The Con Job
Author: Matt Forbeck
Date: 2012-12-31 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Mystery; Crime; Media Tie In; Thriller; Tv; Contemporary; Adult; Mystery Thriller; Action
Description: The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you. When a disreputable dealer starts swindling aged and ailing comic-book creators out of their wealth—and their high-valued comics and artwork—the daughter of one victim comes to ex-insurance investigator Nathan Ford and his team of counter-crooks for help. Their scheme: run a con at the Comic-Con International, where the crook intends to sell the goods. But there’s more going on than simple theft. An arson plot is in motion that will not only destroy countless rare collectibles, but may end up costing lives. With time short, t
Publisher: Berkley
Rights: Copyright © 2012 by Leverage Holdings, Inc.

Meet the Leverage team…

NATHAN “NATE” FORD (“The Mastermind”): A former insurance fraud investigator who leads the team and calls the shots.

SOPHIE DEVEREAUX (“The Grifter”): British wannabe actress. On stage, she’s no award-winner, but running a con, she makes brilliant use of her skills with character and accents to manipulate the marks.

ALEC HARDISON (“The Hacker”): The crew’s computer specialist, hacker, and all-around techno-geek who handles communications and info gathering.

ELIOT SPENCER (“The Hitter”): Ex-soldier, martial artist, and hard case who takes care of team security.

PARKER (“The Thief”): Master thief, cat burglar, pickpocket, and safecracker with a dark past. If it has a lock, she can open it.

LEVERAGE

THE CON JOB

MATT FORBECK

BERKLEY BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

THE CON JOB

A Berkley Boulevard Book / published by arrangement with Leverage Holdings, Inc. and Full Moon Enterprises

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Boulevard mass-market edition / January 2013

Copyright © 2012 by Leverage Holdings, Inc.

© & ™ Turner Network Television, A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.

Photographer: Michael Muller.

Excerpt from The Zoo Job by Keith R. A. DeCandido copyright © 2012 by Leverage Holdings, Inc.

Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-1-101-61850-9

BERKLEY®

Berkley Boulevard Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Berkley Boulevard and its logo are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

ALWAYS LEARNING | PEARSON

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

The Zoo Job

ONE

Simon Curtiss walked into his studio in the back of his home in Tarrytown, New York, stripped off his tie, and tossed it across the top of his drafting table. He hated wearing ties. It felt like he had a noose around his neck. He’d gone to work for himself as freelance illustrator so he wouldn’t have to dress up like a so-called adult and go into an office every day, shuffling papers for one sort of boss or another.

He had only one suit, a classic black number he was proud to say he still fit into, even though it had to be thirty years old. It didn’t get much use. He wore it only to weddings and funerals.

This funeral had been a bad one—the worst.

He shuffled over to his drafting table, his grief weighing on him like an anchor trying to drag him down below the surface of the sea. He slumped down on the high stool he’d sat on almost every day for the past forty years, stared at the table’s ink-stained wood, and ran his fingers over its smooth, high-angled surface. Then he leaned forward and folded his arms against the table, buried his face in them, and wept, hoping that his daughter wouldn’t find him there before he was done.

The phone rang. He glanced at the name showing on the caller ID—Lorenzo Patronus—and wanted to snatch it up and smash it against the wall. Instead, he gritted his teeth and answered it.

“Now?” Simon said. “Now you call?”

“I heard about Rose,” the man on the other end of the line said, his voice smooth as ever. “I just wanted to extend my condolences.”

“Condolences?” Simon’s face flushed. He couldn’t believe the man’s balls. “What the hell good are those going to do me? Where were you last week when I kept calling? Or for the past six months? Where’s my money, Lorenzo?”

“It’s coming, Mr. Curtiss. These things take time.”

“I have a computer, you know. I saw you selling my pages on that eBay. You got paid. How about me?”

The man cleared his throat. “As I said, these things take time. I have to wait for the buyers’ funds to clear the bank before I can send out the original artwork to them. Otherwise, someone might rip us off.”

Simon stood up and clenched the phone so tight that his knuckles turned white. “Ha! Might rip you off? What about me? I sent you a hundred pages of pristine original artwork six months ago and a dozen long boxes filled with silver-age books, and I haven’t seen a dime of it.”

Simon knew exactly how long the man had been taking advantage of him, and every day of it burned him. The bastard had been bugging him about wanting to help him sell his artwork and old comics—the comp copies the companies had sent him of his work—for over a year, but Simon didn’t know him and had blown him off. When Rose got sick, though, he had decided he didn’t have any choice. The man was offering the best prices around, and Simon was desperate for the money, for anything that would help him extend Rose’s life for even another day.

But the cash had never come.

All those days Simon had spent taking Rose back and forth to all those doctors, the long hours spent with her during her chemo, he hadn’t worked for much of it, and he’d watched their life savings drain away faster than he could keep track of it. He’d spent most of that time worrying about how he would pay for all the treatments, how he’d get the money to make sure Rose got the best care she possibly could. And when it became clear that she wouldn’t last much longer, he’d wanted to do whatever he could to make her final days as comfortable and wonderful as possible.

With all their money gone, though, he hadn’t been able to manage much, and his guilt over that had gnawed at him every minute, right up until she passed on. He’d stroked her hair and held her hand as she’d let loose her last breath. At least then, he’d thought, it would finally be over.

And it had been for her, but it seemed like it was just starting for him. The bills for the funeral had almost sent him into shock. As a freelancer, he’d not been able to afford insurance of any kind, not health insurance or life insurance. Medicare had helped to cover some of the hospital bills, but he had no way to pay for Rose’s burial, nor to give her the kind of send-off she deserved.

He hadn’t created Batman or Superman. He hadn’t invented the Avengers. He’d just kept his head down and done his job and had a wonderful time entertaining his readers.

The only thing he had to show after a lifetime of drawing comics was a stack of comics and the original artwork the companies had returned to him. Rose had often called it their nest egg, the one they hoped they’d never have to crack open. But when he finally had, Lorenzo had turned it all rotten.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?” Simon snarled into phone. “You’ve ruined me. Not only that, but you ruined Rose’s last days! You’ve ruined my life!”

“Now, Simon,” Lorenzo said, but Simon didn’t hear any more. He pulled the phone away from his ear and clutched at his chest. The heaviness he’d felt there for the past few days had become a sharp pain, and he felt like one of the muscle-bound superheroes he drew was sitting on his chest.

He let the phone clatter to the ground as he reached out and tried to steady himself on his drafting table, grasping its top edge with both hands. It felt hard to breathe, and the edges of his vision started to turn dark, tunneling down hard on all sides.

Simon’s daughter, Susan, found him slumped against the table, drawn in by the loud dead-line signal sounding from the phone on the floor. At first, she believed he’d fallen asleep, and she thought perhaps she shouldn’t disturb him. She worried that he might fall off his stool, though, so she tried to rouse him, but failed.

The paramedics were there in less than three minutes.

TWO

“They say he’s going to live, Mr. Ford,” Susan Curtiss said as she sat at one of the dark wooden tables in John McRory’s Place, a neighborhood bar in the heart of Boston. “But he’s so weak. I don’t know if he’ll ever be able to draw again.” She held on to her drink to steady herself and took a tiny sip from the glass.

Nathan Ford took the woman in. She was short and pretty, with dark hair going gray around the edges, and the smile lines around her mouth and eyes put her at near fifty years old. She seemed sincere enough, honest enough, still grieving over the loss of her mother and too distracted by her father’s troubles now to give much thought to her hair and makeup. He believed her.

Nate had learned a long time ago to trust his gut, but he also believed in verifying what his gut told him. Alec Hardison, who had set up this meeting, nodded at him from where he sat at his right hand. Hardison—the best hacker Nate had ever seen—had vetted the woman’s story before she’d even set foot in the Irish bar.

“And you’ve reported this to the police?” Nate said to her.

She nodded. “They say that since my dad turned the comics and artwork over to this Lorenzo Patronus voluntarily, it’s not a theft but a breach of contract. Our only option is to sue him in court, but that could take months, if not years.”

“Time your father doesn’t have.”

“Exactly.”

Nate gave Hardison a sidelong look. “Is this a good fit for us?”

Hardison knew what Nate was really asking. The crew of thieves they worked with—were, indeed, an integral part of—had dedicated itself to taking down those in power who abused the less fortunate. Did a fraudulent comic-book dealer rise to that level?

“It’s not just Simon Curtiss this guy’s taken advantage of, Nate. He’s gone after all sorts of old comic-book artists. He promises them top dollar for their most prized possessions and then disappears every damn time.”

Susan leaned in with an earnest nod. “What’s worse is he keeps doing it. He uses the fact that he’s lined up famous artists like my father as clients to legitimize himself in the eyes of others.”

“Eventually word will get out that he’s doing this, and the whole thing will collapse,” Nate said.

“But how many people will he hurt before that happens?” Susan said. “It’s not about the money, Mr. Ford, not for me. My husband and I, we’ll figure out a way to take care of my dad. If he has to sell the house to pay off his bills, he can move in with us. We’ll find a way to make it work.”

She looked Nate straight in the eyes then, making sure he listened to every word she said. “But I don’t want to see what happened to my father happen to anyone else.”

Nate patted the polished table before him. He had sat at this same table with his father when he was a kid. McRory’s had been his neighborhood bar, the place his dad had spent more nights than at home. He could see that Simon Curtiss had been a better father to his daughter than Nate’s dad had been to him. She wasn’t worried about her father moving in with her. She loved him and wanted some help to make this right.

Although Susan said it wasn’t about the money, Nate knew that wasn’t entirely true, at least not to Simon. It wasn’t just that the old man had lost the money, but also his artwork, the product of all his hard labor. If the money had been all he’d cared about, Simon would have sold off that stuff decades ago.

Getting Simon’s artwork back wouldn’t just allow him to sell it. It would give him back the most important thing Patronus had stolen from him: his dignity. That was something Nate thought was worth fighting for, especially if they could keep Patronus’s crime against Simon from being perpetrated on anyone else.

“All right, Ms. Curtiss.”

“Susan.”

Nate glanced at Hardison. The hacker still didn’t know for sure what Nate was going to say, which way he was going to go. Nate liked to keep him guessing.

“We’ll give you a hand.”

Nate couldn’t tell whose smile was wider, Susan’s or Hardison’s. The young man reached out and gave Nate a fist bump. Apprehension soon crept back across Susan’s face, though, and Nate needed to understand why.

“Is there a problem, Susan?”

“I just—how does this work?” She gave him a helpless shrug. “The police say they can’t do a thing. How can you?”

“We’re not in this for the money,” Nate said. “We just so happen to have a team of individuals who are very talented at breaking the law. They’ve just decided to use their talents to do some good.”

Nate swirled the shot of Jameson he’d been nursing and wet his lips with it. “The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you.”

Susan blushed at that, flustered. “But even if you do get back my father’s things, we don’t have any way to pay you.”

“You feel like there’s nothing you can do to take this man on. He has too much money, and the law can’t touch him, not directly. He’s too big, and you’re too small.”

Hardison grinned at Nate’s words. “You know, Archimedes said he could move the world with the right tools. We’re those tools.”

Nate nodded in agreement, never taking his eyes off Susan. “We provide you leverage.”

THREE

“Are you serious?” Eliot Spencer said the next day as they sat down in the stark living room of Nate’s apartment, situated directly above McRory’s Place, to be briefed about the job. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair, not bothering to hide his disgust. “You want us to take on a job about funny books?”

“They’re graphic novels,” Hardison said in a grave tone. “And it’s a serious art form. They’re the most vibrant format for modern literature. And—and they make freaking great movies. I mean, have you seen The Avengers?”

“They’re stories about people who wear their underwear on the outside of their pants,” Eliot said. As one of the toughest mercenaries Nate had ever met, Eliot—Nate felt sure—had never had much time for things like comics. If it wasn’t featured on ESPN or didn’t involve cooking, it wasn’t the kind of pastime Eliot cared about. He preferred to do things rather than read about them.

“I like them,” Parker said. “Have you seen the kinds of acrobatics they pull off in those things? It’s… inspiring.”

Eliot scowled at the thin blond woman from under his own shoulder-length brown hair. “That’s only because you’re nuts. No one could pull off stunts like that.”

“Ah,” Sophie Devereaux said in her smooth British accent, a sly smile spreading across her sensual lips. “So you have read some of these comics?”

