The Con Job

by Matt Forbeck

  “Ow!” Hardison said. “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!”

  Parker threw her arms around him and hugged him tight then gave him a kiss on the cheek. She’d never been so happy to see anyone in her entire life. “I thought we’d lost you,” she said in a whisper.

  “Parker?” Hardison said. “We’re not out of this yet. Not by a long way.”

  “Sure we are.” She stepped back and smiled at him. “Eliot and I took all those big guys down. They’re not going to hurt you any more.”

  “Listen to me,” Hardison said, shaking her hands off him as best he could with his wrists still zip-tied to the steering wheel. “Parker, I’m serious. Listen to me.”

  “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  “Go to the back of the van and open the door. Tell me what you see.”

  She cocked her head at a concerned angle. “All right,” she said, “but don’t you want me to get you out of there first?”

  “Just do what I said.” He flinched as he spoke. “There may not be time.”

  She nodded and raced around to the back of the van to fling the doors open. In her head, she ran through what she’d do if they were locked, as she didn’t have much in the way of tools on her. There hadn’t been any place to hide them in the Princess Leia costume. The doors came open without trouble, but she gasped out loud at what she found behind them.

  “What is it, Parker?” Nate said. “What’s in the van?”

  She staggered back to take it all in. The entire back of the van was packed floor to ceiling with boxes. “I—I don’t know.”

  She reached in and pulled one of the boxes open. It was filled with dynamite.

  “Nate?” she said. “We got a problem.”

  FORTY-SIX

  The auction went well. News that Simon Curtiss was in the hospital seemed to have spread, and the bidders drove the prices for his artwork higher and higher with each piece. By the time Patronus was done, he’d gathered together enough money to pay off all of Simon’s bills and then some. Not that he was going to give any of that money to Simon—or the Hero Initiative—of course.

  Patronus’s smarmy grin had grown wider and wider throughout the event until Nate wondered if the man’s face might split. The man thought he was in the middle of pulling off the biggest scam of his life and that it was going to succeed without a hitch. He had no idea that Sophie and the crew had already taken him for everything he would make.

  Every now and then, Sophie saw Patronus take out his smartphone and fiddle with it. Between lots, he’d check the time and messages. This seemed to be the only irritant in his evening, and every time he pulled out the phone to look at it, he got a bit more agitated.

  “He’s expecting a call?” Sophie said to Nate. “Or for someone to arrive that hasn’t yet?”

  Nate frowned. He’d been watching Patronus too. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ll bet you that phone could tell us.”

  Sophie nodded at Nate, then made her way to the back of the crowd, excusing herself as she pushed through the other bidders and into an open expanse. The rest of the con roared on around the auction, oblivious to the bidding, everyone caught up in their own activities: selling, buying, watching, reading, posing, photographing, chatting, or just taking it all in.

  It struck Sophie that Comic-Con was something like a modern-day Brigadoon, a thriving city of a hundred and fifty thousand people that sprang up here in San Diego for less than a week every summer. People flocked to it from across the nation and around the world to populate it for its all-too-short existence, played their chosen roles, then dispersed back to their real homes as soon as the city disappeared. And the next summer, they’d do it all over again, forming a living history of their own in annual installments.

  She turned back to Patronus’s booth and circled around the crowd, coming at the booth from behind. With the security guards all gone, carrying things into the underground parking structure, nothing prevented her from sliding over one of the tables between the display cases and slipping into the booth. She strolled up behind Patronus, who stood at the podium, auctioning off a gorgeous painting that an artist named Alex Ross had donated to the Hero Initiative.

  She waited patiently until Patronus was done and handed the painting off to one of the women hired to help him. As he reached for his phone and pulled it out, he spotted her. “Hi, Jess!” he said. “So glad you and Jeff could make it.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world, partner,” she said with a broad smile. “Seems like it’s going great. Anything I can to do to help?”

  “No, no, nothing at all,” he said as he checked the phone. “Like you said, it’s going great.”

