by Matt Forbeck
Meet the Leverage team…
NATHAN “NATE” FORD (“The Mastermind”): A former insurance fraud investigator who leads the team and calls the shots.
SOPHIE DEVEREAUX (“The Grifter”): British wannabe actress. On stage, she’s no award-winner, but running a con, she makes brilliant use of her skills with character and accents to manipulate the marks.
ALEC HARDISON (“The Hacker”): The crew’s computer specialist, hacker, and all-around techno-geek who handles communications and info gathering.
ELIOT SPENCER (“The Hitter”): Ex-soldier, martial artist, and hard case who takes care of team security.
PARKER (“The Thief”): Master thief, cat burglar, pickpocket, and safecracker with a dark past. If it has a lock, she can open it.
LEVERAGE
THE CON JOB
MATT FORBECK
BERKLEY BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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THE CON JOB
A Berkley Boulevard Book / published by arrangement with Leverage Holdings, Inc. and Full Moon Enterprises
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Boulevard mass-market edition / January 2013
Copyright © 2012 by Leverage Holdings, Inc.
© & ™ Turner Network Television, A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.
Photographer: Michael Muller.
Excerpt from The Zoo Job by Keith R. A. DeCandido copyright © 2012 by Leverage Holdings, Inc.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.
All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 978-1-101-61850-9
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ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
The Zoo Job
ONE
Simon Curtiss walked into his studio in the back of his home in Tarrytown, New York, stripped off his tie, and tossed it across the top of his drafting table. He hated wearing ties. It felt like he had a noose around his neck. He’d gone to work for himself as freelance illustrator so he wouldn’t have to dress up like a so-called adult and go into an office every day, shuffling papers for one sort of boss or another.
He had only one suit, a classic black number he was proud to say he still fit into, even though it had to be thirty years old. It didn’t get much use. He wore it only to weddings and funerals.
This funeral had been a bad one—the worst.
He shuffled over to his drafting table, his grief weighing on him like an anchor trying to drag him down below the surface of the sea. He slumped down on the high stool he’d sat on almost every day for the past forty years, stared at the table’s ink-stained wood, and ran his fingers over its smooth, high-angled surface. Then he leaned forward and folded his arms against the table, buried his face in them, and wept, hoping that his daughter wouldn’t find him there before he was done.
The phone rang. He glanced at the name showing on the caller ID—Lorenzo Patronus—and wanted to snatch it up and smash it against the wall. Instead, he gritted his teeth and answered it.
“Now?” Simon said. “Now you call?”
“I heard about Rose,” the man on the other end of the line said, his voice smooth as ever. “I just wanted to extend my condolences.”
“Condolences?” Simon’s face flushed. He couldn’t believe the man’s balls. “What the hell good are those going to do me? Where were you last week when I kept calling? Or for the past six months? Where’s my money, Lorenzo?”
“It’s coming, Mr. Curtiss. These things take time.”
“I have a computer, you know. I saw you selling my pages on that eBay. You got paid. How about me?”
The man cleared his throat. “As I said, these things take time. I have to wait for the buyers’ funds to clear the bank before I can send out the original artwork to them. Otherwise, someone might rip us off.”
Simon stood up and clenched the phone so tight that his knuckles turned white. “Ha! Might rip you off? What about me? I sent you a hundred
pages of pristine original artwork six months ago and a dozen long boxes filled with silver-age books, and I haven’t seen a dime of it.”
Simon knew exactly how long the man had been taking advantage of him, and every day of it burned him. The bastard had been bugging him about wanting to help him sell his artwork and old comics—the comp copies the companies had sent him of his work—for over a year, but Simon didn’t know him and had blown him off. When Rose got sick, though, he had decided he didn’t have any choice. The man was offering the best prices around, and Simon was desperate for the money, for anything that would help him extend Rose’s life for even another day.
But the cash had never come.
