Rat Runners Read online

  The alley was about seven or eight meters wide, lined with the rear entrances of a row of cafés and other small businesses. Outside those doors were wheelie bins, and it was bin day. FX had checked.

  “Here it comes,” Scope muttered.

  A garbage truck was slowly making its way down the alley, the bin men pulling two wheelie bins out at a time, hooking them onto the arms on the back of the truck. From there, they were lifted up and their contents emptied into the clanking vehicle. The two rat-runners turned and bounded through the broken window behind them into a kitchen that had long ago been gutted of its cupboards and appliances, then into the corridor beyond and down ten flights of stairs. They had found the room that suited their needs earlier. It didn’t have a balcony, but one of the large windows was unlocked and could be opened right out. The garbage truck was almost beneath them as they reached it.

  “Ladies first,” Scope exclaimed, hopping onto the windowsill.

  She poked her head out, gauged the distance, judging it to be about two meters. Checking to see that neither of the bin men were looking up, she leaped out onto the roof of the passing truck. The sound of her feet hitting the steel roof was drowned out by the noise of the hydraulic arms dumping two more bins into the truck’s innards. FX followed a moment later. The next jump would be harder. The torn hole in the plastic sheeting was just out of reach, so they’d have to jump up as well as out.

  “My turn,” FX told her.

  The truck set off just as he stood up to make his move. It was a bigger leap—nearly two and a half meters—and he was jerked sideways as he jumped. He thrust his hands through the hole, dropping them to catch the ledger—the horizontal bar running behind the sheeting. In one motion, he lunged up and through the gap, his body and small backpack just fitting without getting caught in the dust-covered plastic. He tucked into a roll, expecting to land on the boards that should have formed a floor beyond the ledger…but found himself falling into thin air instead. It was only his grip on the bar with his right hand that kept him from hitting the ground seven meters below. With a gasp, he got his other hand up to the bar, his feet dangling until he could brace them against the vertical bars known as standards.

  Scope had been even more rushed in her jump, and there was shouting as she was spotted by the bin men. Like FX, she came headfirst through the rip in the plastic, but unlike him, she let go of the ledger before she realized there was no floor. She let out a panicked cry, her hands flailing, and FX just managed to catch her wrist as she fell past him. Her hand closed around his wrist in reflex, and his arm was nearly wrenched from its socket as he stopped her fall. She swung over onto the ledger below him, letting go of his hand, and hung there, breathing hard.

  “Thanks,” she panted.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  There were boards further along at FX’s level, and Scope climbed up to join him as he scrambled over to them.

  “Bloody vermin!” one of the bin men called from below. “You’ll get yourselves killed, you fools! Why aren’t you in school?”

  But the garbage collectors left it at that. They saw plenty of rat-runners on their rounds, and knew they were the kind of trouble that was best ignored.

  There was dust everywhere inside the scaffolding frame, the boards and plastic covered in it, spoiling the look of the freshly scoured walls. FX rubbed his hands; the palms were grazed from the rough, dried splashes of cement that coated the steel bars. There were ladders up through the scaffolding to the fourth floor, where the windows weren’t barred. He and Scope scaled the ladders in no time, and on the fourth-floor boards, FX found a window he knew he could open.

  Double-glazing was extremely difficult to break; it was easier to lever out the frame. Neither FX nor Scope carried a crowbar, however; a good way of inviting the attention of the police was to have a Safe-Guard spot one in your bag—it was hard to hide a steel bar from someone with x-ray vision. Using a crowbar also took a lot of strength, more than most teenage kids could normally bring to bear, and it could be noisy too. But FX had another way.

  Fire services used a piece of hydraulic equipment called a ‘spreader,’ for prizing the pieces of a crashed car apart to get people out. The pincers could crush or spread metal with huge force. FX had made a much smaller, simpler version using a woodwork clamp. He kept it broken down to its component parts, so that it would be less obvious what it was. Some of those parts could also be used for other things.

