The Con Job

by Matt Forbeck

  “Really?” Cha0s put a hand to his chest. “I’m hurt, Hardison. I know we’ve had our differences, but I put that down to our competitive natures. I figured at the least our rivalry was built upon a foundation of mutual respect.” He shrugged. “At least respect from this side, for sure.”

  Hardison knew the man was trying to manipulate him, but that didn’t help him not feel a bit bad about it. Cha0s thought he was a much better social hacker than he was. His general lack of empathy worked against him, and it rang hollow to a trained ear when he tried to fake it.

  Hardison, on the other hand, had plenty of empathy. He’d tried to repress it when he’d started out as a hacker, but it had always lurked there, just beneath the surface. That’s the reason he’d leaped at the chance to work with Nate. He liked ripping off big, faceless corporations that were probably involved in all sorts of questionable stuff, and Nate had given all that a focus.

  More to the point, their clients gave these problems a face, turning the abstract issue of any particular crime into something personal. What Patronus had done to all those artists, for instance, was a crying shame, something that Hardison was happy to help put an end to. Susan Curtiss, though, had put a human face on the trouble, so they weren’t just working to help a group of artists but Susan and her dad, Simon, and many of his friends.

  Hardison loved that.

  For Cha0s, though, he had no love. The man stood as the epitome of everything Hardison disliked about the hacker culture. He was arrogant, self-important, and lacked a shred of sympathy for anyone else. He thought of the rest of the world as suckers for him to take advantage of at every opportunity, and nothing mattered more to him than funneling money to his offshore bank accounts so that he could have the kind of lifestyle he felt he deserved.

  The fact that Hardison feared he might have ended up just like Cha0s only made him dislike him that much more.

  Still, the man was the most talented hacker Hardison knew, other than himself, and he was here as part of the greatest geek culture event on the planet. Hardison felt like maybe he should cut him a break, or at least call a truce, for as long as they were here.

  “All right,” he said, smiling not enough to show his teeth. “We’re good.”

  Cha0s grinned, his eyes flashing with excitement. “Excellent! Because I have the greatest news. You see all these people around here?”

  Hardison glanced around at the hard-core, well-heeled Star Trek fans mingling with the objects of their fannish affections. He spotted LeVar Burton chilling out in a chair in the far corner of the room, and there was an open chair beside him. His heart wanted to stop.

  One part of Hardison could step back and see that this was just insane, wasting so much money to spend a bit of time with people who weren’t really the fans’ heroes, just the people who played them on TV. Another part of him had to put all of its energy into resisting the urge to sprint over to Burton, leap into the chair, and do his level best to keep his tongue in his mouth. After all, he’d spent the money to be here and meet the man, hadn’t he?

  “That’s Kunta Kinte, man,” Hardison said, a little too aware that he was staring.

  “Yeah, he’s a hoot,” Cha0s said. “But the rest of these people? Losers. You know why?”

  Hardison shook his head, never taking his eyes off his idol. Burton hadn’t just been Kunta Kinte and Geordi La Forge to him. He was also the man who’d given him a love for books as the host of Reading Rainbow. In his case, the actor actually was Hardison’s hero, and he desperately wanted to meet him.

  Cha0s leaned in and spoke to Hardison in a low voice. “Because they’re missing out on the real party. The one downstairs.”

  That broke the trance Burton had over Hardison. He turned and scowled at Cha0s. “The hell you talking about? This is it. Right here, right now.”

  Cha0s smirked. “Look around you. Notice who’s missing?”

  Hardison ran through the bridge crew in his head. Everyone he could think of was there. Gates McFadden was chatting with a gaggle of women at a table festooned with boat drinks, and Brent Spiner sat at the table next to her, doing his level best to have such a lively face that no one would ever confuse him with the android Data that he’d played on the show.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Cha0s said. “Ensign.”

  Hardison gasped. “Wesley Crusher?” He gaped at Cha0s. “What have you done with Wil Wheaton?”

