by Declan Finn
“SMURFs,” a chorus corrected him.
“—then why did only one side ask for help?”
Gary Castelo laughed, once more seeming like the Ghost of Christmas Present. “I own a gun range. Figure it out.” He nodded to Kovach. “You read his write-up of Bradley's SWATting experience. Do the math.”
The one Sean labeled as “Freddie Mercury” said, “I'm Calvin Y. Jefferson—Crazy Cal to my fans. In addition to being an author, I'm a gunsmith, and I make my own swords. As Gary says, do the math.”
Jesse James didn't even look up from the laptop. “Yeah, don't even start with me. Someone else can go.”
Rachel Hartley reached under her chair and brought out a tactical umbrella with a solid iron core. “I'm good with this.”
“But in all honesty,” Omar Gunderson said, “We don't need it. These guys are, at best, keyboard commandos. Sure, sic a SWAT team on us via 9-1-1? Not a problem. But you've met the leaderships of some of our … antagonists?”
Gary chuckled. “Mild annoyances?”
Omar shrugged. “Sure. Like it or not, we're not in a place where they can come and get us. Even if they call a SWAT team on us again here, in Atlanta, there's no way that they would get past the front desk. It's hard to SWAT someone in a hotel, you know?”
“And let's face it, there's no way in Hell they'd take us on one-on-one,” Kovach said. “Unless they have some psycho foot soldiers around, of course. Heh. But let's face it, what are the odds of that?”
That's when someone came up the Hyatt's back stairs and wheeled onto the patio with a gun.
Chapter 7: No Such Thing as a Free Ticket
The gunman, one Joseph Alan Leddon of downtown Chicago, didn't have a rapsheet, but mostly because he was just that good—or just that lucky. By the time of WyvernCon, he had murdered some 33 people, most of them in cold blood.
When he had found a $10 million bounty for one Sean A.P. Ryan, the first thought in Leddon's head was “Retirement money.”
His plan was, as usual, to survive by blunt force and pure audacity of action—he had made more than his fair share of hits by simply walking up to someone in public and filling their head full of bullets.
His first pass by Sean Ryan was walking out the back door of the Hyatt, and catching a glimpse of Sean's general location on the patio before taking the stairs down to the street.
By the time he had come back up the stairs, only two things had changed—Matthew Kovach had arrived, and Colonel Bradley had stepped off to the side take a phone call from his wife.
The Colonel didn't seem to be that much of an issue—he was on the wall opposite from the patio, an easy ten to fifteen feet behind Leddon.
What he didn't count on was Colonel Bradley's phone.
Without a word, from the moment that Leddon had reached for his gun, Bradley closed his heavy flip-open satellite phone—a half-pound monstrosity that would survive the rigors of travel in some very nasty parts of the world, with a long antenna, covered by hard plastic.
By the time that Leddon had his gun out, Bradley's phone was already in flight, heading right for the back of the gunman's head, antenna first. Leddon staggered forward a few steps, reeling.
By that time, Sean was already rolling forward, under Leddon's line of fire. When he came to a stop his hands shot up, grabbing the muzzle of Leddon's gun as well as his wrist.
Sean sprang straight up, maintaining the grip on the gun, keeping it ahead of him. The back of the gun barrel slapped into Leddon's face, right before Sean pushed back on his wrist, and up on the muzzle, bending Leddon's wrist back the wrong way until he released the gun.
Sean rotated the gun and stabbed into Leddon's temple with the muzzle of the pistol. He kicked the gunman in the balls, then roundhouse-kicked Leddon in the head, hurling him down the stairs—all sixty concrete steps.
“Huh. He didn't bounce. Oh well.”
* * * *
Michael DeValera hated this assignment more and more as time went on, and he hadn't even taken his first shot at Ryan yet.
DeValera was starting to understand why no one had killed Sean Ryan. He was good and his team was theoretically better. But, most importantly, he seemed to be so bloody lucky. The former Secret Service agent, he could count on and outmaneuver. The former SpecOps guy who liked to knit? Relatively easy. The former “IRA” thug was possibly going to be the easiest of them to remove. And there was something to be said for the Elf.
