Rat Runners Read online

  “Hope it uses shorter words than you do,” Nimmo chuckled, gazing around the lab, his eyes taking in the two technicians, who were trying to look engrossed in their work.

  “Don’t act the ignoramus, Nimmo, it doesn’t suit you.”

  “The ignor-what?”

  Scope frowned, increasing the magnification on the microscope she was looking through. The specimen she was peering at was the seed-like object Nimmo had taken from under Brundle’s thumbnail. She had hoped that it would be some unusual seed, something that could be used to narrow down who Brundle’s killer might be. But now, looking at it magnified two hundred and fifty times, she could see that it wasn’t a seed—at least no seed she’d ever come across before. It had a surface like a colander, and she could see that there were more structures inside, but couldn’t make them out. It looked organic, like it had been grown rather than made. There was some kind of marking on it. Turning the knob on the microscope, she increased the magnification.

  What she saw made her lift her head and step back away from the counter in surprise.

  “What’s up?” Nimmo asked.

  “It’s man-made,” she gasped. “It’s got a bloody serial number on it. I think it’s an implant, or an RFID tag.”

  “What?”

  “This thing,” she said, pointing at the microscope. “The seed thing you scraped from under Brundle’s thumbnail. It’s a piece of bio-tech. It’s really advanced. I think it could be some kind of bug. If it is, it had to be planted by Vapor’s people. I can’t tell if it’s transmitting anything, but we’ve both been carrying it around with us—we’ve had it with us almost since the start. If somebody’s reading it …”

  Nimmo took a quick look through the scope’s eyepiece at the slide, then drew the slide from the clips. Taking a piece of tinfoil from his pack, he wrapped the slide up. It looked like a folded piece of chewing-gum wrapper. The foil would hopefully prevent it from sending out or receiving any signals. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  “This can’t change anything,” he said. “Finish what you’re doing. We know we’re being watched. We know these guys are serious operators. This is a race, Scope. We have to figure them out before they crack us.”

  But I’m not in the racing business, she thought. She didn’t like being rushed, and she was definitely wary of going up against people she couldn’t identify, people with frightening power. Whatever that seed thing was, it was more advanced than anything she’d seen before. When you couldn’t even make sense of the technology your enemies were using, you had to ask yourself how far you were willing to go.

  Scope decided she’d go a little further.

  Nimmo left her to it, and she lost track of time as she steered the computers through the DNA analysis and used the lab’s equipment to examine the other forensic samples. Under the microscopes, she had learned nothing new after hours of study. But when the analyzer finally chimed to alert her that it had completed its task, she found herself with an identifiable segment of DNA. One of Reach’s hackers helped her get into WatchWorld’s DNA database, where a profile was kept on almost every adult in the country. It didn’t take long to find a match.

  The man she’d come to think of as Death Metal, because of his tattoos, had a real name—and a face that matched the one she’d seen on the roof of the building in Greenwich. He was Paul Cronenberg, and he had a criminal record. A look at the court records online told her that Cronenberg had been convicted of developing and selling weapons. Bio-tech weapons.

  Scope shivered slightly as she thought of the seed thing Nimmo now had in his jacket pocket.

  CHAPTER 22

  A FRIEND SHE HASN’T MET

  VERONICA BRUNDLE OFTEN spent Friday nights at her dad’s because she liked to hit one of the clubs in town, and her mother took a dim view of her staying out late in general, and underage drinking in particular. Her father’s views weren’t quite as firm, though he wasn’t above giving her the odd lecture on drinking responsibly. And she’d be guaranteed a few sharp words if she showed up at his place looking as if she’d spent several hours on a wildly spinning fairground ride—an appearance that came over her from time to time. But she was his little girl, and he never stayed mad at her for long.

  There’d be no more lectures now; no more sleepovers at Dad’s. Veronica Brundle was out for a night on the town, underage, overwhelmed by grief, itching to cut loose. She’d deal with her mother’s outrage when she got home.

  Club Vega was situated in a basement in Soho, under a building that housed a number of solicitors’ offices. The narrow lane that led past it was a throughway between streets of all-night internet cafés, late-night pubs and dodgy nightclubs. Its sleaziness gave it an air of cool for the students who hung out there, flashing fake IDs that matched their carefully casual faces.