Nate allowed himself to enjoy the way Sophie needled Eliot. Nate had grown closer to her over the past few months, to the point that they now regularly shared each other’s bed. After the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage, he wasn’t in any hurry to get married again, but he had to admit to himself that Sophie was the only woman he could envision a future with.

Of course, that might only be due to the fact that she was able to tolerate him and his many flaws. She knew him as well as anyone—much better, in fact—and she still stayed with him. That meant more to him than he might ever let her know.

“I’ve seen the movies,” Eliot said. “You can’t avoid the things. Stupid capes are everywhere.”

“There really aren’t that many capes these days,” Hardison said. “Superman and Batman’s about it. Hell, most of the superheroes lost their capes for the movies.”

Eliot snarled at Hardison, who just stared him down. The hacker knew better than to show Eliot any fear, no matter how certain he might be that Eliot could take him apart in seconds. “Are we going to do the briefing or not?” Eliot said to Nate.

Nate picked up the remote and pressed a button. The wall of screens behind him leaped to life. In the center one, the face of Lorenzo Patronus grinned out at them.

Patronus looked as slick as he was. He was short but carried himself like a larger man. He wore a cheap but stylish suit, and he stared into the camera with all the false charm of a real estate agent on the prowl. He kept his hair swept back tight and shiny. Nate was willing to bet it wouldn’t be moved by anything less than a class-five hurricane.

“This is Lorenzo Patronus, of Anaheim, California. He doesn’t seem to have much of a past, which indicates that whoever he claims to be now, he’s likely using a false identity. He cropped up on the rare comics and memorabilia scene about a year ago, and he’s been aggressively courting a number of the most legendary names in the industry to sign on as his clients.”

“He promises them large percentages of huge prices, but once he sells the goods, his clients never see a dime,” Sophie said. Nate could tell she was guessing, but per usual, she had nailed it. “It’s a classic scam.”

“Classic or classless?” Hardison said. “Ripping off old people for the simple crime of trusting you doesn’t seem like much of a challenge.”

“Aren’t we a little out of this guy’s league?” Parker said, blunt as ever.

“The man’s out to rob these comic-book legends of the last things they want to get rid of,” Hardison said. “They gave the world some of its finest heroes. Saving them’s the least we can do.”

Eliot’s lip curled in the direction of a sneer, but he aimed it at Nate rather than Hardison. Nate shrugged it off. Hardison had a point.

“The worst part,” Hardison said, “is these people really don’t have a whole lot else. Most of them worked as freelancers their entire career. They got no heath insurance, no retirement package, nothing.”

“Just like us,” Sophie said as she gave Nate a meaningful look.

Nate knew she was referring to his son, Sam, who’d died because IYS—the insurance company he’d worked for as one of its top claims investigators, back when he’d chased after the people he worked with today—had refused to cover the expensive treatment that might have saved Sam’s life. They’d claimed it was experimental and therefore ineligible. Nate had fallen apart after that in a spectacular way that had ended both his marriage and career.

That had forever put him on the side of the underdog, a class into which Simon Curtiss and his fellow comic-book creators squarely fell.

“Some of these comics guys are sharp,” Nate said. “They ask for recommendations, and Patronus gives them what they want.”

“They’re faked, of course,” said Sophie. “But all he needs is a few people to not bother to check, and soon he has a few legitimate clients he can use to gin up his credentials. It snowballs from there.”

“Precisely,” Nate said, pointing toward her.

“So what the hell’s the rush?” Eliot said. “You called us in on this like the artwork was all on fire.”

“Patronus is going to hold a huge auction of all the artwork and collectibles he’s managed to scam out of his clients,” Nate said. “And it’s going down next week. If we don’t stop him before then, the stolen goods will be gone, dispersed among dozens of buyers.”

Parker nodded. “And if he’s smart, he’ll disappear right after that. Destroy his identity and pop up someplace else as someone entirely new.”

“Right,” said Nate. “If we want to put an end to this, it’s now or never.”

Eliot unfolded his arms and shrugged. “All right,” he said. “Let’s put this punk out of business. Where we headed?”

“San Diego. Patronus is going to hold the auction in the heart of the largest pop culture convention in this hemisphere.”

Hardison’s face split into an ear-to-ear grin. “Pack your bags, baby,” he said. “We’re going to Comic-Con!”

FOUR

The crew piled into a minivan cab outside San Diego International. Nate and Sophie took the two seats in the middle row while Hardison, Parker, and Eliot filed into the back row.

“I always get the hump,” Parker said as she settled into the middle seat. “It’s not fair.”

“There’s no hump in the middle of a minivan,” Eliot said, already frustrated with everyone. It had been a long flight from Boston. “The hump in a car goes over the driveshaft, and the minivan sits up high enough that it goes right over it.”

“That’s just what somebody who didn’t have to sit on the hump would say.”

“Where we headed?” the cabbie said.

“Comic-Con,” Nate said.

“Straight to the show?” The cabbie shrugged, a note of fear tingeing his voice. “Suit yourself.”

“Is that a problem?” Nate asked.

“Kinda crazy down there right now. Preview night’s about to start. Hard to get within a quarter mile of the front doors.” The cabbie looked back at them. “Sure you don’t want to head for your hotel first? Easier to get there and walk in. Or flag a couple pedicabs if you can find them.”

“Just how crazy is this place?” Parker said. Nate couldn’t tell if she was disturbed or excited. Maybe both.

The cabbie laughed as he pulled into traffic. “Crazy as it always is. You get a hundred and fifty thousand people descend on your city for five days, you tell me what happens.”

Eliot frowned. “I don’t like crowds. Too many ways for things to go wrong.”

Parker’s eyes sparkled. “Big crowds make for easy pickings. And easy getaways.” She noticed Nate giving her a stern look. “Not that I would do that just, you know, for fun.”

“I love the buzz of a crowd,” Sophie said. “It feels like an audience forming.”

“So,” Nate said to Hardison, “where are we staying?”

Hardison winced. Nate often let the young man shoulder the brunt of the planning logistics. He was such a whiz with a computer that no one else could come close to doing it better, especially if they ran up against a problem.

Also, Hardison had made it clear to Nate that he wanted to full-on run missions for the team. He had a lot to learn, but he was sharp and ambitious. With a little guidance and the chance to mature, Hardison might someday be better at that part of the game than Nate—not that Nate was about to tell him that. The hacker didn’t need any more confidence in himself than he already had.

“I couldn’t find us a place within ten miles of the convention center,” Hardison said.

“Ten miles?” The cabbie laughed again. “You did a good job, then! I know people staying all the way out in Carlsbad. Hell, I got a friend who decided it was easier to find a place in Tijuana.”

Every member of the crew glared at Hardison. “You brought us all the way out here without a place to stay?” Eliot said. “What’re we supposed to sleep on, a park bench?”

“Most of those are full too,” the cabbie said with a wicked grin.

“Couldn’t you just do your thingy with the computer?” Parker said. “Get us someone else’s room?”

Hardison wavered. “Sure, I could have, no problem. The security they got around those room booking systems is like a kid’s playpen, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

Eliot reached across Parker to grab Hardison by the front of his shirt, but Parker shoved her shoulder between the two men, foiling the effort. “That’s your thing, man,” Eliot said over Parker’s shoulder as Hardison backed away into the corner of the cab. “What’s stopping you?”

Hardison shrugged, embarrassed. “All the people who come out here, they’re doing it for the sheer joy of being a geek about something. Might be the Avengers, Star Wars, Sailor Moon, or even them sparkly vampires, but hey, they took a week off work, saved up all their pennies for the badges—which sell out in about ninety minutes—and got their butts out there for the show. I—I just couldn’t do that to them.”

Eliot put a hand over his eyes and shook his head. “Fine,” he said. “You got your geek solidarity.” He dropped his hand and snarled. “But where are we going to sleep tonight?”

“Hey, ain’t no need to get nasty about it.”

Nate put up his hands to calm the two men down. “Look, guys,” he said, “I understand how Hardison feels.” The hacker started to give Eliot an I-told-you-so smile, but Nate cut him off. “But Eliot here has a point. We can’t run this, ah, business from Tijuana. That’ll put a real cramp in our operation.”

Hardison held up his hands. “I know, I know. I should have said something earlier. I just figured, you know.” He glanced at Nate and Sophie.

“No,” Nate said, confused. “You know what?”

“I know,” Sophie said in a warm, understanding tone. “He just figured that we could handle the situation once we were on the ground here.”

“Oh, good!” Parker said with a girlish delight. “Can I break into a penthouse?”

“I’m sure you could,” said Nate, “but that wouldn’t really help us out when the people who booked the room show up to claim it. No, this requires a little more finesse.”

He looked over at Sophie. She gave him a knowing smile.

“That it does,” she said. “Fortunately, I know just how to handle it.” She turned forward again to speak with the driver. “Sir?” she said. “Can you take us to the Horton Grand?”

As far as Nate knew, Sophie had never been to San Diego. The way she spoke the hotel’s name, though, sounded like she was talking about an old friend.

“Anyplace you like, miss,” the cabbie said. “As long as I don’t have to drive you to the con’s front door.”

FIVE

“You’ve been here before, I take it,” Nate said as he and Sophie walked up to the front of the Horton Grand. They’d left the others waiting in the cab.

“Of course,” Sophie said. “It’s a beautiful place, truly historic. The restoration of the main staircase is fantastic.”

Nate stared up at the building from the corner of Island and Fourth. It looked like something straight out of Vienna, Austria, a classic facade that featured tall windows on the first floor and bay windows with balconies on the second and third. They walked toward a blue awning with the hotel’s name on it and entered the wide, airy foyer.

“Did you know that Wyatt Earp used to live here?” Sophie said.

“The lawman?”

“More like the gambler. He owned three saloons while he lived in back in the late 1800s, and every one of them offered games of chance.”

“That wasn’t exactly illegal around here back then, though, was it?”

She gave him a little smile. “He was a scoundrel just the same.”

Only a few people milled about the foyer at the moment. One pair of them was dressed up as Superman and Batman, Nate knew, but versions of them that he’d never seen before. He recognized the two icons, of course. It was impossible to live in America and avoid them. But he didn’t read comics—at least not anymore—and he wasn’t up on any of the changes that might have happened to the characters in the pages of their comics.

Nate and Sophie walked straight through the foyer to the front desk, situated off to the right. There, a tall man in a faded Batman T-shirt and a name tag that read Ray greeted them with a forced smile.

“Hello, how may I help you?” he said.

Sophie stepped up to the counter, removed her sunglasses, and spoke to the man in a flawless Southern California accent. “We’d like to check into our rooms,” she said. “They should be under the name Chris Bucket.”

The man tapped a few words into his computer and bared a grimace. “I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to have any reservation under that name. Did you place it through the convention housing bureau?”

“Of course not,” Sophie said with a nervous laugh. “How do you think that would work out for Mr. Canyon? He’d be mobbed.”

“How are you spelling it?”

“Canyon, as in Grand,” Nate said, pumping up his own obnoxiousness. “How the hell do you think it’s spelled?”

The desk clerk started to scowl at Nate’s attitude but quickly caught himself. “C-A-N-Y-O-N, sir.”

Nate threw up his hands and turned to Sophie. “They lost our reservation. I told you. I knew this would happen. You put Carissa in charge of tackling hotel reservations. You can’t expect them to be done right.”

Sophie put a hand on Nate’s shoulder to calm him down. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m sure there’s just been a misunderstanding.” She focused her dazzling smile on the clerk. “Isn’t that right, Ray?”

Ray shrugged. “I’m afraid not. The entire downtown area’s been booked solid for months.”

Nate groaned. “We’re going to lose our jobs over this. All of us!”

Sophie leaned in over the counter and spoke to the clerk in a conspiratorial tone. “He worries so much. It’s just that, well, Christian—I mean, our employer—has been going through a rough patch, and he is a bit more temperamental than usual. Are you sure there isn’t any way you can help us?”

The clerk gave Sophie a sympathetic wince. “There really is no room at the inn.”

Nate leaned forward over Sophie’s shoulder. “This is ridiculous,” he said to the Ray. “Is your manager here?”

Ray pointed to his name tag. Right below his name, it read Day Manager.

Nate threw up his hands again and started to walk away. He didn’t look back.