  Scope watched with interest as he quickly put it together and jammed the flat ends of the pincers in under the window frame. In his bag, he had a builder’s sensor for finding electrical wires in walls. Looking through the glass into the space inside, he examined the frame with his eyes and then with the sensor for any sign of wiring for a burglar alarm, but didn’t see anything. Then he slid a long screwdriver through the hole at the top of the screw to act as a lever.

  “Couldn’t you just use a glass cutter to make a hole in the window pane?” she asked.

  “You mean with a suction cup, like in the films?” he snorted. “Try it. You can make a nice neat circle OK, but you can’t pull the bleedin’ thing out.”

  Gripping the screwdriver at either end with both hands, he twisted the clamp’s screw and the frame was forced open a few millimeters at a time. After several turns, they heard a crack. Together, they got their fingers in under the frame and pulled hard. The latch finally broke completely and the window swung open.

  They climbed inside and found themselves in what would probably end up as some kind of storeroom. There was no door in the doorway, so they moved on out into an office space, and beyond that to a corridor. It seemed that none of the rooms had been fitted with doors yet.

  “That should make looking around a bit easier,” Scope whispered.

  FX nodded, and they set off down the corridor, peering into each room in turn. They weren’t certain what they looking for, but were sure they’d know it if they found it.

  “This could take ages,” Scope said, after they’d checked out a number of rooms. “Let’s think this through. If you were going to get up to something dodgy in an empty building, where would you do it?”

  “Depends what I was doing,” FX replied. “But probably where I’m least likely to be seen or heard—some room with no windows, or with the windows covered, either on the top floor or the basement. And if I’m using computer gear, I’d want to be as far from the sandblasters as possible. Probably the basement, but let’s say we start at the top and work down?”

  She agreed. The elevators were working, but using them would be stupid, so they crept up the stairwell that joined the floors at one end of the building. There were doors sectioning off the stairwell from the corridor on each floor. At the fifth floor, Scope was about to push through the door into the corridor when FX stopped her. He peered through the small square of glass in the door, then ducked his head back.

  “PIR sensor,” he muttered. “And it’s working. They’re not very good at seeing through glass, so I don’t think I triggered it, but there’s no getting in that way. Not without a bit more preparation.”

  “There weren’t any on the floor we came in on,” Scope pointed out. “So what makes this floor so important?”

  “Looking at the layout of this place, I’d say most of the rooms have windows,” FX suggested. “Maybe these guys have been sloppy, and left some uncovered. Why don’t we go up to the roof and find out?”

  The only building directly overlooking the office block was the derelict building they had just come from, and all the other buildings nearby were lower, so the chances of being spotted were slim. FX assured Scope that there were no satellites overhead at that time of day—he had a piece of software that tracked their movements and sent updates to his phone—though he couldn’t be sure about spotter planes or drones. They’d have to take the chance. A door in the corridor led to another that opened onto a flight of stairs that took them up to the flat, painted concrete rooftop. Around them, metal boxes f
or vents and air-conditioning units formed aluminum islands in the cream-colored concrete.

  “How are we going to look in the windows?” Scope asked, wishing she’d brought her keyhole camera.

  But FX had the next best thing. Taking a roll of stiff cable from his bag, he unwound it and attached one end to a small digital camera using a clamp he had designed himself. As with his improvised spreader, the pieces looked innocent enough, but it was how he put them together that made their use suspicious.

  “Let’s start with the side opposite the scaffolding,” he said. “See what we can see.”

  “Right. Don’t be too obvious, OK?”

  He switched the camera to video, then plugged the other end into a small tablet. Nothing came up on the screen. He checked the camera was on, then tapped the screen of the tablet. Scope watched him tap it again. She sighed, putting a hand to her face.

  “Bugger,” he said. “Tablet’s on. We should have the view from the camera. There must be a short in the cable. And the wireless doesn’t work on this camera.”

