Rat Runners Page 14

  “Things are getting complicated,” Manikin said, sipping her coffee. “We could do with a round-up of the week’s news. Here’s how I see it:

  “We’re looking for a box that contains ten blank cards—credit cards of some kind. We know the box was in the possession of Watson Brundle. We don’t know what the value of the cards might be, but Move-Easy’s dead keen to get his hands on them, so they’ve gotta be worth a bomb. Based on what FX and Scope picked up when they were out, we think Brundle did a dodgy job for someone powerful—who we’re calling Vapor—and the cards were Brundle’s payment, or part of it.”

  “Whoever this Vapor guy is, he’s a pretty serious customer,” Scope took up the narrative. “Like, scary serious. Frank Krieger had WatchWorld gear on him when Nimmo flattened him. He’s a well-known ex-con—he couldn’t have been a real WatchWorld operative, but Vapor somehow has the means to equip him as one.”

  “Everything we know about Brundle suggests he didn’t normally mix with villains,” Nimmo put in. “We don’t know what this job was, but Scope reckons it centers around the repair of scar tissue using some kind of implant. If her theory is right, Brundle could have come up with a way to…to program the growth of new skin—technology that would be worth an absolute fortune. We do know that Brundle was mugged a couple of weeks ago, and his case was stolen. If it was one of Move-Easy’s trolls, it could explain how a street-level villain like Easy found out about Brundle’s work.”

  “We can’t be sure of that yet,” Scope cut in. “But we know Brundle’s behavior changed after the mugging. If Easy figured out what Brundle was working on, right there on Easy’s territory, there’s no way he’d miss out on grabbing a cut of that kind of money.”

  “And once Move-Easy took an interest,” Nimmo added, “Brundle had a big problem. On one hand, he had Move-Easy demanding a piece of the profits, or maybe even wanting to take the whole thing over himself. On the other, Brundle has to satisfy this mysterious Vapor guy, who’s possibly even more dangerous than Easy. So what happened? Did Brundle try and screw one of them over and get himself killed? And if we assume that the box of credit cards was his fee from the client, does that mean Brundle finished the job?”

  “We know Vapor’s lot have Brundle’s daughter under surveillance,” Manikin said. “Maybe they’re looking for the box too. They could also be looking for whatever Brundle was working on. Maybe Brundle never handed it over. Or maybe he did, and Vapor’s guys are just getting rid of loose ends to keep it all a secret.”

  “Whatever that secret is,” Scope concluded helpfully.

  “Still too many questions,” Nimmo said, pressing his fingertips against the cold glass containing his iced water.

  “But it all really comes back to just one question,” Manikin reminded them. “Where’s the box? My money’s on the daughter, but I’d still like to know where that kid went—the one who lived on the same floor as Brundle.”

  Nimmo turned to watch through the window as a half-naked man with nipple piercings hung an Oxford English Dictionary from each ring. Beyond the braster, Nimmo could see the black man with the goatee leaning against a lamppost on the far side of the street, not looking at the café.

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up,” he murmured. “It’s a big city, but it’s hard to stay lost in it for long.”

  CHAPTER 20

  CLOCK’S TICKIN’

  AFTER THEY’D STAYED in the café for over an hour, the three rat-runners decided to split up, to divide the men who were shadowing them. Manikin had to go and check out the nightclub and its surrounding streets, so she headed out first, turning left outside the café. Nimmo and Scope exited a few minutes later, turning right towards Victoria Station.

  Once inside the station, Nimmo led Scope to an elevator, timing it so that they could get in alone. He pressed the button for the lowest floor, then, after the doors had slid closed, pressed the button for closing the doors three times, and then another three times. The elevator began to descend. It did not stop at the lowest floor, continuing on down another few meters.

  “Move-Easy has one of these,” Scope commented. “But only he and a few of his closest guys are allowed to use it.”