Sophie sighed. “Well, that is too bad. We’d heard so many excellent things about the Horton Grand. Our employer was hoping to make this place his headquarters during the show—his man-cave, if you will.”

Nate stormed back and took Sophie by the arm to lead her away. “Well, Mr. Bale’s just going to have to learn to live with it,” he said. “But if he winds up sleeping on the streets this weekend, then we’re all going to end up there. Permanently. Let’s go see if we can find some other place for our batty boss to hang.”

“Wait,” Ray said as Nate and Sophie turned from the desk. Knowing that Ray couldn’t see his face, Nate allowed himself a brief, small smile.

Sophie took her arm back from Nate, who stopped in his tracks, and turned around. “Yes?”

The flustered clerk looked down at her. “I, ah—I just remembered that we do have one last suite left. It’s the manager’s suite, but, you know…” He gestured at the name tag on his Batman shirt.

“Since you’re the manager?” Sophie sidled back up to the front desk.

“I can release the room to you, of course.” He gave Sophie a sheepish smile and then let his fingers fly across his keyboard. “Ah, yes. Here we go.”

Nate returned to Sophie’s side. “How big is this suite?”

“About six hundred square feet. It comes with a king bed in the bedroom and a queen sofa bed in the sitting room.” He looked up, chagrined. “I hope that will work for you.”

Nate grimaced, thinking about how they would manage with all five of them crammed into a single room. “It’s going to be a tight fit.”

“Are you sure you don’t have anything else?” Sophie asked, a grateful yet hopeful tone in her voice.

Ray wrung his hands. “That really is the last room we have. We’re entirely booked, and I’m sure you’ll find the same is true at every other hotel within a dozen miles of here. I do hope it’ll be enough.”

Sophie reached over the counter and gave the manager’s hand a squeeze. “I’m sure we can make do.”

SIX

“This ain’t so bad,” Hardison said as he glanced around the room. “Nice big place. Lots of woodwork. Historic atmosphere.”

“There are only two beds,” Eliot said. “Which part of the floor do you want?”

Hardison arched his eyebrows at the mercenary. “I can’t sleep on the floor,” he said. “My chiropractor says I have a condition.”

Eliot rolled his eyes and pointed at the door to the main bedroom. “Nate and Sophie are shacking up in there. That leaves the foldout couch.”

“There’s room enough for two of us on that.”

“Who?” Eliot glared at Hardison. “You going to share that bed with Parker? Or are you going to make her sleep on the floor?”

Hardison glanced toward Parker and blushed. He’d had a crush on her for years now, ever since they’d started working together. Despite that, he’d never been able to make a solid move forward with her. She was one of a kind—quiet, athletic, beautiful, and smart. She was also one of the sharpest thieves he’d ever known—she could crack a safe just as fast as he could bust open a secure server—but in many ways she was also a complete innocent. Part of that meant that she had barriers around her that were so high that only she could scale them, and she needed to trust that the world would be safe for her outside them first. Until then, he’d set up his camp outside of those walls to wait.

Sharing a bed with her this weekend was not going to work.

“All right,” Hardison said. “We can go round up some air mattresses or something.”

“Sure,” Eliot said with a smirk. “Wouldn’t want to worry about your delicate condition.”

“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 Ellises 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 check 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.

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 bringing 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.

“This is like a soap opera for boys,” she’d told Hardison when he’d found her reading it. “Ridiculous plots, people dying and coming back, hyperdramatic situations. You take the superpowered fistfights out of it, and a soap opera is exactly what you’d have left.”

“Aw, now why you have to ruin it for me like that?” he’d said as he’d taken the book back from her.

She’d gone back later to find it and finish it. She understood the attraction.

Slipping into her role as Jess, Sophie began to stroll toward Patronus’s booth. She took the long way around, making sure that it didn’t seem like she’d come straight into the hall to see only him. Instead, she stopped to peruse some comics called Dork Tower, about a group of gamers that seemed to include a short, greedy, mentally deranged man called Igor and an only slightly less diminutive muskrat named Carson.

She looked up then and let Patronus’s booth catch her eye. Intrigued, she put down the comic she’d been perusing and let the artwork she saw draw her forward.

“Good work,” Hardison said to her through her earpiece. “Now remember, most of the stuff in that booth is the handiwork of Golden Age and Silver Age legends. You don’t want any of that. You want his stuff only.”

Sophie glanced up to see Hardison peering down at her from a windowed room above, from which he could observe Patronus’s section of the floor. He’d gone in there with a faked press pass and was pretending to be typing up his latest blog entry.

Sophie wished Nate was up there with him, but he still refused to enter the convention center. He’d told her and the rest of the crew that it was because he wanted to give Hardison the space to run this part of the operation on his own. Nate would be off-site but nearby—in the poolside bar at the Marriott Hotel next door to the convention center—ready to step in should the circumstances demand it. They all hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Nate had talked about renting a yacht and parking it in the marina as their base of operations instead. If he could find one large enough, they could all sleep on it too, but Hardison had nixed the idea fast. Spots in the marina were just as hopelessly sold out as any other place you could rest your head nearby.

If Nate had put his trust in Hardison, then Sophie would too. She’d long been advocating for Nate to give the young man the chance he clearly ached for, and it delighted her to see him taking her advice. Still, she knew that this wasn’t the only reason that he’d refused to enter the convention hall, and sooner or later she would find out why.

Meanwhile, though, she had a mark to meet.

THIRTEEN

Sophie wandered around Patronus’s booth, admiring the various pieces of artwork on display in the glass cases. Some of the pages might have lacked the talent of the great masters, but they more than made up for it with the energy they depicted. It surprised her that such simple bits of art—pencil-and-ink illustrations, really—could be transformed into the stunning and sharp artwork she saw throughout the hall, but that fact only made these artists’ work more impressive.

Sophie made a complete circuit of the booth, avoiding direct contact with Patronus. She brushed her hair off of her glasses as she moved across his line of sight, trusting that it would catch his attention. Knowing that he was watching her now, she moved into the booth itself to get a better look at the artwork shown on the other side of the tall glass cases.

When she came to a pair of pages that weren’t up to the standard of the other bits of work around her, she stopped cold and pretended to be impressed. The anatomy was off just enough to tell her that the artist wasn’t a professional but a gifted amateur. His characters seemed lifeless and awkward rather than living and fluid, the way the other pictures managed to depict them.

“Damn,” Hardison said. “You went right to his stuff. How did you know?”

“It’s not hard to tell,” she said under her breath. “If he was as good as he thinks he is, he’d have his artwork right out there with the other masters, front and center. He doubts himself, though—especially in comparison—so he keeps it in here, half hidden, in a section of the booth you have to work to get to. He can’t bear to keep it hidden away, but he can’t bring himself to flaunt it either.”

“Nice,” Hardison said. “You frighten me sometimes.”

Before Sophie could respond, she felt a presence at her elbow. “Can I help you with anything, miss?”

She turned to discover Lorenzo Patronus at her side. Despite the fact that he was as well dressed as she, his voice shook just a bit as he spoke. She’d gotten his hopes up just by stopping in front of his artwork.

“Yes,” Sophie said in a flawless Manhattan accent, regarding him in an offhand way. “This artist here, I admire his work, but I don’t recognize it. Who is he?”

“Ah,” Patronus said, a sly smile on his lips. “You’re very perceptive. He’s a talented gentleman, but unlike the rest of the pieces I have on display here, this work is unpublished.”

“Still, it’s a fine job,” Sophie said. “How can someone that talented not be working in the industry? Is this just some kind of hobby for him?”

Patronus chuckled. “Hardly. He has as much passion for this as for anything else in his life.”

“I can see that in his line work,” Sophie said. “It’s very sophisticated.” She stared at the drawing for a moment as if lost in its beauty, then caught herself and laughed.

“I’m sorry,” she said with a soft laugh. “I just get so swept up sometimes. I’m Jess Drew.”

“Lorenzo Patronus,” the man said with a wolfish grin. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Welcome to my booth. If you have any questions about this or any of the other artwork, I’d be happy to help you.”

Sophie regarded him with a look of surprise. “Well, Mr. Patronus, what do I have to do to bring one of these pieces home with me?”

“Call me Lorenzo, please,” he said with false deference. “I’m afraid that none of the artwork in the booth is for sale at the moment. We’re showing it here in preparation for auctioning it all off on Saturday. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Hero Initiative.”

“Really?” Hardison scoffed in Sophie’s ear. “That’s the nonprofit some publishers set up about a decade ago to help out comic-book creators who fall on hard times. When you don’t have any kind of retirement plan, that happens.”

“How generous and thoughtful of you, Lorenzo,” Sophie said. “So good to know that people like you are trying to help out the old heroes when they need it.”

She frowned then and gestured toward the artwork she’d been admiring. “I suppose I’ll have to come back on Saturday and put my bid in on these pieces. In the meantime, can you tell me the artist’s name?”

Patronus blushed just a bit then and spread his hands before him. “I believe I’ve already given it to you.”

Sophie’s eyes grew wide. “You?” She smiled and gave him a playful slap on his chest. “You were just playing with me! So talented and a charmer too.”

“Forgive me,” he said. “I hesitated to place my work up next to that of these legends at all. I haven’t told anyone that it’s mine.”

“Well, I’m happy to keep your secret,” she said. “Just as long as you promise to keep one of mine.”

Patronus arched his eyebrows at her, intrigued but uncertain what she meant. “How can I refuse?”

“You can’t.” Sophie leaned forward and spoke to Patronus in a low, conspiratorial tone that just barely carried to his ears over the background noise in the hall. “I’m an agent, and I’m on the hunt for new talent.”

“Really?” Patronus’s voice cracked just a little bit with excitement. He cleared his throat to cover the feeling, but he didn’t fool Sophie at all.

“Really,” she said. “And that leads me to one very important question for you, Lorenzo. One that just might change your life.”

He let loose a nervous laugh. “And what might that be, Jess?”

She gave him the same wolfish smile he’d greeted her with a few moments before. “Do you currently have any representation?”

FOURTEEN

“We don’t have a lot of time for this,” Nate said into Eliot’s earpiece as Eliot led Parker up Aisle 200, the one that ran alongside the convention center’s north wall. The retrieval specialist, as he liked to call himself, weaved his way past people who’d stopped to take photos of a trio of women dressed in superhero outfits. Nate wasn’t sure exactly who they were supposed to be, but they had drawn a large crowd. He trusted Parker to be able to follow him wherever he went. She wasn’t nearly as good as he was in a fight, sure, but the woman knew how to move.

“Sophie set her appointment with Patronus for five o’clock,” Hardison said from his perch up in the press room. “We should have until then at least.”

“Sure,” Nate said. “As long as our anxious artist doesn’t decide to go looking for her before that.”

“Jess Drew arranged to meet him at his booth,” Sophie said. “He doesn’t know where I plan to take him yet.”

“Jess Drew?” Nate said. “Seriously? You couldn’t come up with a better name than that?”

“What’s wrong with Jessica Drew?” Hardison said. “It’s Spider-Woman’s real name.”

“Other than that stunning little detail—which I didn’t know about, but our mark might—there’s the fact that it sounds an awful lot like ‘Just Drew,’ which is a hell of an odd name for an artists’ agent, don’t you think?”

“The man’s a serial abuser of pseudonyms himself,” Hardison said. “Even if he does think of that, he’d probably just chalk it off as a professional name. Hell, the man took his last name from a Harry Potter spell. He’s not one to talk.”

“Would you two quit bickering like an old married couple?” Eliot said. “We got a job to do here.”

“Just keep on going,” Hardison said. “You’re in the right area. Just start looking around.”

“What exactly are we looking for again?” Parker said. “Bootleg DVDs?”

Hardison chuckled. “Yeah, there’s always some idiot selling illegally copied DVDs in these shows. It’s against the convention’s rules, not to mention the law, but they just set up shop and sell as much as they can until someone reports them and they get kicked out.”

“Got it.”

Eliot spotted a likely booth at the end of one of the clusters of booths on the aisle. It was filled with all sorts of Japanese DVDs, including many that featured scantily clad young women with black bars strategically placed over their breasts and crotches. They also had a lot of German memorabilia stacked toward the back of the booth, some of which looked like it dated back to World War II.

“There we go, Parker,” he said to her.

She adjusted her navy blue suit and slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses. “On it.”

