Rat Runners (28 page)

TROTTING DOWN THE stairs, Manikin planned out her next few moves. There was a utility room at the far end of the corridor on the fourth floor, where she could change disguise and dump the bits she didn’t need. She was already taking off her jacket as she descended, which was how she happened to have it draped over her forearm as she reached the fifth floor and ran right into Frank Krieger. He was wearing a casual brown suit and shirt. Apologizing, he stepped back, reaching for his jacket pocket. Manikin tensed, ready to raise her hands in defense.

“Miss Brundle?” he asked, flipping open a police identity card. “I’m Detective Sergeant Pembry. Something’s come up regarding the circumstances surrounding your father’s death, and we need to ask you a few questions. Would you mind coming with me?”

Manikin hesitated. None of the rat-runners had expected anybody would try anything inside the building—not with the Safe-Guard so close. They weren’t prepared for this.

“Would I mind coming where?” she asked, her mind racing.

“Just down to the station,” he replied in an easy voice. “It won’t take lo—”

She threw her jacket into his face, swung her foot up into his balls, then brought her knee up into his face as he doubled over. Grabbing him by the hair, she pulled his head past her and brought her elbow down between his shoulder blades. Then she kicked off her shoes and bolted for the next flight of stairs, taking them three at a time.

She heard Krieger saying something above her—calling somebody over a radio. Swerving around the turn in the stairs, she made it down to the fourth floor in time to see Hector charging up towards her. She could try getting past him—one on one, she might have a chance—but he only had to hold onto her long enough for Krieger to catch up and they’d have her. And whatever the scrotes intended doing, they obviously weren’t too worried about alerting the bloody peeper.

Changing direction, she sprinted down the corridor. Passing the utility room she had intended to use, she reached the tall sash window at the end of the hallway. Wrenching it open, she looked out. She was four floors up and there was no way down. Manikin pulled the bag from her back and hurled it out.

Four stories below, Nimmo was there to catch it. Seconds later, he was gone, off into the rat-runs. Wonder if we’ll ever see him again, she thought, her face twisting into a scowl. Manikin pivoted, her guard up, ready for a fight, but Hector and Krieger were approaching her cautiously, their eyes flicking between her and the window. They’d seen what she’d done. Breathing hard, she was bitterly aware that these men would have little problem beating a teenage girl. But she was going to make sure they got hurt in the process.

Then she looked past the two men, spotting a figure coming down the stairs beyond them.

“Mrs. Caper!” she called. “Mrs. Caper! Hi!”

The weaselly woman lifted her head and waved hesitantly. Veronica Brundle would not have normally been so eager to get her attention. Manikin walked past Hector and Krieger, not giving them a second glance as they exchanged looks, unsure of what to do. Perhaps they weren’t as willing to take their chances with witnesses, now that they knew she no longer had the case. Manikin joined Mrs. Caper at the stairs.

“Hello, Veronica, love,” Mrs. Caper said, in a friendly but curious voice, regarding the two strangers with interest. No doubt her nose for gossip caught a tantalizing whiff. “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again anytime soon. How are you, my dear?”

“Having a bit of a rough day, to be honest,” Manikin responded. “I was just here to pick up a few of Dad’s things. You know, after the fire. Horrible, seeing the place like that. What do you think happened? Are you on your way out? I’ll walk with you.”

“Of course, my love,” Mrs. Caper said, eyeing the two men one last time, before continuing on down the stairs. “I was just popping out for my magazines. Yes, that fire was a terrible thing. It was a bunch of those rat-runner vermin who set it, you know. Some gang of little thieves. Almost got themselves killed! Fell right down through the ceiling of my kitchen, don’t y’know! I don’t suppose you know if your dad’s insurance is still valid, do you?”

