Rat Runners (17 page)

There was nothing for Scope to do for the next few minutes. She walked to another corner of the building and looked down. With a grunt of interest, she went back over to FX and tapped his arm.

“There’s a window open around this side.”

FX wound his cable back up and looked at what he had recorded as they crossed the roof to the other end. The rooms he had filmed were empty. Reaching the parapet, he slowly and carefully lowered the phone again, paying out the cable until the camera was just below the top of the open window.

“Give it a minute or two,” Scope said to him. “No more. We’re pushing our luck as it is.”

FX nodded and looked at his watch. After a minute and a half had passed, he raised the camera up and stopped it recording, switching it to play. They both gazed at the screen.

The room that came shakily into view was unlike any of the others they had seen. The camera had been hanging out in the daylight, looking into a darker room, so the light in the picture wasn’t great. They could see tables set around the walls of the room, laid out with portable computer gear. Scope and FX both let out low whistles as they took in the laptops, servers and other pieces of hardware, impressed with what looked like top-end gear. A foldable satellite dish lay on one table, beside a bank of monitors, a selection of cameras and a bunch of other pieces of equipment they couldn’t identify.

“See that?” FX murmured, pointing at a gun-shaped object with a dish at the end of the short barrel. “Think that’s a long-range parabolic mike.”

Scope nodded—she’d recognized it. It was a microphone that could pick up sounds from hundreds of meters away. There were wardrobe-sized metal cabinets in the room too. One stood open to show an array of assorted objects mounted on racks, ranging from an umbrella to a pair of boots, a rolled-up newspaper to a briefcase.

“Not sure what to make of those,” FX grunted.

But in her time in Move-Easy’s Void, Scope had seen most of these objects used in another context. Seeing them all together like this suggested only one thing to her.

“Weapons,” she said. “I think they’re all fitted with concealed weapons.”

Then the camera’s speaker, which up to now had just emitted the papery roar of wind across its mike, gave the hint of another sound. A voice. A man came into view, walking in through a doorway, speaking on a phone. He was a muscular, stocky man with long blond hair tied back in ponytail. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the old death metal band, Absent Conscience, on it. His face was still in shadow, but he had rectangular, black plastic-framed glasses, and the stylized horror tattoos on his arms confirmed his death metal obsession. FX and Scope huddled around the camera’s tiny speaker to try and hear what he was saying.

“… that’s not whut he sayd,” Death Metal’s voice could just be heard saying over the sound of the wind. His accent was either Scottish or Northern Irish, it was hard to tell. The sound was being broken up by the interference on the mike: “He never sayd she
didn’t have it
. He just … wuzn’t
in hor apartment
.
Whut? I don’t know … ask him, why don’t yeh? Huh? … moan all yeh like. Vapor paid this numpty, and he wants … give a damn about the cards. We do this … whut I mean? Performance-related bonus an’ all tha t… got tae be worth a hundred gra— … Brundle didn’t come cheap … wants his stuff, and he duzn’t—”

At that point, the man’s face turned towards the camera. There was still a shadow over his face, but they could feel his eyes staring straight out of the screen, seeming to fix FX and Scope in his gaze. He had spotted the camera. He froze and stopped speaking. Then he spun around and ran for the door.

“Jesus,” FX swore, looking up.

They were watching a recording. Death Metal had run from the room nearly a minute before. Which was how he managed to be
right there now
, just three meters away from them on the roof…with a bloody great hunting knife in his hand.

Scope dived and rolled, coming to her feet behind him as he lunged forward. The knife came at FX, but he stepped to the side and whipped the cable at the man’s face. It only distracted the man for an instant, but it was enough time for FX to duck under his swinging arm and start running along by the parapet. Scope was just ahead of him, looking back just once to make sure he was with her. FX detached the little camera from the cable and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He heard heavy feet accelerating along the roof behind him.

Scope reached the side of the building covered in scaffolding—the scaffolding that was entirely encased in tough plastic sheeting. There was no easy way in. She turned and jumped onto the parapet, running full tilt along it, pulling her small multi-tool from her pocket and unfolding the blade. Aiming for one of the open spaces of plastic, free of steel bars, she leaped forward onto it, skidding along it on her backside. She dug the blade in as she slid, cutting a long gash through it behind her. FX was right on her heels, and with one bound, jumped over the parapet and punched feet-first straight down through the hole, tearing it wide open. Scope was now sitting with her feet over the side of the slippery sheeting, and rolled backwards before she could lose her tenuous grip.

Death Metal had switched his sights from FX to her, and now he was up on the parapet above her as she came up against it. He made to grab her, and she dragged the nails of her left hand down his arm, drawing blood. He snarled, but it hardly slowed him down at all. She scrambled back out onto the plastic, and turned to look at him. Death Metal was glaring down at her, his eyes warily judging the strength of the sheeting, unwilling to put his greater weight on it. It probably wouldn’t even hold
her
for long if she wasn’t spreading her weight by staying on her hands and knees.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said in a reasonable voice, motioning her towards him with his empty hand. “You could fall, kill yorself. I’m not going tae hort yeh—I just want tae ask yeh a few questions.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” she replied in a shaky voice, holding up the fingers she’d used to scratch him. “But you’ve got a much bigger knife. And I’ve got everything I need right here.”

Then she plunged headfirst down through the rent in the plastic. She had a grip on a transom—one of the cross-bars across the top—as she tumbled through, and controlled her fall to touch down neatly on the boards below. As her eyes found FX, she jumped towards him, seeing what he was about to do. Death Metal and his huge knife came crashing down through the plastic, landing heavily on the boards where she had been standing a moment earlier. Then FX yanked one of the boards from the other end, dislodging it. The cement-covered plank fell from under the guy, who lost his footing and let out a shout as he fell, one leg dangling down through the gap.