Parker strode right up to the booth and stood in front of it like it owed her something. A tubby, tattooed man with muttonchop whiskers and a bad sunburn grinned at her, showing his bad teeth. “Something I can help you with, miss?”

Parker pulled a wallet out of the breast pocket of her suit jacket and flipped it open to reveal an FBI badge. “Special Agent Hagen,” she said. “FBI. We’ve received a report that you’re selling illegally copied recordings here, including both CDs and DVDs.”

The man shot her a knowing frown. “And you’re here to shut me down.”

Eliot had walked past the booth and was pretending to check out the replica weaponry at the booth next door. They sold knives of all kinds, up to and including two-handed swords as long as he was tall. Some of them seemed impractical, more for decoration than anything else. Still, they gave him something to look at while he waited for Parker to make her play.

“May I?” He reached for a replica of Andúril, the sword reforged for Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and gave it a closer look. The saleswoman there assented to the examination with a nod.

“I’m sick and tired of this,” the burly man said to Parker as he signaled for the bald, scrawny man working with him to start packing up the booth. “I don’t know what the government’s doing sending a woman out here to come down on us and our legitimate business. It’s a free country, and we’re providing a needed service here.”

“The RIAA and MPAA don’t see it that way, sir,” Parker said. “You’re in clear violation of copyright laws here. Just from where I’m standing, I can see seventeen cases of infringement alone.”

“Well, to hell with them,” the man said. He glanced around, acting nervous.

Eliot tightened his grip on the sword’s hilt and felt its heft.

“And to hell with you, Fed!”

The big man took a swing at Parker with a meaty fist. It came within an inch of clipping her, but she had seen it coming and managed to duck out of the way.

Eliot had the sword out of its scabbard and slapped it against the bruiser’s throat in the blink of an eye. The flat side of it smacked against the man’s Adam’s apple and stopped him cold.

“I’d think about that again if I were you,” he said to the man.

The scrawny guy threw a DVD case at Eliot and then charged at him. Eliot caught the DVD easily enough—a copy of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, which he cursed at. Then he waited for the younger man to charge in. When he did, Eliot hit him with the butt of the sword in his hand and knocked him cold with a single blow.

Then Eliot brought the blade back around to point it straight at the chest of the burly man, who had been about to charge back into the fight. “Think long and hard,” he said as he pushed the tip of the weapon into the man’s sternum. It was a dull enough blade that it probably wouldn’t cut the man, but Eliot didn’t care a bit if it did. He figured the man could use a reminder about how to be polite.

The big man glared at Eliot for a full five seconds before he cracked. He bowed his head and put up his hands in surrender, then backed slowly away.

“You got fifteen minutes to get all of this stuff out of here.” Without taking his eyes from the man, Eliot slipped the sword back into its scabbard with a smooth, practiced move. “Or I’m going to put that Nazi crap somewhere very uncomfortable for you.”

Parker oversaw the orderly teardown of the booth. At one point, a few of the convention security staff came over to investigate, but she just flashed them her badge. One of the men, a burly black man with a goatee, smiled at her. “Once you’re done with these jackasses, we could point you toward a couple other places that could use your attention.”

Parker gave the man a grim nod. “We’ll put our best people on it.”

Eliot had disappeared after cowing the two men in the booth. He’d handed the blade back to its merchant and said, “Nice balance,” before he left. He hadn’t gone far, though, and Parker spotted him walking by once to goose the bootleggers into moving faster.

Within half an hour, the booth had been stripped back down to a single table and two chairs sitting on a patch of bare concrete. Parker dropped a cardstock sign onto the table that Hardison had made for her. It read CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE FBI.

Then she escorted the two men to the loading dock area in the back of the hall. “I’m going to let you off with a warning this time,” she said. “I see you again, though, and I’ll let my partner there get in as much practice time with that sword as he likes.”

The scrawny guy—whose eyes and the bridge of his nose had already turned black-and-blue—scowled at Parker. “That guy was your partner? He didn’t look like no fed to me.”

Parker looked at the man over the top of her sunglasses. “You think we all wear suits and glasses?” She gave him a sardonic smile. “We’re everywhere.”

The bigger man shuddered at that thought and hustled the skinny guy off. “I told you that,” he said to his friend as they disappeared. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

Parker waited until they were gone and then took off her sunglasses and her blazer and folded it over her arm. She undid the top buttons on her shirt, let down her hair out of its ponytail, and walked back into the hall. She looked nothing like an FBI agent any longer.

FIFTEEN

“Do I really need to wear this getup?” Eliot said hours later as he, Parker, and Hardison walked back into the convention center. “Why can’t I just go into the con as someone who looks like me?”

“Come on,” Hardison said. “Look around here. How many of these people look anything like you?”

Out of some sense of obligation, Eliot peered over the top of his black-lensed sunglasses and scanned the crowd milling about them. “You mean like me normally or like you got me made up?” He adjusted the black fedora on his head and did his best not to scratch at the full, brown beard going gray down his chin.

It was too damn hot to walk around in the black suit over the untucked and open-collared black shirt Hardison had insisted he wear, but he’d been through worse, mostly in jungles filled with snakes, mosquitoes, and bad men with guns. At least here he didn’t have to worry about anyone shooting at him. Or so he hoped.

He spotted a group of about twenty people dressed up in Star Wars stormtrooper uniforms. Their costumes were perfect, as if they’d stepped straight off the set of The Empire Strikes Back, although the blaster rifles they carried were clearly inoperable, custom-built models rather than modified weaponry. They had a few women with them too, dressed in armor with breastplates that fitted their curves far better than the standard uniform could manage.

“They don’t look like anybody, anywhere real,” Eliot said.

Hardison chuckled. “Them? They’re with the 501st Legion. They’re harmless.”

“There’s a legion of those guys?” Parker asked as they moved past the stormtroopers and into the hall.

“They’re all over the place,” Hardison said. “Got garrisons all over the country. Hell, all over the world.”

“People dress up like that? For fun?” Eliot shook his head. “They got nothing better to do?”

“They do it for charities. Kids love it. Besides, you ever heard about Civil War reenactors?”

Eliot pushed his sunglasses back up onto his nose as they walked into the hall. “Sure. People who like to dress up in wool uniforms from a hundred and fifty years ago and get sunburned pretending to be dead on a battlefield all day.”

“These are the same kinds of people. They just like the battle of Endor better than the Battle of Gettysburg.”

“You three are on the show floor now,” Nate said in their ears. “You need to focus.”

“Absolutely,” Sophie said. “Eliot, you need to concentrate on your accent. You’re supposed to be from Essex, to the east of London.”

“Right,” Eliot said, trying to imitate Sophie’s accent as best he could.

“Oh, no. You sound like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, guv’na,” Sophie said. “Try it like this.” She cleared her throat and shifted to a flawless Essex accent. “See, it’s not so hard now, is it?”

“Of course not,” Eliot said. “It’s nothing but a walk in the park.”

“Stick to pointing and grunting a lot,” Nate said. “Sophie will be doing most of the talking anyhow.”

“Fine,” Eliot said, irritated by the entire plan. “Who the hell is Warren Ellis again?”

Hardison gaped at the man. “Only one of the greatest comics writers in the past twenty years. Might as well ask who Alan Moore is, or Frank Miller, or Mark Waid, or Brian Michael Bendis, or Marv Wolfman, or Geoff Johns.”

Eliot gave Hardison a blank look as they wove their way through the hall. Parker took the lead, toting a printed sign with her. Eliot and Hardison trailed in her wake. They made a point of striding right past Patronus’s booth. They didn’t turn to see if he noticed them.

“No one?” Hardison said. “Nothing? Not even Kurt Busiek? Neil Gaiman?”

“I have a life. I do things, active things. I date women.”

“Stan Lee?”

Eliot gave Hardison that one with a wag of his head. “Who hasn’t heard of Stan Lee?”

“All right,” Hardison said with satisfaction. “You had me worried there, man.”

“You sure this Warren Ellis guy’s not really here?” Nate asked. “I thought all the comic-book people were in San Diego this weekend.”

“Nope,” said Hardison. “Checked his Twitter feed. ‘Not making it to Nerd Prom this year. Soldier on.’”

“See,” Sophie said. “Now that was a proper Essex accent.”

Eliot rolled his eyes. “Just get me to the damned booth.”

The trio descended on the booth the bootleggers had cleared out of. Parker got there first and set up her sign on the front of the table. It read: ARTISTS WANTED! Portfolio Reviews for New Publishing Start-up. Join us!

Hardison brought Eliot into the back of the booth. “You all set for this? Parker and I are your handlers. You’re the grumpy English writer crushing people’s dreams.”

“I got it,” Eliot said with a snarl. Then he tried it again with an Essex accent. “I mean, sod off!”

“Perfect,” Sophie said in a lilting tone.

Eliot sat down at the table and spread out his hands on the surface before him, feeling the white plastic lining that had been stretched and stapled over it. He kept his hat and glasses on, despite the fact that he didn’t need them in here. He would have preferred to ditch the glasses, as they made it harder for him to scan the distant faces in the crowd, but he knew that he didn’t look enough like the photos Hardison had shown him of Warren Ellis to pass for him otherwise. With the hat and glasses, he looked enough like someone who didn’t want people to recognize him, though, that he could pull it off.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s see what’s on today’s menu.”

He looked up and saw a young woman standing before him in a jeans and a stylish blouse, carrying a large, flat leather portfolio by its double handles. She glanced down at him with a nervous smile that looked like it might crack at any instant and send tears streaming down her face. “May—may I show you my portfolio, Mr. Ellis?”

Eliot stifled a sympathetic smile. “It’s Warren, my dear,” he said as he reached for the portfolio and unfolded it on the table before him. “Now, what do we have here?”

SIXTEEN

“Where the hell are you, Sophie?” Hardison said in her ear. “This portfolio review thing isn’t going well.”

“How’s that?” Sophie said as she rushed into the exhibit hall and felt the air-conditioning drop down on her like a weight. “I thought you had a line forming already. Isn’t that what we want?”

“The line’s great,” Hardison said. “But Mr. Ellis here has already sent away three people wailing in tears. I’m afraid we might wind up with a suicide on our hands before too long.”

“Doesn’t do you a damn bit of good to coddle you, now, does it?” Eliot said. He was speaking to the next person in line, but his words were meant for the rest of the crew. “I mean, how’re you going to improve if I just lie to you and tell you you’re fantastic?”

“Fine,” Hardison said, “but do you have to be so damn mean?”

“What some people call mean, I call a mercy,” Eliot said. “Now, let’s see what you’ve got here.”

Sophie tuned out the rest of Eliot’s conversation with the hapless artist in front of him and concentrated on the one she was looking for instead. She spotted Patronus standing on the edge of his booth, glancing at his watch. He looked back up and spotted her, his face brightening into an open smile.

“Miss Drew,” he said. “So good to see you again.”

Sophie reached out and squeezed his hands. “So sorry for running a little late,” she said to him. “The foot traffic around this place is just insane.”

“That’s one of the benefits of spending all day in the hall,” Patronus said. “I don’t have to fight any of that again until it’s time to leave.”

“I’m sure that has its own set of challenges.”

“You have no idea.” Patronus gestured to his booth. “But we don’t have to sell anything here—at least until Saturday. Dealing with browsers is so much easier than taking care of customers.”

“It’s wonderful that you’re going to donate a portion of the proceeds to the Hero Initiative. That’s such a good cause.”

“I’ll confess to a bit of self-interest involved in it,” Patronus said. “After all, I hope to someday be an aging but beloved artist myself.”

Sophie gave him a friendly giggle. “Let’s just hope you don’t wind up needing the money.”

“You help me with the first part of that plan, and I’ll do my best to avoid the second.”

“I have just the thing in mind. Do you have your portfolio with you?”

“What artist would come to Comic-Con without a portfolio?”

“Ones not looking for work, I’d say.”

“Then that wouldn’t be me.” Patronus signaled to one of the security men working the booth, and he hustled over with a large leather portfolio and handed it to Patronus. “We should be all set. Where are you taking me?”

“A little bird told me that a certain famous writer set up an impromptu portfolio review this afternoon. He’s on the hunt for fresh talent for a new publishing imprint he’s heading up for a major media corporation.”

Patronus raised his eyebrow at that. “Can I ask which one? It can’t be Disney or Time Warner. They already own Marvel and DC.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Murdoch likes to keep his little secrets.”