But luck was something that DeValera couldn't plan around.
He frowned as he leaned against the wall of the Hyatt, looking out through the glass walls that led out to the patio. He'd had a clear view of the shooter. By all rights, Ryan should have been murdered in short order. There was no real cover, and no way for Ryan to cover the authors and protect himself. There was no finesse, and very little in the way of planning, but it would have worked if there hadn't been external interference.
DeValera frowned. He was going to have real competition for this bounty.
He got an alert on his phone, and he checked the listing for the notification on Ryan's head. It had gone up. A lot.
That explains it.
* * * *
The short woman with the blonde highlights (that really was nothing more than a lousy dye job) blinked in surprised at the sign in front of the Sheraton parking lot.
The first sign was something she expected. The sign was big and bold, in bright, glow-in-the-dark letters: WYVERNCON TICKET PICKUP HERE.
The second sign was completely out of left field.
COMPED TICKETS FOR THE FOLLOWING CON GOERS
And then, she found her own name on the list. Such good luck … I'm suspicious.
Although the strange thing was that it had her old job title attached to it. She hadn't been in the Secret Service in over a year.
The 4'11” sort-of blonde dug into her backpack, pulling out her credentials. She kept them on hand as a conversation piece for parties. When she got to parties.
Then again, she thought, it's been a while since I've even been in the country. I'm surprised that WyvernCon knew where I was living. It's not like I left a forwarding address.
She pulled out her credentials, and started walking along the line, passing by the people who were already Cosplaying before the convention even started. Most of them were just shiny t-shirts like “I'm fluent in Sarcasm and Movie Quotes,” and “May the [Handgun] be with you.”
When she got to the doors heading inside the building, she flashed her creds at the Stormtrooper standing guard.
“Move along,” he said. “Move along.”
She smirked, and moved along.
The other line was insane. Go into the hotel, do a U-turn to get onto one line, which U-turned onto yet another line, and that was the line to get into the hotel, onto the line for the pre-registration room, where she got onto that line … So everyone but her went from a line, to get onto a line, to get onto a line, to get onto a line.
The preregistration line was a serpentine mess across a ballroom about 30 yards long, roped off and packed. Organizers kept calling out names, because there was one person to deal with people in select alphabetical segments (Adams-Alabaster, Annoying-Bradbury, etc). It took two hours to get to the front of the line, where they had broken the line up into segments per group—and they took 5-10 minutes per member.
The line split three ways at that point – green tape on the floor were for those people preregistered and prepaid, blue for those people who weren't registered at all.
Red tape was for her.
She followed the lines, admiring the layout. The admissions area for WyvernCon was basically a series of ballrooms strung together, with lines divided up as in Disney World.
When she got to the ballroom at the farthest end of the hallway, she peeked in, confused. The mostly empty hall had one man working the booth. He was a teenager fingering through the convention schedule with a highlighter in one hand.
She cleared her throat. “Hi. I'm a
pparently going to get a free ticket?”
The teenager looked up, frowned at her, and reached for a radio. “Yes, sir, one of the VIPs has arrived.”
“Thank you,” chirped the voice back.
She sighed, shook her head, and strode forward (well, as much as she could actually stride, given her height). “There a point to radioing in? Do you need backup?”
“No, ma'am, I just need senior personnel to verify you.”
She growled in mild frustration. “Seriously? Senior personnel? What? Has security been taken over by military officers?”
There was a chuckle behind her that said, “More like asymmetrical warfare.”
She stopped in midstep, and stumbled, trying to turn. A titanium grip held her arm and swung her to her feet.
At that point, former Secret Service Agent Wilhelmina “Villie” Goldberg was face-to-face with the one man she never wanted to see ever again in her entire freaking life.
“Ryan?”
“Hey, Villie. How are you doing?”
“Oh for Adonai's sake!”
Sean laughed.
