Rat Runners

by Oisin McGann

  “Jesus, who is this guy?” Nimmo muttered to himself as he hurried down the last flight of stairs. “The pissin’ roadrunner?”

  He wasn’t used to being outrun so easily. How could this scrote have disappeared so quickly? Nimmo was steaming over this as he ran through the lobby to the front door, throwing it open to find himself staring straight into the tinted visor that covered the face of the Safe-Guard.

  The figure in front of Nimmo was only a little taller than him, but seemed much bigger. Its head was covered by a graphite-colored helmet with a long smoked-glass visor, behind which Nimmo could just make out a mask of lenses and sensors. The helmet was mounted on a sturdy shoulder harness, able to swivel right and left, to save the guard’s neck from carrying the weight of all the apparatus. The only marking on the helmet was the WatchWorld logo on the front, and the square white digits of the Safe-Guard’s identification number—L489I—on the sides. The logo was made up of two silver, stylized hands on a black background, encircling a red sphere, forming the image of an eye. There were vents in the sides, allowing the figure to hear, but also to detect sounds and signals inaudible to the human ear.

  Its height was exaggerated by the length of the visor, and by the long blue-gray cloak, the seams marked in lighter gray in vertical lines. The cloak hid the Safe-Guard’s arms and covered its legs down as far as its ankles. There were epaulettes on the shoulders of the harness, also bearing its ID in steel numbers, and a WatchWorld badge on the left breast. But otherwise the cloak had little in the way of features. The Safe-Guards were not meant to be eye- catching. It was their job to see others.

  Nimmo had seconds to think. Bursting through a door, breathing fast and looking like you’re going somewhere in a rush was the kind of thing that got noticed. Doing it not long after a death on the top floor of the building—a death that would be discovered before long, even if he didn’t report it—would set alarm bells ringing in WatchWorld Control. Best to get it all out in the open. Or a version of it, anyway.

  “Muh boss is dead!” Nimmo panted, letting his face go slack and his eyes go dull. He let his lip hang as he spoke, giving himself a strong North London accent and slurring his words slightly. “I fink someone’s muuurdered ’im. You got ’o get help!”

  The Safe-Guard regarded him for a moment, and Nimmo had to remind himself that there was a human under all that get-up. The peepers were designed to be anonymous, asexual, impersonal. The less human they looked, the more people could think of them as a walking camera, rather than a nosy public official. There was a pause as the figure stood still and Nimmo knew it was waiting for instructions. Safe-Guards could not communicate with the public without permission from their supervisors. “What is your name?” it asked at last. The voice was electronically modulated. All Safe-Guards had similar voices, to remove their individuality.

  “Charles U. Farley,” Nimmo replied without hesitation. He had been trained to beat the Safe-Guard’s rudimentary lie detectors.

  “Who is dead, Charles, and where did the incident take place?” the Safe-Guard inquired.

  “My boss, Watson Brundle. I live next door to his place, righ’—you were just there, but I wusn’t in the lab. Look, aren’t you gonna to go up there? Ah’m telling yaw, he’s dead. It’s only just ’appened. The one who did it must still be nearby!”

  “What age are you, Charles?”

  “I’m fifteen. Look—”

  “You say you live with Watson Brundle? You are not listed as a dependent.”

  Nimmo sighed and shook his head.

  “I … I was on the street—homeless, awright?” This was a story Nimmo and Brundle had agreed on. Nimmo paid his landlord for the cover, and did the odd errand for the scientist. Given Nimmo’s line of work, Brundle had discovered he could be all kinds of useful. “’E give me a break, took me in. He don’t like goin’ aht-side much, so he let me work as an assistant in his lab. I got him stuff that he needed from the shops an’ that. You’re going up there, right? That scrote’s gettin’ away!”

  The Safe-Guard paused for another few seconds, listening to its handlers.

  “I have another assignment,” it said, and Nimmo could have sworn he heard a reluctance in the impersonal voice. “A police unit will be sent to investigate. You may go back inside, but do not go to the sixth floor or interfere with the crime scene in any way, or allow anyone else to do so.”

