by Matt Forbeck
“You ready for this?” Eliot asked the hacker. “Or do you want me to fight you with my feet instead?”
“Look here, Spencer,” Cha0s said, his eyes wide and round with fear. “I don’t want any trouble.”
Eliot didn’t say a word. He just gave Cha0s the barest of smirks and then lunged at him.
It was the first time Eliot had gone on the offensive, and for an instant Cha0s froze. He managed to get his sword up just in time to parry the first blow, which smacked into his brand-new sword so hard that it smashed it back into his nose. He stumbled backward, clutching at his face with the hand attached to his shield arm, which barely saved him from Eliot’s follow-up slash.
Even with Eliot fighting left-handed, with one hand stuck behind his back, Cha0s was no challenge. He could have ended the fight any instant he felt like it, but he wasn’t quite ready to let the hacker off the hook. He pretended to forget to account for his unusable arm, and he stumbled.
Cha0s snatched the opening and went on the offensive as best he could. He brought back his arm and hacked down at Eliot as hard as he could, over and over again. Each time Eliot parried his blow, letting Cha0s wear himself down, one swing at a time.
In less than a minute, Cha0s was huffing and puffing, and his swings came more slowly and with less force behind him. The only thing keeping him going was his rising sense of frustration. “Go down, dammit!” he said to Eliot. “Why won’t you go down?”
Eliot smiled. “You’re playing the game wrong,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Cha0s kept swinging away, but none of his attacks came close to touching Eliot. “This is my game. Mine! I! Never! Lose!”
“You’re trying to knock me down,” Eliot said.
He waited for Cha0s to take one last swing at him. This time, instead of blocking the blow, he stepped aside. Cha0s’s blade smacked into the pavement where he’d been standing, and Eliot pinned the sword there with his own boffer blade with a backhand flick of his wrist.
Exhausted and overextended, Cha0s gaped up at Eliot in horror. He tried to pull back on his sword, and when he did, Eliot went with him. He used Cha0s’s own momentum to guide his sword so that he smacked the hacker square in the chest with it and sent him sprawling back across the balcony’s concrete surface.
The crowd stared at the combatants in silent awe for a second, then erupted into an enthusiastic roar. The weapons master leaped forward, grabbed Eliot by his now-freed right hand, and shoved it up into the air. “And we have ourselves a new champion!”
While all the attention was on Eliot, Cha0s decided to leave. Eliot saw him start to scramble away, but he stopped cold when Parker came over and stepped on his boffer sword, pinning it to the pavement.
“We have a lot to talk about,” she said to Cha0s. “And it’s not about any date.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Parker escorted Cha0s down the stairs behind the boffer arena. He was covered in sweat, too tired to argue with her, but when they got to the bottom of the stairs, he glanced back and blanched at the sight of Eliot following them down. That spurred him enough for him to try to make a break for it.
He didn’t get more than three feet, though, before Nate and Sophie stepped in front of him, cutting off his route of escape. Exhausted and discouraged, he threw up his hands. “All right,” he said. “You got me.”
Nate and Sophie led the hacker down another flight of stairs, with Eliot and Parker coming up behind them. They wound up at the marina that butted right up against the convention center. Most of the boats in the area sat floating silent and empty, their local owners wisely deciding to give the downtown area a wide berth this weekend. A few of them, though, had been rented out as party boats.
One of these featured a red, blue, and yellow banner that read CBR TV. Nate spotted a pair of reporters sitting on the back deck, interviewing none other than Stan Lee. Although Nate was sure Stan wasn’t in on Patronus’s plans, he didn’t want the living legend accidentally compromising the crew’s job with an innocent remark before the auction. He led the group on a bit farther, until they reached a less populated part of the wharf.
“All right,” Nate said. “You lost. Now tell us what happened to Hardison.”
Cha0s glanced at each them, looking for some kind of weakness he could exploit, some way he could weasel his way out of having to tell the truth. When he didn’t find any, the wind ran right out of him in a deep sigh. “Fine,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Where did you take Hardison last night?” Parker said.