  “Reach has two, but he only ever uses the other one,” Nimmo replied. “It’s a cargo elevator. He wouldn’t fit through this door. Listen, Scope, Tubby should be OK about us buying some time in his lab, but let me do the talking once we’re inside, OK? Only answer a question if he or one of his brothers ask you directly. And try and stay out of the way of Gort—he’s the one with the implants, and he’s not as … polite as his brother.”

  The elevator doors opened into the corridor that led to the same well-appointed waiting room that Nimmo had so recently visited through. He and Scope passed the small group of people waiting for an audience with the King of the Getters. A ferret- faced woman with small black eyes and bright-red nail varnish sat in one of the chairs, reading a magazine filled with real-life drama. Nimmo drew in a breath, raising his left hand up as if to scratch the side of his head, hiding his face from the woman, as he walked past.

  “That’s Amelia Caper,” he murmured to Scope, as he opened the door and closed it behind them. “She owns the apartment on the floor below Brundle’s lab. What the hell’s she doing here?”

  “Maybe she’s here to sell him a box of blank credit cards,” Scope suggested.

  “More likely chasing down the latest gossip in gangsterland.”

  Nimmo gave her a faint grin, as they were met by one of the women who acted as Reach’s hosts. The pair of rat-runners were let into Reach’s inner chamber, which still pulsed with music, its multi-level floor space and couched booths lit like an exclusive members’ club. Tubby Reach greeted them warmly and exchanged a few civil words with Scope, his perceptive eyes reading much more from her appearance than she was giving him in words. Nimmo explained what they needed—without saying what for—and was surprised when Reach agreed without fixing a price.

  Reach gestured to his youngest brother, and Gort stepped forward and gently took Scope’s arm, leading her out of the room. Her eyes were looking back anxiously at Nimmo as she went through the door, but he nodded reassuringly to her.

  “We would seem to have a problem in common,” Reach said to Nimmo, as his brother and Scope left. “Namely, that tangerine psycho, Move- Easy.”

  Nimmo didn’t reply at first. He was immediately suspicious. He hadn’t told Reach that he was working for Easy, and if Reach was having him watched, Nimmo wasn’t happy about it. He’d be even more unhappy that he hadn’t spotted the watchers.

  “Don’t go all chilly on me.” Reach held up his fat hands. “It’s not you I was watchin’—it was this numpty.”

  The obese Asian crime boss had a screen built into his desk, and he tilted it to show Nimmo. A piece of video was playing on it. An operating theater being ransacked by three men and a woman, all wearing balaclavas. Reach froze the clip and pointed at one of the men, who was little more than a boy, hardly older than Nimmo. The idiot had lifted his balaclava to wipe sweat off his face, and had been caught by the hidden camera.

  “His name’s Punkin,” Nimmo said. “That’s about how dumb he is.”

  “I know,” Reach grunted. “The girl must be his piece o’ skirt, Bunny. And we’ve since found out those trolls he’s with are from Move-Easy’s gang. Me an’ Easy normally keep out of each other’s way in the interests of avoidin’ costly violence, but that’s Punkin an’ Co. knocking over one of my clinics, the one I told you about the other day. What you ain’t seein’ is Coda—you know Coda, right? He showed up just long enough to take three of my lads apart—one’s dead, one’s brain-damaged and one’s got a bullet hole through his leg. Anyway, this little gang of trolls relieved my staff of a large wodge of my cash, and a batch of the latest implants from Axis Health Solutions—real state-of-the-art stuff.

  “We got one new lot in that can change your eye color, even make ’em glow in the dark. People love that crap. Looks right
spooky on the street screens. Got another kind too that can give you a false tan at the press of a button. Can make a white man black, just can’t do it the other way. It’d work fine on your pale arse. You could do with a bit o’ color.”

  “Maybe that’s what Move-Easy was after,” Nimmo said. “Sort out his skin problems.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Me, I’m just waitin’ on one that’ll turn you thin.”

  “Nah.” Nimmo shook his head. “You just need one that’ll make you give up your mum’s cooking.”

  Reach laughed. “That kind o’ science don’t exist!”

  “So how did you get these Axis implants? You steal ’em?”

