by Matt Forbeck
“Hey,” Hardison said, offended. “I have a note from my doctor.”
“This ain’t grade school. And there’s no ‘we.’ You were supposed to line us up some beds. Now’s your chance.”
“But it’s preview night tonight,” Hardison said. “That’s our first chance to get into the show and, ah, get the lay of the land, find out where our boy Patronus set up shop.”
“We don’t need five of us to do that,” Eliot said, flinging himself down into a chair. “Get shopping.”
“But I—”
“I got it,” Nate said as he and Sophie entered the sitting room from the bedroom. “I’ll take care of the bedding.”
“Can’t we just call for a couple rollaways?” Parker asked.
“They’re all gone too, I’m afraid,” Sophie said. “I already asked.”
“Wait,” Eliot said to Nate. “Don’t we need you down there on the floor?”
“We always need to keep a couple faces in reserve,” Nate said. “It’s not good for us to be seen together, not in the same place as the mark.”
“Yeah, but it’s usually us in reserve,” said Parker. “Right?”
Nate shrugged. He didn’t really want to get into this. “Hardison’s been asking for more responsibility, and he’s been doing a great job with it. This job seems more up his alley than mine. It only makes sense to let him take the lead.”
Sophie narrowed her eyes at Nate, but he ignored her, sure that she would read the signal and back off. If she wanted to talk about it, she could ask him about it later, when they were alone. He might even answer.
Nate walked over to the table near the room’s bay window. Hardison had laid out his equipment there, including the things he’d brought along for the rest of the crew. A lot of it was electronic equipment that Nate recognized only because he’d seen Hardison using it at one point or another. He couldn’t have operated much of it to save his life. Still, they all had their specialties.
Nate reached down and picked out his earpiece, which had a color-coded dot on the inside of it. It wasn’t much bigger than the eraser on the end of a pencil, and it fit deep enough into his ear canal that no one outside of a doctor with an otoscope would know it was there. When the rest of the crew had their own earpieces in place, they’d be able to communicate with one another as if they were in the same room. They could even listen in on conversations they were having with other people.
Hardison gathered up the rest of the earpieces and distributed them to the others. “Remember, the range on these babies isn’t unlimited. They’re good for a couple miles in the open, but with all these big buildings around here, it might be a lot less. Y’all ought to check in before you go do something crazy, just to make sure they’re working.”
The others nodded as they inserted their own earpieces. “Maybe you don’t want to hear what I say about you,” Eliot said.
Nate allowed himself a wry smile as Eliot’s voice echoed in his ear. The earpieces gave the team a huge advantage over their marks, providing them with instant, always-on communication, almost like telepathy. It made it so much easier for him to coordinate the team’s efforts that he sometimes wondered how they’d ever gotten along without them.
The trick, he knew, was to make sure they didn’t rely on them too much. Like any other bit of equipment, the earpieces could fail—had failed, in fact—at crucial moments.
Also, there were times when using them felt like having four other people in his head. While Nate knew and trusted the other members of the crew—and in fact had never been closer to any group of people in his life—he still enjoyed his privacy. When he was on a job, he tried to push that aside. He could sacrifice it for the cause for that short period of time—or at least until he decided he couldn’t.
“Go ahead,” Nate said to Hardison. “Take Parker and Eliot down to your little get-together and have some fun.”
“Get-together?” Hardison’s hackles started to rise, but they lowered as soon as he saw Nate smiling at him. “All right. We’ll go check out the mark while you and Sophie do a little household shopping.”
Nate put an arm around Sophie’s waist and smiled at her as she nestled against him. “That sounds fine to me.”
SEVEN
“I can’t believe it’s taken you this long just to get into the show,” Nate said as he and Sophie propped up the bar at the Field, an Irish pub just around the corner from the Horton Grand, over on Fifth, right in the heart of the city’s historic Gaslamp Quarter. That put it right on the main drag that led up to the San Diego Convention Center, but a healthy enough distance away from the bulk of the crowds that the noise outside had fallen off to a dull roar.