Cha0s swallowed hard. “You ever heard of a man named Daichi Kanabe?”
Nate masked his surprise at hearing Kanabe’s name, as did Sophie and Eliot, but Parker gasped out loud. “You mean that guy with the nasty comics?”
Cha0s leered at Parker for a moment, until a steely glare from her chased all sexual thoughts from his mind. “Yeah, that’s the one. Do you know what Hardison did to him?”
This time they all nodded. There was no reason to hold back this information any longer, Nate knew.
“Can you get to the point?” he said to Cha0s, letting his irritation show.
“They had a suite in the Hyatt, him and all of the goons working in Patronus’s booth. I brought Hardison down to it, pretending I was heading to a celebrity Dungeons & Dragons game.”
Nate gaped at him. “And he fell for that?”
“Hey,” Cha0s said, offended. “I can be persuasive when I try. I told him Wil Wheaton was going to be there.”
“Who?” said Nate.
Cha0s rolled his eyes. “Never mind.”
“And what happened to him next?” Eliot said, his voice full of menace. “Did you just leave him there?”
“Do you want me to lie to you?” Cha0s said with disgust. “Of course I left him there. I don’t have any desire to be a material witness to a felony of any kind.”
Parker grabbed Cha0s by his ear and twisted it hard. He yowled in pain, but it wiped the smug look off his face.
Nate glanced around. A few people had noticed Cha0s’s plight, but none of them seemed interested in doing anything about it. Maybe they thought it was some kind of cosplay event. He didn’t know or really much care, as long as they kept moving. He shot Eliot a glance, and Eliot leaned over and spoke softly into Cha0s’s other ear.
“I’d stay quiet if I were you,” he said. “My bet is you got some fairly valuable electronics on you that you’d rather not lose the use of.”
“Fine,” Cha0s said. “Fine, fine, fine, fine! Just make her let me go.”
Parker gave the hacker’s ear a final tweak. He stood back up, holding his injured ear as if it might fall off. “Did you really have to do that?” he said.
“Where’s Hardison?” Parker said.
“I don’t know.”
Cha0s flinched as Parker reached up for his ear again. “No, hey, I really don’t. Why would I? I left him with those guys last night. He could be anywhere by now.”
Nate nodded. “Right, but you have an idea, don’t you?”
“Why would you say that?” Cha0s’s tone didn’t fool anyone. He looked like he didn’t even believe his evasions himself.
Sophie held up Cha0s’s shopping bags and glared at him.
“Oh, hey,” he said with an unguarded smile. “I’d wondered what happened to those. Thanks, Sophie.”
“These are filled with pieces of original artwork,” she said, uncharmed. “Most of them were created by the same people Patronus is featuring in his auction. There are even some early Simon Curtiss pieces here.”
“What can I say?” Cha0s said. “I’m a collector, and tell me what you like about Lorenzo Patronus, the man has taste.”
“There must be thousands of dollars’ worth of artwork in those bags,” Nate said. “What’s your angle here?”
Cha0s shrugged. “Just seemed like a wise investment. After the auction, a lot of that stuff’s going to be off the market, right, so it stands to reason that what’s left wo
uld go up in value. I figured I’d flip it in a few months for a tidy profit.”
Sophie narrowed her eyes at the man. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. Assuming all those pieces get sold, they’ll flood the market with new pieces from those artists. The value of those pieces you just bought should plummet.”
Cha0s paled at her words. “Oh, wow,” he said. “I am such an idiot. I—I guess I just didn’t think it through.”
That bothered Nate. “Wait,” he said. “You’re a lot of horrible things—unethical, sociopathic, evil even—but you’re no idiot.”
Sophie gasped. “The forgeries. This is all about the forgeries.”
Nate grimaced. Now he understood. He’d seen this kind of scam before, and he kicked himself for not recognizing it earlier. “Patronus wants to get triple paid for all that artwork.”
Parker squinted at him. “How do you mean?”