  “How long will they take to get ’ere, the police?” Nimmo demanded.

  “They will be here as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation, Mister Farley.”

  That appeared to be the end of the discussion. The Safe-Guard turned around and walked away. Nimmo stared after it, trying to hide the bitterness he felt. He had taken a huge risk, standing in front of this thing, allowing himself to be recorded in order to report this murder, and the bloody drone wasn’t even going to bother heading up to have a look at what had happened.

  He strode back inside and ran up the stairs. They were sending someone to investigate. Nimmo knew what that meant. Ever since the WatchWorld system had been brought in nearly ten years ago, the number of police on the street had been steadily cut until it was fraction of what it had been. Nowadays, the government relied on surveillance to deal with crime. There were thousands of Safe-Guards on the streets now, but hardly any police officers, hardly any detectives to investigate serious crimes. That unit could take hours to get here, and even then, the investigation might never get off the ground.

  Nimmo had chosen to live in this part of town for a reason. It was poor and run-down, with fewer cameras and surveillance towers than the more affluent areas. It was the type of area where there was so much trouble the police didn’t bother with the minor stuff. As long as the crime stayed in this area, they paid it little attention. And if something big happened, they came in hard, with Serious Crime Squad officers, riot police, or the heavily armed jump squads. It was the kind of place where you could keep a low profile, if you were careful to stay out of trouble.

  A single murder in a dodgy tenement wouldn’t score very high on their priorities. Brundle’s case might get some attention because he owned the building and had that weird lab of his, but there were too few detectives, and too many other, more important cases.

  Charles U. Farley was one of Nimmo’s identities, one he might now have to dump after the police interview. The character was designed to explain his nomadic life, while remaining enough of a nonentity to avoid the interest of the police, or anyone else for that matter. He was particularly careful when entering or leaving his home, regularly changing his appearance and using hats, sunglasses or scarves to casually conceal his face. Apart from Brundle, hardly anyone who knew Nimmo knew where he lived.

  Farley was just one more uneducated, unmotivated and unremarkable drop-out who’d get put on the register as soon as he turned sixteen. Nimmo had clothes, possessions and ID to go with the identity, just as he had for his others. Each identity took a lot of time to prepare and establish, and he hated having to give one up. But that was what they were for.

  Nimmo stood in the door of Brundle’s laboratory, gazing down at the dead scientist. He had two options. As the last person, except for the Safe-Guard, to see Brundle alive, he’d be the focus of the police investigation. He should get out now, and never come back. But if he ran, it would make him look guilty. They had recorded his face and his voice. That was more than enough information to track him down, unless he left the country completely—assuming he could. No, he’d have to stay here and ride this out.

  And if he was the chief suspect, the sooner they had another suspect, the better. Nimmo wasn’t the type to sit around waiting for others to decide his future. He moved into the lab, pulling on a pair of latex gloves and taking a few sealable plastic bags from a drawer. As he walked past one of the desks, the stupid pug dog toy started barking again. Nimmo swore at it, but left it on—the less he interfered with things the better. Taking a look around the room, he took a deep breath and went b
ack to the body.

  He took photos with the camera on his phone—from as many different angles as he could. He could find no sign of a wound, or blood, or even a recent bruise. He didn’t want to move the body too much, but there was no obvious sign of the cause of death. He checked Brundle’s eyes and the inside of his mouth. He wiped down the blade of a letter-opener and used it to clean under the corpse’s fingernails, putting his findings into a plastic bag. He checked the color of the skin under the fingernails, and photographed the tips of the index finger and thumb of each hand with his phone, to record the fingerprints.

  Looking at his watch, he tried to guess how long he might have before the police got here, but there was no telling. He plucked a few hairs from Brundle’s scalp and put those in a bag. He carried on moving around the body, gathering as much information as he could for another five minutes and then he decided he’d pushed his luck far enough.