All those days Simon had spent taking Rose back and forth to all those doctors, the long hours spent with her during her chemo, he hadn’t worked for much of it, and he’d watched their life savings drain away faster than he could keep track of it. He’d spent most of that time worrying about how he would pay for all the treatments, how he’d get the money to make sure Rose got the best care she possibly could. And when it became clear that she wouldn’t last much longer, he’d wanted to do whatever he could to make her final days as comfortable and wonderful as possible.
With all their money gone, though, he hadn’t been able to manage much, and his guilt over that had gnawed at him every minute, right up until she passed on. He’d stroked her hair and held her hand as she’d let loose her last breath. At least then, he’d thought, it would finally be over.
And it had been for her, but it seemed like it was just starting for him. The bills for the funeral had almost sent him into shock. As a freelancer, he’d not been able to afford insurance of any kind, not health insurance or life insurance. Medicare had helped to cover some of the hospital bills, but he had no way to pay for Rose’s burial, nor to give her the kind of send-off she deserved.
He hadn’t created Batman or Superman. He hadn’t invented the Avengers. He’d just kept his head down and done his job and had a wonderful time entertaining his readers.
The only thing he had to show after a lifetime of drawing comics was a stack of comics and the original artwork the companies had returned to him. Rose had often called it their nest egg, the one they hoped they’d never have to crack open. But when he finally had, Lorenzo had turned it all rotten.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?” Simon snarled into phone. “You’ve ruined me. Not only that, but you ruined Rose’s last days! You’ve ruined my life!”
“Now, Simon,” Lorenzo said, but Simon didn’t hear any more. He pulled the phone away from his ear and clutched at his chest. The heaviness he’d felt there for the past few days had become a sharp pain, and he felt like one of the muscle-bound superheroes he drew was sitting on his chest.
He let the phone clatter to the ground as he reached out and tried to steady himself on his drafting table, grasping its top edge with both hands. It felt hard to breathe, and the edges of his vision started to turn dark, tunneling down hard on all sides.
Simon’s daughter, Susan, found him slumped against the table, drawn in by the loud dead-line signal sounding from the phone on the floor. At first, she believed he’d fallen asleep, and she thought perhaps she shouldn’t disturb him. She worried that he might fall off his stool, though, so she tried to rouse him, but failed.
The paramedics were there in less than three minutes.
TWO
“They say he’s going to live, Mr. Ford,” Susan Curtiss said as she sat at one of the dark wooden tables in John McRory’s Place, a neighborhood bar in the heart of Boston. “But he’s so weak. I don’t know if he’ll ever be able to draw again.” She held on to her drink to steady herself and took a tiny sip from the glass.
Nathan Ford took the woman in. She was short and pretty, with dark hair going gray around the edges, and the smile lines around her mouth and eyes put her at near fifty years old. She seemed sincere enough, honest enough, still grieving over the loss of her mother and too distracted by her father’s troubles now to give much thought to her hair and makeup. He believed her.
Nate had learned a long time ago to trust his gut, but he also believed in verifying what his gut told him. Alec Hardison, who had set up this meeting, nodded at him from where he sat at his right hand. Hardison—the best hacker Nate had ever seen—had vetted the woman’s story before she’d even set foot in the Irish bar.
“And you’ve reported this to the police?” Nate said to her.
She nodded. “They say that since my dad turned the comics and artwork over to this Lorenzo Patronus voluntarily, it’s not a theft but a breach of contract. Our only option is to sue him in court, but that could take months, if not years.”
“Time your father doesn’t have.”
“Exactly.”
Nate gave Hardison a sidelong look. “Is this a good fit for us?”
Hardison knew what Nate was really asking. The crew of thieves they worked with—were, indeed, an integral part of—had dedicated itself to taking down those in power who abused the less fortunate. Did a fraudulent comic-book dealer rise to that level?
“It’s not just Simon Curtiss this guy’s taken advantage of, Nate. He’s gone after all sorts of old comic-book artists. He promises them top dollar for their most prized possessions and then disappears every damn time.”
Susan leaned in with an earnest nod. “What’s worse is he keeps doing it. He uses the fact that he’s lined up famous artists like my father as clients to legitimize himself in the eyes of others.”
