Rat Runners (2 page)

MANIKIN SAT ON a black-painted steel park bench, facing a litter bin ribbed with wood that stood on the far side of the path. Her eyes were on the book she held in her hands, but she kept her attention on the tarmac path that passed in front of her, following the perimeter of the small green area that offered shelter from the rush of the city beyond. The small park was surrounded by tall mature trees, and a dense hedge. A gate opened into the park thirty-five meters up on her left. The mark would come in that way. He would exit the park through the gate at the other end of the lane, off to her right. There was another gate behind her, just visible over her left shoulder. Outside that gate, in the shadow of a multi-story car park, her two partners waited for her signal.

The patch of green was one of the few public spaces in the city center that were almost entirely obscured from security cameras. Only one camera, on the wall of the car park behind her, watched over this space. Manikin knew that camera would not be working. Her brother would see to that.

She looked at her watch. The guy they were waiting for was late. Manikin realized that she hadn’t turned a page of her book in several minutes and did so now. It was at that moment that she saw a Safe-Guard walking down the lane on the far side of the park. Her blood ran cold—if the mark appeared now, they would have to let him pass. Just as she always did when she saw a Safe-Guard, she ran through a check of what she had on her person, in case the peeper looked over at her. Nothing too suspicious. She was wearing a strawberry-blonde wig, but the watcher wouldn’t spot that unless it was very close. The same went for the tinted contact lenses that made her eyes look blue instead of green. The pockets of her khaki-colored mac were empty—so that the coat could be cast off in a hurry if need be. Beneath the coat she wore a pair of unremarkable black jeans and a gray wool sweater. Nothing too distinctive. She carried nothing illegal—except for her fake ID, which was of an extremely high quality. She was always careful about that when she was on a job. The work was dangerous enough without doing something stupid like carrying a weapon or some stolen property.

Even so, she felt a chill as the blue-gray, cloaked figure turned the glass visor of its helmet in her direction. She hated the way they moved. They were trained to glide, walking slowly and smoothly. She never saw one looking hurried or agitated. They were taught to show as few human qualities as possible, to be walking surveillance posts and nothing more. They couldn’t even talk to you without permission from their Controllers. It didn’t look at her for very long, but she still felt that disturbing sense they always gave you—that they could see through you, see anything you were hiding. The stare that said they could tell when you were up to no good.

Then it was gone, leaving through a gate on the far side of the park. That wasn’t gone enough for her liking, but at that moment a boy her age appeared through the gate on her left, swerving onto the lane on a skateboard. His lank brown hair hung over a spotty, petulant face, much as his baggy jeans hung off his backside. His tense expression and watchful eyes gave him away. This guy was on duty. He was carrying a cuddly toy under his left arm, a rather hungry-looking caterpillar with a meter-long skinny green body, a large red head and multi-colored legs. It was time to go to work.

Manikin tapped the top of the bench with her right hand. As the skateboarder sped towards her, two people on roller-blades swept out from the gate behind her, coming up on her left. They were going too fast to stop. The skateboarder twisted to avoid them, but the guy with the bleached-blond hair and the ox-blood leather jacket hit the skater hard enough to knock him off the path. The spotty kid might have stayed on his feet if the red-headed girl hadn’t fallen over her boyfriend’s sprawling legs and slammed right into the unfortunate skateboarder. He collided with the litter bin, dropped his cuddly caterpillar and tumbled onto the grass. The redhead staggered up into a standing position, wobbled on her roller- blades, and stood on the side of the skater’s knee. He let out a yell. She fell over onto him again, her elbow hitting him in the face.

“What are you doin’?” he protested. “You muggin’ me or do you, like,
normally
skate like a drunk baby? Get off me!”

Manikin was already on her feet, as the guy in the leather jacket stood up on his roller-blades, his face contorted into a snarl. His name was Punkin, and he was a short fifteen-year-old, with a pale, pinched face, premature bags under his eyes and cropped, bleached-blond hair. He stood over the spotty kid, his right hand clenched into a fist.

“Watch where you’re goin’, you little scrote!” he barked. “You skatin’ with your eyes open, or are you, like…usin’ the Force? Hey, I’m talkin’ to you, arse-face!”

The skater was distracted for a moment by Punkin as Manikin picked up the caterpillar. She reached for the litter bin as she walked behind Punkin, who stood between the bin and the skater. The spotty kid stretched to the side, looking past Punkin and focusing his entire attention on the cuddly toy in Manikin’s hands.

“Hey, that’s mine! Let go of that! Let it go!” he cried, his voice a little too shrill.

“Sure, sure,” she said, handing it over as he stood up. “I saw what happened. You OK? It was all their fault, they ran right into you. I’ll testify to that if you need to make a claim. Are you hurt? Is the caterpillar OK?”

“Yes! No! Just…just leave me alone,” the skater said, obviously shaken, and holding onto the cuddly toy like a toddler meeting strange relatives. “I just need to go.”

“Hey, this isn’t over!” the bleached-blond guy snapped. “You run into me, you’re gonna apologize! You and your caterpillar both!”

“Apologize for what? You got a whole park to roll through and you hit the only other person in it? I gotta apologize ’cos you can’t steer straight? That what you’re tellin’ me?”

