The Bestseller Job

by Greg Cox

  “Not just any agent.” She thrust out a well-manicured hand. “I represent Denise Gallo.”

  His jowly face hardened. He let her hand hang in the air. “We’ve got nothing to talk about.”

  “I beg to differ,” she replied. “Unless you’re satisfied with just one bestseller.”

  His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “Suppose, just hypothetically, that my client happened to be in possession of a sequel to Assassins Never Forget, completed shortly before your brother’s untimely accident?”

  Brad’s eyes widened, but Sophie could tell he wasn’t convinced yet. “So how come I’m just hearing about this now?”

  “Well, it’s not as though you’ve been all that receptive to communicating with my client.” According to Denise, Brad had barely made an appearance at Gavin’s funeral before heading straight to a lawyer to secure his claim on his brother’s estate. He had ignored all of Denise’s calls or e-mails since. “You can hardly blame her for wanting to secure representation before coming forward with this highly valuable property.”

  Brad scowled. “Why you? What happened to the old agent?”

  “That was Gavin’s agent, as your lawyer made abundantly clear.” She came on strong, like she was holding all the cards. “Denise was smart enough to realize that she needed someone looking out specifically for her interests.”

  “And that would be you, huh?”

  “Bingo.” She held out her hand again. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Not so fast. Let’s say, just for the moment, that this isn’t a pile of bull. What exactly does ‘your client’ want for the book?”

  “A fifty-fifty share of the proceeds, plus creative control.”

  He nearly choked on his beer. “Like hell,” he sputtered. “Even if there really is a sequel, and you’re not just making this all up, anything Gavin wrote belongs to me now. I don’t owe that gold digger anything.”

  “In theory, perhaps,” Sophie conceded. “But all of that is academic if you don’t actually have a copy of the text. And possession, need I remind you, is nine tenths of the law.”

  He glared at her. “And suppose I get a court order demanding the book?”

  “What book? Where? Let me assure you that any hypothetical computer files are safely stowed away where you will never find them, court order or no court order. And do you really want to fight this out in the courts for the next several years, when there’s a fortune just waiting to be made? The reading public has a lamentably short attention span. Believe me, you want to strike while Assassins is still on the bestseller lists, before the Next Big Thing comes along.” Her voice took on a more conciliatory tone. “Look, we don’t have to go to war here. We all want the same thing: for Gavin’s work to reach an eager audience, and for his loved ones to benefit from the fruits of his imagination.”

  “But I’m his brother! She’s not even blood.”

  “Right,” Sophie said, unimpressed. “And which of you would he have trusted with the sequel?”

  Sophie and the rest of the team were counting on the fact that Brad had no way of knowing if his estranged brother had been working on a sequel or not, and that Denise was the person most likely to know about any hypothetical works in progress. As with any good con, the narrative had the ring of plausibility. It was not unlike writing a novel, really. The trick was not to ask the reader to suspend his disbelief too far.

  As Brad mulled things over, she let her gaze drift around the quaintly Teutonic beer garden. She had many fond memories of Frankfurt, which was the financial and business center of Germany. Why, she had once managed to pull off a highly profitable stock swindle a few blocks from here, simply by posing as a naive barmaid from Stuttgart.

  Of course, that was before Nate found a more altruistic use for her talents.

  Her nostalgic stroll down Memory Lane came to an abrupt halt when she spotted a too-familiar figure lurking near the entrance. The peeper from McRory’s snapped a photo of her with his phone while trying unsuccessfully to remain undetected. Sophie’s eyes widened slightly. It took effort to keep her shock and dismay out of her expression. What on earth was the lurker doing here, nearly four thousand miles from Boston?

  This is not a coincidence, she realized. This is trouble.

  Unfortunately, there was no way she could confront him now, not without breaking character in front of Brad, so she did the next best thing instead.

  “Excuse me for a minute,” she told Brad. “I need to check my messages.” She stepped away from the bar. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Turning her back on him, she lowered her voice. “We have a problem,” she told the others via the earbud. “That peeper I told you about? The one from McRory’s? He’s here.”