Manikin cast a quick look back at Vapor’s men, before turning to listen to Mrs. Caper’s account of the day the vermin dropped in. Strolling down the stairs into the lobby, they made their way to the front door, with Manikin making all the right noises as she listened to Mrs. Caper rabbit on, and fended off the woman’s attempts to learn more about Veronica’s ‘two friends upstairs.’

Pulling open the doors, they stepped out onto the path. Manikin hooked her arm into Caper’s as they walked past the line of cars parked at the curb, heading towards the shop on the corner of the street.

Manikin had not missed the minivan with the darkened windows that stood at the curb with its engine running. She tensed, ready to turn and run at the first sign of a door opening.

“Wherever are your shoes, my dear?” Mrs. Caper asked, looking down at Manikin’s feet.

On reflex, Manikin looked down too, and that was when Mrs. Caper struck her over the head with something hard and heavy. The door of the van slid open, and she was dragged semi-conscious into the vehicle. With a screech of tires, it pulled out, and roared down the street.

FX stood, trembling in shock, as he watched from the bus stop on the far side of the road.

“That was the Turk!” he blurted into his phone. “Jesus, Scope, they’ve got Manikin. Move-Easy’s got my sister!”

In the Hide in Brill Alley, FX sat on one of the chairs, face resting on the heels of his hands, his fingers clutching his hair. Scope watched him, her pale face making a lie of her attempts to reassure him.

“What are we going to do?” he moaned. “God, they’re going to kill her! Move-Easy knows we’ve screwed him over for sure now. They’re going to put her through
hell
, and then they’re going to kill her.”

“She’s still got a chance,” Scope said softly, struggling to hold onto the hope herself. “As long as they think she’s Veronica, they won’t hurt her—not for a while at least. Move-Easy will think she’s just a little girl he can scare into giving him what he wants.”

“Yeah, but what happens when he doesn’t get it?” FX groaned through gritted teeth. “She’s got to let him have one of the brundleseeds. Can she do that? Can they take it out of her?”

Scope didn’t reply, because he already knew the answer. The seeds had grown into implants, and they couldn’t be removed without an operation—even assuming a surgeon could work out how to separate one from her body. And it would be useless once it was taken out. And even that didn’t matter.

Manikin’s disguise wouldn’t fool Move-Easy for long. And the mob boss would have ordered the deaths of the rat-runners by now. He might still spare Scope, but Manikin wasn’t getting out of there alive.

“Where the hell is Nimmo?”
FX snarled. “He should be back by now! If he’s cut out on us—”

“There he is,” Scope said, pointing at the screen that showed the view from the doorway in the alley.

Nimmo was approaching the door. Scope buzzed him in, and less than a minute later he was walking into the Hide.

“I tracked the van to Move-Easy’s Void,” he told them, taking the black leather case from his backpack and laying it on the desk where FX was sitting. “As far as I could tell, they still think Manikin is Nica. So long as she doesn’t give them reason to check her fingerprints or her irises, that should keep her alive for a while.”

“We need to take the case to them, try to trade it for her,” FX said, laying his fingers on the box.

“That’s not going to work, FX, and you know it,” Nimmo replied. “Easy thinks we’re working for the law, or for Vapor. We’ve been marked, man. We have to get Manikin out of there some other way.”

Scope shook her head and picked up the box. “Let’s see what all the fuss has been about,” she muttered.

Taking a scalpel from her toolkit, she broke the resin seal around the edge of the case, and opened it. Inside the leather-lined walnut box were ten blue and gold cards held in a presentation velvet setting, each one with a credit chip embedded in it. Each card was emblazoned with the WatchWorld logo.

“They’re boons,” FX said in a subdued voice, reading the RFIDs with his phone. “This is how everyone who gets brasted by WatchWorld gets paid. If you put on a good show for the screens, they give you one of these.” He looked at the readout. “But these are the highest denomination. Each card is worth twenty-five grand.”

“Quarter of a million quid,” Nimmo murmured.