  He was turning to leave when he spotted the box that Brundle had asked him to hide. It lay undisturbed, just where he had left it. Nimmo felt a pang of guilt, disappointed that, in his last contact with this man, he had played such a selfish trick.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

  Careful not to leave a trace of his action, he slid the leather case out and took it with him. Brundle had wanted it kept safe, and he’d been scared the peeper would find it. Was it the reason he’d been killed?

  Wrapping the case and the evidence in two plastic bags, Nimmo checked the time again and went up to the roof. A hacker mate of his provided him with updates of the movements of surveillance satellites—he always preferred to move around in the blind spots. The sky was a clear blue; there was no sign of surveillance aircraft, or drones either. He taped the packages into the top of a ventilation duct that jutted up at one corner of the roof.

  He came back down into the corridor, went into his flat and looked quickly around to make sure there was nothing in sight that would draw attention to his real life. But he was always careful about this, and it all seemed fine.

  Then he descended to the fifth floor, where he sat on the stairs and waited for the police. As he waited, he checked his emails on his phone. He had one email address that rarely received anything but spam. He opened them all, and came upon one that was advertising excellent deals on a new drug that treated fungal infections. It seemed Move-Easy had a job for him.

  CHAPTER 5

  A TOUCHY SUBJECT

  LIKE MANY IN the criminal world, Scope worked from late in the day until late in the morning. This was not because she was a career criminal herself. She might have been resigned to taking part in the business side of crime, but at least she didn’t commit any crimes against people—or against civvies, normal people, anyway. For her, it was an important distinction. She did work criminal hours, however, because everyone she worked with did too.

  It was nine o’clock in the evening, and she was just beginning work. She was sitting at her desk in a small underground lab, with a magnifying glass hooked over the left lens of her glasses. Scope did not need to close her right eye to see clearly through the magnifying glass, because she was blind in her right eye. There was a little light over the lens of the glass, and she was using it to stare at the rounded end of the piece of gelatin in her hand. It was roughly the size of her thumb, and it had a fingerprint molded into the end of it.

  The fingerprint was a man’s—some hit man who had tried to shoot her boss. Her boss was an extremely powerful gangster known as Move-Easy. She had taken the fingerprint off a glass that the hit man had touched. What that man would never know was that this glass had been stolen and delivered here to her lab. And then Scope had used a process involving superglue, a digital camera, some photo- editing software, a transparency sheet and a cheap photosensitive printed circuit board to mold his fingerprint onto this piece of gelatin. Now she would give the lump of gel to her boss, and his men would use it to leave the hit man’s fingerprints at a crime scene. This and a few other bits of manufactured evidence would be enough to send him to prison for twenty or thirty years. It was not work that Scope liked doing, but she was good at it, and as long as she did it, her family stayed safe.

  “What you do is weird,” a voice commented from behind her.

  “Are you wearing overalls?” she asked, without looking up.

  She knew he wasn’t, because she hadn’t heard him come in. Scope insisted that everybody entering her lab wear white disposable overalls, and they rustled when you walked.

  She sighed, switched off the little light, and lifted the magnifying glass off her spectacles. She took the glasses off, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and then looked at the teenage boy who was addressing her. He had parted the clear plastic curtains that blocked the space between her workspace and the door to the corridor, and was leaning into her pristine workspace. This breach of her rules annoyed her, but he knew that and was doing it anyway.

  Tanker was older than her, but they were actually very alike in looks—people commented on it all the time. He was only slightly taller than her; they both had their hair in shoulder-length cornrows; there were the same well-defined cheekbones, triangular faces, sticky-out ears and lean frames. But while Tanker was proper black, Scope was albino black—paler in every way. Tanker often joked that they were a positive and negative of the same picture, yin and yang. Her skin was a creamy white, her hair was blonde, and her eyes were hazel. Many of the people who lived in the Void and didn’t go out a lot were paler than they were supposed to be, but Scope was the only one who looked like she was born to a life underground. It was as if someone had taken an African baby and raised her in a cave.

  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-wall
ed 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.