Rat Runners (9 page)

There was a small van parked against the curb of the narrow path, a few meters away from the window. It was old, with a sticker for a fake security system on the window. No alarm, but the ignition system on these vans was hard to crack. That was OK, he didn’t need to start the engine. Checking that he was still out of sight of the cameras, Nimmo took a long piece of wire and a steel ruler from his bag. The pack was full of odds and ends, but he kept nothing in it that could get him arrested. He had the driver’s door open in a matter of seconds.

After another discreet look around, he took the van out of gear, released the handbrake and pushed it forward until it was under the window. Then he put it back in gear and pulled up the brake handle.

There was a young couple coming up the path towards him. He took out his phone—still disconnected from its battery—and leaned back against the side of the van, pretending to text someone until they had passed. After they rounded the corner, he hopped onto the bonnet, then onto the van’s roof, and jumped from there up to the window, grabbing hold of the sill. After a peek inside to make sure there was no one in the room, he climbed in, dropping to the floor and listening carefully. He was in a bedroom, standing by a double bed covered in a flowery bedspread and scattered with old-fashioned embroidered cushions. There was someone upstairs in the living room—two people, having a lively argument, by the sound of it. He winced, and dropped quietly to the floor. There were times when you just had to go for it.

He walked across the small, pine-paneled bedroom, down the hall past the bathroom door, and silently let himself out the front door. He put it on the latch, so it wouldn’t click when he closed it. They could wonder about that all they liked.

Casually coming out of the front door of a flat made him look like a resident. He was on camera out here, but he doubted anyone paid much attention to this part of the building. Coming in the normal way, you had to walk past a bunch of other cameras to get here. He was now on the corridor leading to the Brundles’ apartment. The camera was at the end of the hallway, behind him. Hobbling as if on an old man’s stiff legs, he hunched his shoulders, tilted his head down and made his way slowly to Veronica’s front door, which opened onto the other end of the corridor.

As he walked along with the camera on his back, his thoughts turned, as they so often did when he was on a job, to his mother and father. He could imagine what they would have said if they saw him now. “You’re taking too many chances, not checking it out enough. Not thinking it through,” his father would say.

“Acting like a bloody amateur,” his mother would say. “Did we teach you nothin’?”

They’d made a lot of sacrifices to keep him safe—to hide his existence from their enemies, but they’d still left him alone, hadn’t they? And now Brundle’s death had rattled him more than he wanted to admit, and he was being forced to work with a new crew, just when he needed time on his own to work the angles. He was rushing into this. He’d been in too much of a hurry to get away from the others and do something,
anything
, to lay out a proper plan. But he was stuck into it now, and had to follow it through.

People living in apartment blocks such as these tended to mind their own business, but there was no one in the corridor anyway. Peering through the glass in the door, he looked for any sign of a passive volumetric sensor in the hallway—the tell-tale box with a little red light. But he saw nothing. He took the arms off his sunglasses and used the lock-picks to open Veronica’s front door.

Slipping inside, he heard the faint squeak of a floorboard under his foot. He waited a few seconds with the door open, while listening for any other sound, his eyes searching the doorframe for any sensors. Nothing. A quick look into the first couple of rooms confirmed what he’d suspected. No burglar alarm. The WatchWorld system had reduced casual burglaries, particularly in places like this. That meant fewer people spending money on expensive security systems. There was a silver lining to every cloud. He closed the door.

This was an apartment laid out over two levels, stretching from the front of the building to the back. Nimmo tucked his sunglasses away and had a quick look around the place before he did any digging. At the entrance level was a hall, with the main bedroom to the right. To the left, past the bathroom, was a second bedroom that looked out the front of the building. The stairs went up from just inside the door. The upper floor had a living room at the front, a kitchen in the middle, and a dining room at the back. After checking these, he came back downstairs. Veronica’s room was the obvious place to search first. This was the smaller of the two rooms, down the hall past the bathroom.

Most of the apartment was laid with semi-solid beech-wood flooring, with the walls finished in white or pastel colors, but Veronica was clearly at that stage in her life where everything was about making a statement. Two of the walls were bright green, the other two were purple. It wasn’t a big room. Nimmo wondered how she spent much time in here without getting a headache. There were a few posters on the walls—the usual bands and film stars a girl his age would be into. There was a computer on a small desk facing the door, and a dressing table beside it, under the window. A single bed with a deep orange-patterned duvet stood against the wall to the right. A sound dock sat on a sideboard in front of him, beside a small television. Nimmo picked his way across a floor littered with clothes, shoes and books. He made a mental picture of the room. When he left, he wanted to be sure there would be no sign that he’d been there. The computer was switched off. He switched it on, and continued his search while it warmed up.

Even though he couldn’t find what he was here to search for, his thief’s instincts took over, and he began assessing the value of the things around him. On a whim, he had a look under the mattress first, and to his amusement found a diary there, covered in girlie stickers. He left it there for the moment. He could go back to it later. There were plenty of guys who would have had a good laugh to themselves poking around a girl’s bedroom, but Nimmo was working. A quick search through the wardrobe beside the door turned up nothing of interest. There were no hidden spaces that he could find. Her jewelry was mostly of the cheap student variety, with a few more valuable pieces that were probably presents. They lay in and scattered around two open jewelry boxes on the small dressing table. After checking under the bed, he looked through the various drawers, bags and boxes tucked out of the way around the edges of the room.

He poked about, looking for hidden panels in the walls, floor, ceiling and in the furniture. Nothing. If she had a place for hiding her secret things, it wasn’t here. Nimmo had to be thorough—the story he told Move-Easy might depend on it.