“Yeah, let’s ’ave it!” his girlfriend backed her man up. “You an’ that bug gonna show us some respec’.”

The girl, whose name was Bunny, was a manic-faced strip of a thing, with a wild mop of ginger hair and near-permanent look of frustration. The same age as her boyfriend, she was slightly more stupid, and just a little bit more of a psycho. She always spoke as if her knickers were painfully tight. Manikin would not have been working with either of them if she hadn’t been desperate. Bunny moved forward as if to push the guy, and Manikin stepped into the way. Manikin felt a hard shape under the girl’s jacket and frowned. Looking down, she saw the butt of a black plastic handle sticking out of Bunny’s waistband. Manikin hid her shock well. Turning back to look at Punkin, she noted the way he held his right hand down near his waist. He was carrying as well, the idiot.

“Leave him alone!” Manikin told them. “I saw the whole thing—you weren’t watching where you were going, either of you. You ran him right off the path! I should call the bloody police, although they’ve probably seen everything already.” She pointed at the camera up on the wall of the multi-story car park. “Go on, get the hell out o’ here.”

But it was the skater who moved first. With one glance up at the security camera, he kicked his skateboard back onto its wheels, jumped on and rode away down the path.

Manikin spun around, hissing quietly through her teeth: “You could have blown everything, you stupid bloody fools! Guns? You bring
guns
to a
switch
?
Are you out of your tiny little minds? Get lost, and meet me back at the van. And try not to get arrested on the way.”

“Mind your tone,” Punkin grunted, showing her the handle of the automatic he had in his waistband. “I know how to use this.”

“Really? ’Cos the only thing that’s good for is putting us all in
prison
,” Manikin growled. “FX and me brought you in on this ’cos we thought you had savvy. Now, if it’s not too much trouble, try and get back to the van without bringing every bloody copper in the city down on top of us. I’ll see you there.”

“Did you get it?” Bunny asked, ignoring Manikin’s expression of disgust.

Manikin reached into the litter bin, pulling out the black plastic bag that sat within it. This was not a garbage bag—she had placed it in there herself. Inside the bag was the skater’s green caterpillar. The one he was hurrying away with was a dummy, which she had switched for the real one as she passed behind Punkin’s back. She nodded, showing them the toy before closing up the bag and tucking it under her arm.

“That camera’s about to come back online.” She tilted her head towards the wall of the car park. “Let’s move.”

As Punkin and Bunny went one way, and she went the other, Manikin was already working over the angles. Her ‘partners’ had not needed the guns for the job. Manikin and her brother had planned it that way. In a city filled with x-ray cameras and the super-senses of the Safe-Guards, even a complete moron would avoid carrying a gun unless they had a really,
really
good reason. And there was only one reason Manikin could think of.

She and her brother were about to be reesed.

FX FOLDED HIS console as he saw his older sister approaching the minivan. The server controlling the cameras in the underground level of the car park would stay offline for another ten minutes—plenty of time to get out of there. There was a scattering of other cars parked on this level, but it was late in the evening, and very few people were working in the office block attached to the car park. FX had hacked into, and crashed, the surveillance server seven other times in the last two days, to make sure the security guards who monitored the car park were thoroughly sick of the malfunctioning system before the day of the job. Another crash would be unlikely to cause much alarm. He had also knocked out a single camera, on a separate system. It overlooked the park behind the building—and the lane that ran along one side of that park, where his sister had just finished their latest job.

Now that he could see Manikin coming towards him through the shadowy car park with a black bag slung over her shoulder, he knew it was time to go.

FX was short for his age—as his sister was always keen to point out—and his round face and the spray of freckles on his brown cheeks did little to relieve his youthful appearance. His curly black hair was gelled into a carefully sculpted mess atop his head and his teeth were a little crooked at the front. And he was becoming doubtful that his wiry build would ever be particularly muscular. But then, FX was never going to be the muscle on any job. He was too useful in other ways.

Manikin slid open the side door of the metallic-mustard minivan, dumped the large black plastic bag on the seat and whipped off the wig of strawberry-blonde curls. She pulled the pins out of her own straight black hair, letting it fall over the collar of her khaki mac.

“Gimme the dye pack,” she muttered, as two figures hurried up behind her.

“Did you get the thing?” he asked.

“Did you hear me?” she asked back.

“What happened?” he tried again.

“Give. Me. The. Bloody. Dye. Pack. You. Wazzock,” she said slowly and softly, in a voice she only used when they were really in trouble.

He drew a wad of twenty-pound notes from his bag and handed it to her. Inside the hollowed-out wad was a type of anti-theft device used by banks. If Manikin had decided to use it, the job had gone badly wrong. She slipped her hand into the top of the plastic bag and placed the bound lump of notes somewhere inside. FX opened his mouth to ask her what had happened, but she cut him off:

“The switch went fine. Punkin and Bunny knocked the mark off his feet, just like they were supposed to. Born to fall over, those two were.” She shook her head, color rising under the tanned skin of her face. “While they were all untangling themselves, I switched his caterpillar for the dummy in the litter bin. The courier didn’t cop it, I’m sure of that. He whined a bit, and took off holding onto the dummy like his life depended on it.”

“So?” FX pressed her. “What’s the problem?”

Punkin and Bunny rolled up behind her on their roller-blades, and Manikin looked sourly at them.