  “Not me personally, y’understand. I just happened to know some boys who hijacked a van takin’ ’em from the lab to the airport.”

  “And now somebody’s stolen them from you.”

  “Right, some people got no respect, y’know? Anyway, it was this Punkin who led the raid. Took my fellas a few hours to find the little monkey, and we’ve been watchin’ him ever since. Move-Easy should know better than to knock over one of my operations—neither of us wants a turf war—but maybe he didn’t know. Doesn’t matter now. What matters is that I get my stuff back, or I get back at him—preferably both.

  “A couple of my girls were following Punkin when he and Bunny ran into you and that one, Manikin, who you were with that time. You done ’em up nicely, I hear.”

  “That was nothing,” Nimmo said uneasily. “Those two gombeens were trying their luck, that’s all. I’m doing a job for Move-Easy, I don’t have any trouble with him.”

  “No, Nimmo,” Reach told him. “If you were all peachy with that Cockney Oompa-Loompa, he wouldn’t have Coda shadowing you.”

  Nimmo felt cold air against his skin. “What? What are you talking about? I haven’t seen any sign of Coda.”

  “That’s ’cos he don’t want you to see him, boy. Guy’s unnatural, Nimmo. Killed a man with a light bulb once—just for laughs. Move-Easy don’t let that dog off its leash unless he’s intendin’ to use it, you get me?”

  Nimmo avoided Reach’s gaze, staring at the wall behind the fat man, but he nodded in agreement.

  “Whatever you’re into, it’s high stakes,” Reach said. “I know there’s four of you rat-runners mixed up in it, that Easy has you lookin’ for something, and that you’re up against WatchWorld…or somebody who’s in with WatchWorld. And it’s got something to do with a dead man named Watson Brundle. You’re out of your depth, Nimmo.” Tubby Reach leaned as far forward as his massive torso would allow, his expensive green silk shirt failing to hide the way his man-boobs created folds over his blubbery belly. His eyes were hard and eager. “But if you’ve got a line on something Move-Easy wants this badly, then I want it too—so let’s us do some business.”

  Right, like there aren’t enough villains involved already, Nimmo mused.

  “Let me get back to you on that,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, don’t take too long,” Reach warned him. “Coda’s got his eyes on you, boy. Clock’s tickin’.”

  CHAPTER 21

  GETTING TECHNICAL

  TUBBY REACH HAD a lab setup that put Scope’s to shame. She struggled to contain her excitement as she explored the five rooms that made up the lab complex, looking around at the stereomicroscopes, the electron microscope and the thermal cycler. He had a gas chromatograph—and a mass spectrometer! His hackers also had a line into the WatchWorld DNA database. After Gort had made it clear to the two lab technicians that they were at her disposal, they offered to do the DNA work for her, but she wasn’t about to leave it to someone she didn’t know. From the looks on the faces of the man and woman, both in their forties, she could tell that they had their doubts. But Scope was used to that. This wasn’t the kind of gear you’d normally let a kid anywhere near. But then, there weren’t many kids like her.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” Gort asked.

  Scope didn’t reply as she sat down at the control console for the thermal cycler, took Nimmo’s bags of samples from her backpack and laid them on the counter beside her. She took a sealed pack of small plastic vials from her bag—not trusting theirs to be clean enough—and began dealing out the samples. These included the blood and skin she had scraped from under her own fingernails after scratching the guy who had chased her and FX onto the scaffolding.

  In the last few years DNA analysis had become almost entirely automated so, using their equipment, she could run all the tests herself in a matter of hours. It took a couple of minutes to sort the samples in their test tubes. Each sample would then have to be replicated in the thermal cycler before the tests could be run in the analyzer. She programmed in the instructions and got the machine running. In the meantime, she took some of the other forensic samples over to the bank of microscopes to take a closer look at them.

  “Mind if I take a peek?” Gort said, still hanging like a nightclub bouncer at her shoulder.