“Hey, we had to get our badges,” Hardison said. “Even the pro line took forever.”
“I thought you said the badges were sold out months ago,” Sophie said.
“Hey, I got both means and ways,” Hardison said. “I wouldn’t let us down.”
Nate smiled as he signaled the bartender for a shot of Jameson. “I thought you had something against ripping off your fellow dorks.”
“Geeks, Nate. We’re geeks. Get it straight.”
“We’re surrounded by nerds,” Eliot said. He spoke under his breath, but Nate could hear him as well as if Eliot were whispering in his ear. “Nerds as far as the eye can see.”
“That’s a hundred and fifty thousand of my people,” Hardison said. “You watch your mouth.”
“What are they going to do?” Eliot said. “Beat me to death with their padded swords?”
“Those are boffer swords,” Hardison said, “and they’re a legitimate form of exercise.”
“They do look like fun,” Parker said in a playful tone.
“Let’s stay on target, people,” Nate said. “Get in there and find Patronus. Word is he has a huge booth. Shouldn’t be hard to find him.”
“Man actually has an ad in the program book,” Hardison said. “Piece of cake.”
“How did you get the badges?” Parker asked. “You didn’t steal a badge from a pro, did you?”
“Of course not,” Hardison said. “Geek solidarity to the end.”
“Then whose name is this on my badge? Who’s Diana Prince?”
Hardison laughed. “That’s Wonder Woman’s secret identity.”
Parker giggled at that. “And who are you? Carl Lucas?”
“That’s Luke Cage’s original name.”
“Who?” Eliot didn’t bother to conceal his irritation.
“Luke Cage? You know, Power Man? Of Power Man and Iron Fist?” Hardison waited for a response that never came. “Sweet Christmas, what’s wrong with you people?”
“We have lives. And just who am I supposed to be, huh? Batman’s secret sidekick?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Sophie said. Nate gave her a nudge with his elbow, and she fixed him with a mischievous smile.
“Naw, man,” said Hardison. “I wouldn’t do that to you. I know how you feel about ‘fictional’ people.”
“So who the hell is Warren Ellis?”
“He’s a comic-book writer. Good one.”
Eliot groaned. “For God’s sake, do I look like a comic-book writer?”
“Hey, don’t knock Warren Ellis. He wrote all sorts of great stuff. Global Frequency, The Authority, Transmetropolitan. Good stuff.”
“Did you steal Warren Ellis’s badge?” Parker said.
“Of course not,” said Hardison. “What kind of fan do you take me for? I checked his blog. He’s stuck back in England where he belongs. No nerd prom for him.”
“Then why’s he got a badge waiting for him here?”
“The pro badges are free, see? Lots of pros ask for them on the off chance they might use them. A lot of them never get claimed. I knew Ellis’s was up for grabs, so I grabbed it.”
“If he’s so famous, isn’t there a chance someone might ask Eliot what he’s doing with his badge?” said Nate.
“What? There can’t be two Warren E
llises in the world?”
“At Comic-Con?”
“All Eliot has to do is wear his badge backward. They come on these crappy lanyards that are always flipping the things over anyhow. The folks standing guard at the exhibit hall’s entrance might ask him to flip it over, but they’re just looking for the color coding on the badge to make sure no one’s trying to sneak in on a one-day badge on the wrong day. They don’t read the names.”
“Fine,” Eliot said, “but if someone asks me for an autograph…”
“Hey,” Hardison said. “Did you see that movie Red?”
“The one with the old CIA agents? Yeah, that was a hoot.”
“You wrote the comic that was based on.”
Eliot laughed at that. “All right,” he said. “That was hilarious. I mean, all full of holes and silly as hell, but good fun.”
“I’ll let Roger Ebert know you’re gunning for his job.”
Eliot laughed at that too. Nate smiled in satisfaction. They were all a bit jet-lagged, and the three-hour time difference between San Diego and Boston meant they’d be feeling the effects of it soon. It might be only 8 p.m. in San Diego, but that meant it was 11 p.m. to them.