  Cha0s laughed. “Me? Nothing. I just arranged to play a little D&D with him in his suite on the thirty-fifth floor. He’s down there with the entire crew from his new YouTube show. You know, the one about games you play without computers?”

  “TableTop?” Hardison said. His jaw dropped. He couldn’t believe that Wil Wheaton would blow off this party to go play Dungeons & Dragons. Worse, he couldn’t believe that Cha0s would be playing with him.

  Cha0s nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one. He’s got that redheaded chick with him too.”

  “Felicia Day?” Hardison loved watching Felicia Day in The Guild, her Web show about a group of World of Warcraft players. He shook his head. “Gotta give it to you, man. That’s just too cool.”

  Cha0s nodded with a dramatic flair, rubbing it in hard. Then, with false nonchalance, he said, “You know, I think they might have another spot open at the table, especially for someone who already knows the fifth-edition rules. You game?”

  Hardison glanced over to where Parker stood pressed against the far window, which faced west, out over Coronado Island across the marina, Point Loma after that, and the Pacific Ocean beyond. There was a stairwell that plunged down to the next floor along that wall, but Parker had just inched her way along the windows’ edge, ignoring the gap below her. She was still fascinated with the view.

  “Hey, Parker,” Hardison said to her through the earpiece. She didn’t turn around.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “If I get out of here and go play a game for a little bit, that all right with you?”

  “Okay.”

  Cha0s gave Hardison a smarmy wink. “The ball and chain let you free for the night?”

  “Oh, hey, it’s not like that,” Hardison said, starting to correct the man. Then he thought better of it. If Cha0s thought he and Parker were together, he was okay with that. At least it might keep Cha0s from hitting on her again.

  Or, knowing Cha0s, it might make it worse.

  “I’m good,” Hardison said. “Let’s go.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Right this way,” Cha0s said as they got off the elevator. The man had grabbed his backpack from behind the bar and had to fiddle with it for a minute before they could head out, but he’d been all smiles as they left.

  A part of Hardison told him he should be suspicious. Cha0s and he had never gotten along all that well, not well enough for the other man to invite him along to meet geek royalty. But maybe that was the point.

  Maybe Cha0s recognized his own inherent unlikability and had recruited Hardison as a buffer between him and the people he wanted to impress. Cha0s was good enough at the social end of hacking to be able to wheedle his way into a game, sure, but anyone who had to spend more than five minutes with the man would start to see cracks appear in his friendly facade. Hardison had spent enough time with him that those cracks appeared like canyons, but he knew that Cha0s could turn on the charm for a little while when he needed to. It just never lasted, mostly because he didn’t have it in him to mean anything kind or friendly he said.

  Hardison had just about convinced himself that he’d lucked into an amazing evening by the time they reached the doors to the suite at the end of the hallway. Besides, he told himself, if something went wrong, he had his friends as a backup. He could always call for help via the earpiece. Even if Nate and Sophie had signed off for the night—and thank God for that—Parker was only a few floors up, and Eliot would ditch his date and come running at the first sign of trouble.

  “Hey,” Hardison said to Cha0s, “this is really cool of you to invite me along t
o this. When I came out here, I admit, I was a little leery. I mean, in my heart I’m a total geek and all, but I wasn’t sure how well I’d fit in here, right?”

  “Hey, Hardison,” Cha0s said with a wry smile. “I get it. It’s one thing to be able to do your own thing in your own town with your own friends, assuming you have any. It’s something else to come out here and find a tribe of people who enjoy the same things you do and treat them with the same kind of passion you do. It’s really just amazing.”

  Cha0s opened the door then and ushered Hardison inside. “Yes,” Hardison said. “Yes, it is.”

  It wasn’t until he got all the way into the room and heard the door click behind him that he knew that something was wrong. The suite he’d just walked into was spectacular, and it had a fantastic view to the south, in which he could see the brightly lit convention center stretching far out into the night. It had a main sitting room with a long conference table, surrounded by chairs, and a few couches and chairs arranged in conversation areas to either side.

