by Matt Forbeck
Parker punched at him, but he raised his shield. “Forget it, Parker,” he said. “You’re not going to get anything more out of me. Not like that.” He leered at her. “Now, maybe if you’d like to come back to my hotel room, we might be able to work out an accommodation.”
“Ew!” she said.
Cha0s shrugged. “If that’s how you’re going to be, then I don’t know what I can do to help you. It’s too damn bad about Hardison, though. He was a hell of a hacker.”
“You tell me what you’ve done with him right now,” Parker said. “Or else.”
“Or else what?” Cha0s said. “You going to take me down?”
The man’s mocking tone grated so much on Eliot’s ears that he couldn’t take it anymore. He started up the stairs, picking up a padded sword from the rack as he passed it by. He tested its weight as he marched toward Cha0s, who had his back to him. Its heft and balance surprised him. He hadn’t expected it to be such a well-made weapon.
Parker gave Cha0s a vicious grin. “I could,” she said, “but I don’t have to. That’s his job.”
She nodded over Cha0s’s shoulder, and the man turned around to see Eliot stalking up behind him.
“Oh, hey, wait,” he said. “No one said anything about Spencer being here.”
“Where’s Hardison?” Eliot said. He hefted the sword in front of him, then swung it around, getting a feel for it.
“Like I just got finished telling her,” Cha0s said, gesturing toward Parker, “I don’t know. Last I saw him was last night. He could be anywhere by now.”
“Hey,” Cha0s’s former opponent said. “He looks like he’s pretty good! We got another challenger!”
Cha0s looked a little ill at the thought of taking on Eliot. For his part, Eliot ignored the guy in charge of the padded weapons. He wasn’t here to humiliate Cha0s, although he would take care of that if he needed to. He just wanted to find Hardison.
“Who has him?” Eliot said.
That set off a light in Cha0s’s eyes, and Eliot knew he’d struck a nerve. The bastard had sold Hardison out to someone, that was for sure. Now Eliot just needed to figure out who.
“Tell me now, or I’ll take you apart with this thing.” Eliot waved the padded sword in front of him.
“You really think you know how to handle a boffer sword?” Cha0s said. “I’m the king of the boffers! Just ask any of these people.”
Eliot glanced around and saw that some of the people who’d been lounging in chairs at nearby tables had gotten up to see what was going on inside the combat circle. None of them appeared hostile, although being surrounded never made Eliot comfortable.
“You want to take me on like that, you go right ahead,” Cha0s said, his voice seething with bravado. “No one beats me at this. No one here, and especially not some overmuscled goon like you.”
“Yeah!” the boffer weapons master said, pumping his fist in the air. “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The small crowd forming in a circle around the ring joined in the cheer. “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Cha0s flung his arms wide, the shield still on one of them, his sword in his other hand. “You want a piece of this? Bring it on!”
Eliot, who’d been dead serious up until this point, cracked a smile. “All right,” he said, hefting his borrowed sword to one side. “Let’s do this.”
The weapons master cheered, and the crowd joined in with him. Cha0s turned and raised his weapon to the people surrounding them, and the roar grew louder.
“You want some?” Cha0s said as he turned toward Eliot. “Come and get it!”
“Why is it that men reduce themselves to one-liners and bad movie quotes whenever they get into a fight?” said Parker. “Is there some kind of script they’re supposed to follow when they get to this point? Or does the raging testosterone just shut down their higher brain functions?”
“That’s an excellent question, Parker,” Sophie said through the earpiece. “Eliot? You’re a fighting kind of guy. What do you have to say about that?”
Eliot snarled at Cha0s, ignoring the women. He held his padded sword before himself in his right hand, in the en garde position, and he beckoned Cha0s toward him with his left.
Cha0s gave him a solemn nod, then screwed his face up into a mask of rage. He let loose with a wild scream and charged straight at Eliot, his sword held high over his head.