  By 11 p.m. there was already a queue to get in, the smartly dressed young things chatting and flirting, hemmed in along the wall by a row of brass poles threaded with a red rope.

  Manikin stood on the other side of the laneway, making no attempt to keep her eyes on Veronica, who stood about halfway up the queue. The girl had changed her appearance since the photos they had on file had been taken. Her hair was longer, and had streaks of a coppery orange running through it.

  Manikin was tucked into the shadow of a doorway of a small feminist bookshop, talking into her mobile phone as if having a girlie conversation with a friend. She was a blonde again, but with multi-colored hair wraps giving her an Aussie backpacker look. Her black denim jacket, purple punk T-shirt with a peeling image, short black skirt and black tights all contrasted with a wide, studded pink belt that loosely encircled her waist. The pink Doc Martens she wore had a funky look she loved, but they were also comfortable enough for running. She was going to need them. This had to look convincing; FX was fast on his feet for a little nerd.

  There was a white Ford Transit van a little way up the laneway to her right. She recognized it from a clip of video that FX had shown her. There were two men sitting in the darkness of the cab.

  Manikin’s ‘friend’ on the phone was Scope, who was talking to her via a secure line FX had set up over the web. Actually, Scope was doing very little talking, as most of what Manikin was saying was teenage gibberish:

  “And then she was just, so, like, OH MY GOD!” Manikin gasped in a voice of utter disbelief. And he was going, y’know, like, what-EVER, and all that. So then they broke up!”

  “Fascinating,” Scope cut in. “You’ll have to fill me in on the rest of that some other time. FX is all set to go. The cameras in the street are down, and there’s no peepers for four blocks in any direction. This is our chance. How’s our girl?”

  “She’s just, like, SO ready for it,” Manikin said, in the same gushing voice as before. “Four meters from the front of the queue—next to a girl with purple hair and silver boots. The bag’s hanging off her right arm, just inside the rope. Our guys in the van haven’t moved. Let’s do it.”

  “OK, he’s off,” Scope informed her.

  Scope was back in Brill Alley, coordinating things. The rest of them were out here on the street. FX appeared from around the back of the white van. Manikin knew he had just placed a device of his own design on the van’s back doors. He had a baseball cap low over his eyes and a pair of big square-framed glasses on that distorted the shape of his face. He had wanted to wear a mustache or goatee, but Manikin had convinced him he’d look ridiculous, on account of him being a baby-faced short-arse. Walking down the lane with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he made his way towards the queue of teenagers.

  “Here he comes,” Manikin said into her phone, pulling out a hands-free earpiece from her pocket and fitting it into her ear.

  The phone went into her pocket, and she started across the lane as if to join the queue for the nightclub. FX passed in front of her, from left to right, walking down the length of the queue towards the door of the club.

  Two things happened almost at once. First, al
l the doors of the white van locked and its alarm started going off. The crowd in the queue turned and started to point and laugh as Krieger and his mate found themselves unable to get out, and unable to switch off the alarm. At the same time, FX was walking past Veronica. Moments after the alarm went off, he seized her red leather handbag and broke into a run, sprinting away down the laneway. He’d had his leg stamped on earlier that day, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down now.

  “Oi, you little fart!” Manikin roared, and set off after him.

  Veronica tried to follow, but high heels on a cobbled road soon brought her to a frustrated, stumbling halt. Two young guys took off to try and catch the thief, egged on by others in the queue.

  “We’ve got a couple o’ heroes,” Manikin said into her earpiece, her legs pumping to keep up with FX.

  “Nimmo’s on it,” Scope told her.

  FX darted around a corner, and then another, racing down an alley with Manikin close on his heels. At another corner, they passed Nimmo, who was standing at the back door to a restaurant, among some wheelie bins. As soon as they’d gone past, he grabbed one of the bins and pulled it out into the alleyway. The two would-be heroes came around the corner at full tilt, and ran crashing into Nimmo and his bin. Three bodies and the large plastic container tumbled and sprawled over the cobbles.