Patronus gaped at Sophie’s purposeful slip and then allowed a grin to grow across his face, showing all of his teeth. “What are we waiting for?” he asked.

Sophie led him toward the back of the hall and then over to Aisle 200, in which the booth the others had appropriated sat. As she led Patronus around the corner, she had to stifle a gasp. The line had grown, snaking out from the booth and across the cap of the aisle and then down the cross-hall lane until it disappeared into the crowd.

“I can’t believe the line is so long,” she said.

“It can’t be that bad,” Nate said in her ear. “How many wannabe artists can there be at the convention?”

“You don’t know these people, Nate,” Hardison said. As he spoke, he motioned for Sophie to join him in the booth. “They all want to be comic-book artists. If we’d have advertised this in the convention program, we could have been here all day.”

“Excuse me,” Parker said to the people standing in line to see Warren Ellis. “Can you let Mr. Ellis’s friends in, please?” She raised her voice to an obnoxious shout to make sure she was heard.

A few of the people grumbled about the interruption and the fear that someone would be cutting ahead of them in line, but the people standing between Sophie and the booth moved out of the way despite that. Sophie took Patronus by the hand and then snaked her way through them, past the table at which Eliot was examining a tattooed and pierced young man’s portfolio of skateboard art, and onto the patch of open concrete behind him.

“Jess!” Hardison stuck out his hand. “So good to see you again. How’s your son?”

Sophie smiled at Hardison and shook his hand, then pulled him into a brief hug. “He’s great. He wishes he could be here, but his father wouldn’t let him go this summer. You know how it is.”

“All too well. If you’ll give us just a minute, Warren’s finishing up with this latest hopeful.”

“It’s not bad for something you’re going to slap on a skateboard or use as a tattoo,” Eliot said in his awful British accent. “But I’m looking for real illustration here. Your sense of anatomy’s spot-on, but you don’t seem like you’re able to show any depth in these samples. Work on your perspective. Pick a focal point and draw the vanishing lines toward it to help frame it and give it a sense of dynamism. There’s really no cheating around that until you’re much better than this.”

The young man—a brutally sunburned punk who looked like he’d just stepped off his father’s Harley and had something to prove—stood there and nodded along with Eliot’s critique. “Thank you, Mr. Ellis,” the artist said, his voice cracking. “I really appreciate the feedback.”

“He took that well,” Nate said through the earpiece.

“He’s here for advice,” Eliot said as he turned around to greet the newcomers. “I’m just telling him what he already knows. Now he knows what to call his troubles, he’s got a chance to fix them.”

Behind him, another hopeful artist stepped up to the table. Her face fell when she saw that Eliot had turned his back on her.

“Mr. Ellis is taking a three-minute break,” Parker said. “Please remain in line so that you don’t lose your place. He’ll be back with you shortly.”

“Warren?” Sophie said. “I want you to meet someone who’s not going to need any of that advice from you. He’s ready to go as is. Lorenzo Patronus? Warren Ellis.”

Patronus stuck out his hand. “I’m a big fan, sir.”

Eliot shook Patronus’s hand with a smile. “Then I like you already.”

“Can he show you his work, Warren?”

Eliot sucked at his teeth and considered the line of people waiting to see him. “It’s a bit unusual, I’m afraid.” Patronus’s face fell, but before he could utter a word, Eliot continued on. “But anything for you, Jess. I don’t forget my friends. You know that.”

“Oh, I didn’t want to impose on you, Warren.” Sophie gave a bashful flip of her hair.

“Nonsense. I remember the good turn you did for me in London last year. It’s the least I can do.” He turned to Patronus. “All right, big fan, then. Show me what you’ve got.”

Patronus fumbled with his portfolio until he got it open. “I’ve been trying out some new brush techniques with my inking,” he said. “I think you’ll like it.”

The portfolio consisted of a number of large spiral-bound pages sitting inside plastic sleeves that held the artwork and protected it. Eliot reached down and began to flip through the pages while Patronus held the portfolio open.

“I see what you mean. It’s a curious technique. Hmm.” He flipped a few more pages. “Can’t say as how I care for it.”

Patronus’s face fell. “Honestly, sir,” Eliot said. “I don’t think your inking is your strong point. I wouldn’t try to sell yourself on it. You’ve taken perfectly excellent line work here and obliterated it behind trails of misapplied blackness.”

“But I—” Patronus turned to Sophie for help.

“I understand what you’re saying, Warren,” she said, “although I think that’s clearly just a matter of taste.”

“I’ll grant you that, Jess,” Eliot said. “But then again, if I’m heading up this new division, then it’ll be my taste that matters.”

“I’ll give you that, but take a closer look at his pencils, then. You yourself just said they were perfectly excellent.”

Eliot flashed Sophie a hungry grin. “That I did. Let me take a closer look.”

He went back and flipped through the pages again, this time peering hard at the pencil marks underneath the inks.

“You’re right, Jess,” Eliot said. “You’ve got a great eye, as always. I’ll be damned, but you’re absolutely right.”

The smile of disbelief on Patronus’s face grew with every word out of Eliot’s mouth until it took over his entire face. The edges of the portfolio started to shake. Eliot took mercy on him by taking it away, closing it, and handing it back to him.

“Congratulations,” Eliot said. “I’d like to hire you.”

Patronus looked like he might leap up and embrace Eliot, but he just shook hands with him instead. “Thank you, Mr. Ellis. Thank you! You don’t know what this means to me.”

“I was in your shoes once myself, Lorenzo. We all were. And call me Warren.”

Hardison tapped Eliot on the shoulder. “The three minutes are up, Mr. Ellis.”

Eliot shrugged. “It’s back to the river to pan for gold for me,” he said. “Thank you, Jess, for bringing me this nugget. We’ll work out the details soon?”

“As soon as you’re ready, Warren.”

“Excellent, I’ll look forward to that, then. Cheers.” With that, Eliot sat back down at the table and started to riffle through the portfolio of the woman who had waited for him without complaint.

SEVENTEEN

Eliot sat in the booth and critiqued artwork until the hall closed down at 7 p.m. He grumbled about not having signed up for this, but every time Hardison or Parker offered to shut down the line and turn the rest of the people away, he told them to forget it. Despite the huge hassle it was to hand out constructive criticism and crush hopes, he discovered he enjoyed it.

He was still at it when the hall closed and the convention security staff walked down the halls to sweep the room. The people in line groaned in disappointment. Eliot realized that he could have been there for hours longer. If they’d started earlier in the day, he probably would have.

Since Eliot, Parker, and Hardison didn’t have exhibitor badges, they had to leave with the rest of the public. A few of the people in line tried to grab Eliot’s attention as he left, but Parker and Hardison formed a cordon around him and escorted him from the exhibit hall, his sunglasses still on and his hat jammed down on his head as he kept his eyes focused straight ahead and toward the ground, refusing to make any kind of eye contact with anyone.

Eliot veered off toward the men’s room to change out of his disguise. He slipped into a stall and peeled off the fake beard, then stuffed it and the hat and sunglasses into his jacket pockets. He then buttoned up his shirt, tucked it in, and removed the jacket to drape over his arm.

As he was finishing up, he spotted a pair of sneakers standing outside the stall door, facing toward him. “Just a minute,” he said. As the words left his lips, he realized he was still speaking in his awful British accent. He’d have to ditch that too.

“Mr. Ellis?” the man on the other side of the stall door said. “Could I get you to look at my portfolio, please?”

“You want me to what?” A hard edge leaped into Eliot’s voice, and the British accent slipped away. “Are you out of your flipping mind?”

“I just wanted to see if you’d—”

“If I’d what? Wipe my ass with your pages? There’s a time and place for such things, kid, and this ain’t either of them. Get the hell out of here!”

Eliot could hear Hardison snickering through his earpiece, and that only made him madder. He slammed his fist against the stall door, and the young man on the other side gave out a little yelp before scurrying away.

As Eliot emerged from the stall, the rest of the people in the bathroom erupted into applause. He gave them the grim smile of someone who’d just taken care of an unpleasant task, washed his hands, and left. Outside, he found Hardison waiting for him, trying not to smile.

“Did you send that kid in there after me?”

“I didn’t have to,” Hardison said as they walked toward the glass-walled exits, where Parker stood waiting for them. “He followed you all the way here from the booth. He stood here for a moment to work his nerve up and then went after you.”

Eliot growled. “And you didn’t do a thing to stop him?”

Hardison failed to repress a laugh. “Now, why would I want to go and do something like that?”

The three of them left the gigantic building, then crossed Harbor Drive and the San Diego trolley rails, heading north on Fifth Avenue to join Nate and Sophie, who were already at the Field. Leaving the hall at the same time as most of the attendees meant swimming through a sea of people, but after they made their way under the wrought-iron archway that welcomed them into the Gaslamp Quarter, the crowd thinned out as the people spread out toward the vast variety of restaurants and watering holes that awaited them as dusk fell over San Diego.

Hardison clapped Eliot on the back. “Admit it,” he said. “You kind of like doing that.”

“Telling that kid off?” Eliot looked at Hardison as if he’d been the one who’d knocked on the stall door himself. “Are you kidding me?”

“Naw, the portfolio reviews in the hall. You know, crushing all those dreams.”

Sophie spoke through Eliot’s earpiece. “I never realized you knew so much about art.”

“I’m more than just a pretty face, you know,” Eliot said. “You pick up a lot of things on the job.”

“About anatomy?” Parker said as they strolled up the street, her leading the two men by a few yards. “And perspective?”

“Helps me know which bones to break and which shots to take.” He shrugged. “Listen, I could convince those people to give up their dreams with a three-minute critique, then they don’t have what it takes anyway. They’re bound to run up against a lot worse than that.”

“What about that teenage girl you sent away in tears?” Nate asked. “Was that really necessary?”

“I did her a favor,” Eliot said. “Same favor I did for every one of them. I was honest with her.”

“You think that’s what she needed?” Sophie said.

Eliot chuckled. “Either one of two things is going to happen. She’s maybe going to quit and go home, in which case I just saved her years of whining about how life’s not fair. She can go find something else to do that suits her better instead of drawing out her failure.”

“Or?”

“Or she’s going to dry her eyes, put on her big girl pants, and prove me wrong. In which case, I just put her on the path to a successful career doing something she loves and is determined to succeed at. Either way, she’s better off.”

“Which way do you think she’s going to go?” asked Parker.

“Hell if I know,” Eliot said. “You think I can sum up someone’s life in the course of a three-minute meeting? All I know is that the worst thing I could have done was told her to keep doing what she was doing, which would have added up to constant rejection. I either kicked her in her ass or put her out of her misery. Trust me, I did her a favor.”

“You gave up, didn’t you?” said Nate.

Eliot didn’t say a word. Neither did anyone else. He and Hardison strolled along after Parker, moving at the crowd’s laid-back pace.

“There’s something wrong with Patronus,” Eliot said. “He’s not the guy that hired all that muscle.”

“What do you mean?” Parker said. “He’s in charge of that booth. They work for him.”

Eliot shook his head. “He’s a small-time rip-off artist. Auctioning the goods at Comic-Con is a big step up for him, and yet he’s more interested in showing off his portfolio than staying on top of his business. Plus, you don’t need guys like that to watch a booth at a convention. That artwork’s not that valuable.”

Hardison nodded in agreement. “True. The electronic equipment in any one of the bigger booths is worth a hell of a lot more than most of those pages. Easier to hock too.”

“True,” said Parker. “And he’s never done anything like this before, far as I know. He always worked alone.”

“So someone else is behind this?” Sophie said. “But who?”

“That’s what we need to find out. Hardison? Any way you can figure out who paid for his booth?”

“I’ll give it a shot. Might require a bit more legwork, though.”

“Meanwhile, hurry on over here. This place is filling up fast, and people keep asking us for your chairs.”

EIGHTEEN

“Don’t you think we should call Patronus?” Hardison said as he sipped at his orange soda. Nate had been right. The Field was packed, despite the fact that it didn’t normally serve his favorite drink. He was glad he’d faked an order for the stuff on behalf of the Field before they’d left for the convention. He’d done the same thing for the Dublin Square over on Fourth Avenue, just in case. He might never have been to San Diego, but he knew the kinds of places where Nate liked to hang out.

Nate shrugged, and Hardison wasn’t sure how to interpret it. “I mean, we’ve got him on the hook, right? Let’s reel him in.”