Scope and FX slid down the ladder to the next level, but then had to dive aside as a grunt of effort and a rain of dust from above made them look up. FX gasped as dust got in his eyes, but he was already out of the way of a second heavy board as it clattered down. Scope had to throw herself forward and, rolling over, she looked up again to see their pursuer drop straight down through the wider gap in the floor above. Death Metal let out a snort of satisfaction as he landed beside FX, stamping on the boy’s left calf hard enough to make him cry out. Probably just a dead leg—but FX wouldn’t be running anywhere for the next few minutes. Scope was standing under another gap in the boards above her, and she jumped, just as the hunting knife slammed into the boards where her foot had been a moment before. Like a monkey, she scampered up one of the poles hugging the wall of the building, ending up back on the level above, where they’d started.

“Come on dine, sweetheart,” Death Metal called. “I don’t hurt kids as a rule, but it’ll go bad for your friend if you don’t get yer arse dine here right nye.”

Scope closed her eyes for a couple of seconds, trying to get control over her breathing. Damn this bloody dust—she was covered in it, and it was causing havoc with her lungs. But she couldn’t slow down now. She crouched down, unzipping the pockets on either side of her jacket. There was an inhaler in each pocket—a blue one in the right, and a brown one in the left. Looking down through the cracks between the stout bare planks, she could see him watching her. She would only be a dark shape against the light, but it was enough for him to follow her.

“Come on nye,” he said in a softer, more confident voice. “Yer breathin’ don’t sound too good, love. Asthmatic, are we? You need to get out of here, before it gets any worse.”

Scope coughed, and exaggerated the sound of her wheezing as she shook both inhalers. Taking a blast of the blue one, she held her breath, slipping that one back into her pocket.

“All right,” she said, coughing again. “Don’t hurt him. I’m coming down, OK? I’m coming down.”

Checking his position through the cracks between the planks, she jammed her right foot between a board and the ledger. Then she swung the top half of her body down through the gap and sprayed Death Metal in the face with her brown inhaler. This one was highly pressurized—it wasn’t designed to ease one’s breathing.

Death Metal staggered back from the blast of the aerosol, rubbing his eyes and gagging. He drew in a huge breath and let out an almighty sneeze, and then another. The force of the sneezes caused him to bend forward. Scope pulled herself up, released her foot, grabbed hold of the transom and swung like a gymnast, bringing her whole body feet-first down and under the bar, and slamming the soles of her trainers into the top of Death Metal’s head. He cried out and tumbled backwards.

FX was already on his feet, rubbing his eyes, but he could only limp towards the ladder that led down to the next floor. Scope let him go ahead of her, then slid down the ladder after him. Above them, they could hear Death Metal sneezing helplessly, cursing and groaning as he struggled to breathe, or even open his eyes. FX let out a grunt as he jumped off the ladder, taking some weight on his bruised leg.

“What the hell was in that thing you hit him with?” he asked.

“Pepper, some Indian Unani powder, a little ammonia and a few other things,” she replied. “A little potion I mixed up for this kind of thing. Keeps the lads at bay back in Move-Easy’s.”

They descended another ladder and strode along the boards to the hole in the plastic where they’d first come in, on the second floor. This was the section of scaffold without any boards; there should have been a ladder here, but it was missing. They dangled off the transom and were about to drop down to the first floor, when they heard a clatter from above. A sneeze turned into a high-pitched shriek, and they both let out yelps as Death Metal fell past them, hitting the ground below.

“Gaaaaaargh! Jesus Christ, me leg! Aaaargh! Jesus, I’ve broken me leg! Jesus!” he bellowed, and then started sneezing again, letting out roars of pain whenever he could draw breath, each violent blast of breath causing a spasm of agony in his broken leg, which caused more cries, and more sneezing.

The door in the tall wooden hoarding was locked, and they didn’t want to climb down past Death Metal anyway. As Scope cut a hole in the wall of plastic sheeting at their level, FX found a length of rope, tied one end to a standard and tossed the other end out of the hole.

“Ladies first,” he said.

Scope lowered herself out and abseiled carefully down past the greasy anti-climb paint on the hoarding. FX followed her down. His leg was loosening up, but he was still limping a little as they set off down the alley at a fast walk. They were breathing hard, shivering with a mixture of relief and adrenaline.

“So you hit him with sneezing powder?” FX asked, feeling restless, needing to talk.

“Yeah, but a pretty high-powered dose of it.” She smirked, cocking her head as she listened to Death Metal letting rip, swearing and screaming behind them. “He’ll calm down a bit in a few minutes, but he’ll be sneezing for days.”

“Cool!” FX laughed. “I’d have used tear gas myself. Or turned the bloody thing into a flame-thrower.”

“The guys who were bullying me in Easy’s?” Scope said, as she took a little zip-lock plastic bag from her pocket. “Most of ’em were too thick to be afraid of being hurt. I had to come up with a way of humiliating them—making the others laugh.”

FX watched as she tore a toothpick out of a packet and used it to clean the blood from under the nails of her left hand—the blood and skin she’d scraped from Death Metal’s arm.

“Move-Easy keeps files on every criminal his people ever come across,” she explained to him. “He’s got his own automated system for analyzing DNA, and a huge DNA database. For him, it’s all ammunition he can use against them. I can even get Tanker to pipe me into the police database if I need to. This guy’s DNA has to be on record somewhere. Give me a day or two, and I’ll find out who he is.”

“I’ll race you,” FX challenged her. “We’ve already got his voice recorded. Even that should be enough.”

“Right,” she said. “But what we really need now is his
employer
. Who is
Vapor
?”

After walking a few blocks, they both put their batteries back in their phones and turned them on. Scope’s beeped immediately with a message. It was from Tanker. It wasn’t good news.