  Manikin cast a quick look back, hearing Nimmo bawling abuse at the two unfortunates, demanding to know what they were doing flouncin’ around like a pair of chimps on a bouncy castle at this hour of the night.

  FX’s flight took him into the rat-runs, away from the cameras and sensors of WatchWorld and all the other businesses that fed into the network. He bounded up onto the back of a street bench and leaped over a wrought-iron fence into a small park. In the shadow of some bushes, he emptied the contents of the handbag over the ground. Manikin arrived a few seconds later. They were both breathing hard. Their route had been chosen carefully, but there was no telling how much time they had before a Safe-Guard wandered into the area.

  Manikin examined the stuff from the bag, sorting through the scattering of mundane things every girl carried around with her. The only unusual things were a copy of Orwell’s Animal Farm—the one with the mad illustrations by Ralph Steadman—and a set of keys adorned with the most key rings Manikin had ever seen in one bunch.

  FX used a small blade to cut a couple of stitches in the seam at the bottom of the bag. He inserted a disc no bigger than the nail of his little finger, then sealed the tiny hole with a bead of superglue. Manikin handed him the SIM card from Veronica’s phone and he slipped it into a scanner attached to his own phone. Having cloned its number and downloaded its files, he handed it back, along with another tiny disc. Manikin fitted both back into the phone. A third bug was quickly concealed in the lining of Veronica’s wallet, and a fourth under the photo of her and her dad in a plastic fob on her key ring.

  “OK, get out of here,” Manikin whispered, gathering everything back into the bag. “Time for me to get into character.”

  “Break a leg,” he replied, and then he was gone.

  “Won’t go that far,” she said, reaching up to tear the collar of her T-shirt, and rip a small hole in her tights over her left thigh. “But I do want to look the part.”

  A quick application of some make-up made her look as if the corner of her mouth was slightly swollen. She could have got FX to give her a real split lip—he’d done it a few times before, not always with her permission—but there was no need. To an amateur like Veronica, in the atmospheric lights of a nightclub, Manikin would look every bit the conquering hero.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE POST-MUGGER LOOK

  VERONICA AND HER friends were still standing outside the nightclub, discussing what had happened with expressions of shock and excitement. The bouncers, who had shown no sign of chasing after the thief, were still chivalrous enough to let the girls have some time out of the queue to wait and see if the pursuers had any success. When the two guys came back, the girls groaned their disappointment, but applauded the lads for having a go. Veronica was quite upset—an early state of drunkenness making her all the more dramatic. Her face had gone pale beneath her make-up, contrasting with the purple-red birthmark down the left side of her face. She wanted to give up on the night and go home, but her friends were all trying to persuade her to come on into the club.

  Then Manikin showed up with a tired, triumphant smile on her face, holding the handbag in the air for the whole crowd to see. There was a chorus of cheers and whistles.

  “Oh my God!” Veronica gasped, gratefully taking back her bag. “You did it! You absolute star! Honey, whoever you are, I owe you, big time! I’m Veronica, but everyone calls me Nica. Who the hell are you?”

  “Georgina—but I bloody hate the name. Call me George,” Manikin replied. “It was no problem. The little weasel threw a hissy fit when I caught him, but he was more scared of getting caught on camera than anything else. He took off when I started shouting for help. No big deal.”

  “No big deal, she says,” Nica scoffed as she exchanged looks with her friends and tugged on Manikin’s torn collar. “Well, you’re my knight in shining Docs, George.”

  High on the excitement, they were all hugging Manikin and whooping like a team that had just scored the winning goal. Then, turning to the bouncers standing at the door, Nica announced:

  “She’s with us. And I’m paying her admission.”

  The club was already nearly full with bodies, hot and stuffy and pounding the customers’ brains with drum and bass that Manikin could feel in her bones. She heard a voice just over the music, but couldn’t hear what it was saying. Turning, she found Nica pointing at her leg.

  “Hey, your tights are torn!” the girl shouted in her ear, offering a bottle of beer.

