The Con Job

by Matt Forbeck

  The people standing in those booths loved the things they made, and they just wanted to share that love with the rest of the world. They only hoped that enough people would love them back that they could continue doing what they loved. Otherwise, it would be back to the cubicle farms for them.

  Hardison turned to the left and followed the aisle until he came to Patronus’s booth, which was actually a ten-booth island twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long. It wasn’t any taller than the booths that surrounded it in this part of the hall, but it looked a lot classier. It had thick, plush carpet that invited attendees to enter the area and wander around. Rather than having merchandise on wire racks, Patronus had set much of it on display in glass cases that would not have looked out of place in a museum.

  “There’s some great pieces here,” Hardison said as he wandered through the center of the booth, down the interior aisle the glass cases formed. He recognized one page from a Spider-Man comic he’d read as a kid. “Some of these are going to go for top dollar.”

  “He’s got hired muscle hanging around the place,” Eliot said. Hardison still didn’t see him, but that was all right. Eliot needed to do his job, and for that, the less attention the better. “They look a bit higher up the ladder than the kinds of guys I’d expect to see working security at a comic convention.”

  “Are you saying that their talents might be wasted here?” Nate asked over the earpiece.

  “Or there’s more going on here than a simple art auction. This guy working for anybody?”

  “Not that we know of. His lack of much of a personal history suggests that he may have faked up his ID.”

  “Hey,” Parker said. “I know that guy.”

  Hardison glanced around. He still couldn’t see her. “Which guy?”

  “The only one in a suit in the entire aisle,” Parker said. “He’s on the north side of the booth at the moment.”

  Hardison worked his way north and stole a surreptitious glance in the direction Parker had mentioned. There he was, the man in the suit. He looked like he didn’t care much for the suit. It showed no signs of wear or tear, which meant that he didn’t wear it when he could avoid doing so—which had to be most of the time.

  He was short—well, shorter than Hardison, like most people. He had dark hair laced through with gray, slicked back with product. He had the kind of tan that seemed typical of people from Southern California, burned in so deep it looked like it hadn’t faded in decades.

  The man chatted with a middle-aged man in shorts and a T-shirt with a faded Captain America shield in the center of it. He seemed calm, but he kept wiping the sweat from his forehead, despite the fact that the air-conditioning in this place was on full blast. The badge hanging from a lanyard around his neck identified him as Lorenzo Patronus.

  “You know him?” Eliot said.

  Hardison didn’t look for Eliot. He trusted him to be where he needed to be. He kept his eyes on Patronus instead, watching him tell the man all about how amazing the auction would be.

  “Sure do,” Parker said. “And I know just how we’re going to take him.”

  TEN

  Nate and Sophie grinned at the rest of the crew as they filed up the narrow set of stairs that led to the dining area in the upper part of the Field. It occupied only the front part of the building and had a low railing over which Nate could look down to see the main barroom below. With the convention hall having closed down at 9 p.m., most of the Gaslamp Quarter was packed, and the Field was no exception.

  Eliot, Parker, and Hardison sat down at the empty chairs at the table. They kept their earpieces in so they could talk in voices low enough that no one in the roaring bar could hear them while they could hear one another just fine. Nate liked how that kept the possibility of eavesdropping ears away. The odds that someone who knew Patronus might overhear them were tiny, he knew, but he didn’t like to take unnecessary chances.

  “So what have we got?” Nate said.

  Hardison held up a gigantic bag that Parker could have used as a dress. “I picked up all sorts of things,” he said with a smile. “I grabbed the entire run of Chew, and I snagged the first trade paperback for the Magic: The Gathering comic, autographed by the writer, no less. I also snatched up the latest D&D comics, and then I found this.”

  He reached into the bag and pulled out a huge hardcover book in a handsomely illustrated slipcase. “A first printing of Absolute Kingdom Come, and I even got Mark Waid to sign it.”

  Sophie narrowed her eyes at Hardison’s bag. “And what about that?”

  His eyes sparkled with the joy of a collector who’s made a huge score. “This is one of the free bags they give out at the DC booth, only a limited number every day. This year it features the Justice League drawn by Jim Lee, my favorite comic artist ever.”

  “Better than Jack Kirby?” Nate asked.

  Hardison cocked his head at Nate. “I thought you didn’t read comics.”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just been a long time.”

  Eliot slapped a hand in the middle of the table. “That’s enough about Hardison’s shopping expedition.” He turned to the hacker. “I can’t believe you made us wait for you while you bought that crap.”

  “Crap?” Hardison stuck out his lower lip and gave Eliot his best puppy-dog eyes. “I’ll have you know that these are works of art, not to mention prized collectibles.”

  “What about Patronus?” Nate asked, hoping to defuse the tension between the two by getting back on the original subject.

  “He was there, all right,” Hardison said. “Played the honest businessman to the hilt. He had a ton of fantastic merchandise too. Hell, I’m half tempted to put in a few bids on some of those original pages myself.”

  Hardison pulled out his smartphone and started tapping its screen.