“Small money, really, for what Brundle invented,” Scope commented. “But maybe it
is
enough to buy Manikin back. For this kind of money, maybe Move-Easy’d be willing to forget all about us.”

“Enough to make him forget about the brundleseed?” Nimmo asked. “Because as long as he doesn’t have that, he’s never going to let us go. And d’you want to see his surgeons trying to dig one out of Manikin’s body?”

Scope was looking closely at the box. “There’s something else here,” she muttered, picking up her scalpel again. “Somebody’s tampered with the bottom of this case.”

Cutting around it, she peeled back the layer of leather that covered the walnut box. A hollow had been cut into the underside of the box, covered by a thin panel of the wood. Scope prized it open. Nestled neatly into the bottom of the box, held in place by clips, were five small plastic vials. Scope took one out and held it up to the light. Floating in some kind of clear solution was a dark speck, much like a small seed. As the others watched intently, Scope took a magnifying glass from her toolkit and examined the tiny object.

“I think it’s a brundleseed,” she said, a look of wonder on her face. “We’ve got ourselves five more brundleseeds.”

“We can get Manikin out!” FX exclaimed excitedly. “Bloody hell, we only need
one
, and we could trade it for her!” There were a few seconds of silence as they all considered this.

“How could we know for sure he’d leave us be?” Nimmo wondered aloud. “The guy does treachery for a living. And then what about Vapor? Do we do the same for him? We don’t know anything about him, or how far he can reach. Even if we handed the rest of these over to him and made a run for it, how far would we get? And is this what we want to be doing with what could be the most dangerous technology on the planet? Givin’ it to the likes of Easy or Vapor? Seriously? This doesn’t solve our problems. If anything, we’ve just raised the stakes.”

“I know it’s a crap choice,” Scope snapped. “But what else are we supposed to do?”

“I’m tired of letting all these scrotes decide the rules of this game,” Nimmo said, a hardness setting in his eyes. “And I’m done bein’ on the defensive. Let’s take these bloody implants and use them to do like Manikin said—draw Easy and Vapor out. Let’s play this our way, and see what happens.”

MANIKIN SAT IN the bare concrete cell, her back against the wall, her arms resting on her knees, her head resting on her arms. The only light came from the cracks around the steel door, which did not have a keyhole on the inside. Her wrists were bound by manacles, a twenty-four-centimeter chain between them, and another, longer one, attached to the ring in the wall over her shoulder. She had gone through the worst of the terror at her situation, and it had subsided to a cold dread, which at least allowed her to think clearly.

The Turk had questioned her for a little while, intimidating her, but not hurting her. They still thought she was Veronica, and trusted to the abject fear she would doubtless feel to get the truth out of her. But she hadn’t been able to tell them anything useful, and sooner or later they were going to get impatient. Then they’d start hurting her. Manikin didn’t know what she’d say then.

The cell was cold and damp, and she shivered, though it might not have been the chill that caused it. FX would be going out of his mind right now. Scope would be a bit more removed, trying to think it out. Had Nimmo come back? Manikin had her doubts. But even if he did, she couldn’t see how any of them could help her now. She had brundleseeds in her body, which meant that Move-Easy had them, even if he couldn’t use them when he took them out of her. If Nimmo had come back, then he and the others had the case, but that wouldn’t be enough. Manikin wasn’t kidding herself. Move-Easy wasn’t about to let her go—and if he found out who she really was, he wasn’t about to let her live.

Manikin had one desperate play left, but if she blew it, she’d be dead for sure. For even the sliver of a chance of getting out of here, she’d have to time it just right. Her head jerked up as she heard footsteps in the corridor outside. A key turned in the lock, and the expression of fear on her face as the Turk walked in was not as fake as Manikin would have liked.

“I have more questions,” he said to her, his gold teeth and his eyebrow piercing glinting in the dim light, that light also forming a cold halo reflected off the bald dome of his head. “In particular, I would like to know, please, your relationship with a girl called Manikin, and her rat-runner friends.”