“We chase him, and he’ll run,” said Nate. “It’s a lot easier to have him come to us.”

“Better for the con too,” Sophie said. “People don’t tend to question their good fortune if they feel like they have to pursue it.”

Parker and Eliot nodded in agreement. Hardison put up his hands. “All right,” he said. “I just think you gotta take advantage of an open connection when you have it. What if he gets cold feet? Man’s got a lot going on this weekend.”

“You saw him,” Sophie said with a sly smile. “The look in his eyes? Nothing’s more important to him than this.”

“But what if he gets too busy with his scam here at the show? We don’t have forever to make this happen. That’s all I’m saying.”

Sophie’s phone—the no-contract cell phone that Hardison had set her up with for this job—rang. She checked the caller ID. It read Lorenzo Patronus.

“I need to take this,” she said with a smile, flashing others the name.

“Maybe you should just let it go to voice mail,” Eliot said. “Let that man dangle on the end of your hook for a while.”

Sophie glanced at Nate, who shook his head. It was tempting, and if they were working a long con, Nate might have gone that route. People suspect less treachery from those they have to chase, after all, but Hardison was right. They just didn’t have that much time to play around with this guy.

Sophie cleared her throat and slipped back into her New York accent. “Hey, Lorenzo!” she said as she answered the phone. She kept her tone casual but enthusiastic. “How you doing?”

“Just wanted to check in and see what our next step is with Warren Ellis,” he said. “I’m pretty excited about this.”

“And I don’t blame you,” Sophie said. “That went about as well as can be expected. I have to warn you, though. I think we need to strike while the iron’s hot. Warren, he tends to get all excited at a show like this and then fall off the face of the earth once he gets back home. I mean, it’s a long trip, who can blame him? But I’d feel a lot better if we could nail this down fast.”

“I’m totally on board with you about that, Jess,” Patronus said. “As far as I’m concerned, the sooner, the better. Better we get this all signed and sealed before he discovers someone better than me here at the show.”

“Oh, he’s not going to do that.” Sophie laughed. “Still, let’s get moving on this. First thing we need to do is have you sign an agent agreement. That makes everything official so I can go ahead and start negotiating with Warren on your behalf. Until that happens, we’re at a standstill.”

“Then when can we meet?”

Sophie indulged herself in a smile. She knew that the answer the man wanted to hear was “right now.” She didn’t want to appear too eager, though.

“How about lunch tomorrow, at the Tin Fish? It’s right across the street from the convention center, at the corner of Sixth and L.”

“I know right where it is. Can we meet early and beat the rush?”

“Afraid I have another meeting that morning. How about one thirty?”

“All right.” Sophie could hear him forcing a chipper attitude into his voice. “One thirty it is. Can’t wait to see you.”

“I’m looking forward to it too. We’re going to make great art together.”

Sophie disconnected and slipped the phone back into her pocket. “Consider the hook set.”

“Good work.” Nate reached over and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “We should celebrate.” He raised his hand to signal the waitress to bring them another round of drinks.

Hardison laughed. “Hell, yeah! BOOM! Studios is having a drink-up over at the Hyatt, and I got a personal invitation to the IDW party by none other than Ted Adams himself. Time to get my geek on.”

“We ain’t done here,” Eliot said, putting a damper on that burst of enthusiasm. “You figure out who’s the moneyman behind Patronus yet?”

“Aw, that can wait for a little bit, right?” Hardison said. He pulled out his smartphone and waved it in front of them. “Hell, I’ll get on it while we’re waiting for our food to show up.”

“You need to take this seriously,” Eliot said. “There’s something fishy about all this. I don’t like it.”

“You don’t like anything,” Hardison said. “How do you parse something like this out from the rest?”

“Are you going to look into this or not?”

“Hey, it’s w00tstock tonight too. I’m not going to miss that.”

“I thought you said that sold out months ago,” Parker said.

Hardison shrugged. “I mean, sure, I don’t have tickets yet, but these problems can be solved. It’s Wil Wheaton, and Paul and Storm, and Adam Savage! You know, from MythBusters?”

“How about the myth that hackers lack a decent work ethic?” Eliot said. “You want to bust that?”

“Hey, you can’t keep a good geek down!”

Nate gave the hacker a hard look. “Hardison?”

The young man scowled. “I’m on it. Like I said, I’ll have something for you before the food shows up.”

“Ha!” said a voice emanating from the stairs leading up to the dining room. “Want to race?”

Hardison and the others turned to see who was coming to join them. They’d been pretty sure they’d been careful about letting anyone who might recognize them know they were there. Sure, there were a hundred and fifty thousand visitors in town, so someone out there had to know someone in the crew, just by the law of averages. But that’s why Nate had chosen the dining loft at the Field. Sitting in a tiny, sheltered room shielded from any view of the street cut down on the possibility of coincidences.

When Colin Mason—the hacker known as Cha0s—stuck his head up over the stairway’s railing, though, Nate knew this could be no coincidence.

NINETEEN

“Well, hi, friends,” Cha0s said as he emerged into the dining room right next to them. “Long time no see.”

The hacker’s false friendliness grated on Nate, but he knew how much more irritating it must be for Hardison. The two of them had a not-so-friendly rivalry going that had wound up with Cha0s behind bars, at least for a while. The two men were at the top of their respective games, two of the top hacking whizzes in the world, and they both had a competitive streak to boot.

While Hardison had given up his old ways to take up with Nate and the rest of the crew to help innocent people, though, Cha0s was the worst kind of black-hat hacker. He wasn’t above trying to kill someone who got in his way, if he thought it would be the most efficient way to deal with a particular situation. He’d nearly killed Sophie with a tricky bomb at one point, and it wasn’t for lack of trying that he’d failed.

Whereas Hardison cultivated an air of coolness, Cha0s embraced his geekiness. Thin and bearded, he often wore the kind of semicasual clothes that you’d see on any programmer in any office in America. Today—likely because he wasn’t on the job—he wore a pair of khaki shorts and a gray T-shirt that featured a handful of bright red gamers’ dice spinning around a twenty-sided die like electrons around a nucleus.

“So good to see you all here.” Cha0s gave them a smarmy smile. “Did you all lose a bet with Hardison about where you should go on your family vacation this summer?”

“Beat it, Cha0s,” Nate said. “We don’t have time for you.”

“Why?” Cha0s pulled up the only empty chair at the crew’s table, spun it around, and sat down on it backward, his arms folded against the top of the chair’s back. “Are you kids on a job here? Don’t tell me you’re mixing business with pleasure.”

“It was all pleasure here until you showed up,” Hardison said. “How’d you get out of prison this time?”

“Do you really need to ask?” He leaned back, knitted his fingers together, then stretched them forward, cracking them all at once. “It’s really not that hard once you know how it’s done, right, Nate?”

Nate knew that Cha0s was referring to the time that Nate had been forced to break out of prison himself. There weren’t any circumstances under which he wouldn’t have called his experience hard, though.

“You pled out, didn’t you?” said Nate. “The feds put you in a witness protection program, and you took off out of it the first chance you got.”

“Close, but no cigar,” Cha0s said with the kind of grin Nate wanted to wipe off the man’s face with his knuckles. “You get to go home with one of our lovely parting gifts.”

Nate glanced at Eliot. Cha0s had always been terrified of the man. “You got it half right, Nate,” Eliot said with a snarl that made Cha0s almost leap out of his chair. “My bet is he’s still under the witness protection program.”

“Bing-bing-bing! We have a winner!” Cha0s said. “Why would I want to leave something like that behind? The government does a hell of a job setting up new and fresh and perfectly legal identities for people it likes. I’m happy to take advantage of that for as long as I can manage it.”

“What are you doing here?” Sophie asked, a hard edge in her voice. Cha0s might have long since given up on trying to kill her, but Nate knew she’d never forget that he’d tried.

“I’ve got tickets to w00tstock tonight, and I was wondering if one of you lovely ladies might care to join me as my date?” Cha0s produced a pair of tickets and grinned at both Parker and Sophie in a way that dared them to accept his offer.

“Can’t decide which one of you should go?” He fanned the tickets in his hand a bit wider to show that he actually had three. “How about you both? No need to fight over me. At least not until later, you know, after the show.”

Hardison stood up on one side of the table, and Eliot mirrored him from the other. They didn’t say a word, just glared at him, daring him to say something else to provoke them. He took a step back and slipped the tickets back into his pocket.

“Hey, boys, I only have three tickets, I’m afraid, and I think the ladies would be much better company. I mean, I’m sure you’re good-looking gentlemen—I don’t really pay attention to that kind of thing—but you’re not really my flavor.”

Eliot took a half step toward Cha0s and smiled as the man flinched. “Get out of here,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “You can leave by the window or the stairs. Your choice.”

Cha0s put up his hands. “Fine. I just wanted to come by and make a peace offering, but I can see that you’re all busy.” He started to turn away, then clapped a hand over his mouth in mock surprise.

“Wait,” he said. “You are here on a job, aren’t you? So that’s what it gets to bring the high-and-mighty Hardison to finally come down to Comic-Con and let his geek pride flag fly? A job?” He grimaced at his rival hacker. “I can’t tell you know disappointing that is. I thought you’d finally given up trying to pretend you’re not a geek and were embracing your true nature.”

“Hey, I’m as much a geek as anyone.” Hardison stabbed an accusatory finger at Cha0s.

Eliot chuckled. “I think we can all vouch for that.”

Hardison listed off some of his geek credentials, his voice rising with every point. “I can code in binary. I have a complete run of Spidey Super Stories, the ones they did with The Electric Company. I hacked my GameCube when I was nine. I won a Magic: The Gathering pro tournament. I. Have. Been. To. Gen Con!”

Cha0s shrugged, unimpressed. “Good for you. Maybe someday you’ll be comfortable enough with your geekiness to step out on your own around here, unencumbered by your, ah, mundane pals. Might even level up.”

“You think I don’t see the D&D jokes in there?” Hardison said. “Get out of here before I have Eliot take ten on giving you a beating.”

“Have it your way,” Cha0s said as he headed for the stairs. “Whatever it is you’re working on, I hope you stop the bad guys.” Halfway down the stairs, he peeked over the railing. “Unless, that is, you’re the bad guys. I can never keep all this straight.”

Quick as a striking cobra, Eliot threw a steak knife at him. It stuck point first in the railing, juddering right before his eyes. The hacker goggled at it for an instant, then ducked away and disappeared.

“Good thing you missed him,” Parker said to Eliot once Hardison had peered over the railing and given them the all clear. “That would have made a big mess of this place.”

“I hit what I was aiming for,” Eliot said. “Next time, I might aim a little higher.”

TWENTY

“Are we sure there’s not a better way?” Nate said into Parker’s earpiece as she worked her way up onto the roof of the San Diego Convention Center.

“Maybe,” she said. “But there’s not a more fun way.”

Parker wasn’t going to argue for turning back at this point. She’d been itching to take on this building since she’d first seen it from the plane’s window, and it turned out to be even more fun than she’d imagined. She didn’t know who the architect was, but if she ever met him, she wanted to thank him. He’d incorporated so many different shapes and angles in his design that he’d provided plenty of shadows for her to hide in.

Sure, much of the building’s facade was lit up with spotlights, both from within and without, but the triangular struts made for stark patches of darkness in which she—dressed in her basic black work clothes—could hide. She probably could have taken an easier way in, but where was the excitement in that. Besides, thousands of people were still milling about inside, even at this time of night, and there were cameras trained on them from all sorts of directions. Coming into the building via the roof would be, she was sure, the easier and cleaner path.

She’d been surprised to find that the center of the roof of the building wasn’t flat. Instead, the north end of the building featured a number of tennis courts. They weren’t being used during the convention, but Parker couldn’t help but imagine a few of the stormtroopers from the 501st squaring off against one another in a mixed doubles match. She ignored these and headed south until she ran into the Sails Pavilion, the part of the building that was roofed with stretched canvases.

She envisioned using a crossbow that would fire a cable up to the top of the roof and then haul her up there on a set of micromotors. No matter how much fun that might be, though, she wasn’t confident that the canvas would hold her weight well or that anyone standing below might not hear and see her trying to scramble across the slippery surface. Instead, she slipped down to the side of the pavilion and skirted it by stalking along the curved glass roof that looked down over the empty mezzanine level. She knew it wasn’t much safer, but at least by taking this path she stood a hope of seeing someone below before they could see her. Thick vines covered the glass and provided her with a little bit of cover.