  “We’re supposed to be professionals here!” Scope said sharply. “Don’t you test your gear before you use it on a job? I thought you were meant to be some hotshot brainiac?”

  “The cable worked fine last time I used it!” FX protested. “There must be a kink in it … a broken connection somewhere.”

  “What—in the wire, or in your brain?”

  “If we didn’t have to keep our phones off here, we could—”

  “Yeah, but we do, don’t we?” Scope cut him off. “Come on, let’s go downstairs and see if we can—”

  FX held up his hand.

  “Look, wait…I can just set it to record, lower it down, then pull it up every few meters and check out what it’s picked up.”

  “We’re not filming hamsters in their burrow here, FX. Given the psycho hit men we could be dealing with, I’d feel better if we weren’t using kit that looks like it was made on Blue Peter!”

  But when it came down to it, Scope didn’t have any better ideas, so she gave up and waved him on. He lowered the camera over the side of the building, until it was hanging just below the top of the fifth-floor window, where it could film what was inside. The cable was rigid enough for him to be able to keep the camera pointed in the right direction, though the breeze caused it to sway from side to side slightly.

  There was nothing for Scope to do for the next few minutes. She walked to another corner of the building and looked down. With a grunt of interest, she went back over to FX and tapped his arm.

  “There’s a window open around this side.”

  FX wound his cable back up and looked at what he had recorded as they crossed the roof to the other end. The rooms he had filmed were empty. Reaching the parapet, he slowly and carefully lowered the phone again, paying out the cable until the camera was just below the top of the open window.

  “Give it a minute or two,” Scope said to him. “No more. We’re pushing our luck as it is.”

  FX nodded and looked at his watch. After a minute and a half had passed, he raised the camera up and stopped it recording, switching it to play. They both gazed at the screen.

  The room that came shakily into view was unlike any of the others they had seen. The camera had been hanging out in the daylight, looking into a darker room, so the light in the picture wasn’t great. They could see tables set around the walls of the room, laid out with portable computer gear. Scope and FX both let out low whistles as they took in the laptops, servers and other pieces of hardware, impressed with what looked like top-end gear. A foldable satellite dish lay on one table, beside a bank of monitors, a selection of cameras and a bunch of other pieces of equipment they couldn’t identify.

  “See that?” FX murmured, pointing at a gun-shaped object with a dish at the end of the short barrel. “Think that’s a long-range parabolic mike.”

  Scope nodded—she’d recognized it. It was a microphone that could pick up sounds from hundreds of meters away. There were wardrobe-sized metal cabinets in the room too. One stood open to show an array of assorted objects mounted on racks, ranging from an umbrella to a pair of boots, a rolled-up newspaper to a briefcase.

  “Not sure what to make of those,” FX grunted.

  But in her time in Move-Easy’s Void, Scope had seen most of these objects used in another context. Seeing them all together like this suggested only one thing to her.

  “Weapons,” she said. “I think they’re all fitted with concealed weapons.”

  Then the camera’s speaker, which up to now had just emitted the papery roar of wind across its mike, gave the hint of another sound. A voice. A man came into view, walking in through a doorway, speaking on a phone. He was a muscular, stocky man with long blond hair tied back in ponytail. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the old death metal band, Absent Conscience, on it. His face was still in shadow, but he had rectangular, black plastic-framed glasses, and the stylized horror tattoos on his arms confirmed his death metal obsession. FX and Scope huddled around the camera’s tiny speaker to try and hear what he was saying.