The computer was now up and online. FX would probably be rooting around in it right now, but Nimmo took a data key from his pocket anyway, connected by wireless signal to the computer, and set the PC to copying all of its more recent documents, photos and other files onto the key. That would take a while. He’d come back to it.

He was flicking a last look across the bookshelves over the computer desk, when his eyes caught on the title of one of the books.
Fahrenheit 451
, by Ray Bradbury. He tilted his head, gazing
at the spine. It was a dangerous book. He was surprised her mother let her keep it. Veronica shouldn’t leave it sitting out where someone might see it.

Leaving her bedroom, he tackled the rest of their home. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock, but the longer he was here, the more chance there was of somebody walking in on him. Just because the two who lived here were accounted for, he couldn’t be sure they didn’t have a cleaner, or a friend or neighbor who had the run of the house. Nimmo normally didn’t do break-ins without studying the target for at least a few days, but he was on the clock now. Again, he could imagine his parents’ dismay if they knew how sloppy he was being. His mother, in particular, would be muttering curses under her breath. The risk of being caught always gave Nimmo a buzz, but it knuckled the pit of his stomach too, and he was getting it worse than normal.

He searched Veronica’s mother’s bedroom next; a more mature, yummy-mummy style with lots of cushions on the bed, interesting fabrics, driftwood ornaments and abstract artwork in box frames. There were lots of ethnic-craft boxes from Eastern and African cultures for her bohemian jewelry. There was every chance the ex-Mrs. Brundle would have known about the case, and could have hidden it herself, so he looked here too. No joy, of course. The living room and dining room were decorated to the mother’s tastes, but offered little in the way of hiding places. There was no attic or basement.

The small cupboards in the bathroom held only the mass of toiletry and cosmetic bottles, facial packs, make-up pads and other bits and pieces you’d expect with a teenage girl and her mother competing for space in the apartment. There was a slight give in the teak bath panel when he pushed against it, and he noticed there were faint scrapes on the tiles near the base of the panel, and those at right angles to it.

He pulled at the bottom and the panel came off. It seemed Veronica, and possibly her mother, had their own little Void going on. In the space under the bath, wrapped in plastic bundles, were more dangerous books. Nimmo noted some of the titles:
Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Catch 22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. All books that the publishers had voluntarily pulled off the market because of the risk they posed to society. He sat back on his hunkers, regarding this stash with thoughtful eyes. It was a clumsy hiding place, but if Veronica or her mother were going to hide the case anywhere in the house—if they’d had the case—Nimmo would have bet that it would be hidden here.

He took a couple of pictures with a small camera he kept in his pack, and put the panel back in place, careful to make sure it was just as he’d found it.

Trotting quietly down the stairs, he checked his watch and turned to go back into Veronica’s room, to have a look at her diary. He was stepping over the mess on the floor towards her bed when he heard a key turn in the lock of the front door.

HE COULD TELL by the sound of the tread on the hall floor that it wasn’t the girl or her mother. The steps were careful, but the semi-solid wood floor creaked, as if under a heavy weight. The door was opened and closed quietly. It was the sound of an intruder, and Nimmo had to assume they were here for the same thing he was. They would search the place … and find him.

The computer was still copying the files onto his data key. He pulled the power cord out of the back of it and the screen went dark. There was a cushioned stool under the dressing table. He pulled it out into the middle of the floor. Grabbing an aerosol deodorant from the table, he moved quickly across to the wardrobe and silently opened the door. It didn’t squeak. Careful not to rattle the hangers on their rail, he slipped in, crouching among the hanging clothes. Closing the door after him, he pulled the clothes together in front of him. He wasn’t kidding himself that he’d be hidden if the wardrobe door opened. But that wasn’t what he was about.

The guy did a quick recce of the flat first, just as Nimmo had, before beginning his search. When Nimmo heard him go upstairs, he considered making for the front door, but he couldn’t be sure of making it, and besides, this way he’d get more answers.

Like Nimmo, the intruder began his search in earnest in Veronica’s room. Through the white slatted doors of the wardrobe, Nimmo watched him try and switch on the computer. The guy checked the plug, reconnected the power cable, switched it on, and placed a data key down beside Nimmo’s, linking it to the PC. Then he came over to the wardrobe.

As he opened the doors, Nimmo was holding the aerosol ready. He sprayed it into the guy’s eyes and lunged forward. The man staggered back with hardly a sound, one hand at his burning eyes, the other raised in defense. Nimmo kicked him hard in the stomach. The man fell backwards, toppled over the stool in the middle of the floor, and cracked the back of his head on the dressing table. It wasn’t enough to knock him out, but he was stunned, flailing around, trying to fend off an attack he couldn’t see coming. He was up on one knee when Nimmo moved in behind him, got a head lock on in one smooth motion, and squeezed, cutting off the blood to the man’s brain. There was a thin line between rendering someone unconscious and killing them with this technique, but Nimmo’s father had taught him well.

The guy’s body slumped, and Nimmo checked he was unconscious by listening to his breathing. The man had a face like a Mexican gunfighter, complete with horseshoe mustache. He was dressed in the uniform of a security guard—the company that guarded the estate. Nimmo looked for identifying marks on his face, neck or arms and found a tattoo of a cat on the inside of his right forearm. A symbol used in prison by professional thieves. He took a photo of the stranger’s face and his tattoo, then tied the man’s wrists and ankles with two pairs of Veronica’s tights and covered his eyes and mouth with black electrical tape from his own backpack. Then he dragged him out into the hallway. Searching the man’s pockets, he found a single key, one hundred and thirty pounds in notes and change, a multi-tool and a phone.