The way Cha0s squirmed in front of him told Nate he was right. “He replaced the originals with forgeries so he could destroy them. He’s going to do it here, on the floor, during the convention.”
“Right,” said Sophie. “That way he can collect insurance money on them and still have the originals to quietly sell to private collectors on the black market. He can claim that a few of the pieces survived, and he’s willing to sell them for the right price.”
“And if he destroys the fakes after the auction but before he delivers them, he can collect that money too,” Eliot said. “He just disappears and stiffs the buyers out of their refunds.”
“Best of all, no one ever knows about the fakes,” said Parker. “When he destroys them, he takes care of the evidence too. Smooth.” She nodded her head in reluctant admiration.
“And you figured you’d take advantage of some of the spillover effect from that, didn’t you?” Nate said to Cha0s. “You pick up a lot of artwork from the same artists now, before the auctioned stuff is supposedly destroyed, and you watch the scarcity for it drive up the demand of the pieces you bought.”
Cha0s shrugged, disappointed and disgusted but determined not to show it. “And I would have gotten away with it too, if not for you darn kids.”
“So,” Parker said, “where’s Hardison?”
The four of them crowded in around Cha0s, their proximity making him more uncomfortable by the second. “All right,” he said. “I wasn’t lying before. I don’t know where he is—but I have an idea about how you might find him.”
Nate and the others just stared at him and waited for him to crack. He glanced at each of them, decided that they weren’t about to offer him any sympathy at all, and spoke. “Patronus wanted to haul out all of the originals last night, but the security here at the convention center is a lot tighter than you would guess. They kick everyone out—exhibitor badge or not—not too long after the hall closes.”
“Right,” Parker said. “They can’t have the exhibitors stealing from one another. It’d be too easy to just buy a booth and then walk off with whatever you wanted.” She stopped talking for a moment when she realized everyone was staring at her. “What? That’s how I’d do it.”
“So they couldn’t get everything out of the hall last night,” Nate said.
“And they couldn’t just pick up and walk out with it all at once during the middle of the show either,” Eliot said. “Right?”
Sophie nodded. “But they could take it out one or two pieces at a time, maybe in boxes or bags like these huge ones that our friend here has been toting around.”
“Hey,” Cha0s said, “I don’t have any of Patronus’s pieces. I paid good money for everything in my bags.”
“Clean money?” said Nate
“Well, I mean, sure, I didn’t exactly work for that money—you know me—but the stuff I gave the merchants in there is good, all right? No counterfeits, no charge-backs, nothing hinky like that.”
“So you don’t know where they’ve been taking the goods?” Sophie said. “They must be close by if they’re just carrying them out of the hall by hand.”
Cha0s shrugged. “I don’t, but they had so much stuff that they’re probably still toting it out a piece at a time. You head back to Patronus’s booth, you might be able to track them to wherever they’re going.”
Eliot nodded. “Worst case, it means I can get one of those boys of his alone and get him to give up Hardison’s location.”
“All right,” Parker said. “Let’s go get ’em.”
“Hold up a minute.” Nate wasn’t quite ready yet to just leave Cha0s alone. “Tell me. How did you stop Hardison from calling for help?”
Cha0s’s face lit up like a mischievous kid who’d just won first prize in a lying contest. He reached into one of the baggy pockets on his cargo shorts and pulled out something that looked like an old police walkie-talkie, but with three antennae and no speakers. “It’s the coolest thing,” he said. “A portable cell-phone jammer. It’s only good for a few meters, but if you’re standing next to someone, it takes out all of their communication devices: cell phones, earpieces, you know.”
Nate stuck out his hand. Cha0s hesitated for a moment, then laid the device in his palm. “And Hardison’s earpiece?” Nate said. “I think he’ll want that back.”
Cha0s reached into the same pocket where the jammer had been and fished out the tiny device. He held it out between two fingers and dropped it into Nate’s other palm. “It’s a sharp little piece of equipment,” he said.
“Nothing but the best from Hardison,” Parker said.
