Rat Runners by Oisin McGann Read Free Book Online Page A

man’s name was Coda, and he was the most dangerous of Move-Easy’s enforcers. And he was the only one who didn’t wear a piercing in his eyebrow—the means by which the boss monitored his people. Nor did he ever carry anything that could be recognized as a weapon. Rumor had it that Coda only ever killed with his bare hands, or with whatever happened to be lying around. FX eyed the man anxiously. He had heard that Coda had once tortured and killed someone using only a pair of spectacles. FX could only guess how.
    Move-Easy stared at the three kids for a minute, with a fatherly smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He had been one of the first gangsters to start using specially trained teenagers for some of his dirty work, and had several on his payroll. The three in front of him were freelancers, but that didn’t make much difference. If you lived in London and Move-Easy wanted you to take on a job, you took it. As you were underage, it was easier for you to operate within the WatchWorld system. The system could watch you, but it was forbidden to assign a Safe-Guard to follow you until you were sixteen, and even then there were limits to what they could watch until you were eighteen.
    That was why Move-Easy used kids on a lot of his jobs.
    “You owe me money,” he said to Manikin and FX. “This job will wipe the debt clean. That’ll be your payment. Nimmo, you’ll be paid on your usual terms. You’re all good little players, and as of now, you’ve got one very simple task. I want you to find this box.”
    He lifted a remote, pressed the touch-screen surface, and an image appeared on the cinema screen. Manikin, who was discreetly watching Nimmo, trying to measure him up, noticed the slightest change of expression in his eyes as he saw the picture. He was hiding something. The image was of a tall, long-limbed man with a mess of black hair and protruding features. The photo had been taken at night at the back of a tall building, with wheelie bins in the background. It was monotone, slightly blurred and a bit grainy, probably taken with a night-vision camera. But they could make out a slim black box in the man’s left hand. It was roughly the size of the kind of presentation box used to hold a necklace.
    “So what’s in it?” Manikin asked.
    “Ten credit cards,” Move-Easy replied. “Blue and gold in color—you don’t need any more details. Either they’ll be in the box or not. The geezer in the picture is the previous owner. Name’s Watson Brundle, an’ he’s dead. He was a civvie.A scientist, engineer or summink—had some private project going, workin’ on RFIDs and the like.”
    “How’d he die?” Nimmo asked.
    “You don’t care,” Move-Easy assured him. “What you care about is that box. We know it was in his lab yesterday, because we saw ’im go in with it, and ’e didn’t come out again before ’e died, which was early this evenin’. Bit of a hermit, he was. The old bill went in about an hour after ’e died, and after they were gone, I sent a couple of boys in to fetch it. It wasn’t there. If the cops’ve got it, I’ll find out through my people. But I don’t think they have. There was some kid who lived up on the same floor as Brundle, ’parently did some work for ’im. We’ve not had a good look at ’is face yet, but he’s the law-abidin’ type. Went runnin’ right up to a peeper when the murder ’appened. ’E was questioned by the bill today, but we can’t find ’im now. We will. That’s not your job either.”
    He touched his remote again, and a new picture appeared on the screen. This one showed a teenage girl, possibly about fifteen or sixteen. She was wearing a blue, gray and white school uniform. The picture looked as if it was a still from a surveillance camera in a school corridor. Tanker had probably hacked in and lifted it from the school’s files. The girl’s left hand was running through her dark hair, revealing that her sallow-skinned face was tainted by