It felt good to hear Eliot and Hardison laughing together again. The two of them were like brothers sometimes. They bickered with each other all the time, but if anyone said a thing against one of them, the other would leap to his defense in a vicious heartbeat.
They’d come to rely on that bond. If it frayed or even shattered, it would put them all at risk, and in this line of work, that could cost them their lives. Nate took a long draw off his glass of Jameson and smiled.
EIGHT
“This is insane,” Parker said as she followed Eliot and Hardison into the San Diego Convention Center. As someone who liked to scale buildings and leap off the sides of them, she loved to study architecture, and the convention center made for a feast for her eyes. The entire time they’d walked up to it as the sun set behind it, she’d imagined crawling around on top of it.
The building stretched for more than a half a mile along a sheltered harbor protected from the open Pacific Ocean by Coronado Island, on which sat a U.S. Navy base, complete with its own airstrip. The front of it looked like a long tube of glass spearing through a series of triangular structures made of pale gray concrete that stretched five stories high. In the center of the tube several brilliant-white canopies stabbed out of the area where the tube ran, forming open-air areas larger than any circus tents.
In her head, Parker raced along the top of the building, using all her skill and experience to make sure she didn’t lose her footing and go sliding and then tumbling along the structure’s slippery glass facade. She somersaulted from there to the edge of the tentlike canopies, where she reached up and caught one by its taut-stretched edge. From there, she scaled the canopies as if they were mountains or the whitecapped crests of some magnificent tidal wave frozen in time on the shore.
Up there, above the crowds, silence reigned. She could sit perched on a canopy’s peak and stare out over Coronado Island, past the Cabrillo National Monument, and toward the open sea beyond. She could watch the sun be sucked down into the wide waters and feel the breeze off the ocean ruffle her long blond hair.
Down here, though, she felt caught up in a rising tide of humanity. According to Hardison, a hundred and fifty thousand people were in town for the show, and it seemed to Parker like every one of them had converged on the convention center at once. It made her feel hemmed in, trapped.
Parker was an expert at breaking into places—and then getting back out of them again. She normally worked alone, in the dark and quiet, far from prying eyes. Here she felt exposed and endangered.
She started looking for a way out. Maybe she could join Nate and Sophie at whatever bar they were hanging out at. Hardison and Eliot could handle things on their own, right?
She felt a hand on her arm then, and she spun around, ready to take down whoever it was who’d laid a finger on her. She found herself face-to-face with Hardison instead, and the sight made her catch her breath. She lowered the fist she’d been about to punch him with.
“You all right?” Hardison said. “Don’t worry about all these people. They’re not going to bite.”
A woman in zombie makeup shuffled by, holding the hand of a man dressed as Darth Vader. “Are you sure about that?”
Hardison gave her one of his wide, easy smiles, and she felt the tension ease out of her. He wouldn’t steer her wrong.
“Yeah, girl,” he said. “They’re just here to have fun. Sure, they look a little freaky, but under all the makeup and costumes and silliness, they’re just like you and me.”
“Like you, at least,” Eliot said. “Don’t scare her like that.”
Eliot spoke to Hardison, but his sharp gaze scanned the crowd around them, vigilant for any kind of threats. Parker knew that he would have already checked the rooftops for snipers, and he would keep an eye out for any threatening people coming their way. How he could manage it in a crowd like this, she didn’t know, but she’d seen him do it before. She appreciated it more than she would ever tell him.
“Why you gotta be that way?” Hardison asked. “These people aren’t hurting anyone. They’re just here having some fun.”
Eliot scoffed. “Seems like a lot of effort to put into something for fun, doesn’t it?”
“Hey, the only thing wrong with the folks here is they still believe in heroes. There’s a lot worse things in life than that.”
Eliot bit his tongue, then gave Hardison a friendly slap on the back. “You got me there.”