  Sophie gave him a concerned look. “Really?” she asked. “You seem a little—I don’t know—distracted up there.”

  His breath caught in his chest at those words. He frowned at his phone and held it out in front of her. “You’re right. I’ve been waiting for a surprise guest to show up—an idol of mine—so we can auction off his piece. A friend of mine set it up, but the artist isn’t here yet.”

  “Who is it?”

  Patronus glanced around. “Can you keep a secret? What am I saying? Of course you can.” He leaned in close and spoke in a stage whisper. “It’s Jim Lee!”

  “The X-Men artist?”

  “Sure, that and one of the founders of Image Comics, and current copublisher of DC Comics. I’ve been a fan of his for years, and my friend Mr. Kanabe said he’d arranged for Jim to make a few remarks here before we auction off this great Batman piece he drew.”

  Sophie took great care to not react at the mention of Kanabe’s name. As far as Patronus knew, she and Nate had never heard of the man and knew nothing of his reputation.

  “So you keep checking for a message from him?”

  Patronus shrugged. “Yeah, that too, but if I don’t spot Jim soon, I’m supposed to call him on this private number Mr. Kanabe gave me. It’s so tempting to just buzz him, but I know how busy he is at this show, and I don’t want to come across as any kind of bother.”

  Sophie gave Patronus an understanding nod. One of the helpers stood on the stage, waiting for him to give the go-ahead for the next lot of the auction. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, reaching for the phone. “You’ve got too much going on. You’ve got people waiting for you, and this is too much of a distraction. Let me take care of it for you.”

  “Really?” Patronus smiled with relief as he relinquished his phone to her. “Thanks so much, Jess. You don’t know what this means to me.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. “Here’s the number. If you see me get to the Tim Bradstreet piece and he’s still not here, go ahead and give it a call.”

  “No trouble at all,” Sophie said. “Give the auction your whole attention. I’ve got this.”

  Patronus squeezed her shoulder and rushed back to the podium, ready to sell another piece of art for his favorite charity: himself. Without his phone weighing him down, he became much more animated, almost charming, as he set into the spiel for this next piece, an illustration of Indiana Jones facing off against Han Solo by Tommy Lee Edwards.

  Sophie examined the phone as she slipped out through the rear of the booth. “Nate? Meet me by the back of the bidders.”

  By the time he reached her, she’d had a chance to check out the phone. It was a Samsung, nothing particularly special about it. She glanced through Patronus’s recent calls and saw several to Daichi Kanabe. He also had a number of voice mails from artists who had their work in the show, including one from Simon Curtiss. He hadn’t listened to any of them.

  “Nice work,” Nate said. “Anything interesting in there?”

  “Not much,” Sophie said. “He didn’t even have it locked. Maybe Hardison could find something incriminating on here, but not me.”

  “At least we know he won’t be calling his muscle back here—or trying to, anyhow.” Nate couldn’t help but smile at that.

  Then Parker sp
oke to them over the earpiece. “Nate? We got a problem.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “Get out of here, Parker!” Hardison said. Kanabe’s men hadn’t been kind to him. He’d been sitting in this damn van for he didn’t know how long. His face hurt, and the zip ties that held him by the arms and legs had been put on so tight they’d cut into his skin. And he was terrified he was going to die.

  But the chance that Parker might die here with him scared him even more.

  “It’s dynamite,” Parker said, calling to him over the boxes of explosives. “They were packing the van with dynamite.”

  Hardison pulled against the zip ties again, but they only cut deeper. Eliot had shown him how to defeat the damn things once, but that trick had involved putting your hands together and getting enough leverage between them to stretch and snap the plastic. Kanabe’s men had gone overboard with the damn things, using two or three on each of his limbs, and he couldn’t find any angle to push or pull against them that worked.

  “It could go off at any second,” Hardison said. “You got to go grab Eliot and get out of here.”

  Parker ignored him. She rushed around to the driver’s side of the van and inspected Hardison’s bonds.