  The problem was that the people sitting at the table weren’t Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day. In fact, they didn’t look like gamers at all. They were burly leg breakers, the kind of thick-necked men who spent their days on security details and their nights committing mayhem.

  The lone exception to that rule was a man Hardison recognized. After all, he’d researched every aspect of his life that morning. His name was Daichi Kanabe, the secret partner behind Patronus’s auction.

  Kanabe was a Japanese man, short and sharp-eyed with dark hair going gray. He stared at Hardison with a stone-hard face, as if he could break a man’s spirit with his glare. Hardison decided that the smart thing to do was not to let that happen, and he turned around to leave. He figured he could knock Cha0s flat if he had to, but he hadn’t banked on another big man—like the ones he’d seen sitting at the table—standing there, blocking his way.

  They’d been ready for him. Cha0s had set him up.

  He turned on Cha0s, who’d already put himself a step behind the bruiser standing between Hardison and the door. “You son of a bitch,” Hardison said through a tight-set jaw. He wasn’t used to being played like this.

  “Hey,” Cha0s said with a wry smile and a smug shrug. “You wouldn’t have come down here if I’d told you the truth.”

  “Mr. Hardison?” Kanabe stood up at the far end of the table. “We’ve been waiting for you. Please join us.”

  “I think I’m just fine over here, if you don’t mind, thanks,” Hardison said.

  The bruiser standing in front of the door grabbed him by the back of his collar and hauled him toward the table. Hardison let the man shove him along, offering only token resistance, but as he went he spoke low into his earpiece. “This is not going well. Could use a little help here.”

  No one responded. Not a word. It was then that Hardison realized he hadn’t heard anything from anyone on the crew since he and Cha0s had left the party. “Parker?” he said. “Eliot?”

  The big man swung Hardison around and into a chair, slamming him into the seat at the other end of the table from Kanabe. Hardison felt himself starting to panic, and he tried to stand up right away. Another bruiser had positioned himself behind the chair, though, and he grabbed Hardison by the shoulders and pressed him right back into it.

  “Mr. Hardison, please.” Kanabe gestured to the chair into which Hardison had been forced. “I would appreciate having your full attention.”

  “I just want to ask one thing first,” Hardison said. He’d given up struggling against the bruisers. Eliot had taught him a bit of hand-to-hand combat over the years, and he could handle himself well, even against bigger men like these. However, he couldn’t handle so many of them at once, especially if any of them were armed with something more dangerous than their ham-size fists.

  “Go right ahead,” Kanabe said with the gracious air of a king granting a subject a request.

  Hardison turned toward Cha0s. “Who the hell do you think you are? Do you even know who you’re working for? And what the hell did you do to my earpiece?”

  “That’s actually three things,” Cha0s said as he took a seat near Hardison, one that put his back to the window. “But I’ll answer them in reverse order.”

  Cha0s removed his backpack, reached inside of it, and hauled out something that looked a lot like a walkie-talkie, but with three antennae sticking out of it and no speakers. “This here is a wideband mobile cell-phone signal jammer. I know all about your earpieces, and I couldn’t have you using them to call for help. I mean, as much as I’d like to wrestle with Parker, I think Eliot would kick my ass. So I brought this along with me to stifle any ideas you might have had about calling in the cavalry.”

  Kanabe leaned over his end of the table. “Now, Mr. Hardison, please hand over this earpiece of yours. Or I will have one of my men remove it. I’m afraid they won’t be gentle.”

  Hardison knew when he’d been beat. He reached up and removed the device from his ear and set it on the table before him. Cha0s scooped it up, turned it off, and slipped it into his pocket. “This is a clever little toy. I’d use them myself except for the fact that I like to work alone.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hardison,” Kanabe said, leaning back in his chair. “You’ve proven to be a real thorn in my side this week. I suppose you think that it was funny to expose my little side operation with the private manga site.”

