The Con Job

by Matt Forbeck

  “This is like a soap opera for boys,” she’d told Hardison when he’d found her reading it. “Ridiculous plots, people dying and coming back, hyperdramatic situations. You take the superpowered fistfights out of it, and a soap opera is exactly what you’d have left.”

  “Aw, now why you have to ruin it for me like that?” he’d said as he’d taken the book back from her.

  She’d gone back later to find it and finish it. She understood the attraction.

  Slipping into her role as Jess, Sophie began to stroll toward Patronus’s booth. She took the long way around, making sure that it didn’t seem like she’d come straight into the hall to see only him. Instead, she stopped to peruse some comics called Dork Tower, about a group of gamers that seemed to include a short, greedy, mentally deranged man called Igor and an only slightly less diminutive muskrat named Carson.

  She looked up then and let Patronus’s booth catch her eye. Intrigued, she put down the comic she’d been perusing and let the artwork she saw draw her forward.

  “Good work,” Hardison said to her through her earpiece. “Now remember, most of the stuff in that booth is the handiwork of Golden Age and Silver Age legends. You don’t want any of that. You want his stuff only.”

  Sophie glanced up to see Hardison peering down at her from a windowed room above, from which he could observe Patronus’s section of the floor. He’d gone in there with a faked press pass and was pretending to be typing up his latest blog entry.

  Sophie wished Nate was up there with him, but he still refused to enter the convention center. He’d told her and the rest of the crew that it was because he wanted to give Hardison the space to run this part of the operation on his own. Nate would be off-site but nearby—in the poolside bar at the Marriott Hotel next door to the convention center—ready to step in should the circumstances demand it. They all hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  Nate had talked about renting a yacht and parking it in the marina as their base of operations instead. If he could find one large enough, they could all sleep on it too, but Hardison had nixed the idea fast. Spots in the marina were just as hopelessly sold out as any other place you could rest your head nearby.

  If Nate had put his trust in Hardison, then Sophie would too. She’d long been advocating for Nate to give the young man the chance he clearly ached for, and it delighted her to see him taking her advice. Still, she knew that this wasn’t the only reason that he’d refused to enter the convention hall, and sooner or later she would find out why.

  Meanwhile, though, she had a mark to meet.

  THIRTEEN

  Sophie wandered around Patronus’s booth, admiring the various pieces of artwork on display in the glass cases. Some of the pages might have lacked the talent of the great masters, but they more than made up for it with the energy they depicted. It surprised her that such simple bits of art—pencil-and-ink illustrations, really—could be transformed into the stunning and sharp artwork she saw throughout the hall, but that fact only made these artists’ work more impressive.

  Sophie made a complete circuit of the booth, avoiding direct contact with Patronus. She brushed her hair off of her glasses as she moved across his line of sight, trusting that it would catch his attention. Knowing that he was watching her now, she moved into the booth itself to get a better look at the artwork shown on the other side of the tall glass cases.

  When she came to a pair of pages that weren’t up to the standard of the other bits of work around her, she stopped cold and pretended to be impressed. The anatomy was off just enough to tell her that the artist wasn’t a professional but a gifted amateur. His characters seemed lifeless and awkward rather than living and fluid, the way the other pictures managed to depict them.

  “Damn,” Hardison said. “You went right to his stuff. How did you know?”

  “It’s not hard to tell,” she said under her breath. “If he was as good as he thinks he is, he’d have his artwork right out there with the other masters, front and center. He doubts himself, though—especially in comparison—so he keeps it in here, half hidden, in a section of the booth you have to work to get to. He can’t bear to keep it hidden away, but he can’t bring himself to flaunt it either.”

  “Nice,” Hardison said. “You frighten me sometimes.”

  Before Sophie could respond, she felt a presence at her elbow. “Can I help you with anything, miss?”

  She turned to discover Lorenzo Patronus at her side. Despite the fact that he was as well dressed as she, his voice shook just a bit as he spoke. She’d gotten his hopes up just by stopping in front of his artwork.