“Eventually word will get out that he’s doing this, and the whole thing will collapse,” Nate said.
“But how many people will he hurt before that happens?” Susan said. “It’s not about the money, Mr. Ford, not for me. My husband and I, we’ll figure out a way to take care of my dad. If he has to sell the house to pay off his bills, he can move in with us. We’ll find a way to make it work.”
She looked Nate straight in the eyes then, making sure he listened to every word she said. “But I don’t want to see what happened to my father happen to anyone else.”
Nate patted the polished table before him. He had sat at this same table with his father when he was a kid. McRory’s had been his neighborhood bar, the place his dad had spent more nights than at home. He could see that Simon Curtiss had been a better father to his daughter than Nate’s dad had been to him. She wasn’t worried about her father moving in with her. She loved him and wanted some help to make this right.
Although Susan said it wasn’t about the money, Nate knew that wasn’t entirely true, at least not to Simon. It wasn’t just that the old man had lost the money, but also his artwork, the product of all his hard labor. If the money had been all he’d cared about, Simon would have sold off that stuff decades ago.
Getting Simon’s artwork back wouldn’t just allow him to sell it. It would give him back the most important thing Patronus had stolen from him: his dignity. That was something Nate thought was worth fighting for, especially if they could keep Patronus’s crime against Simon from being perpetrated on anyone else.
“All right, Ms. Curtiss.”
“Susan.”
Nate glanced at Hardison. The hacker still didn’t know for sure what Nate was going to say, which way he was going to go. Nate liked to keep him guessing.
“We’ll give you a hand.”
Nate couldn’t tell whose smile was wider, Susan’s or Hardison’s. The young man reached out and gave Nate a fist bump. Apprehension soon crept back across Susan’s face, though, and Nate needed to understand why.
“Is there a problem, Susan?”
“I just—how does this work?” She gave him a helpless shrug. “The police say they can’t do a thing. How can you?”
“We’re not in this for the money,” Nate said. “We just so happen to have a team of individuals who are very talented at breaking the law. They’ve just decided to use their talents to do some good.”
Nate swirled the shot of Jameson
he’d been nursing and wet his lips with it. “The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you.”
Susan blushed at that, flustered. “But even if you do get back my father’s things, we don’t have any way to pay you.”
“You feel like there’s nothing you can do to take this man on. He has too much money, and the law can’t touch him, not directly. He’s too big, and you’re too small.”
Hardison grinned at Nate’s words. “You know, Archimedes said he could move the world with the right tools. We’re those tools.”
Nate nodded in agreement, never taking his eyes off Susan. “We provide you leverage.”
THREE
“Are you serious?” Eliot Spencer said the next day as they sat down in the stark living room of Nate’s apartment, situated directly above McRory’s Place, to be briefed about the job. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair, not bothering to hide his disgust. “You want us to take on a job about funny books?”
“They’re graphic novels,” Hardison said in a grave tone. “And it’s a serious art form. They’re the most vibrant format for modern literature. And—and they make freaking great movies. I mean, have you seen The Avengers?”
“They’re stories about people who wear their underwear on the outside of their pants,” Eliot said. As one of the toughest mercenaries Nate had ever met, Eliot—Nate felt sure—had never had much time for things like comics. If it wasn’t featured on ESPN or didn’t involve cooking, it wasn’t the kind of pastime Eliot cared about. He preferred to do things rather than read about them.
“I like them,” Parker said. “Have you seen the kinds of acrobatics they pull off in those things? It’s… inspiring.”
Eliot scowled at the thin blond woman from under his own shoulder-length brown hair. “That’s only because you’re nuts. No one could pull off stunts like that.”
“Ah,” Sophie Devereaux said in her smooth British accent, a sly smile spreading across her sensual lips. “So you have read some of these comics?”
Nate allowed himself to enjoy the way Sophie needled Eliot. Nate had grown closer to her over the past few months, to the point that they now regularly shared each other’s bed. After the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage, he wasn’t in any hurry to get married again, but he had to admit to himself that Sophie was the only woman he could envision a future with.