  “He brought some high-price muscle along with him,” Eliot said. “I spotted at least a half-dozen guys watching the booth for him. Professional grade too.”

  “I guess he doesn’t trust the convention security guards to keep his stuff safe for him.” Parker looked sideways, then whispered: “He shouldn’t.”

  “He only had two of them in the booth,” Eliot said. “The others roamed around the area instead, keeping an eye on the traffic. They’re not messing around.”

  “We’re not here to steal the artwork back anyhow, right?” Sophie said. “Sure, we want to get it back to the rightful owners, but if we just take it, Patronus will file an insurance claim and make all the money from it anyhow.”

  “Plus that would make the goods unsalable as stolen property,” Nate said. “Which would defeat the purpose of returning it to the owners.”

  “So what’s our angle?” Eliot said.

  “I think Parker might be able to help us out there. How do you know this guy again?”

  “He’s an art forger,” she said with a mischievous smile. “A good one too, but he doesn’t work in oils or acrylics. He’s more of an illustrator.”

  “You mean like a comic-book artist?” Hardison said.

  Parker nodded. “He used to make fake sketches of other artists’ work and then sell them as originals. He wasn’t bad at it.”

  “And how did you run into him?” Hardison asked.

  “I robbed his biggest customer, this billionaire who collected all sorts of art but had a real thing for original comics art. When I tried to sell the pieces, the fakes got spotted, and I did a little checking to see who’d made a mess of that for me.”

  “I’ve heard of this guy too,” Hardison said, “but under another name.” He held up his smartphone and showed the others a Web site called BleedingCool.com, a comics industry site. The article Hardison had pulled up showed a man in a T-shirt holding up what looked like an original comic-book cover. It had been penciled and inked, but it hadn’t been colored—at least not on that bit of paper.

  “That looks like a much less slick version of the guy we saw in the hall,” Eliot said.

  “He used to contact comic
-book companies and pretend to be a famous artist offering to draw covers for them,” Hardison said. “He got caught a couple different times before the publishers figured it out and started confirming the contact information regularly.”

  “That’s it,” Nate said. “That’s our angle.”

  Sophie gave him an approving smile. “Very good,” she said. “It plays to a man’s most vulnerable point: his dreams. I like it.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Parker asked, a confused look on her face.

  “This guy Patronus,” Nate said. “Or whatever his real name is, he could make a better living forging all sorts of things: priceless works of the Old Masters, hundred-dollar bills. Instead, he keeps coming back to comics. Why?”

  “Because he wants to be a comic-book artist,” Eliot said.

  “Right,” Hardison. “And more than he wants money.”

  Nate grinned at the others. “So, that’s how we get him.”

  “How’s that?” Parker said, genuinely curious.

  “We promise him what he wants, and we’ll have him eating out of our hands,” Sophie said. “From there, it shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “But how are we going to do that?” Eliot turned to Hardison. “You got that kind of clout among the nerds here?”

  Hardison corrected him. “Geeks.”

  “I have a solution for that, and we’ll start on it first thing in the morning,” Nate said, raising his glass for a toast. “Let’s go steal us a comic-book publisher.”

  ELEVEN

  Even before he’d joined up with the rest of the team, Alec Hardison had been a wealthy young man. His hacking skills had filled his bank accounts with cash that no one would ever know had gone missing. Since teaming up with the others to use their skills to take down the real bad guys, he’d steadily grown even richer. There was little that he wanted that he couldn’t have.

  Right now he’d have paid a million dollars for a proper bed.

  He hadn’t slept on an air mattress in years, and his back wanted to remind him why. Instead of complaining about it to the others, though, who seemed to be sawing wood just fine, he decided to quit struggling for another hour of uncomfortable sleep and cracked open his laptop.

  He cruised the Web, using his bulletproof Virtual Private Network to connect with the offshore servers he rented and check on his various projects. Then he decided to take another crack at a serious search for Patronus. He’d come up mostly empty before, a clear sign that the man had fabricated his new identity.

  Now that he’d seen the man, though, and had a good look at the artwork in his booth, he had new data to use, fresh angles to explore. Better yet, he’d taken some photos while he’d been on the convention floor last night. Eliot had warned him against it, but so many people brought cameras to Comic-Con to capture all the crazy and wonderful imagery that Hardison had been sure no one would notice him.

  Sure, he could have set himself up with a microcamera hidden in his badge, but the resolution for those things wasn’t as high as he needed. When you wanted to set up a comparative image search on the Internet, after all, the clearer the picture, the better. Besides, it felt good to play the wide-eyed fanboy at Comic-Con for a little bit. It had been liberating.

  Despite having wanted to attend Comic-Con for years, Hardison had never been able to do so. He’d always been too busy with more important matters, and as he’d tried to explain to the others, you had to plan a trip to Comic-Con months ahead of time. Even if he’d been willing to drop mad money on the event, it would get him only so far, as a twinge in his spine reminded him once again.

  Despite his wealth, Hardison still had thrifty urges. He’d turned to crime mostly because his family had needed money, fast, and he found it hard to pretend that money didn’t matter to him. He cared how he spent it.