  “Yes,” Sophie said in a flawless Manhattan accent, regarding him in an offhand way. “This artist here, I admire his work, but I don’t recognize it. Who is he?”

  “Ah,” Patronus said, a sly smile on his lips. “You’re very perceptive. He’s a talented gentleman, but unlike the rest of the pieces I have on display here, this work is unpublished.”

  “Still, it’s a fine job,” Sophie said. “How can someone that talented not be working in the industry? Is this just some kind of hobby for him?”

  Patronus chuckled. “Hardly. He has as much passion for this as for anything else in his life.”

  “I can see that in his line work,” Sophie said. “It’s very sophisticated.” She stared at the drawing for a moment as if lost in its beauty, then caught herself and laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a soft laugh. “I just get so swept up sometimes. I’m Jess Drew.”

  “Lorenzo Patronus,” the man said with a wolfish grin. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Welcome to my booth. If you have any questions about this or any of the other artwork, I’d be happy to help you.”

  Sophie regarded him with a look of surprise. “Well, Mr. Patronus, what do I have to do to bring one of these pieces home with me?”

  “Call me Lorenzo, please,” he said with false deference. “I’m afraid that none of the artwork in the booth is for sale at the moment. We’re showing it here in preparation for auctioning it all off on Saturday. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Hero Initiative.”

  “Really?” Hardison scoffed in Sophie’s ear. “That’s the nonprofit some publishers set up about a decade ago to help out comic-book creators who fall on hard times. When you don’t have any kind of retirement plan, that happens.”

  “How generous and thoughtful of you, Lorenzo,” Sophie said. “So good to know that people like you are trying to help out the old heroes when they need it.”

  She frowned then and gestured toward the artwork she’d been admiring. “I suppose I’ll have to come back on Saturday and put my bid in on these pieces. In the meantime, can you tell me the artist’s name?”

  Patronus blushed just a bit then and spread his hands before him. “I believe I’ve already given it to you.”

  Sophie’s eyes grew wide. “You?” She smiled and gave him a playful slap on his chest. “You were just playing with me! So talented and a charmer too.”

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I hesitated to place my work up next to that of these legends at all. I haven’t told anyone that it’s mine.”

  “Well, I’m happy to keep your secret,” she said. “Just as long as you promise to keep one of mine.”

  Patronus arched his eyebrows at her, intrigued but uncertain what she meant. “How can I refuse?”

  “You can’t.” Sophie leaned forward and spoke to Patronus in a low, conspiratorial tone that just barely carried to his ears over the background noise in the hall. “I’m an agent, and I’m on the hunt for new talent.”

  “Really?” Patronus’s voice cracked just a little bit with excitement. He cleared his throat to cover the feeling, but he didn’t fool Sophie at all.

  “Really,” she said. “And that leads me to one very important question for you, Lorenzo. One that just might change your life.”

  He let loose a nervous laugh. “And what might that be, Jess?”

  She gave him the same wolfish smi
le he’d greeted her with a few moments before. “Do you currently have any representation?”

  FOURTEEN

  “We don’t have a lot of time for this,” Nate said into Eliot’s earpiece as Eliot led Parker up Aisle 200, the one that ran alongside the convention center’s north wall. The retrieval specialist, as he liked to call himself, weaved his way past people who’d stopped to take photos of a trio of women dressed in superhero outfits. Nate wasn’t sure exactly who they were supposed to be, but they had drawn a large crowd. He trusted Parker to be able to follow him wherever he went. She wasn’t nearly as good as he was in a fight, sure, but the woman knew how to move.

  “Sophie set her appointment with Patronus for five o’clock,” Hardison said from his perch up in the press room. “We should have until then at least.”

  “Sure,” Nate said. “As long as our anxious artist doesn’t decide to go looking for her before that.”

