Rat Runners (5 page)

She only felt that way sometimes, but they were tough times. As a self-confessed nerd, she was a social outcast in the world of crime. As an albino, her appearance cemented her inability to fit in. Her finger pointed at him like a weapon.

“I just wanted to tell you that—” he began.

She cocked her thumb like the hammer on a gun and pointed again. He sighed and pulled his head back behind the curtains.

“All I ask is that you don’t contaminate my space,” she called over to him. “And you, my friend, are crawling with contaminants. Why do you always have to push it?”

“Because I like winding you up,” Tanker said from behind the curtain. “And when my own business is
slow, I like pokin’ me nose into other people’s. Boss has got all paranoid again, and shut down my web connection. He wants you, by the way. That’s what I came to tell you. He’s askin’ for his ‘Little Brain.’”

Scope sighed again, placed the piece of gelatin carefully in a sealed container, and pulled off her latex gloves as she walked through the curtains. She got out of her own overalls, picked up her toolbox and followed Tanker out of the lab. He was Move-Easy’s best hacker, but when it came to chemistry, biology—or anything to do with forensics—Scope was called in. Before joining Move-Easy’s ‘staff,’ she would never have guessed how much chemistry and biology were involved in running a criminal empire. The applications for forensics were a little more obvious.

She spent most of her time here, in Move-Easy’s Void. A Void was a speakeasy, any place hidden away from the prying eyes of London’s WatchWorld system. It was a place free of surveillance—or at least, surveillance by the Safe-Guards and the police. This one was the largest in London, situated beneath Ratched Hospital, right in the city center. Voids were typically run by criminal organizations, though there were a few hippy communes and artists’ refuges around too, like the one where Scope had grown up. None of them were as secure as this one. But then, they didn’t run major counterfeit operations either. The rooms she walked past contained people working on producing fake IDs, or hacking firewalls, or running identity theft scams, or online gambling or black market operations. One room was being used to plan a bank robbery. In another part of the complex, men and women with intense eyes gambled their money away in an illegal casino.

As Scope and Tanker walked down the concrete-walled hallway, the boy handed her a ‘backscatter’ x-ray image printed on an A4 sheet of paper.

“He wants to know what that is,” Tanker said, pointing at part of the image.

Scope frowned, puzzled by what she was seeing but not in the least bit surprised. She’d seen all sorts of bizarre things since she’d started working here. The main object was caterpillar-shaped, filled with rectangular shapes. There was a harder, clearer box visible near the mouth end. This was what Tanker was pointing at. The image was still holding her attention as she followed Tanker through a doorway.

“Ah, there’s my Little Brain!” an East End accent bellowed. “Come ’ere, my pet, and grace us wiv
yor luminescence!”

Move-Easy was orange. If you valued your life, you didn’t mention it in his presence. It was a result of spending time on a sun-bed nearly every day. Since establishing himself as one of the most powerful gangsters in London, he had become increasingly paranoid about surveillance, and had sought permanent refuge underground. He had been living underground, without emerging into daylight, for seven years. After the first year, he became concerned about how this lack of sunlight might affect his health, and his looks, so he’d had a sun-bed installed in his quarters. Hence the orange skin. It was a touchy subject with him. The last guy to crack an Oompa-Loompa joke in Move-Easy’s presence was now sleeping with the fishes.

The audience chamber, as Move-Easy called it, was a room about twelve meters square. It looked like an interior decorator’s dream from the nineteen-seventies: all maroon, white, orange and brown, with geometric-patterned wallpaper, ornate gold lamps and paintings that would once have been considered avant-garde, but now looked hopelessly out-dated. A cinema screen was built into one wall, with a state-of-the-art sound system, and there was a bar in one corner. A snooker table was visible through one doorway, a second door was closed, and the third door admitted staff and guests. Scope came through this door to find that Move-Easy had visitors. There was a circular sunken area in the floor, its circumference made up of couches. A young man and woman sat on one couch with their backs to Scope. When they turned to look up at her, she recognized Punkin and Bunny. She’d seen them enough times before to wonder why two small-time chancers were being given an audience with the boss. They weren’t members of his organization, and rarely had anything of real worth to sell. They were looking pretty pleased with themselves now.