Nate glanced at the others, ending with Eliot. “Now,” he said, “how do we know you won’t just call up Kanabe and warn him that we’re on our way?”
Cha0s put up his hands in protest. “Really? Do you think so little of me? I’m already done with Kanabe. He paid me for a job well done, and I washed my hands of it. I even spent all the money today. How do you think I paid for all my new artwork?”
“I don’t know, guys,” Nate said to the others. As they spoke they closed ranks around Cha0s, pressing him against the edge of the wharf and cutting off any hope of escape. “Do you think we can trust him?”
Sophie, Parker, and Eliot all shook their heads.
“Hey, look,” Cha0s said, growing more nervous by the second. “I knew it might come to this. I made it easy for you to find me, right? I gave Parker my number, remember? Do you think I did that by accident?”
“I think you were just hitting on Parker,” Sophie said.
“What, me? Why would I do that?”
Parker glared at him. “Is there something wrong with me?”
“What? No!” Cha0s fumbled for the right words to say, the right excuse that would get him out of this predicament. “I just thought that, well, you know, you and Hardison—”
“So you only hit on her because you thought it would make Hardison jealous?” Eliot sneered at him. “You sure you weren’t hitting on Hardison?”
“What? Wait, no.” Cha0s screwed up his face in surprise and disgust. “No, really, that’s not me. I just—I just—”
“You just what?” Nate shook his head. “Forget it. There’s nothing you can say or do to pay back for how you sold out Hardison. And if we find out he’s dead, know this. There is nowhere on this planet you can run and no amount of pain you can suffer to make up for it.”
“Whoa, hey,” Cha0s said, the color draining from his face as he edged farther and farther away. “That’s just—”
Eliot leaned forward then and said one word. “Boo.”
Cha0s jumped a little, despite himself. That little jump was enough to put the heel of his back foot over the edge of the wharf. He windmilled his arms, trying to recover his balance, but to no avail. He even put out a hand to ask for help, for someone to save him, but when he saw Nate and the crew glaring at him, he recoiled again.
That was what finally put him over the edge. He plunged from there into the dark waters below and disappeared beneath the lapping waves.
Nate and the others turned and strode away before
he could make his way back to the surface. They didn’t want to be around when the man managed to grab himself a breath and start shouting for help. They pretended not to have heard the splash and walked straight back toward the convention center.
“That water should do a number on all his electronics,” Parker said with a vicious grin. “At least he won’t be calling Kanabe or anyone else when he gets out of there.”
“If he gets out of here,” said Eliot.
“You think he can swim?” Sophie said.
Nate frowned but kept walking without glancing back. “At this point, I don’t think I give a damn.”
THIRTY-NINE
“So what do we do?” Parker asked as they walked up to the back entrance of the convention center.
Far behind them, Cha0s had started yelling for help, which Nate took to mean that the man could at least swim well enough to keep from drowning, but maybe not so well as to be able to haul himself up out of the drink. That made him smile.
Parker grabbed him by the sleeve as they were about to enter the convention center. “I mean, what about Hardison?”
Nate knew she was worried about their friend. Hell, he was worried too. At times like these, the others looked to him for a plan.
Sophie conned people. Parker stole from them. Eliot hit them. Hardison hacked them.
Nate… he made plans. He brought the disparate skills of his crew together and forged its members into a team far greater than the sum of its parts. Individually, no one of them would probably be able to find and save Hardison, but together, they might be able to manage it.
Maybe.
Nate stopped before they entered through the doors of tinted glass and hauled the others over to a quiet spot out of the way of foot traffic. “Let’s assume Hardison’s still alive,” he said. “If they were going to kill him, they’d have probably done it already.”
“In which case, this changes from a rescue mission to revenge,” Eliot said, a fierce snarl on his face.
Nate nodded. “Right, but if it’s revenge, then we take our time with it and get it right. What I’m saying is that we should have a little bit of time here either way. Let’s not rush in and spook Patronus or Kanabe or whoever. If we do that and Hardison really is still alive, they might do something rash, and that could end up getting him killed.”