The three of them stuck together as they rode with the river of people flowing into the exhibit hall. They strolled through an open set of double doors, right past the con staff put there to check the color of their badges. No one said a thing to stop them.
Parker gasped as they emerged into the exhibit area. It was the largest single hall she’d ever seen. The ceiling had to be thirty feet tall, with the kind of exposed steel rafters and catwalks she could play in all day long.
The hall itself was made up of nine regular-size convention halls that could be separated by removable walls. Those had been put away for the weekend, and now Parker could see all the way from one end of the hall to the other. “Wow,” she said. “I’ve never been able to actually see a vanishing point from inside a building.”
Of course, Hardison and Eliot wouldn’t have been able to hear her without the help of their earpieces. Walking into the central part of the hall felt like stumbling into a wall of sound. The roar of a hundred thousand people chatting with one another warred with the massive sound systems blaring out sound tracks and voice-overs advertising films, TV shows, toys, video games, and even comic books.
Lights glared down from the high ceiling, illuminating every inch of the hall’s floor. Strange structures that could be thrown up in hours or even minutes and taken down and packed away in even less towered throughout the place, each of them selling or showing some element of pop culture that the attendees had swarmed here to see. The colors and sounds were enough to make her dizzy, and then there was the scent of so many people in one place.
Parker threw back her head and smiled. “I love this!” she said. “It’s so cool.”
Hardison grinned at her, and she knew he was happy that she understood this place. She got it.
NINE
“We’re not here to gawk at the geeks,” Eliot said. “We got a job to do. Let’s get to it.”
“I’m not gawking at the people,” said Parker. “Not that some of the costumes aren’t incredibly cool, mind you. I’m gawking at the stuff! Look at all this stuff: toys, comics, movies, games. It’s like a teenage boy’s bedroom exploded in here.”
“It’s big business,” Hardison said. “And it’s not just for boys. They got stuff here for everyone from girls to grandpas.”
“The show floor closes in an hour,” said Nate. “You need to find Patronus’s booth and chec
k it out fast.”
Hardison consulted his smartphone. “He’s in Booth 1050, so we need to get over to Aisle 1000.”
“And where are you now?” asked Sophie
Hardison pointed up to the bright blue banners that hung in several spots along each aisle. “Aisle 3400.”
“How many aisles are there?” Parker asked.
“It goes from 100 at the north end down to 5200 at the south end. We got a little hiking to do.”
Eliot led the way, never wavering from his goal. He dodged in and out between conventioneers who moved too slowly or had stopped to examine something or to take a picture of someone in costume. Parker followed right behind him, treating it like a grown-up game of follow the leader. Hardison struggled to keep up the best he could.
“Excuse me. Pardon me,” he said as he jostled his way past the people between him and his friends. The others had moved around them like they weren’t even there. Hardison might be able to treat server security software like that, but he just wasn’t as nimble as Eliot or Parker.
By the time Hardison made it to Aisle 1000, he’d lost the others. He didn’t even see in which direction they’d gone. He figured, though, that this would be fine. This way, if Patronus spotted any one of them, he wouldn’t see them together. Those kinds of coincidences drove marks nuts.
As he walked through the hall, he emerged from the larger booth areas, which were run by companies like Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Mattel, Lucasfilm, and Hasbro. He spotted a semitruck someone had driven into the hall that promised to create an action figure of you with a full-body scan, and he made a mental note that he had to come back for it.
Hardison kept on going, though, and the booths became smaller and lower. The people in this section of the hall sold comics or games or books or some other kind of low-tech entertainment. They didn’t have the multimillion-dollar marketing budgets provided the bigger companies in the center of the hall, and they made do with more modest stands.
Most of the booths here stood on simple ten-by-ten-foot sections of concrete left bare because the publisher didn’t want to have to pay for the carpet. They had a table up front, on which they displayed their books in wire racks, and they had a pop-up backdrop in the back, the kind that folded down into a couple cases you could check with your luggage.
