by Matt Forbeck
Most of those costumes looked like they belonged on the cast of the TV show, as Hardison had described it to her. When she’d confessed to never having seen it, he’d sworn that he would introduce her to it once they got back home, but he’d yet to have a chance to make good on that promise. One of the costumed attendees was a tall black man with a high hairline that framed prominent ridges on his forehead.
“That your guy?” Walt said.
“I think we’d have mentioned the fact he was a Klingon,” Eliot said.
Parker shot him a look. “You know this stuff?” she said.
Eliot scowled. “It’s hard to avoid it. Especially with Hardison around. Honestly.”
Walt moved on until Parker spotted Hardison strolling out of the elevator, a wide, happy grin plastered across his handsome face. “That’s him!” she said. “Hold it right there.”
Walt froze the image. “If you say so,” he said. “That’s when he entered the place, though, not when he left it.” He peered closer at the monitor, then glanced back at Parker with suspicious eyes. “That woman with him looks awfully familiar.”
Parker looked closer and saw why. It was her. She opened her mouth to explain, but nothing came out. She looked to Grace, who folded her arms across her chest as she returned Parker’s gaze.
Eliot came to her rescue. “This is an undercover operation, like we said. Do either of you have a security clearance?”
He gave both Grace and Walt a hard stare. They both recoiled a bit and shook their heads.
“No?” Eliot said. “Then I’m afraid we’ve already told you too much. I’m going to rely on your sense of patriotism to keep a tight lid on our investigation. Loose lips about this could blow months of work.”
Grace and Walt exchanged glances. Parker could see that Walt had swallowed the story. As a security guard on the day shift, he was thrilled to have something so important to work on, and he channeled it into being dead serious. That sold Grace on the story as well. She gave Walt an emphatic nod.
“All right,” Walt said, returning to the recording. “We’ll help you find your man.”
After a few more minutes, Parker started to wonder if Hardison had left the Top of the Hyatt by some means other than the elevator. She remembered the stairwell that plunged down at the far end of the room, in front of the windows that looked out over the harbor. Had he somehow sneaked out that way?
But she’d been standing on top of that stairwell for many long minutes. As engrossed as she’d been with studying the rooftops below, she couldn’t imagine that he’d have been able to slip by her that way. Also, he’d told her over the earpiece that he was leaving. If he’d been that close to her, he’d have told her in person, right?
Maybe there had been another way off the floor that she’d missed. If this didn’t work out, she’d have to take Eliot back upstairs to poke around and be sure. The thought struck her that maybe Hardison had never left the bar but maybe been stuffed into a closet up there.
Then she spotted the back of his head on the monitor. “That’s him!” She stabbed her finger at the image on the screen.
Walt froze the playback. It was Hardison all right. She’d know the shape of him anywhere.
Better yet, there was someone with him. It looked like a man, shorter with dark hair, but Parker didn’t recognize him from the back.
“Can’t you turn the image around?” Eliot said. “Is there a camera inside the elevator? We need to see that man’s face.”
“No,” Walt said. “This is the only camera we have in that area. But wait for it.”
Parker narrowed her eyes at the security guard and saw that he was smiling. He pressed the button on his mouse, and the images on the screen started rolling forward again.
“People enter the elevator with their back to the camera, sure,” Walt said. “But almost all of them turn around to face the doors before they close.”
Parker nodded at that and leaned over Walt’s shoulder to stare at the monitor with unblinking blue eyes. Hardison entered the elevator with the other man right behind him. Hardison turned around then, just like Walt had said he would. The other man didn’t, though. He just kept talking to Hardison, who gave him an uneasy smile.
“Come on,” Parker said, unaware that she was speaking out loud. “Just turn around, would you? Come on!”
At the last possible instant, the man with Hardison did spin on his heel and look back through the doors. He looked up like he knew where the camera was too, and all but winked at it.
Parker recognized him in an instant.
“Cha0s,” she said, her voice dripping with venom.
Next to her, Eliot nodded in agreement. “Gotcha.”
THIRTY-FOUR
“So it’s Cha0s?” Nate said over the earpiece as Eliot and Parker walked back to the convention center.
“No doubt about it,” said Eliot. “We caught him cold.”
He wanted to punch something, hard. No, not something—someone: Cha0s. And now he had an excellent reason.
The security chief had been smart enough to not ask any questions about what he and Parker had been after, and the hotel manager had been all too helpful after Eliot had switched from giving her hard glares to warm smiles. People responded to different stimuli in different ways. Just like in a fight, you had to know what pressure points worked best for each individual and then push them in just the right sequence to make the most efficient job of it.
Eliot had never liked Cha0s. He didn’t like hackers in general, people who didn’t do a damn thing for the world but manipulate numbers on their little machines. Guys like himself had to concern themselves with the real word, not the virtual one, the place where people actually breathed and bled, lived and died. Playing around with toys just got in the way.
He’d learned to make an exception for Hardison. The kid was one of the smartest people he’d ever met, maybe too smart for his own good, but he really was just a kid, too young to know better most of the time. Still, he had a proven capability of pushing himself outside of his comfort zone, of taking on new tasks and new challenges in new ways, not just the ways that would have been the easiest or made him the most comfortable, and Eliot respected that.