  “In Frankfurt?” Nate’s voice asked with concern.

  “I’m looking right at him,” she said, risking another glance at the mystery man in the green hoodie. Their eyes met across the beer garden and he bolted for the exit again. “Hold on. He’s on the move.”

  “I’m on it,” Eliot said. “Leave it to me.”

  Sophie watched the lurker retreat. She was tempted to pursue him herself, find out just what he was after, but she wasn’t done hooking Brad yet. She would just have to trust that Eliot and the others had her back—as usual.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, rejoining Brad at the bar. “An agent’s work is never done.” She put away her phone. “So, are we ready to talk terms yet?”

  “I need to think about this,” he grumbled.

  “Of course,” she said reasonably. “In the meantime, here’s a little teaser, as a gesture of good faith.” She tucked a portable thumb drive into the vest pocket of his suit. “The first three chapters, free of charge.”

  She figured she had done enough to whet his interest. She got up from the bar and headed for the exit. “We’ll be in touch.”

  By now, of course, the lurker was long gone. She waited until she was safely clear of Brad before checking in anxiously.

  “What’s happening? Did you get him?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the young Russian woman asked in German. Her equally attractive companion giggled beside her. “Can you help us find the lost and found?”

  Eliot was patrolling the exhibition halls, disguised as a member of the fair’s security staff. A stolen blue uniform helped sell the role. His flowing mane was tied back in a neat ponytail. A bogus headset completed the picture and gave him an excuse for talking to himself. He was on hand in the unlikely event that things got physical, but was keeping his distance from Brad; it wouldn’t do for the mark to get a look at him this early in the operation. They didn’t want Brad to recognize him later on; once a team member was “burned” on an operation, they couldn’t be brought in later as needed. Besides, it wasn’t as if Nate or Sophie was likely to need a hitter anytime soon. They were at a book fair, for Pete’s sake. How dangerous could it get?

  The biggest threat around here was paper cuts.

  “You girls lose something?” he asked, maintaining his cover. Mr. Helpful, he thought. That’s me.

  “Maybe,” the first girl said. A name tag on her vest identified her as sonia. Her friend was katya. They both made Russian publishing look good. She eyed him speculatively. “Or maybe we’re just looking to see what can be found.”

  “Da,” Katya said. “This place is so big and confusing. Maybe you can show us the way.”

  Eliot grinned back at the girls, in a way that had served him well with women on all seven continents (including one memorably toasty night in Antarctica). He was on the job, of course, but he figured there were worse ways to pass the time than flirting with a couple of bored Russian bibliophiles. Sonia took hold of his right arm. Katya took his left. He admired their tactics.

  He was trying to remember exactly where the lost and found was when Sophie spoke urgently into his ear: “We’ve got a problem…”

  His boyish grin evaporated. He disengaged himself from his shape
ly Russian distractions.

  “Sorry, ladies. Something’s come up.” He thrust a folded map of the complex into Sonia’s hands. “Good luck finding… whatever.”

  They pouted in disappointment, but he couldn’t worry about that now. As he hurried to intercept the fleeing lurker, he wondered what this unwanted complication was all about. Did it have something to do with the con they were running at present, or was it something completely unrelated to Denise and her troubles? The Leverage crew had made more than their share of enemies over the years, and stepped on some very big toes. This wouldn’t be the first time that somebody had placed them under surveillance—or worse.

  Heading toward the beer garden, which was one level above his current position, he searched the crowd ahead for someone matching Sophie’s description of the lurker. His fists clenched in frustration as he fought his way through the slow-moving crowd. There were too many looky-loos dawdling in the aisles and not enough people getting out of his way. The PA system announced a book giveaway two halls over. A famous historian and his entourage paused to sign galleys in the middle of the aisle, causing a traffic jam. Eliot mentally struck the historian’s next book from his reading list.

  “Security,” he grunted. “Coming through.”