  He saw that she was dressed as Princess Leia. And not just any Princess Leia but Leia in her slave-girl outfit. He wondered if he’d fallen into some kind of final delirium. Much as he hurt, she looked great.

  “This is not good,” she said as she figured out how tightly he’d been bound into the vehicle. “Not good at all.”

  “Parker.”

  “Shut up.” She looked up into his eyes, fierce and determined. “I’m not leaving you here, so don’t waste any more of our time by saying it again.”

  He nodded, then tugged at his bonds again, pain flaring through his limbs. He thought maybe he could just work through it and bust the damn things, but he’d thought that every other time he’d tried to break free. It didn’t work this time either.

  “You got a knife?” he asked. “Come on, cut me free.”

  She’d been bending over to check out the zip ties on his legs. She straightened up and gestured at herself. “Do I look like I have any place to keep a knife on me?”

  “Fine, then get out of here.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “What about Eliot?” Hardison said. “You going to just let him die too?”

  “What about all those people standing above us?” Parker said. “If the bomb you’re sitting inside of goes off, you think that won’t blast a huge hole in the floor of the convention center?”

  Horror washed over Parker’s face as she realized what she’d just said. “Nate? Sophie?”

  “We heard,” said Nate. “What do you think the chances are of that bomb going off right now? Do we have time to call for a bomb squad?”

  Parker frowned. “I don’t—hold on.” She pulled Hardison’s earpiece out of her top and slipped it into his ear. “Talk.”

  “I heard them talking about it,” Hardison said. “It’s supposed to go off before the hall closes. It’s Saturday night, and the place is packed. They figured they’d take out the most people that way.”

  “We already don’t have long until the hall closes,” Nate said. “It might go off at any minute.”

  “Parker?” said Hardison. “If you’re not leaving and can’t get me free, then get on in here and tell me what you see behind me. I’ve been trying to get a good look at the detonator forever, but I can’t get my neck to bend that far around.”

  The passenger-side door opened. Eliot stood there, looking like something out of a mash-up between The Empire Strikes Back and Halloween. His face was as white as Hardison had ever seen it, and sweat slicked his face.

  “I know demolitions better than anyone here,” he said, slurring his words. “What do you got?”

  “Oh, man, I am so glad to see you,” Hardison said.

  Eliot’s knees gave way then, and he slid to the parking lot’s concrete floor. Hardison’s relief turned to panic.

  “Eliot?” he said. “Eliot!”

  “I’m all right,” Eliot said, although he clearly wasn’t. “Just so damn cold.”

  “He’s going into shock,” Sophie said. “We need to help him.”

  “We need to take care of that bomb first,” said Nate. “Parker, get in there and tell me what you can see.”

  Parker climbed into the van by slipping over Hardison in a way that he knew only she could manage. She braced herself in the doorway and then slid in over his outstretched arms, which were still bound to the steering wheel. How she did this without pressing the horn in the middle of the steering wheel, he’d never know.

  Under just about any other circumstances, Hardison would have welcomed such close physical contact with Parker. The pain in his arms and legs and face was enough to ruin that possibility, but when you topped it with the fact that she was climbing into a van filled with dynamite to save him, he couldn’t enjoy it at all.

  “Patronus is a terrorist?” Sophie said, her voice filled with shock. “I mean, the man is scum, but I never pegged him as a killer.”

  “Or suicidal,” said Nate. “That bomb goes off, he’s getting blown up with the rest of us.”

  “It’s not him,” Hardison said. “The guys who grabbed me laughed about it. Kanabe’s behind it.”

  “How does that make any better sense?”

  “Remember I told you Kanabe had all that real estate around Anaheim? He blows up part of the San Diego Convention Center, and guess where Comic-Con’s going to end up next year.”

  “Right,” said Sophie. “And then all that supposedly useless land he owns in Anaheim skyrockets in value. He’ll make a killing. Patronus is as much of a dupe as any of us.”

