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than a bird, so I’m assumin’ you didn’t check to see if the cash had been rigged before bringin’ it here. Or did you just not want to check, in case you blew it? Was you just tryin’ your luck instead?”
    They exchanged glances again.
    “Was that wrong?” Bunny asked innocently.
    “Christ, but you’re a proper pair o’ wazzocks.” Move-Easy sighed. “Scope ’ere is goin’ to ’ave a look wiv her sneaky eye, and tell us what you’ve brought into my ’ome.”
    Scope was no longer paying any attention to the people in the room. She had work to do, and went at it with her usual fixed intensity. She had taken her inspection camera from her toolbox. This was a keyhole camera on a long flexible tube. She could manipulate the direction of the tube with her index finger, using the joystick positioned like a trigger on the handle. The front of the tube had a tiny camera, connected to a small screen at the on top of the handle. Laying the x-ray printout down in front of her, she switched the inspection camera on, took the lens end of the tube and inserted it into the mouth of the cuddly caterpillar. Then, keeping her eye on the screen, she slid the lens end further in.
    The image on the screen showed her what was inside the soft toy. She knew there was a tube filled with money, but that wasn’t what she was interested in. The camera was equipped with an ultrasound scanner. She switched it on and the screen filled with blue-white see-through forms against a dark background. Her attention was on the hard-edged shape near the mouth that stood out clearer than anything else on the image.
    “It’s a dye pack, sitting at the top of the money tube,” she said to Move-Easy. “Doesn’t look like there’s a transmitter, but I’d have to take it out to be sure. I’d say the trigger is a light sensor. If you’d tried to take it out of the toy, the lights in here would have set it off. But I can deactivate the mechanism with a magnet.”
    Taking a small magnet from her toolbox, she slid her hand into the caterpillar’s mouth and pressed it against the wad of money she could see on her screen. Then she pulled out the bound bundle of notes and held it up in front of Punkin and Bunny:
    “You brought a dye pack in here. Banks use them to foil armed robberies. If you’d tried to take out the money, the first wad of cash you’d pull out would be this one. It’s hollowed out. Inside, there’s a device that, when exposed to the light, would spray a bright pink aerosol dye all over you, while burning at two hundred degrees Celsius.”
    She taped the magnet to the wad of money and tossed it into her toolbox.
    “An’ if I got painted, or if I even had to repaint this place ’cos of you monkeys …” Move-Easy sniffed as he pulled the meter-long rubber tube of cash out of the caterpillar’s mouth, “ you’d be the ones swallowing this .”
    The two small-time crooks went pale, but Move-Easy had already thrown the tube to Tanker, who took it from the room. The cash would be checked, sorted, counted and absorbed into the business. There had to be thousands of pounds there, but the gangster had hardly given it a second glance.
    “Now,” the orange-skinned boss said, lounging back on the couch, as Scope packed up her toolbox and stood up, “you’ve bought yourselves a few minutes of my time. What exactly is you two looking for, in return for this charmin’ act of goodwill?”
    “We’d like to join your organization, Mister Easy,” Punkin said, leaning forward. “We wanna move up; we’re done just bein’ rat-runners. I know we’d have to prove ourselves, but we’ve got a line on a big score. I got myself an implant the other day, at a clinic in Soho. It’s an underground operation—the surgeons there only deal in cash …”
    He paused, and glanced up at Scope. Move-Easy looked up at her and tilted his head towards the door. She took the hint and headed out of the room. As she was leaving, she heard her boss