  By the time he neared the escalator, he felt like hitting somebody, which, to be honest, was a fairly common state of affairs for him. Craning his head back, he spotted a likely suspect coming down the crowded escalator. His brain checked off the details of Sophie’s description.

  Pale. Scrawny. Green hoodie. Thick glasses. Shifty-looking. The four-eyed geek descending the escalator looked like the guy all right. Sweating nervously, he kept looking back over his shoulder, as though he was trying to get away from somebody. He fidgeted impatiently on the moving stairs, hemmed in by people above and below him. In other words, he looked guilty as hell.

  “Got him in my sights,” Eliot reported.

  “Be careful,” Nate advised. “We don’t know who this character is, or what he’s after.”

  “Roger that,” Eliot said. The guy on the stairs didn’t look too tough, but you never knew. Eliot still had a four-inch scar from a petite East German mercenary he had tangled with in this very city six years ago. She had seemed harmless, too, until she’d slashed a box cutter across his ribs. The embarrassment of being suckered by somebody half his size had hurt worse than the cut.

  He wasn’t about to make that mistake again.

  Eliot positioned himself at the bottom of the escalator, letting the mechanism bring his target to him. He considered the best way to play this. Take the guy aside, still posing as security, and find out what his story was? Maybe escort him to some quiet storage room or service corridor where he could interrogate him with extreme prejudice?

  Works for me, he thought. Nobody spies on my friends and gets away with it.

  Too late he remembered that the lurker had already seen him sharing a table with Sophie at McRory’s, back when they were meeting with Denise. The guy’s eyes bugged out behind the Coke-bottle lenses of his glasses as he spotted Eliot waiting at the bottom of the escalator. His face went even paler, if that was humanly possible.

  “Damn it,” Eliot growled. “He’s made me.”

  Sure enough, the guy spun around and starting shoving his way up the down escalator, pushing his way past startled men and women heavily laden with laptops, briefcases, and bulging book bags. Indignant protests in myriad languages greeted the man’s frantic exodus as he rushed back the way he’d come. An irate fräulein swatted him with her purse.

  Eliot sprang into action. He knew better than to try forcing his way up through the confused bystanders clogging the escalator. His prey already had too much of a head start. Eliot dashed for the up escalator instead, only to find it just as congested. Nobody seemed in a hurry to get out of his way. He felt like a salmon fighting his way upstream.

  “Security!” he shouted, in every language he could think of. “Move it!”

  It was no use. By the time he squeezed his way past the uncooperative, uncomprehending civilians blocking his way, the lurker had vanished into the mobs crowding the upper level. Eliot scanned the overpopulated exhibition hall, with its endless aisles and displays. It was like trying to find a single sports fan at the Super Bowl. There were bookworms everywhere.

  “Parker! Hardison!” he barked. “He rabbited. I lost him.”

  “I’m looking, I’m looking,” Hardison replied. In theory, the team’s resident geek was hacked into the fair’s umpteen zillion security cameras, but that was a lot to keep track of. The trade-fair complex covered over six hundred thousand square feet and consisted of at least nine multilevel exhibition halls. They could only hope that that the nameless lurker was still in the same general vicinity, and that the crowds were slowing him down, too. How far could he have gotten yet?

  “Hardison?” Eliot asked impatiently.

  “Found him!” Hardison said. “Level One, Aisle G. Looks like he’s making a break for the subway entrance outside the far end of the hall.” Eliot ran through the layout of the fairgrounds in his head, wishing he had hung on to that map he’d given the Russian dolls. “He’s heading your way, Parker. It’s on you, girl.”

  She did not respond immediately.

  “Parker?”

  Next time, she decided, Eliot has to wear the dog suit.

  Parker fumed inside the plush Pomeranian costume. She was far from claustrophobic—indeed, she had once crawled through more than two hundred feet of narrow air ducts to lift a pricey Botticelli from Frankfurt’s own Städelsches Kunstinstitut—but the cartoon dog suit was stuffy, smelly, and severely cut down on her peripheral vision. She felt like she was trapped inside the world’s most disgustingly cute deep-sea diving outfit. For someone who had always survived by being light on her feet, being stuck inside the cumbersome suit made her skin crawl.