  “I’m in,” Parker said as she slipped into the space between the two front seats. “And it’s bad. The entire back of this van is jammed with dynamite.”

  “Do you see a detonator?” asked Nate.

  “Yes,” Parker said. “It’s sitting on top of the boxes, about midway to the back. It’s attached to one of those flip phones.”

  “That means it’s been set up to go off when someone calls that phone’s number,” Eliot said.

  Despite all the tension, Hardison smiled. “Good to hear your voice, man.”

  “I ain’t done here yet,” said Eliot, his voice weaker than Hardison had ever heard it. “Those babies are usually booby-trapped good. Saw them all the time in the Middle East.”

  “So what can we do to stop it?” asked Nate.

  No one responded.

  “Eliot?”

  Parker leaned over the passenger’s seat to check on the man. “He’s passed out, Nate.”

  “Dammit. Anyone else? Any ideas?”

  “I got it,” Sophie said. “I know what the number is.”

  “How’s that?” said Hardison.

  “Patronus just handed it to me, along with his phone. He said it was Jim Lee’s cell-phone number.”

  “Are you kidding me?” That was so ridiculous that Hardison almost felt insulted. “There’s no way a guy like Patronus has Jim Lee’s private phone number.”

  “I’m supposed to call it if Jim doesn’t show up by a certain point in the auction.”

  “Which would then blow up the entire auction,” Nate said. “The authorities check the phone records later, and they figure out that the call to detonate the bomb came from Patronus’s phone. He takes the blame.”

  “Plus me,” said Hardison. “Kanabe had me put in here so that when they identified my body, I’d be known as a terrorist forever. It wasn’t enough for him to kill me. He wanted to destroy my reputation too.”

  “Well, if we have Patronus’s phone, then what’s the problem?” Parker asked. “He can’t call the number, right? Sophie saved the day!”

  Hardison shook his head. “Uh-uh. If Kanabe gets tired of waiting on Patronus to make the call, he can just do it himself. Hell, he could use a disposable phone, a restaurant phone, ev
en a pay phone if he could find one. Or a wrong number could blow us all sky-high.”

  “Where’s your phone?” Nate asked.

  Hardison’s stomach flipped as he realized what Nate meant. “He took it from me. I mean, I had it locked, of course, but his guys promised to beat me until I gave up the pass code.”

  “Tell me you didn’t,” said Nate.

  “Of course not. I keep too much sensitive stuff on that thing for me to let it fall into the wrong hands. I gave him the wipe code instead. It opened the phone all right, but there’s not a damn thing in its memory anymore.”

  “But it could be used to activate the bomb then, right?” said Sophie.

  “Aw, dammit,” Hardison said. “We got to figure out a way to disarm this thing.”

  “All right, Hardison,” said Nate. “How do we do that? What are our options?”

  Hardison thought about it fast. “We don’t have many options. We can pull the wires attached to the phone and hope it’s not booby-trapped.”

  “And if it is?”

  “We go boom.”

  “Other options?”

  Hardison considered it for a moment. “You guys don’t happen to have Cha0s with you?”

  “No, but we did run into him earlier. Why?”

  “Man had a cell-phone signal jammer on him last night. That’s how he stopped me from contacting y’all when he sold me out to Kanabe.”

  “Is that a little black box with three antennas coming out of it?” Parker said.

  “That’s the one!” Hardison said. “How did you know that?”

  “We took it off him, along with your earpiece,” said Nate. “I gave it to Eliot. Parker?”

  She was already in motion. “I don’t know, Nate. There’s not a whole lot of extra room in these costumes. He might have just thrown it out when he was changing into his costume, or he might have stashed it with his clothes.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Sophie noticed Patronus signaling to her from the podium. He had a beautiful piece of artwork on display that featured a hard-looking man in a black shirt with a gigantic skull on its front, the teeth of which had been elongated to run down past its belt. The lighting in the piece was fantastic, a real study in shadows that communicated the kind of world this man came from and what violence he planned to perpetrate on it.