There was a round, smoked-glass table in the middle of the circle. On the table sat a cuddly caterpillar with a green body, a large red head and multi-colored legs. That was new.

“Got yor tools?” Move-Easy asked, gesturing her towards him.

Scope nodded. She descended the three steps to the sunken floor and sat down beside her boss, opening the toolbox on the floor. Move-Easy was sitting on the couch opposite Punkin and Bunny. He had a bulbous, brutish face, a smutty grin and chilly blue eyes. His thinning, dyed black hair was slicked back in a widow’s peak from his orange brow. He was wearing an expensive white shirt and navy suit trousers, his wrists and fingers adorned with heavy gold bracelets and rings. A gold chain hung down over the shirt, the gray hairs of his orange chest sticking in a tuft over the open collar at the front. He made her skin crawl, and there were times that he terrified her, but she knew he liked her. As he often said, she was worth her weight in diamonds.

“These two ’ave brought us a present, ’aven’t you, guys?” he said, not expecting an answer to his question. “Robbed a cash courier, comin’ from another Void. Some poor soul’s lost his profits for the week. Still, their loss is our gain, eh? Have to say, I’m impressed, Punkin. Didn’t think you had the brains to pull off a job like that, out among all the eyeballs, and get away with it. But my boys tell me you wasn’t followed or nuffink. So…had some ’elp, didya?”

“It was all us, Mister Easy,” Punkin replied casually, throwing a smug smile at Bunny. “What can we say? We got the moves, y’know?” “You got the moves, eh?” the boss said thoughtfully, working his jaw. “Thing is, my lovelies, you was scanned when you came down, and we found a piece of electronics on you that you didn’t declare. Only reason you’re sittin’ here now is that it’s
not transmittin’ any signals
.”

Punkin and Bunny looked nervously at each other. Everyone knew you got scanned when you came into Move-Easy’s place. It was a standard precaution in any Void, but he ran his place like airport customs. You had a better chance of getting on a plane with a machine-gun than you had of slipping an electronic device into his Void without him knowing. And the penalties for trying could be ugly and painful. Scope could tell from their expressions that they didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I’m tellin’ you, Mister Easy, we don’t know nothin’ about—”

“Obviously,” the gangster growled, cutting him off. “You ’aven’t the balls. But neither of you has more brains than a bird, so I’m assumin’ you didn’t check to see if the cash had been rigged before bringin’ it here. Or did you just not
want
to check, in case you blew it? Was you just tryin’ your luck instead?”

They exchanged glances again.

“Was that wrong?” Bunny asked innocently.

“Christ, but you’re a proper pair o’ wazzocks.” Move-Easy sighed. “Scope ’ere is goin’ to ’ave a look wiv her sneaky eye, and tell us what you’ve brought into my ’ome.”

Scope was no longer paying any attention to the people in the room. She had work to do, and went at it with her usual fixed intensity. She had taken her inspection camera from her toolbox. This was a keyhole camera on a long flexible tube. She could manipulate the direction of the tube with her index finger, using the joystick positioned like a trigger on the handle. The front of the tube had a tiny camera, connected to a small screen at the on top of the handle. Laying the x-ray printout down in front of her, she switched the inspection camera on, took the lens end of the tube and inserted it into the mouth of the cuddly caterpillar. Then, keeping her eye on the screen, she slid the lens end further in.

The image on the screen showed her what was inside the soft toy. She knew there was a tube filled with money, but that wasn’t what she was interested in. The camera was equipped with an ultrasound scanner. She switched it on and the screen filled with blue-white see-through forms against a dark background. Her attention was on the hard-edged shape near the mouth that stood out clearer than anything else on the image.

“It’s a dye pack, sitting at the top of the money tube,” she said to Move-Easy. “Doesn’t look like there’s a transmitter, but I’d have to take it out to be sure. I’d say the trigger is a light sensor. If you’d tried to take it out of the toy, the lights in here would have set it off. But I can deactivate the mechanism with a magnet.”