Cha0s was like the flip side of Hardison, a smarmy, arrogant little bastard who wore his personality flaws like a flapping flag, taking pride in them rather than doing a damn thing to correct them. Eliot had several ideas about how he could apply a few corrective measures to the punk that would force him to figure out how to live without a computer for a few months. It was damned hard to type with ten broken fingers and a pair of fractured arms, after all.
“We should have suspected he’d be trouble the moment we saw him,” Sophie said. “He always is.”
“It was a natural enough thing to see a guy like him here,” Nate said. “We didn’t have any reason to think he’d be involved till now. Cha0s is a lot of things, but he’s first and foremost lazy and greedy. He wouldn’t go after Hardison out of sport, would he?”
“Maybe he would,” said Parker. Eliot knew she was as upset about this as anyone, but she’d managed to hold it together like a marine. He’d never seen her show much emotion about anything, of course, which was the main reason why she was so weird. Oddly, that made her easier to read than most people. When Parker showed an emotion, you knew it had to be so intense that it had knocked down all the barriers she had mounted around her, overwhelming them.
Those feelings were as honest as anything Eliot had ever seen. He’d kept an eye on her since they’d discovered Hardison was missing that morning. She’d not cracked yet, although she’d come close a good few times. He worried for whoever might be in the way when she finally let loose.
He hoped it would be Cha0s.
“Any idea where we can find this bastard?” Eliot said. “Searching for him in this city this week is like looking for a needle-neck in a geek-stack.”
“Really?” Parker said, raising an eyebrow at his simile.
“I’m upset,” he said, flat out. Eliot didn’t care for concealing his feelings unless he was on the job. He thought of himself as a simple man who knew what he wanted out of life, and he worked hard to get it. When letting the people around him see what he was after helped him achieve those goals, he didn’t mind pulling back the curtain.
“It’s a challenge, for sure,” said Sophie, “but maybe we can figure it out if we apply ourselves a bit.”
“Sure we can,” Parker said with a smile. “It’s easy.”
“To find that punk here?” Eliot shook his head. “There’s no better place for him to blend in.”
“True. It would be hard.” Parker fished something out of her pocket, a business card printed with green ink on a glossy black background. She flashed it at Eliot. “But he gave me his number.”
Eliot’s scowl faded, and he picked up Parker and spun her around on the sidewalk between the Marriott—which they had passed on the way back from the Hyatt—and the convention center. He put her down, and they grinned at each other.
“I did good to keep this, didn’t I?” she said.
“You did good, Parker,” Sophie said.
“So should I give him a call?” Parker said. “Won’t that just let him know that I know he had something to do with Hardison disappearing?”
“Maybe not,” Nate said. “He was at the party with you last night, right? It’s not too crazy for him to think you spotted him chatting with Hardison.”
“True,” Sophie said. “Call him and just ask nonchalantly whether he knows what Hardison got up to last night. You can pretend that you’re angry with him for ditching you.”
“Cha0s didn’t ditch me.”
“No, Hardison.”
“Hardison didn’t ditch me either.”
“You just need to pretend, Parker.”
“Wait.” Parker hesitated and frowned. “Did he? He did, didn’t he? Hardison ditched me. Now I am mad at him.”
“Better yet,” said Nate. “Now you don’t have to pretend. Just call the man and tell him you’re looking for Hardison and angry that you can’t find him.”
“You think he’s going to just tell me where he is?”
“Of course not,” said Sophie. “He’ll lie through his scruffy little beard about it. But that’s okay. Lead off with the fact that Hardison stood you up for lunch and you’re starving. That will give him an in.”
“An in for what?”
“He’ll ask you to lunch. Then we have him.”
“Why would he do that again?” Parker’s tone told Eliot that she knew she was missing something, but she just didn’t know what.
He patted her on the shoulder. “Just trust Sophie on this one,” he said. “She knows what she’s talking about. Cha0s gave you that card because he wants to spend some time with you. Make it look like he can do that, and he’ll come running right to us.”
Parker’s face lit up. “Got it!”
She pulled out her phone and dialed the number on the card. It rang three times, which Eliot could hear broadcast through her earpiece. Then Cha0s answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Cha0s,” Parker said, putting on a sweet voice. “I wonder if you might know where Hardison is. I’m supposed to be having lunch with him, and he stood me up.”
“Didn’t he come back to your hotel last night?”
Eliot could almost hear the man laughing. It made him want to reach through the phone and strangle him right there.
“He didn’t,” Parker said, sounding disappointed. “I guess he found something better to do.”
“What makes you think I might know where he is?” Cha0s asked.
“He’s playing it coy, Parker,” Sophie said through the earpiece. “You do the same. Don’t accuse him of anything, or you’ll frighten him off. Let him come to you.”
“Didn’t I see the two of you chatting at the Star Trek party last night?” Parker said. “He said something about going off to play a game. I just figured he wound up with you.”
Cha0s cleared his throat. “I was there, yeah, and we did leave together, but I don’t know where he went after that. Said he had to meet up with some people to play Fiasco at the Wyndham, or something like that.”