  “Jess Drew arranged to meet him at his booth,” Sophie said. “He doesn’t know where I plan to take him yet.”

  “Jess Drew?” Nate said. “Seriously? You couldn’t come up with a better name than that?”

  “What’s wrong with Jessica Drew?” Hardison said. “It’s Spider-Woman’s real name.”

  “Other than that stunning little detail—which I didn’t know about, but our mark might—there’s the fact that it sounds an awful lot like ‘Just Drew,’ which is a hell of an odd name for an artists’ agent, don’t you think?”

  “The man’s a serial abuser of pseudonyms himself,” Hardison said. “Even if he does think of that, he’d probably just chalk it off as a professional name. Hell, the man took his last name from a Harry Potter spell. He’s not one to talk.”

  “Would you two quit bickering like an old married couple?” Eliot said. “We got a job to do here.”

  “Just keep on going,” Hardison said. “You’re in the right area. Just start looking around.”

  “What exactly are we looking for again?” Parker said. “Bootleg DVDs?”

  Hardison chuckled. “Yeah, there’s always some idiot selling illegally copied DVDs in these shows. It’s against the convention’s rules, not to mention the law, but they just set up shop and sell as much as they can until someone reports them and they get kicked out.”

  “Got it.”

  Eliot spotted a likely booth at the end of one of the clusters of booths on the aisle. It was filled with all sorts of Japanese DVDs, including many that featured scantily clad young women with black bars strategically placed over their breasts and crotches. They also had a lot of German memorabilia stacked toward the back of the booth, some of which looked like it dated back to World War II.

  “There we go, Parker,” he said to her.

  She adjusted her navy blue suit and slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses. “On it.”

  Parker strode right up to the booth and stood in front of it like it owed her something. A tubby, tattooed man with muttonchop whiskers and a bad sunburn grinned at her, showing his bad teeth. “Something I can help you with, miss?”

  Parker pulled a wallet out of the breast pocket of her suit jacket and flipped it open to reveal an FBI badge. “Special Agent Hagen,” she said. “FBI. We’ve received a report that you’re selling illegally copied recordings here, including both CDs and DVDs.”

  The man shot her a knowing frown. “And you’re here to shut me down.”

  Eliot had walked past the booth and was pretending to check out the replica weaponry at the booth next door. They sold knives of all kinds, up to and including two-handed swords as long as he was tall. Some of them seemed impractical, more for decoration than anything else. Still, they gave him something to look at while he waited for Parker to make her play.

  “May I?” He reached for a replica of Andúril, the sword reforged for Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and gave it a closer look. The saleswoman there assented to the examination with a nod.

  “I’m sick and tired of this,” the burly man said to Parker as he signaled for the bald, scrawny man working with him to start packing up the booth. “I don’t know what the government’s doing sending a woman out here to come down on us and our legitimate business. It’s a free country, and we’re providing a needed service here.”

  “The RIAA and MPAA don’t see it that way, sir,” Parker said. “You’re in clear violation of copyright laws here. Just from where I’m standing, I can see seventeen cases of infringement alone.”

  “Well, to hell with them,” the man said. He glanced around, acting nervous.

  Eliot tightened his grip on the sword’s hilt and felt its heft.

  “And to hell with you, Fed!”

  The big man took a swing at Parker with a meaty fist. It came within an inch of clipping her, but she had seen it coming and managed to duck out of the way.

  Eliot had the sword out of its scabbard and slapped it against the bruiser’s throat in the blink of an eye. The flat side of it smacked against the man’s Adam’s apple and stopped him cold.

  “I’d think about that again if I were you,” he said to the man.

  The scrawny guy threw a DVD case at Eliot and then charged at him. Eliot caught the DVD easily enough—a copy of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, which he cursed at. Then he waited for the younger man to charge in. When he did, Eliot hit him with the butt of the sword in his hand and knocked him cold with a single blow.