* * * *
“No, Sean, seriously, what the hell are you doing here?”
Sean smiled from across the table. They were in the Sheraton main lobby, where there was limited seating, and thus fewer people who could stalk him there. He sipped from his oversized coffee mug that had a dragon with a machine-gun on one side, and an emblem of “Keep calm and agree with Sean” on the other.
He looked over his shorter compatriot. She hadn't changed in the months since he'd seen her last. Same hazel eyes. Same terrible dye job. “Rome seems to be treating you well.”
Goldberg scoffed. “Please. There's an assassination attempt on the Pope once a month. It's driving me nuts.”
Sean frowned. “Sorry to hear that. I thought that they were just after me.”
“Those that knew who the hell you were?” Goldberg said. “They went after you. Now that there isn't someone obvious and visible from the initial war? They're going after the next obvious person. Then again, the Pope seems to be doing a great job. Any time the morons come within arm's reach of him, he takes them out himself. None of them seem smart enough to have a small, compact, subtle suicide bomb.” Goldberg took another sip of her coffee. “Now, what gives?”
“How familiar are you with the Hubble Awards?”
Goldberg groaned, smacked her forehead against the coffee table, and ran her fingers through her hair.
Sean laughed. “Wow. I thought that I was going to be the only one doing that for the foreseeable future.”
Goldberg turned her head so that one hazel eye could glare at Sean. “Are you kidding me? If you're into classical fandom, you've heard of the Hubbles. If you're into recent fandom … okay, maybe not so much. But this …” Goldberg stopped, sat up, and stared at Sean. “This isn't about the Puppies, is it?”
“How'd you guess?”
“I know the guest list better than you do.”
“Trust me, if you did, you'd want to shoot half of them.”
“Oh, I already do,” Goldberg said. “Have you met Kendall Adler of Redding's Ordinary Tales? I mean, hell, publicly posting about how every Puppy-backed work is crap written by white supremacists? When it even included books she published and authors she had worked with? No. That's just insane.”
Sean cocked his head to one side. “You know, you'd think that someone would have fired her ass over comments like that. Heck, I'm surprised that the authors involved didn't call for her head.”
Goldberg sipped at her coffee, in a cup that read Tech People Do It On Computer Desks. “Oh, there's a ROT boycott going on, don't worry about that.
“Really? How well is that going?”
Goldberg shrugged. “Well, they had a companion piece for one of their primary fantasy series, the Circle of Eternity, and within two months, it was already being sold for half off, so you tell me.”
Sean winced. Well, that sounds like someone's going to be sent out to the woodshed right about now. But she's still employed. Heck, she's here, out in public. It almost sounds like her last chance to make good before being fired. If I was the one in charge, anyway. “And the rest of them?”
Goldberg swirled her cup. “Jerry Friedman is still running on his success as a teenager when he sent a manuscript over the transom forty years ago. Johnny Prada just got a multimillion dollar deal with ROT, though damned if I can figure out why.”
“How so?”
“Have you read his books? Gah. They've gone from being semi-libertarian to being Lefty claptrap. Hell, the only reason his books took off is because the first one was favorited by SuperPundit online. And then he's proceeded to alienate everybody in his fan base.”
“And you wonder why I wanted you here,” Sean told her. “Seriously, you know more about this than I ever want to, and we're going to need all of the information that we can get about who hates who and who wants to kill who.”
Goldberg shook her head. “Don't even bother. The SMURFs hate the Puppies—of all types—but they wouldn't come out from behind their keyboards.”
“You haven't heard about the SWATting, have you?”
“I have.” She shrugged. “So what? It's still behind their keyboards. Or their telephones, depending. No, seriously, this is a waste of your time.”
“I'm getting a nice chunk of change for a waste of my time, so therefore, it's not a waste.”
Goldberg waved it off. “Big deal.”
Sean reached behind him, and pulled out his phone. “This is the next problem.”
Goldberg looked it over and said, “Oh, just great. For ten million, I'd happily hunt you down and kill you.”