  Manikin looked down at the hole in the fabric covering her left thigh. Taking the bottle that Nica was handing to her, Manikin put it to her mouth. She acted as if she was taking a long slug of it, but took hardly any at all. She rarely drank and anyway, she’d need her head straight for this job. Then she handed back the drink for a minute, reached down, tore a few more holes in her tights, and took back the bottle.

  “Cool!” Nica laughed. “Makin’ a fashion statement, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s the post-mugger look!” Manikin responded, clinking her bottle against Veronica’s. “Let’s make a toast to our useless bloody police!”

  Nica’s face fell suddenly, and there was pain in her eyes. Manikin wondered if she’d pushed it too far—the girl had to be angry that the authorities weren’t investigating her dad’s death. But Manikin felt a shiver of guilt at reminding Nica why she was trying to cut loose tonight.

  “Yeah.” Nica nodded, as she said in a colder, harder voice: “I’ll drink to that. Here’s to the fuzz!”

  Despite the noise, other people heard her and laughed, raising their drinks and joining in the toast.

  “To the fuzz!” they roared.

  Manikin was concerned now that she’d spoiled Nica’s mood, but the girl seemed all the more intent on partying. Manikin joined in for all she was worth, surreptitiously letting drink spill from her bottle when anyone wasn’t watching. The gang welcomed her into their circle, and she played her part just right: a girl out for a good time, without looking like she badly needed friends. As the night passed, she found herself liking Nica and her mates, part of her envying their normal lives. But then she would see a troubled shadow cross Nica’s face and think of the girl’s father, and Manikin would remind herself that there was no such thing as normal. Every now and again, the hair that covered the left side of Nica’s face would slip to one side and she would self-consciously put her hand to her face, brushing the hair forward to hide her birthmark as best she could.

  Manikin knew Nimmo would be in here somewhere now, and her eyes occasionally looked around for him—and for any other watchers. But she didn’t spot anything until a remix of an old seventies hit came over the speakers, and an
Oriental man strutted out of the crowd onto the dance floor. He was dressed in a white suit, complete with waistcoat, and a black shirt and shoes. Christ, she thought—it’s Coda. Shorter than most of the men around him, he still grabbed everyone’s attention as he took over the center of the grid of lit squares that made up the dance floor.

  Then he started to move.

  The girls in the room hollered and whistled their appreciation as Coda twisted, flowed and rippled across the floor, each dance step executed with perfect coordination and grace. Within the first twenty seconds, eight girls had joined him, and he allowed them to gather around him, like a lead performer on a stage surrounded by chorus girls. Manikin found herself staring at the spectacle with her mouth open. Coda met her eyes every time he turned in her direction, the arrogant smile on his face contrasting with his stone-cold gaze.

  He pirouetted his way across the floor to her, and before she could react, he had taken her hand, pulling her out through his chorus line, some of whom threw jealous stares her way. Behind her, Nica and her mates cheered her on.

  Manikin considered herself an accomplished dancer, but Coda had to tone down his moves so that she could keep up. She felt the steel-like strength in his fingers when he touched her, the power and agility of a panther in his gyrating body.

  “You’re taking too long,” he said to her, pressing him to her as they took a sliding walk across the floor. At first she thought he meant her dancing, but then he went on: “Mister Easy shouldn’t have to involve me in this, but he’s not seeing any results. He’s getting impatient.”

  “It’s only been two days,” Manikin retorted. “He gave us three. He didn’t hire us for a smash-and-grab job.”

  “You can have until Sunday,” Coda snapped at her. “Don’t forget you’ve got a debt to pay off. If you don’t find that box, he’ll have to find other ways of getting his money out of you.”

  He grasped the little finger of her left hand, folding the digit in on itself so hard into his own fingers he began to crush the joints. She twisted sharply in his arms, trying to escape the agonizing grip. With a flick of his hand, her arm locked out straight, pain shooting from her hand to her shoulder, causing her to gasp as he whirled her away from him like a whip. Coda spun her around and dropped her back into her seat beside Nica. She gritted her teeth and rubbed her aching finger, flexing her arm as he danced away from her. Then he turned to stride off the floor as the tune changed to a heavier, broodier number.