  Then Eliot brought the blade back around to point it straight at the chest of the burly man, who had been about to charge back into the fight. “Think long and hard,” he said as he pushed the tip of the weapon into the man’s sternum. It was a dull enough blade that it probably wouldn’t cut the man, but Eliot didn’t care a bit if it did. He figured the man could use a reminder about how to be polite.

  The big man glared at Eliot for a full five seconds before he cracked. He bowed his head and put up his hands in surrender, then backed slowly away.

  “You got fifteen minutes to get all of this stuff out of here.” Without taking his eyes from the man, Eliot slipped the sword back into its scabbard with a smooth, practiced move. “Or I’m going to put that Nazi crap somewhere very uncomfortable for you.”

  Parker oversaw the orderly teardown of the booth. At one point, a few of the convention security staff came over to investigate, but she just flashed them her badge. One of the men, a burly black man with a goatee, smiled at her. “Once you’re done with these jackasses, we could point you toward a couple other places that could use your attention.”

  Parker gave the man a grim nod. “We’ll put our best people on it.”

  Eliot had disappeared after cowing the two men in the booth. He’d handed the blade back to its merchant and said, “Nice balance,” before he left. He hadn’t gone far, though, and Parker spotted him walking by once to goose the bootleggers into moving faster.

  Within half an hour, the booth had been stripped back down to a single table and two chairs sitting on a patch of bare concrete. Parker dropped a cardstock sign onto the table that Hardison had made for her. It read CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE FBI.

  Then she escorted the two men to the loading dock area in the back of the hall. “I’m going to let you off with a warning this time,” she said. “I see you again, though, and I’ll let my partner there get in as much practice time with that sword as he likes.”

  The scrawny guy—whose eyes and the bridge of his nose had already turned black-and-blue—scowled at Parker. “That guy was your partner? He didn’t look like no fed to me.”

  Parker looked at the man over the top of her sunglasses. “You think we all wear suits and glasses?” She gave him a sardonic smile. “We’re everywhere.”

  The bigger man shuddered at that thought and hustled the skinny guy off. “I told you that,” he said to his friend as they disappeared. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

  Parker waited until they were gone and then took off her sunglasses and her blazer and folded it over her arm. She undid the top buttons on her
shirt, let down her hair out of its ponytail, and walked back into the hall. She looked nothing like an FBI agent any longer.

  FIFTEEN

  “Do I really need to wear this getup?” Eliot said hours later as he, Parker, and Hardison walked back into the convention center. “Why can’t I just go into the con as someone who looks like me?”

  “Come on,” Hardison said. “Look around here. How many of these people look anything like you?”

  Out of some sense of obligation, Eliot peered over the top of his black-lensed sunglasses and scanned the crowd milling about them. “You mean like me normally or like you got me made up?” He adjusted the black fedora on his head and did his best not to scratch at the full, brown beard going gray down his chin.

  It was too damn hot to walk around in the black suit over the untucked and open-collared black shirt Hardison had insisted he wear, but he’d been through worse, mostly in jungles filled with snakes, mosquitoes, and bad men with guns. At least here he didn’t have to worry about anyone shooting at him. Or so he hoped.

  He spotted a group of about twenty people dressed up in Star Wars stormtrooper uniforms. Their costumes were perfect, as if they’d stepped straight off the set of The Empire Strikes Back, although the blaster rifles they carried were clearly inoperable, custom-built models rather than modified weaponry. They had a few women with them too, dressed in armor with breastplates that fitted their curves far better than the standard uniform could manage.

  “They don’t look like anybody, anywhere real,” Eliot said.

  Hardison chuckled. “Them? They’re with the 501st Legion. They’re harmless.”

  “There’s a legion of those guys?” Parker asked as they moved past the stormtroopers and into the hall.

  “They’re all over the place,” Hardison said. “Got garrisons all over the country. Hell, all over the world.”

  “People dress up like that? For fun?” Eliot shook his head. “They got nothing better to do?”