Rat Runners (20 page)

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.”

“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.

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, all 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.