“Really?” Parker said. “Bummer.”
Eliot mimed rubbing his stomach to remind Parker to mention lunch again. She made an O with her mouth in surprise and nodded.
“I’m getting too hungry to wait for him anymore,” she said. “Guess I’m on my own.”
“Well, hey,” Cha0s said, his voice becoming what Eliot was sure he thought was smooth. “I haven’t had lunch yet myself. What do you say I take you out instead?”
Parker made a face at Eliot. The thought of meeting Cha0s for a date repelled her. Eliot gave her a what-else-you-going-to-do shrug.
“My treat,” said Cha0s.
Parker forced a smile onto her face. “All right,” she said. “Sounds great. I’m just outside the convention center now. Where do you want to meet?”
“How about near the boffer circle?” Cha0s said. “I’ve been practicing that for a bit and just bought myself a whole new rig. You can watch me strut my stuff.”
Parker gave Eliot a crazed look of helplessness. “Boffer?” she said to Cha0s. “Um, I’m not sure I’m familiar with that.”
“It’s the mock-combat arena located on the balcony on the back side of the convention center,” Cha0s said. “Over near the marina. You know, the guys with the foam-wrapped swords?”
“I know where that is,” Nate said to Parker. “Tell him you’ll meet him there in ten minutes.”
“Right,” Parker said. “Got it. I’ll see you there in ten minutes?”
“Sounds great,” Cha0s said. “It’s a date!”
Parker ended the call. “Ew, ew, ew!” she said. “I want to wash off my phone. No, I want to disinfect it. No, I want to throw it into the ocean.”
“When we’re done,” Nate said. “You might need that until then.”
“Great work, Parker,” Sophie said. “You reeled him in well. You could have a future in that sort of work.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Parker said. “For Hardison, I’ll do it, but—ew!”
THIRTY-FIVE
Cha0s was standing by the side of the ring when Parker strolled up to join him. He wore a long white tabard with a massive red cross on it over his T-shirt and shorts, and he hefted a long padded sword nearly as tall as he was in one hand. He had a padded shield bound to his other arm.
Eliot had taken the long way around and come up behind Cha0s, getting into place on the stairwell below the boffer circle, which led down from the balcony to the marina. He surveyed the scene from the next landing down, taking care to not let Cha0s see him. That wasn’t too difficult, as the man had his attention focused on a similarly dressed man coming at him hard with a padded sword of his own.
Eliot watched Cha0s fight. Despite the inherent silliness of the weaponry, he handled it well. He managed to block his opponent’s attacks with relative ease, either on his shield or with his blade, while he waited for an opening. When it appeared, he stabbed forward lightning fast, searching for his foe’s body with the tip of his padded blade.
Cha0s tagged his foe on his left arm, and the man cried out, dropped his shield, and stuck his arm behind his back. Despite that, he continued to fight. Cha0s circled around to the man’s left, though, using the fake injury to his advantage.
Soon his opponent started to grow tired. Rather than let Cha0s wear him down more, he launched into a last, desperate attempt to break through Cha0s’s defenses. Cha0s took a step back as the man came at him, and when his lunge overbalanced him, Cha0s slapped down with his blade, catching the man across his shoulder with a loud smack.
The man cried out in frustration, then danced backward, a wide grin on his face. “Good work,” he said. “I’m dead.”
“Yes,” Cha0s said with a triumphant smirk. “Yes, you are.”
Parker, who had been
watching from the sidelines, stepped up then. “That looked like fun!” she said. “You did great!”
“I think these guys are humoring me,” Cha0s said. “After all, I did just drop a lot of money on top-line equipment at their booth.”
“No way, man,” the opponent said as he put his gear back on a rack of equipment close to where Eliot was hiding on the stairs, peeking at them over the balcony’s railing every now and then. “You got some mad skills there. You’ve been training with someone, right? I can always tell.”
“I do a little sparring back home,” Cha0s said with the closest thing to a humble smile he could manage. He stood there in his gear, not quite ready to give up his moment of victory.
“You looked great,” Parker said. “So, where’s Hardison?”
Eliot winced. He’d hoped that she’d be able to resist asking Cha0s that question for a few minutes longer. If she’d followed the plan, she might have been able to finesse the information out of him, or at least get him into a more private place where Eliot could lean on him without fear of interruption. Out here in the open with lots of witnesses about, their options were far more limited.
“I told you,” Cha0s said. “I haven’t seen him since last night.” His defensive tone told Eliot that Parker had already blown the finesse angle.
“You left the party with him,” Parker said. “I saw the recording from the security camera.”
Cha0s hesitated. “Yes, you’re right. I did. But that was the last time I saw him: in the elevator. He got off to play a game with some guys on one floor or another, and I kept going down.”
“You didn’t want to join him for this game?”
“It was late. I was tired. I flew in here from Singapore. I’m still jet-lagged all to hell.”
“You’re lying,” Parker said. She stepped closer to him, a grim look on his face.
“Hey,” Cha0s said. “I know you’re a tough girl—I like that about you, really—but you can’t intimidate me.” He rested his arm on the pommel of his padded sword.