Eliot stepped forward as Cha0s came at him, getting underneath the reach of the padded blade. Before Cha0s could correct for his error, Eliot grabbed the hacker by the wrist of his sword hand and yanked him forward. With Cha0s off balance and overextended, Eliot punched him in the jaw with the unpadded pommel of his boffer sword and sent the skinny man sprawling to the ground, blood spurting from his mouth.
“Hey!” the weapons master said. “You can’t do that. It’s a foul!”
Eliot ignored him. “This might be a game to you, but it ain’t to me,” he said to Cha0s. “You tell me where Hardison is, or I’m going to start plucking pieces off of you in front of all these people.”
Cha0s wiped his mouth with the back of his sword hand and then looked down at the blood smeared across it. He scrambled to his feet.
“It’s not a game,” the hacker said. “It’s a sport. A martial art.”
Eliot couldn’t help but snicker at that. Boxing was a sport. Krav maga was a martial art. This was grown men playing with toys.
“You think that’s funny?” Cha0s said. “You couldn’t beat me at this on your best day.”
Eliot snorted and looked at his sword. “My best day wouldn’t involve goofing around with plastic weapons, I’ll tell you that.”
“Hey, man,” the weapons master said. “That’s just not cool. Give me back my gear and get the hell out of here.” The crowd murmured in agreement.
Cha0s flushed red at Eliot’s insult. “No,” he said. “I tell you what. You beat me in a match of this—by the rules, fair and square—and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
Eliot considered the offer. It would be simpler to just haul Cha0s down the stairs to the docks and dunk him in the bay until he spilled his guts, but it was the middle of the day with lots of witnesses around. Just about every one of them had a camera or a cell phone with a camera, and Eliot just didn’t need that kind of notoriety. It was one thing to take down some punk with a God complex and a foam sword. It was something else entirely to be recorded trying to drown him. There were just too many ways it could go wrong.
“All right,” he said. “You’re on.”
THIRTY-SIX
Cha0s raised his sword in front of him, doing his level best to look like a vicious veteran warrior out of a fantasy film. Even bloodied as he was, he couldn’t pull it off. Instead of intimidating Eliot, his antics only made him want to laugh.
“You really think this is going to work?” Sophie said. “Can we trust anything the man says?”
“Of course not,” said Nate. “We’re going to need some more leverage over him than this.”
“He keeps glancing over at a pair of huge bags behind the weapons rack,” Parker said. “I’m guessing they must belong to him. Eliot, can you keep him occupied while I go take a peek inside them?”
“With pleasure,” Eliot said, a nasty smile spreading across his face.
“Oh, no,” Cha0s said, thinking Eliot was speaking to him. “The pleasure will be all mine.”
Eliot stood his ground and beckoned for Cha0s to come at him again, but the weapons master stepped between them. “I think it’s awesome you two dudes want to work out your issues in the boffer ring,” he said as he spread his arms wide, holding one palm toward each of them. “Seeing as how the newbie here doesn’t know the rules, though, maybe we should go over them quick?”
Eliot smirked at Cha0s. “No hitting in the head or groin. Tagging a limb means that limb’s out of use. Tag someone in the torso and he’d dead.” He glared at the weapons master. “Close enough?”
The man shrugged. “Good by me.”
/> “What do I get if I win?” Cha0s said.
“Huh?” Eliot stared at him as if he was the slowest kid in lowest class.
“If you beat me, I tell you about Hardison,” Cha0s said. “What do I get if I beat you?”
Eliot laughed. “That question makes no sense.”
The weapons master spotted Cha0s fuming over this and interrupted before the hacker lost his temper again. “What do you want?”
Cha0s glanced around until his eyes fell on Parker, who stood by the weapons rack, looking over the giant bags of loot Cha0s had hauled out of the exhibit hall. She felt him staring at her and looked up. She flashed him a smile and a little wave.
“Parker,” Cha0s said. “I beat you, she goes and has lunch with me, wherever I want, and you pay.”
“Fine,” Eliot said. “You might as well toss a mansion and a yacht on top of that wish list of yours because you’re never going to see any of it.”
Cha0s set his jaw. “We’ll see about that. This will be a fair fight. Anyone cheats, and they lose automatically.”