  “… that’s not whut he sayd,” Death Metal’s voice could just be heard saying over the sound of the wind. His accent was either Scottish or Northern Irish, it was hard to tell. The sound was being broken up by the interference on the mike: “He never sayd she didn’t have it. He just … wuzn’t in hor apartment. Whut? I don’t know … ask him, why don’t yeh? Huh? … moan all yeh like. Vapor paid this numpty, and he wants … give a damn about the cards. We do this … whut I mean? Performance-related bonus an’ all tha t… got tae be worth a hundred gra— … Brundle didn’t come cheap … wants his stuff, and he duzn’t—”

  At that point, the man’s face turned towards the camera. There was still a shadow over his face, but they could feel his eyes staring straight out of the screen, seeming to fix FX and Scope in his gaze. He had spotted the camera. He froze and stopped speaking. Then he spun around and ran for the door.

  “Jesus,” FX swore, looking up.

  They were watching a recording. Death Metal had run from the room nearly a minute before. Which was how he managed to be right there now, just three meters away from them on the roof…with a bloody great hunting knife in his hand.

  Scope dived and rolled, coming to her feet behind him as he lunged forward. The knife came at FX, but he stepped to the side and whipped the cable at the man’s face. It only distracted the man for an instant, but it was enough time for FX to duck under his swinging arm and start running along by the parapet. Scope was just ahead of him, looking back just once to make sure he was with her. FX detached the little camera from the cable and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He heard heavy feet accelerating along the roof behind him.

  Scope reached the side of the building covered in scaffolding—the scaffolding that was entirely encased in tough plastic sheeting. There was no easy way in. She turned and jumped onto the parapet, running full tilt along it, pulling her small multi-tool from her pocket and unfolding the blade. Aiming for one of the open spaces of plastic, free of steel bars, she leaped forward onto it, skidding along it on her backside. She dug the blade in as she slid, cutting a long gash through it behind her. FX was right on her heels, and with one bound, jumped over the parapet and punched feet-first straight down through the hole, tearing it wide open. Scope was now sitting with her feet over the side of the slippery sheeting, and rolled backwards before she could lose her tenuous grip.

  Death Metal had switched his sights from FX to her, and now he was up on the parapet above her as she came up against it. He made to grab her, and she dragged the nails of her left hand down his arm, drawing blood. He snarled, but it hardly slowed him down at all. She scrambled back out onto the plastic, and turned to look at him. Death Metal was glaring down at her, his eyes warily judging the strength of the sheeting, unwilling to put his greater weight on it. It probably wouldn’t even hold her for long if she wasn’t spreading her weight by staying on her hands
and knees.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said in a reasonable voice, motioning her towards him with his empty hand. “You could fall, kill yorself. I’m not going tae hort yeh—I just want tae ask yeh a few questions.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” she replied in a shaky voice, holding up the fingers she’d used to scratch him. “But you’ve got a much bigger knife. And I’ve got everything I need right here.”

  Then she plunged headfirst down through the rent in the plastic. She had a grip on a transom—one of the cross-bars across the top—as she tumbled through, and controlled her fall to touch down neatly on the boards below. As her eyes found FX, she jumped towards him, seeing what he was about to do. Death Metal and his huge knife came crashing down through the plastic, landing heavily on the boards where she had been standing a moment earlier. Then FX yanked one of the boards from the other end, dislodging it. The cement-covered plank fell from under the guy, who lost his footing and let out a shout as he fell, one leg dangling down through the gap.

  Scope and FX slid down the ladder to the next level, but then had to dive aside as a grunt of effort and a rain of dust from above made them look up. FX gasped as dust got in his eyes, but he was already out of the way of a second heavy board as it clattered down. Scope had to throw herself forward and, rolling over, she looked up again to see their pursuer drop straight down through the wider gap in the floor above. Death Metal let out a snort of satisfaction as he landed beside FX, stamping on the boy’s left calf hard enough to make him cry out. Probably just a dead leg—but FX wouldn’t be running anywhere for the next few minutes. Scope was standing under another gap in the boards above her, and she jumped, just as the hunting knife slammed into the boards where her foot had been a moment before. Like a monkey, she scampered up one of the poles hugging the wall of the building, ending up back on the level above, where they’d started.