Taking a small magnet from her toolbox, she slid her hand into the caterpillar’s mouth and pressed it against the wad of money she could see on her screen. Then she pulled out the bound bundle of notes and held it up in front of Punkin and Bunny:

“You brought a dye pack in here. Banks use them to foil armed robberies. If you’d tried to take out the money, the first wad of cash you’d pull out would be this one. It’s hollowed out. Inside, there’s a device that, when exposed to the light, would spray a bright pink aerosol dye all over you, while burning at two hundred degrees Celsius.”

She taped the magnet to the wad of money and tossed it into her toolbox.

“An’ if I got painted, or if I even had to repaint this place ’cos of you monkeys …” Move-Easy sniffed as he pulled the meter-long rubber tube of cash out of the caterpillar’s mouth, “
you’d
be the ones swallowing
this
.”

The two small-time crooks went pale, but Move-Easy had already thrown the tube to Tanker, who took it from the room. The cash would be checked, sorted, counted and absorbed into the business. There had to be thousands of pounds there, but the gangster had hardly given it a second glance.

“Now,” the orange-skinned boss said, lounging back on the couch, as Scope packed up her toolbox and stood up, “you’ve bought yourselves a few minutes of my time. What exactly is you two looking for, in return for this charmin’ act of goodwill?”

“We’d like to join your organization, Mister Easy,” Punkin said, leaning forward. “We wanna move up; we’re done just bein’ rat-runners. I know we’d have to prove ourselves, but we’ve got a line on a big score. I got myself an implant the other day, at a clinic in Soho. It’s an underground operation—the surgeons there only deal in cash …”

He paused, and glanced up at Scope. Move-Easy looked up at her and tilted his head towards the door. She took the hint and headed out of the room. As she was leaving, she heard her boss say:

“And you want to knock it over, right?”

“The money’s there for the stealin’, Mister Easy. All we need is…”

Scope couldn’t hear any more without pausing beyond the door, and she had learned long ago not to be curious about these things. Move-Easy was as paranoid about his own people as he was about the police. As he said himself, “You can never trust criminals.”

ONE OF THE keys to Move-Easy’s success, reflecting the length of time his Void had survived undiscovered, was the confounding means of getting inside. Unless you were part of his inner circle, you didn’t get in without being invited. Most of the day-to-day business was done by his people on the outside, whom the boss monitored closely. If you did get invited in—and it was unwise to refuse such an invitation—you entered the maintenance tunnels beneath the massive hospital by a door chosen randomly on the day. You were given blacked-out contact lenses that effectively acted as a blindfold. An actual blindfold would have looked suspicious if you ran into any hospital staff or other civvies who might happen to be in the tunnels at the time.

You were then led by a member of the gang to one of the steel- and lead-lined doors that opened into the nest of old wartime bomb-shelter corridors that formed the core of his Void. Each time you visited, you were taken in through a different door. Each of these doors was disguised in a different way, and their use was also dictated at random. Even the boss’s own people had to change their routes constantly. The WatchWorld computers loved patterns. The hospital complex was monitored twenty-four hours a day, and every member of the hospital staff and every frequent visitor was on file. Anyone else seen going in or out of the hospital on a regular basis would eventually attract suspicion. Move-Easy had built a career on avoiding suspicion.

Manikin was still wearing her mac over black jeans, but had changed to a bobbed red wig. FX was in his usual combats, hoodie and trainers. Blinking over the contact lenses that blinded him, he felt someone take his console bag from him at the security checkpoint, but didn’t protest. It would be held until he was leaving. He suspected they’d try and have a look through the console, but was quite certain even Tanker would not be able to break the encryption that protected its contents. There were hackers in Britain who were better than FX, but he knew most of their names, and none of them worked for Move-Easy. It was more his physical safety that concerned him. These gangsters scared him, and whenever he and Manikin came here, he let her do the talking, because he had a habit of mouthing off when he was nervous. Around someone like Move-Easy, that could be a dangerous habit.