Eliot considered this for a moment. If he made an error—if he broke some arcane or obscure rule he didn’t even know about—he’d be letting the man walk off with Parker. Even worse, he’d have to fight conservatively and stretch the bout far longer than he would have liked, as he needed to give Parker a solid chance to get a look inside Cha0s’s shopping bags. Still, there didn’t seem to be a good way out of it.
“All right,” he said. “Done.”
The weapons master looked to Cha0s for confirmation and got it with a silent nod. Eliot figured the man must finally be serious about something. He’d shut his trap rather than keeping it running.
Eliot wondered how much trouble he’d set himself up for. Normally he wouldn’t worry about an adversary like Cha0s. He could snap the guy into pieces like a toothpick and not even break a sweat. As it was, he’d have to be wary.
He decided to stick with his strategy of getting Cha0s as angry as he could. Cha0s was a smart guy—too smart, maybe—but he had a temper. Angry people—even really clever ones—made dumb decisions.
“Sounds good,” the weapons master said. “Ready?”
Cha0s gave him an eager, intense nod. Eliot failed to stifle a yawn, then nodded too.
Instead of beckoning Cha0s to come at him, Eliot ignored him. He stood where he was, looking bored, letting the tip of his padded sword rest on the ground. He took a deep breath and then cracked his neck.
“You’re not fooling me,” Cha0s said, shaking his head. “You think I’ll just charge in again and you can pop me quick before I even see it coming. Not going to happen.”
Eliot shrugged. “I got all day here, punk. You can bring me anything you think you got.”
Cha0s stared at Eliot for a long moment, sizing him up. Then he started forward, his sword held before him, its tip pointed straight at Eliot’s chest. He moved closer and closer, still not daring to take a swing.
Eliot let the hacker get as close as he wanted to—closer even. Once he got within reach of Eliot, to the point where he should have been able to just reach out and touch him with his sword, he hesitated. Eliot noticed then that Cha0s’s sword was trembling.
He smiled, and Cha0s jumped back, fearful that Eliot was about to make his move. When Eliot remained where he was, the crowd of onlookers chuckled at Cha0s’s reaction. The hacker blushed with embarrassment and gritted his teeth, then lunged forward, fast.
Still, Eliot saw his move coming from a mile way. Cha0s might not have been bad for a boffer swordsman, but Eliot suspected that this was a low bar. The man telegraphed his moves from so far away that Eliot felt like he had time to tap out a reply in Morse code on his chest.
Eliot parried the blow with ease and flung Cha0s back hard on his heels. He could have pressed his advantage and stabbed the hacker in the stomach with a quick riposte, but he didn’t want to end the bout that fast. He could see Parker skulking about behind Cha0s, and she still hadn’t had a chance to look into either one of the bags. She glanced up at him and frowned in frustration.
“I can’t just start pawing through his bags,” Parker said. “Even if he doesn’t notice me, someone else will.”
“We got that covered, Parker,” Nate said. “You see that railing off to your left?”
Parker looked around, spotted an aluminum railing on the western edge of the balcony, and nodded. “Got it.”
“Just take the bags and drop them over that, one at a time.”
“Isn’t that going to make a horrible mess?”
“Maybe,” Nate said. “But Sophie and I are down below you. We’ll catch them and let you know what’s in them.”
“Sounds good,” Parker said.
“Just be quick about it,” Eliot said. “I’m starting to get bored here.” He stared into Cha0s’s eyes as he said it, making sure the man would think the words were intended for him.
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” Cha0s said in as menacing a tone as he could manage.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Eliot had been in far more fights than he could count, with weapons of all kinds. He’d taken out the Butcher of Kiev with a frying pan and a chopped lemon. Nothing Cha0s could bring to the fight could scare him. Still, it wouldn’t stop the man from trying. He’d been riding high, having impressed the crowd with his skills, right up until Eliot had shown up. He wasn’t about to just walk away from that.
Of course, the weapons master had purposely allowed Cha0s to win. He’d just sold the man hundreds of dollars’ worth of new gear, Eliot figured. The least he could do was make the hacker feel good about his purchase.