  Scope did mind, but didn’t want to offend him, fearing that he’d throw her out. She had heard enough about Gort, from listening to talk in Move-Easy’s Void, to know he wasn’t naturally curious about science. She also knew something about his array of implants. He had a plastic eye in his left socket, fitted with a camera, put there after his real eye had been damaged in a fight. Scope self-consciously put her fingers up to her own blind right eye. She didn’t know what that camera could pick up, or what it might be recording. His closeness scared her too. She could smell the curry on his breath, his aftershave and the expensive soap he had used on his hands. Too close. No matter how much time she spent around violent people, no matter how well she thought she understood how their minds worked, she never got over the niggling fear that she would do or say something to set them off.

  “So what you doing anyway?” he tried again.

  Scope had picked up some glass slides, and now paused, wondering about the best way to get rid of him. Describing her work tended to do it for most people.

  “Well, first the machine over there uses a polymerase chain reaction to amplify the DNA samples thousands of times over,” she explained, speaking in a quick, breathless voice. “The fragments of DNA will then be separated and detected using electrophoresis. While that’s going on, I’m going to put this trace evidence on a slide and stain it, dividing out the histologic specimens from the rest, in order to examine them for contaminants, toxins, et cetera. I’ll then identify, categorize and determine the source of the remaining trace evidence, and see where it takes me.”

  She saw the two lab techs turning away, trying to hide their smiles. Gort noticed too.

  “You bein’ funny?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have a sense of humor that I’m aware of,” she replied, looking up at him with big innocent eyes.

  “Sounds like you don’t think I’d understand this stuff,” Gort said.

  “What stuff?” “You know … science stuff. Forensics and all that.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “You will, sweetheart. Someday, everybody’s going to know my name.”

  Bit of a stupid ambition for a criminal, Scope thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.

  “They’ll write books about me,” Gort went on, running his hand through his hair. “Tubby’s a good manager, but I got flair. It’s not enough to make the money if you want to be big these days. You gotta cut a dash—be a bit of a showman, you know what I mean?”

  “Absolutely,” Scope responded, trying to turn her attention back to her work.

  He leaned his face in close to hers, his chin nearly touching her shoulder. She felt in her left trouser pocket for her inhaler—the one that contained the sneezing gas. His large hand closed around her pocket, gripping it like a vice, trapping her hand. She was close enough to tell the difference between his plastic eye and the real one. The real one was ever so slightly bloodshot.

  “You work for Move-Easy, don’tcha
?” he said softly. “Don’t deny it. You may not know much about me, but we weren’t going to let you in here without checking you out. You’re the one who makes the fake evidence for him—you help him blackmail people. And now you’re here, in our place. Nimmo’s taking a bit of a chance with you, isn’t he? What’s your little pack of vermin up to then?”

  “That’s not how we treat our guests, Gort.” Tubby Reach’s voice cut across them. His huge form filled the doorway, looming over Nimmo, who was standing just inside. Reach dismissed his brother with a sideways tilt of the head. Gort gave a smirk and a shrug of his shoulders, as if he and Scope had been caught sharing a guilty joke. Reach stood aside to let him leave, and then turned to Scope. “I trust you have everything you need?” he asked. “How are you getting on?”

  “Well, first the machine over there uses a polymerase chain reaction to amplify the DNA samples thousands of times over,” she explained. “The fragments of DNA will then be separated and detected using electrophoresis. While that’s going on, I’m going to put this trace evidence on a slide and stain it, dividing out the histologic specimens from the rest, in order to examine them for contaminants, toxins—”

  “I’ve no idea what all that means.” Reach held up his hands, turning to leave. “But it sounds great. Carry on.”

  He barely fitted through the doorway, and Scope could still hear his wheezing breathing as he trudged heavily down the corridor, but she had the definite impression that Reach’s mind was infinitely more agile than his body. She suspected that nothing she could say would baffle him. Scope returned her attention to the slides she had started to prepare. Nimmo leaned back against a countertop and watched for a few minutes as she worked.

  “Think you’ll be finished before we have to do this thing tonight?” he asked.

  “Hard to know,” she muttered. “You never know what this stuff is going to say, once it starts talking to you.”