the single lens and handed it to the troll, who then left the room. Sitting on one of the couches in the sunken area of that 1970s throwback of a room was the orange-skinned villain himself. He stared up at her with those icy, empty eyes of his, through a thin cloud of smoke.

  “My Little Brain,” he said in the tone of a fond but disappointed father, taking the cigar from his lips. “I’ve been worried about’cha. I fink you been led astray, love. Those vermin’ve bin fillin’ your head with strange ideas.”

  “What do you mean?” She frowned, acting a little hurt. “I was just doing the job you sent me out to do. When I heard the Turk had grabbed Veronica, I figured you didn’t need me on it any more, so I came back. And here I am. What did I do wrong?”

  Move-Easy’s face was impossible to read. He took another puff of his cigar and gazed at her some more.

  “What did you do wrong?” he repeated, as if pondering the question. “What did you do wrong? It’s a matter of principle, darlin’. A breach of trust. These vermin ’ave turned out to be wrong ’uns and no mistake, and it seemed to the boys who was watchin’ that you fit right in. I wonder if you’ve forgotten where your loyalties lie. I don’t feel like I can trust you no more.”

  “Funny, that’s what they said about me too. Which is ironic, considering.”

  “Considering what, darlin’?”

  “Considering it was Nimmo who reesed them.”

  Move-Easy sat up a bit straighter, laying his cigar in the ashtray. He clasped his hands together and leaned forward.

  “How so?” he rumbled.

  Scope kept her eyes level, not quite meeting his, but not avoiding his stare either. She had lied to Move-Easy before, but never at the risk of her life. The fear was almost enough to dissuade her from what she had to do ne
xt. But then she lifted her head slightly, and met his eyes. As she did so, the powerful zoom lens on her eye-mounted camera focused tightly on his right iris and took a photo. She would need that soon.

  “He had the box all the time, but he’d kept it hidden. He was Chuck Farley. But we only found out afterwards that he had the brundleseed too. That implant—the one you’re looking for. The one everybody seems to be looking for. He’s done a runner with it. And when he did, Manikin and FX told me to sod off. They didn’t trust me. So I’m getting it from all sides. And Nimmo’s got the cards, and the implant.”

  Easy picked up his cigar again, but didn’t take a drag.

  “This implant—this … brundleseed—you know what it does?”

  She nodded.

  “Reckon you could figure out how it worked?”

  “If I had an unused one—or one that was still working in someone’s body. But they’d have to be alive for me to be able to use it.”

  “And Nimmo has one?”

  “Yes.”

  Easy sat back and took a long, long drag before blowing out a lungful of smoke.

  “You’re back ’ome now, luv, but you’re on detention, you ’ear me? You’re stayin’ in for the next few days. No access codes for the doors, no goin’ outside and no surfin’ the bloody web or phone calls to the outside, you got me?”

  Scope nodded.

  “Good. It’ll be safer for you that way. Things is about to get violent, darlin’. Don’t want you gettin’ caught in the crossfire, now, do we?”

  As soon as she was dismissed, she hurried to her lab. She had almost made it to the door when Tanker came out of his computer room. Dressed in his usual cargo pants, hoodie and a red baseball cap, he looked delighted to see her. Her heart sank—he was the last person she wanted to run into.

  “Scope, hey! Jesus, long time no see. How was life out in the sun?”

  “Blinding,” she replied. “Sorry, Tank, I’ve got a job to do for Easy…”