  Sure, he’d spent an incredible amount of money on his vans—every one of his sweet Lucilles, as he’d named them—and the high-tech equipment he personally installed in them, but those were the tools of his profession. He wasn’t about to skimp on something that could keep a job from going perpendicular. The kind of marks the crew dealt with meant that they often put their lives on the line in the course of those jobs, so he considered those expenses an investment in making sure that he and his friends still had a future.

  So he was thrilled to finally have a solid excuse to come to San Diego for Comic-Con, even if it meant mixing business with pleasure, and playing around with that consumer-level camera in the exhibit hall last night had made it all seem so real. He’d even taken a few snapshots of people in some stunning costumes. He’d told the others that it was to give anyone who spotted him taking pictures of Patronus and his booth a good reason to think he was just another conventioneer, but he’d enjoyed every damn second of it.

  “Find anything?” Parker said from behind him.

  Hardison almost jumped out of his chair. Only the fact that he had his laptop on his lap kept him from racing away. Well, that and the fact that he didn’t want Parker to see him look scared.

  The woman moved as quietly as a cat, always, and it hadn’t been the first time that she’d startled him. He suspected that she enjoyed the reaction it got out of him, but he wasn’t about to dump his last shred of dignity just to please her. Instead, he steeled himself and readjusted his computer.

  “Uh, yeah,” he said, trying to remember what he’d been doing. Every thought in his brain had fled when Parker had surprised him. He glanced down at the screen, though, and it all came back to him.

  “You nailed him, all right,” Hardison said. He kept his voice low, hoping to not disturb Eliot, who was still sleeping on an air mattress on the far side of the suite’s sitting room. The mercenary was tough enough that Hardison suspected he’d have slept just as well on a bed of gravel, but that didn’t mean he wanted to wake him up too early. The man got cranky enough as it was.

  “This Patronus has wanted to be a comic-book artist for a long time,” Hardison said. “Here, look.”

  He leaned back so that Parker could peer over his shoulder at the laptop’s screen. He could smell her hair as he did, which made him smile.

  “I didn’t recognize some of the artwork he had on display in his booth last night, so I snapped a few pictures of it,” Hardison said. “Turns out to be his original work.”

  “He couldn’t resist putting it out there next to all that legendary stuff he stole.”

  “Right.” He pointed at the screen. “I searched for those images online and found a match in the deviantART portfolio of an artist named Kirby Miller.”

  “Back when I ran into him, he called himself Steve Eisner.”

  “The guy’s probably got a dozen different aliases. He gets caught under one name, he just comes up with another a few months later and tries again.”

  “And this Kirby Whatshisname’s portfolio is active. I mean, he’s still out there trying to sell himself under this new name.”

  Hardison nodded. “Hell, it even tells people to stop by the Patronus booth at Comic-Con to see his stuff.”

  Parker smiled, and Hardison couldn’t help but mirror it. “We got him good,” she said.

  TWELVE

  Sophie Devereaux strode into Comic-Con like she owned the place, although she was far too well turned out for it in her sharp business dress, stylish glasses, and string of matched pearls. The Con-goers who shuffled around her seemed to instinctively move out of the way as she approached, sensing that she was a shark swimming in their usually friendly sea. Many of them had come here to get away from people like her.

  Her badge read Jess Drew, and if anyone bothered to check into it, she knew they’d find the false identity trail that Hardison had scattered all over the Internet for this particular role. She was an artist’s agent based in Manhattan. She mostly concentrated on avant-garde artists and their multimedia work, but her son had persuaded her to take an interest in the comic books that he loved so much. As such, a growing part of her business included bringi
ng talented newcomers to the attention of the largest comic-book publishers in the nation, including Marvel, DC, IDW, Dark Horse, and Image.

  Sophie didn’t know much about those companies, of course, other than what she’d been able to cram into her head that morning, but her cover story gave her a good explanation for why she’d be involved in such a business without being a comic-book fan herself. She just hoped that Patronus would buy it. If anyone could sell it to him, though, she knew it would be her.

  Sophie wandered around the hall for a bit, acclimating herself to the dull roar of conversation and huckstering going on throughout the place. Patronus’s booth stood toward the north end of the massive hall, apart from the gigantic displays put on by the largest companies, which not only included Marvel and DC but many of the top film, television, toy, and video game studios in the world. She stood by the edge of the TNT booth and surveyed the hall.

  To the north of the center section, the hall became brighter and airier, with more modest booths from smaller companies. Many of these featured long white boxes full of comics, as well as racks, shelves, and tables filled with the things. Beyond that stretched booths filled with paintings, original artwork, stuffed toys, T-shirts, props, and countless other forms of collectible, pop culture merchandise.

  She’d not read many comics in her life, apart from 2000 AD when she was a child in England, but she understood their appeal. As a trained but as-yet-undiscovered actress, she had always been drawn to drama, and comic books had that aplenty. She’d once been bored sitting around the crew’s office and had picked up a lurid graphic novel Hardison had left lying around. It had been called Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story of how multiple Earths from across countless dimensions had come together to battle a villain bent on destroying them all.