“Exactly. We need someone to be on overwatch, Villie. How would you like to be part-time surveillance at WyvernCon?”
“Oy … do I have a choice?”
“Nope.” Sean's phone rang, and he answered. “Yup?”
Athena Marcowitz told him, “They're trying to close the pre-registration line. The room's still full. The registrants have refused to leave.”
Sean glanced at his watch. Nine o'clock. “Okay, cut the line at the room, tell them to hurry up.” He shut the phone, smiled, and said, “Fun fun fun.”
Chapter 8: Minions of the Puppy-Punters
Day one (Friday)
Sean Ryan watched over the long lines of WyvernCon. Plenty of people wore their T-shirts, since they wouldn't want to blow their costumes until the masquerade on Saturday. There were shirts giving five day forecasts on Alderaan (On the third day, 5000 degrees Celsius, and two blank days after), or Zombie Apocalypse rescue. There were shirts advertising binary (“10 types of people in the world—you either get binary, or you don't”), or Venn diagrams discussing time travel, aliens and star ships, and having a telephone booth in the middle.
Some people started with some light Cosplaying, with long brightly multicolored scarves, even though it was already a little warm that morning. At least one t-shirt with the periodic table squares for Sodium (Na) repeated six times, and ending with the Batman symbol. There were Marvel shirts, DC shirts, Marvel versus DC shirts. Plenty of shirts for Bacon. There were puppy shirts, Tearful Puppy shirts, and Giant Robot Tearful Puppy shirts. Women had “these are not the breasts you're looking for” written on their shirts, and men had “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” shirts … and sometimes, vice versa.
There was also a guy who was dressed like an angry dwarf, even though he was too tall to be a dwarf, wearing a booze keg on his back, and using a war hammer as a walking stick, wearing a name tag that read “Brodder.” There was an impromptu party happening in the lines around him.
Sean sighed, wondering how much of the day would consist of just waiting for something to happen.
Don't even ask, Sean, he thought. I'm sure that if you think it's too quiet, it'll go straight to hell anyway.
He sighed, shook his head, and decided to try for a little more recon … or at least as much as he dared.
He pulled out his iPad, and called up the A Pius Geek webpage, and looked for Tearful Puppies Bite Back. He scrolled through several of the SWATting attempts – like the ones on Castelo and Gunderson, and skipping the one on Colonel Bradley.
Then Sean found “Minions of the Puppy Punters.”
Oh, this should be fun.
* * * *
Offices of ROT Books, New York City
Terry "Long Knives" Smith-Smythe-Smites laid back in her office chair, tapping away at a laptop, explaining why the Evil League of Evil was just soooo evil, and the Friends of Sweetness and Light were just too good and pure to be considered “Puppy Punters,” SMURFs or CHUDs.
“How do you spell insidious?” she asked her husband in the desk next to hers.
Patty "Hearst" Smith-Smythe-Smites was busy throwing darts at a board with Gary Castelo's photo on it. The office was, of course, a palatial space, and most of the darts fall short. One dart headed right between Castelo's eyes, then stopped in mid-air, and then fell, seemingly scared of a photo of the Intergalactic Lord of Rage. “Blast it. It's spelled with three 'i's, dear.”
Terry Smith-Smythe-Smites nodded. “Got it. Must be consistent. It's not like there's one word that says racist bigoted misogynistic homophobe.”
Patty laughed. “You mean it isn't 'O'Day'?”
They both laughed politely.
Patty took aim once more. “So, how goes the war on Puppies?”
Terry: “I don't know. I'd have to ask. Igor! Igor!”
Fred “Igor” Moshevsky answered his master's call, and limped into the room. He was in a thick, black, hooded cloak, so he could avoid sparkling in the daylight. “Yeth, mathster?”
“Are you done spamming all of the Puppy Facebook pages and blog posts?”
Moshevsky nodded like, well, an eager puppy. “Yeth, mathster! Yeth! I've even gone after them for calling us SMURFs!”