“Darn it.”

When she got to the end of the glass roof, she realized there was a large gap between the northern and southern sections of the building, at least up here on the top of the building. She’d not seen this from the lower floors, which frustrated her a bit. She might have been able to just walk all the way over here dressed in a Pokémon costume or something, but where would be the fun in that?

“You all right, Parker?” Hardison said. “I can barely hear you in here!”

“Yeah, I’m just used to working with skyscrapers. The convention center looks like one turned on its side, but it just doesn’t work the same way.”

“Just don’t get caught,” Sophie said.

“You see any kind of trouble, just run toward the marina out back,” Eliot said. “I’ll run interference for you.”

“Good call, guys!” Hardison said. “Hey, I gotta shut up! Wil Wheaton’s about to introduce Adam Savage from MythBusters!”

Parker was glad that Hardison had found himself a ticket to this w00tstock thing of his. She just wished that he maybe would have brought her along. Despite the face she’d made at Cha0s, she wouldn’t have minded going with Hardison. At the very least it would have been an excuse to stay out of the hotel room awhile longer. With the five of them in the one place, it felt a little cramped.

“I won’t get caught,” Parker said. “Not tonight.”

Parker spotted just what she needed. She slid down the side of the building, quiet as a black cat in the night. Then she crept over to where she saw a couple kissing in one of the darker corners of the terrace. The young man was dressed as the Hulk, and he had rubbed a lot of his green makeup onto his girlfriend’s face. She was dressed as the Black Widow, but her wig had fallen off and lay on the ground a few feet from her.

Parker crawled over toward the pair like a spider and snatched up the wig without either of them noticing. She stole away with it then and put it on. It fit well, and even if she let the hair fall over her eyes, she could still see fairly well.

Striding toward the southern half of the building, Parker could see herself reflected in the glass doors. With the red wig and her own work clothes, she thought she cut a pretty fine Black Widow herself.

Well enough disguised in case any cameras caught her crossing the open territory of the walkway that ran beneath and between the two parts of the roof, Parker strolled across the expanse and leaped up to grab the bottom edge of the southern roof. Here the roof bulged up a bit then slanted down to where she hung. She pulled herself up and found herself on a forty-five-degree incline, which she scaled with ease. Afraid that she might finally have been seen, she ran south along the edge of the roof until she spotted a wide depression that ran down the center of it.

More than twenty industrial-size air conditioners sat inside the depression, working hard through the night to cool off the exhibit hall below to an icy chill and get a head start on what was sure to be another challenging day. All those bodies packed into one place generated a lot of heat, and that required, in turn, a lot of ventilation. That was a weakness in a building that Parker knew how to exploit.

She lowered herself into the depression and hustled across to the far side. There she hunted around for a trapdoor and soon found one. It was locked, but she had it undone in just a few seconds.

Parker poked her head down through the access hatch and found herself hanging forty feet above the floor of the convention center. The place she was looking for was on the mezzanine level, an office with a window that looked out over the hall, similar to the pressroom from which Hardison had watched earlier.

“I’m going in,” she said.

She played out the line from a retractable cable attached to the black nylon harness she wore over her black clothing, and she attached the clip on the end to an anchor point on the nearest air conditioner. Then she lowered herself headfirst, down into the building.

The lights inside the convention center had been dimmed, and only every third set or so was still on. Security guards roamed the floor at regular intervals, but they weren’t swarming all over the place, and none of them seemed inclined to look up. Even if they had, the ceiling here was painted black, and from where they stood, Parker would have blended right in.

She lowered herself farther, about twenty feet down, until she came to a rest right outside the show manager’s office. The window there stood unlocked and ajar. Parker wedged her fingers into the gap and pulled it open. A moment later, she stood inside.

“I’m in.” She pulled out a red-tinted flashlight and started to poke around. She spotted a filing cabinet and went right to it. Inside it, she found the records of the various exhibitors who had booths downstairs in the main hall.

“I can’t believe they haven’t computerized all this stuff yet,” Parker said.

“Oh, they have,” Nate said. “Most of it, anyhow. But those records didn’t tell us who paid their bill, only that it had been paid. They should have that information in their paper files, if we’re lucky.”

“Should?” Parker said. “You mean I might have broken into this place for nothing?”

“Is that a problem?”

Parker smiled. “No, actually. This was fun.” She found the file marked Patronus Collection and slipped it out of the cabinet. Leafing through it, she found a photocopy of the payment by check.

“Got it,” she said as she folded the paper and slipped it into a pocket in her shirt. After a quick flip through the rest of the file for anything interesting, she slipped it back into place and closed the filing cabinet again.

Parker climbed back out the window, shimmied back up the cable to the access hatch, and emerged into the open night sky. She closed the hatch behind her, undid the cable’s clasp, and climbed back out of the depression.

A flashlight beam stabbed out of the darkness to the north and caught her in its light. “Hey!” a man said in a deep, commanding voice. “Freeze!”

A smile on her face, Parker ran toward the front edge of the building. As she reached it, she vaulted clean over it without breaking stride and landed on her butt on the curved glass that jutted out from it. She lay back and slid down like she was a kid in a playground.

When the glass’s curve went vertical, she let herself fall the last several feet to the thin stretch of terrace below, spinning her momentum into a forward flip. That sent her onto the next section of glass roof, which curved downward even farther than the last; she rode that until it dropped her down onto a wide glass awning that jutted out over the long driveway that snaked in front of the convention center.

“Hey!” the guard above yelled at her. She just laughed to herself, knowing that the man wouldn’t shoot—if he even had a gun—for fear of shattering the glass or hitting a bystander.

From there, Parker reached over and grabbed the edge of the roof, somersaulted out into the open, and then landed in a three-point stance on the driveway below. She reached up then and realized that the wig had actually held on through all her maneuvers, which impressed her to no end. She brushed the reddish strands from her face and saw a group of cosplayers dressed up as members of an all-female version of the Justice League.

The other women goggled at her in amazement and then squealed in delight. “That is the best Black Widow I’ve ever seen!” one of them said.

“Thank you,” Parker said. Then she hustled off into the night.

TWENTY-ONE

In the middle of the night, Parker awoke and rolled over on the sofa bed to see Hardison sitting in a chair and tapping away at his laptop again. The paper that she had stolen from the Comic-Con show offices sat unfolded on the arm of the chair in which he sat. He glared at the screen as he typed, absorbed by the riddle she’d presented him.

“Find anything?” Parker said quietly. She glanced around then and realized that the other friend they shared this room with was missing. “Where’s Eliot?”

“He found himself a date last night with a woman who’s not sleeping on an air mattress,” Hardison said. “He checked in about one a.m., just about the time I was walking back here.”

“And you’ve been hacking away at that thing ever since?”

He winced. “I’m not really hacking here, more like investigating. Let’s call it research, all right? I’m trying to see what I can do with what you brought me back tonight.”

“Figure out anything?”

Hardison glanced at her and smiled. “Oh, yes.” He pointed at the paper. “All I really needed was the name on this check. After that, it wasn’t all that hard.”

Parker sat up. “So anyone could have figured it out.”

“Well, not anyone.” Hardison tried to muster up some modesty, but that wasn’t his strong suit, and Parker knew it. “The name’s the first step, though. It came from an account for a company called MangaWorks.”

“Is that supposed to sound familiar?”

“Not to you, but the folks at Comic-Con probably would have recognized it. Manga means the kinds of comics published in Japan. They’re these black-and-white stories published on the cheapest paper around, like phone books, and they’re about as thick too.”

“Doesn’t sound much like most of the books I saw in the hall.”

“They’re not. You might have seen them without recognizing them, though. They look a lot like the trade paperback collections of American comics, only with a smaller page size, and thicker, like I said.

“In Japan, everybody reads manga, from little boys all the way up to great-grannies. MangaWorks used to publish translations of some of the bestselling seinen and josei manga—that’s the stuff aimed at grown men and women. It had some fans here, but it never really caught on like the shōen and shōjo stuff, which is for boys and girls.”

Parker considered this. “Most grown-ups in American don’t read comics.”

“Right. Some do—like myself, of course—but even guys like me don’t tend to get into the stuff adults like in Japan. Then there was this huge glut of manga stories a couple years ago, and the whole market collapsed. MangaWorks was one of the first to go under.”

Parker pursed her lips. “But now they’re back and paying for Patronus’s booth.”

“Right. That’s the way they got such a great position for their booth in the hall. That’s usually based upon how many years you’ve had a booth at the convention, and MangaWorks had been at it for a long while before they gave up.”

“But what do they have to do with Patronus and selling all that stolen artwork?”

Hardison held up a slender finger. “That there is an excellent question. I’ve been digging into MangaWorks to see if I can figure that out. The company used to be owned by a guy named Daichi Kanabe, a Japanese national who lost a fortune when the company collapsed. When the company was doing well, though, he’d started up another company to invest in real estate in Southern California, and that company—which he called MangaLand—is still kicking.

“They’ve sunk a lot of green into properties in Anaheim, out near Disneyland, but it’s all leveraged hard. They started grabbing them up at a song when the real estate bubble popped, but they haven’t done a damn thing with them yet. If they don’t get something out of them soon, their money’s going to run out, and then Kanabe’s going to be in some serious trouble, maybe even deadly.”

Parker slid forward on the sofa bed to peer over Hardison’s shoulder at his laptop’s screen. “Why’s that?”

Hardison pointed to a map of Japan. “Kanabe didn’t invest all his money here. He also bought a lot of beachfront property back in his homeland. He mostly concentrated on scooping up stretches of beachfront in the area of Tomioka and Naraha, in the Fukushima prefecture.”

“Why does that sound familiar?”

Hardison gave her a sympathetic frown. “It’s the area where the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant sits, the one the tsunami hit in March of 2011. The whole place is still a no-go zone. Anyone who had property there is pretty much screwed.”

“So that explains why this Kanabe’s writing checks for Patronus? I don’t get it.”

Hardison shrugged. “Maybe it got bad enough he decided to get back into comics. Maybe Patronus has something on him. I don’t know—yet. Only thing I know for sure is it’s easy to see how Kanabe might get desperate, and from there it’s only a few short steps toward doing something stupid.”

“Stealing stuff from comic-book legends doesn’t seem like the kind of get-rich-quick scheme you’d usually see one of these guys try.”

“True, although some of that stuff can go for a lot of money. An original cover by Hergé went for 1.3 million dollars not so long ago.”

Parker’s eyes widened. “Really? How much do you think the stuff in his booth might be worth?”

Hardison snickered. “Honestly? Maybe not even that much altogether. Most comic-book art doesn’t go for anywhere near that. Hergé’s this Belgian guy who came up with Tintin. People go nuts for his stuff. The most anyone ever paid for an original superhero piece is just over 448,000 dollars, and that was a piece from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a kick-ass Batman piece.

“I mean, Curtiss and those guys did some amazing stuff, but most comic-book fans these days have barely heard of them. Many of them haven’t worked much for years. People forget about them fast.”

“But you don’t?”

Hardison grunted. “Just because I like new and shiny things doesn’t mean I don’t care how we got here from there.”

Parker gave Hardison a wide and easy smile, the kind she reserved for him alone. Then she lay back down on the sofa bed and nestled into the covers. “Hardison,” she said, “you’re the best kind of geek.”

TWENTY-TWO

“You did what?” Nate said as they ate the breakfast Eliot had ordered from room service after he’d shown up around nine that morning. The fresh orange juice was some of the best Nate had ever had. The stuff he drank in Boston seemed like a faded echo of the flavors of the real stuff, more a reminder of what orange juice should taste like than a glass of something good. He wondered how it would taste with a little tequila and grenadine.

“I couldn’t get too much on Kanabe from here. His MangaLand computers aren’t online, so we’d have to head to up L.A. and break into his offices to really get at them.”

“However?” Nate knew there was a however attached to this. There always was.

“However, MangaLand does have a server on the Web, and that I could get into. It’s mostly just commercial real estate listings and the stuff that goes along with that, but I also found this little password-protected part of the server.”

“Did you break into it?” Sophie said.

Hardison smiled. “It was so easy it was—I almost didn’t want to do it. It was like it looked up at me with its cute little eyes and said, ‘Oh, please don’t look behind my curtain.’”