Eliot, though, had no need to boost Cha0s’s already bloated self-esteem. He just needed to drag the fight out a little bit longer so that Parker could do her job. The trick was to do so without letting Cha0s tag him with that damn sword.
Given the rules of this so-called sport, as the weapons master had explained them, it didn’t take much for someone to lose. A single mistake was all that was required. If your opponent capitalized on it, then the match was over, just like that.
Cha0s knew Eliot. He knew how good he was in a fight—or at least how good he was supposed to be. Cha0s was also a cocky little bastard who liked to think he was wise in the ways of the world, and Eliot suspected he could use it against him.
When Cha0s came in for his next attack, Eliot worked his way around so that he was facing the sun. He shaded his eyes with one hand, pretending to be blinded by the brightness coming in behind Cha0s. He threw up a clumsy block, as if blinded.
Cha0s tapped Eliot’s sword lightly, then brought his blade around it and batted him hard on the forearm. Eliot jumped back as if the sword hadn’t been padded at all, hopping and cursing in pain.
Behind Cha0s, Parker picked up one of the man’s shopping bags and dropped it over the railing behind her. Every eye on the balcony was on Eliot at the moment. No one saw her make her move.
Nate grunted into the earpiece. “Got it,” Sophie said. “Ready for the next one.”
“What the hell was that?” Eliot said to Cha0s, who had stood back and was grinning in glee. “You got rocks in that thing?”
The weapons master stepped between the two combatants. “Time out,” he said. “We got an injury here?”
Cha0s backed up another step, giving the weapons master the room to check out Eliot’s arm. “Hey, Parker!” he said over his shoulder, still keeping half an eye on Eliot. “Better start picking out a nice restaurant. We’re going to eat well tonight!”
For his part, Eliot didn’t plan on letting anyone have a good look at his arm. He wanted them to think he was hurt, and a close inspection would show that he wasn’t. Eliot shook his arm hard, as if he could fling the pain straight out of it.
Despite that, the weapons master grabbed at his arm and didn’t give up until he had hold of it. “Stay still,” he said. “I need to make sure you’re fine, or I’ll have to declare your opponent over there the victor.�
�
Meanwhile, Cha0s turned around and raised his sword and shield toward the sky. He let out a roar of victory, and the crowd responded in kind. As he reveled in the glory, the weapons master took hold of Eliot’s arm and gave it a good once-over.
“Looks fine to me,” the man said in a low, private voice. He looked up at Eliot. “You could take this guy without working up a sweat. You going to let him beat you?”
“What, like you did?”
The weapons master smirked. He continued to speak softly, keeping his eyes on Eliot’s arm as he examined it. “Do me a favor. Kick his ass. It’s not good policy to take down a customer, but hey, he’s not your customer.”
Eliot grunted. “You got it.”
“All right,” the weapons master said in his regular voice. “He looks fine. The battle can go on!”
The crowd cheered, and Cha0s turned back to face Eliot, flexing his arms as he did. With all of the man’s concentration on Eliot, Parker took the opportunity to grab the second bag and slip it over the side.
Nate grunted and then swore.
“Got that one too,” Sophie said. “Might be a little dented.”
“Give him hell,” Parker said.
Eliot gave her a nod and a tiny smile, then squared off against Cha0s. Time to hand the hacker his head.
“You need to put your injured arm behind your back,” the weapons master said. “You use it at all, and that’s a foul.”
“What’s a foul do to me?” Eliot said.
“Cost you the match.”
“Come on, Eliot,” Cha0s said. “Say it. I want to hear it straight from your lips. ‘It’s only a flesh wound.’ Sell that to me.”
Eliot didn’t say a word. He tossed his sword into the air, flipping it end over end, and caught it in his left hand by its grip. Then he put his right hand behind his back and grabbed on to his belt, making sure he wouldn’t accidentally let the hand fly loose.
Left-handed, he slashed through the air in a series of practiced moves designed to intimidate a foe. Cha0s’s eyes widened, and the crowd let out a collective gasp.