Rat Runners (16 page)

“That’s gotta be it,” Scope said.

“What’s the stuff called again?” FX asked.

“Garnet,” she replied. “It’s often used to replace silica sand in sandblasting operations. Fewer health risks for the guys using it. But it still makes a mess. Even with the plastic sheeting, bits of it are going to get everywhere. This has got to be the place.”

FX nodded. He was still disappointed that he hadn’t solved this himself, but there was no denying that she’d cracked it when he couldn’t.

The phone Nimmo had taken from Frank Krieger had divulged only three phone numbers. There were no names listed. FX had found the service providers for all three numbers, and pulled the records. The positions of the phones had only been recorded intermittently across London—obviously these guys were careful, and pulled the batteries when they didn’t want to make calls. But all three phones had been used in this part of the city a number of times, on the Greenwich docks, not far from the Blackwall Tunnel. That was as close as he could get to finding a specific location. When he had hacked into the city’s camera network—the privately owned ones, not the WatchWorld installations—he had been able to follow the van carrying Krieger and his partner back to this area, but then they had disappeared. That had been
damned
odd, until FX discovered that camera feeds had been interfered with. There was a hacker working ahead of him, covering the tracks of the van. Any footage showing the van once it entered Greenwich had been edited out. FX found that a little bit scary. Impressive, but scary. These guys were
really
good.

Scope had found him sitting at his desk, staring at the phone. He had entertained such high hopes that it would provide answers. Instead, all he had were more questions. It was Scope who had thought to examine the phone itself. She had discovered a distinctive kind of dust in the grooves and buttons. Just looking at the phone, the stuff had been barely detectable to the human eye, but once wiped off and enlarged under the microscope, she had been able to identify it.

“Garnet,” FX said softly.

Alluvial garnet grains were used for sandblasting the exteriors of buildings, removing the stains left by pollution. FX had checked the street cameras. There was only one building in that area undergoing sandblasting. As luck would have it, they had arrived just in time to see Krieger and his partner driving away down the alley in their van.

“So what now?” Scope asked.

“We take a closer look,” FX responded.

“Carefully. Really, really carefully.”

“What about Nimmo and Manikin? This is more their bag, don’t you think? Want to call them in?”

“Do you?”

Scope shook her head. She was tired of being stuck inside all the time.

“Right,” FX said tightly. “Then let’s go.”

Manikin and Nimmo had both been out when Scope had made her discovery, so she and FX had taken this bit of reconnaissance upon themselves. Following the rat-runs through the city, they had found their way here to this condemned apartment block overlooking their target. From the sides of the building that had no scaffolding, they could see that the windows of the first three floors were barred, but the floors above were less secure. FX was confident he could get in on the fourth floor. A two-and-a-half-meter-high hoarding surrounded the base of the scaffold, the top half of the boards coated with greasy red anti-climb paint. He and Scope would have to get over those boards to reach the scaffold. There was no easy way of grabbing hold of the scaffolding bars, since they were covered by the taut plastic sheeting. The plastic was filthy, nearly impossible to see through, but there was a rip in the sheeting at the level of the second floor, above the hoarding. It was small, but big enough for an agile twelve- or thirteen-year-old to push through.

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 for 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.