  And then there were the kids…

  “Smile for the camera, Gretchen. Don’t be scared.”

  A middle-aged German mom was determined to snap a photo of her nervous Kinder with the oversize grape-colored canine, even though little Gretchen seemed distinctly unenthusiastic about the prospect. The mom shoved the reluctant child toward Parker, who posed awkwardly for the camera. She had been alternately attracting and terrifying kids all afternoon.

  “Look at the big, funny dog,” the mom urged, trying to pry a smile from the tot. She eyed Parker quizzically. “Who are you supposed to be again?”

  “Polly, the Perky Purple Pup,” Parker said in a less-than-perky monotone. “Bowwow. Arf.”

  The kid started crying.

  Hardison had better not keep any video of this, Parker thought grumpily. A directional sign pointed toward the antiquarian books exhibit a few halls over. Parker wondered if any of the crew would mind if she snuck away long enough to lift a couple of rare first editions, just to soothe her nerves. Heists were her comfort food.

  An urgent SOS from Sophie, followed by rapid updates from Eliot and Hardison, squelched any hopes of a little recreational kleptomania. Parker tensed inside the dog suit, wondering who was after them now.

  “Parker?” Hardison repeated anxiously.

  “I heard you!” she snapped, her voice echoing oddly inside the large hollow dog head. Gretchen bawled at her feet. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here, okay?”

  “Well, make like the Flash, girl. We got a runaway peeper to nab.”

  They had been working together long enough for her to catch the comic-book reference. Hardison was proud of his geekdom.

  “Coming!”

  She shoved the sobbing kid aside and glanced around for the quickest route to Aisle G. The dog costume was hard to see out of, frustrating her efforts to orient herself. Screw this, she thought.

  She ripped off Polly’s head and threw it onto the floor in front of Gretchen’s mom. The little girl screamed in terror.

  “Sorry about that,” Parker said, dashing away. She hoped little Gretchen w
ouldn’t need too much therapy. Could be worse. She could be an orphan who learned to steal at an early age…

  “Wait!” the agitated mom cried out. “What about my picture?”

  That was the least of Parker’s worries. She elbowed her way through the crowded aisle, determined not to let the lurker get away. “Talk to me, Hardison! Where is he?”

  “Heading down to Level One,” he reported. “You better make tracks, girl. No pun intended.”

  “I never make tracks!”

  She kicked off Polly’s oversize back paws and ran barefoot through the hall. The clumsy gloves went next. Her eyes, no longer hidden behind a suffocating mask, scanned the crowd for her target. An escalator led to the ground floor of the building. Reaching the top of the stairs, she spied a suspicious character exiting the bottom of the escalator. Unlike the hundreds of other fairgoers in view, he wasn’t pausing to check out the various booths and exhibits. He was making a beeline down the nearest aisle.

  “I see him! I think.”

  “Scrawny guy, moving like a bat out of hell?” Eliot asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Stay on him, Parker,” Nate advised. “I want to know what he wants with Sophie.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Sophie said. “Get him, Parker!”

  It sounded as though there was an entire briefing going on in her ear, but that was okay; she was used to that.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” she snapped. “Playing fetch?”

  The escalator was packed, so she bypassed the moving steps and hopped onto the handrail instead. Whooping in glee, she slid down the steep, shiny rail at top speed while startled pedestrians yanked their hands out of the way. She took a second to enjoy the ride. Next to cold hard cash and, oh, yeah, helping people, adrenaline was one of her favorite things.

  Okay, this is fun, she thought. Maybe this job doesn’t completely suck.

  She hit the ground running and took off after the suspicious dude. But her stunt, as exhilarating as it was, had hardly escaped his notice. He froze in shock for a moment, then ran like mad, apparently alarmed by the sight of a fierce-looking blonde in a partial dog costume chasing after him.