  Hardison shrugged, giving Kanabe a hesitant smile. “Hey, I just thought it might be cool to share all that comic-booky goodness with the rest of the world. I hope that didn’t cause you too many problems.”

  Kanabe slapped his hand down on the table so hard that Hardison could feel the vibration all the way down at the opposite end. The impact made a flat crack that reminded Hardison a little too much of the sound a hand makes when it slaps the face of someone who’s being held too tight to dodge it. He jumped in his seat just a little and hoped that no one noticed.

  He glanced at Cha0s, who just stood there grinning down at him like he’d just beaten him in some kind of game. Maybe Cha0s saw it that way, but Hardison couldn’t bring himself to be so easy about being threatened by a man with this much muscle on his side. It struck him as unwise.

  Hardison glanced around at the thugs. They were professionals, men who paid close attention to everything going on around them, especially when it came to the one man in the room whom they might classify as a threat—although perhaps not a very large one. Every one of them had their eyes riveted on Hardison, and he found that all the attention made him uncomfortable.

  Despite smacking the table, Kanabe showed little emotion. “You’ve not only embarrassed me but also a good number of very powerful men. They want someone to pay for all the trouble this has caused them.”

  “Is that all this is about?” Hardison said, attempting to put on a brave face. “Hell, that’s the kind of problem that’s easy to solve. Just let me get my checkbook.”

  Kanabe laughed at this in a low, humorless way. “I’m afraid that no amount of money would be able to satisfy these men. They have money, lots of it. What they no longer have are their reputations. And so to make up for that loss, someone must be punished. They, of course, are looking at me.”

  Hardison gave Kanabe a sympathetic frown. “Hey, man, I am truly sorry about that. It can’t be easy having all those angry pornographic comic addicts pissed off at you.”

  Kanabe snorted. “While they may be angry at me right now, I think that I may have already found a way to distract them from that feeling.”

  “Oh,” Hardison said, showing real relief. “That’s good to hear.”

  “All I need to do is give them someone else they can be mad at. I just have to hand over the man who caused all their problems in the first place, in a very public and degrading way.”

  Hardison knew what the man meant, and it sent a chill straight through him. “So you’re going to give them a public apology? You know, man, I think that’s really the way to go. Stand up
, give them a heartfelt mea culpa, and take your lumps like a grown-up. Got to say, I really admire that. Good on you.”

  Kanabe didn’t smile. “I will give them you.”

  Hardison’s eyes widened. “Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You weren’t so careful with covering your tracks as you thought. Mr. Cha0s here was able to trace the breach of security on my Web site directly to you. The evidence he presented me with is compelling.”

  Hardison glared at Cha0s, who had moved to stand closer to Kanabe, putting him well out of Hardison’s reach. “So you’re going to take his word over mine? How do you know he didn’t do it himself? He doesn’t like me much. Maybe he just picked me out at random as someone for you to kill for him.”

  Kanabe did allow himself a small smile at Hardison’s feeble attempt to shift the blame to Cha0s. “That is the beauty of this plan, Mr. Hardison. It doesn’t really matter who you are and whether you attacked my site or not. You’re a hacker of some repute, and that makes you the perfect scapegoat either way.”

  Hardison’s jaw dropped. “So you’re planning on sacrificing me to your friends whether I’m guilty or not? That’s messed up.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed yet, Mr. Hardison, I’m a results-oriented man. I don’t care much about things like laws or culpability, as long as I get what I want, and at the moment you’re the key to making that happen. I’d like to tell you I’m sorry about that, but given what Cha0s here has told me about you, I don’t think I could muster up that level of either regret or dishonesty.”

  Hardison nodded, trying to absorb this. “All right,” he said, not sure he wanted to ask the question pounding inside of his head. He gave in and went with it anyhow. “Then what’s our next step?”

  This time Kanabe smiled wide, showing all of his white teeth. “I’m afraid you won’t like it.”

  THIRTY

  “Really?” Nate said as he walked up to the convention center with Sophie, his heart pounding. “No one’s seen where Hardison is yet?”