“So you left it alone?” Eliot—who sat on the far side of the sofa bed with his boots propped up—shot the hacker a disdainful look as he took a swig of his coffee.

“What’re you, nuts? I tore that curtain down, made a skirt out of it, and made the site wear it around its head.” He put up his hand. “Come on. Somebody give me a high five. Don’t leave me hanging.”

No one moved. Hardison gave up and slapped his own hand. “All right. Be that way.”

“So what’s there?” Nate asked.

Hardison got himself right back on track. “Seems our Mr. Kanabe didn’t entirely give up on comics when MangaWorks went down. He has a site set up with all sorts of illegal content.”

Sophie squinted at Hardison. “How do you mean ‘illegal’?”

“All sorts of ways. For one, he doesn’t own the rights to any of it. He used to own the rights to some of it, sure, but all that faded away when MangaWorks folded. Those licensing contracts don’t survive bankruptcy.”

“That’s it?” Eliot said. “You’re going to nail this guy with the fact he’s bootlegging comic books? Who the hell cares?”

“You mean, besides the comic-book publishers? Maybe no one, but that’s not all of it. Besides, I’m not trying to hurt him. I just want to irritate him, make him do something stupid.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Parker asked.

“He’s behind Patronus. If he thinks someone’s onto him, he’s liable to make a move to change that. We just have to watch what he does, and he’ll practically just show us what’s going on. Right, Nate?”

Nate put up a hand. “Sometimes. Sometimes they just try to kill you instead.”

“The point is that systems under stress show their fracture points. I’m just adding a bit more stress to Kanabe to see what shakes out.”

“Hold on,” Sophie said, suspicious. “You said ‘all sorts of ways.’ What else have you done?”

“Me?” Hardison put a hand to his chest in mock surprise. “I didn’t do much of anything. I just drew back the curtain so people could see what he’s already doing.”

“Which is?”

“Well, besides the stuff he’s got up there from his old business, he’s also got a ton of other files. Best I can tell, he sells passwords to the site to people for a fee and then lets them have anything they want. This includes some pretty nasty hentai manga.”

“Hentai?” asked Nate.

Hardison hesitated as he glanced at the women, but pressed on. “Pornographic.”

Eliot laughed. “That’s all? You exposed the man’s porn habits?”

Parker shrugged, not seeing the point. Sophie raised an amused eyebrow at Nate.

Hardison held up a finger to tell the others to let him finish. “And the names and passwords of everyone who had a membership on the site.”

“Ooh,” said Nate. He was so surprised he stopped laughing. “That’s going to hurt.”

“What’s the big deal?” Parker said. “A moment ago you were all laughing about the idea of exposing Kanabe’s porn habits. Isn’t that the same thing for all those other guys?”

“And girls,” Hardison said, correcting her.

“It’s one thing to embarrass the man,” Nate said. “It’s something else to ruin his business—even if it is a side business—and embarrass all his customers at the same time. That switches him from a laughingstock to a target.”

“How bad could it get?” Parker said, still a little confused.

“It depends who’s on that membership list,” Eliot said. “Most people, what are they going to do? Write him an angry e-mail?”

“It’s a long list,” Hardison said.

Eliot shrugged. “Toss in a few yakuza, you never know. Mr. Kanabe could wind up short a few fingers after this.”

“Or other appendages,” said Nate. He nodded at Hardison, impressed. “Good work. I’m not sure if it was wise or not, but it’s bound to make something happen.”

“But there’s more,” Hardison said. “I also found out where Kanabe’s land is.”

“I thought you did that last night,” Parker said. “What’s the big deal?”

“Ah! That’s where the land he’s trying to sell is, yeah, but he’s got a whole lot more stuff that he’s holding on to, stuff that’s not on the market.”

“That’s curious,” said Sophie. “Perhaps he’s keeping it for some kind of a development he has in mind.”

“Could be,” Hardison said with a nod. “Most of it’s clustered in the same spot, all of it right around the Anaheim Convention Center.”

Nate frowned. “Is that a coincidence? I mean, we’re here at another convention center. What’s the connection?”

“As you might guess from the crowds here and how much trouble we had snagging a hotel room, Comic-Con’s getting too big for San Diego. There’s been talk about moving it out of town for years. Guess which city had the next best bid?”

“Anaheim,” said Eliot.

“Right. Now those talks started a few years back, and Comic-Con has since extended its contract with San Diego through 2015, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t move it up there once that’s done.”

“Or that they couldn’t find some way to break their contract here if they really needed to,” said Nate. “Kanabe would stand to make a killing on his real estate holdings near the convention center in Anaheim if Comic-Con moves, wouldn’t he?”

“It would make it a lot easier to sell off those places, for sure.”

“But how does helping to host an auction of stolen comic-book art help that happen?” Sophie said. “Even if Patronus’s plot gets exposed, that wouldn’t be enough to ruin the city’s reputation. Would it?”

Nate shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t. There’s something else going on here, something deeper. We just got to keep digging until we find it.”

TWENTY-THREE

The sun beat down on the San Diego streets, but the breeze coming in off the sea kept the air balmy. Sophie would have preferred to take a taxi or a hired car down to her meeting with Patronus, but it was only five blocks from the Horton Grand to the Tin Fish. Even this long after the exhibit hall had opened on Friday, the traffic downtown was a horrible snarl, and it was easier to just take the stroll rather than worry about maintaining her disguise as a New York artist’s agent. The sidewalks still hummed with people, many of whom were strolling back to the convention center after lunch. Sophie hoped that the crowd at the Tin Fish would have thinned out, at least just a little.

She’d taken care to walk the route separately from anyone else, including Nate. Well, especially Nate. While their relationship had grown much closer over the past few months, it didn’t mean they didn’t have a job to do.

If she had to be honest, Sophie might have admitted that without Nate she’d have given up this Robin Hooding long ago. She discovered that she rather enjoyed helping people in this way, and it gave her a good excuse to keep herself busy doing something good rather than using her skills to steal from people who didn’t deserve it (although they could always afford it). But the risk-to-reward ratio almost never added up, at least if she were only to think about personal rewards.

But Nate never did. To him, it had never been about the amount of money they could make. He only cared about where it was coming from and how much good it could do for the people who’d had it taken from them in the first place. He was the kind of good person Sophie had often hoped existed, but she had seen so little proof of it that she’d been willing to discount it entirely up until she’d met Nate.

At first, she’d not believed in him—or that there could ever be anyone like him—but he’d shown her how much he cared about his work in dramatic fashion, time and time again. As a grifter, she’d worked in such rarefied and wealthy circles that she’d come to accept bitterness, deceit, and tragedy as the bulk of the human condition. By showing her good people who needed help, Nate had proved to her not only that he was a good man but that he wasn’t the only one around.

That’s what kept her with him despite his flaws. He drank too much, and he wasn’t emotionally available to her at all times, but she suspected those two traits were connected. Despite that—or maybe because of it—he needed her, and she’d long ago realized that she needed him as well.

For that reason, she’d insisted on him giving her at least a ten-minute head start before he left the hotel after her. She didn’t need a shadow, for one, but she especially didn’t need Patronus or anyone he knew making a connection between the two of them before she was ready. Patronus would have enough reasons to be suspicious of them on his own. They didn’t need to furnish him any extras.

Eliot had left the hotel an hour before Sophie, and he’d already reported in. “Patronus got here ten minutes ago,” he’d said. “Twenty minutes early. He’s one anxious artist.”

Hardison hadn’t been needed for this part of the operation, so he’d scampered off to the exhibit hall as fast as he could. Parker had gone with him to let him show her around. Sophie thought that might be good for her. Despite her skills as a burglar, she’d led a terribly sheltered life. Getting out and doing things in a crowd could be good for her, especially with Hardison as her expert guide.

“I’m just about there,” Sophie said for the benefit of her earpiece as she crossed Fifth Avenue at L Street. The restaurant’s bright blue awning beckoned to her, drawing her in until she spotted Patronus standing under one of the many palm trees scattered about the place’s outdoor dining area. He waved to her, and she strolled over to him and shook his hand.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,” she said.

“Just long enough to work up an appetite,” he said with a winning grin. “Shall we?”

They got into the line to order their food, which moved much faster than Sophie would have guessed. She inspected the menu and made a quick decision, choosing the fish and chips. It wouldn’t be as good as the stuff she’d grown up on from the chippie around the corner, back home in the UK, she knew, but it would still feel like comfort food to her.

They placed their order, and Patronus insisted on paying. Sophie refused. “I’m the agent, and you’re the client,” she said. “Consider this part of your courtship. Lunch is on me.”

“All right,” he said with a laugh, throwing up his hands. Although he tried to keep cool, he smiled at everything she said.

Sophie understood why. As far as he knew, she was about to make his dreams come true. She’d almost feel sorry for him if she hadn’t known exactly what he’d done to all those elderly artists whose shoes he hoped to be able to fill.

Within a few minutes, they were sitting at a steel table under the shade of another palm tree and enjoying their meal. Sophie had to admit, the fish tasted fantastic. She loved eating seafood when she was close enough to see the sea—or would have been if not for the convention center blocking her view.

“So,” Patronus said, “that seemed like a wonderful meeting with Warren Ellis yesterday. What’s our next step?”

Sophie shrugged. “I’m not so sure. Warren talks a good game, but I know for a fact that he hasn’t lined up enough funding for this little venture of his quite yet. News Corp. is willing to put up about half the money he needs, but they don’t know the market as well as they would like to be comfortable enough to fund the whole thing. They want Warren to bring in some outside investors to chip in for the company’s other half.”

“Makes sense,” Patronus said, sitting back in his chair. A spot of grease dribbled down his chin and stained his tie. He picked up a napkin and wiped it away as best he could. “They reduce their risk, and they hopefully get in some backers who have some cred within the industry. That makes the venture look better and raises the value of their investment.”

“Exactly!” Sophie patted Patronus on the arm and gave him a smile. “It’s not that they can’t afford it, but they want the division to succeed or fail on its own. They could just operate it as a loss and use it to generate ideas for their film and television units, of course, but that would only last for so long. Besides, Warren wants to prove to the world that it’s possible to make money at comics and not be relying on heroes that were created fifty or seventy-five years ago. This is his big chance.”

“So he’s putting some of his own money into it?”

“As much as he has. Warren’s a terribly successful comic-book writer, but he’s not a wealthy man. At least not by Rupert Murdoch’s standards—but then, who is?”

Patronus took a sip from his drink. “Does he have anyone else lined up?”

“That’s one of the big reasons he’s here,” Sophie said. “And the reason he’s incognito as much as he can be. If you read his Twitter feed, he’s pretending to still be in England. You watch. If anyone reports him being here, he’ll categorically deny it.”

“Clever,” Patronus said. “So is he having any luck?”

“Some,” Sophie said with a coy tone. “I’m helping him out a bit with this. I’m meeting up with a few potential investors today. With luck, we’ll have the whole thing sorted, and we’ll get you signed to Warren’s new company soon.”

“Do we need any paperwork between us?” Patronus said. “I’ve never had an agent before, but I understand there should be a contract.”

“Of course there is,” Sophie said with a smile, “but we can handle all of that once I get back to the office. No need to worry about it right now. A handshake’s good enough for me if it’s good enough for you.”

Patronus stuck out his hand. “Deal.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Nate strode up to Sophie’s table. This was the first time he’d seen Patronus in person, and he had to resist the urge to haul the man to his feet and punch him in the mouth. He knew, though, that with a bit more patience and a little finesse, he could hurt the man with far more than a sock in the jaw. He could take every penny he had and ruin his reputation too.

“Hey there, Jess,” Nate said to Sophie. “Hope you had a great lunch. I just finished up with Mark Waid and his people. He’s got all sorts of crazy ideas for this online comics venture. Keeps going on and on about Thrillbent.com or some other name like that. Brilliant stuff.”

“Mark Waid?” Patronus said. “The writer Mark Waid?”

Nate sat down at an empty chair at the table between Sophie and Patronus. “You know any others?” he said with a wisecracking grin. “Of course it’s the writer. Great guy.”

Nate turned to Sophie and spoke in a confidential tone. “He’s looking to buy in, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s all right, Jeff,” Sophie said to Nate. “I’ve already brought Lorenzo here up to date. Oh, and I’m sorry, I’m being rude. Lorenzo Patronus? Jeffrey Mace.”

“Jeff’s fine,” Nate said as he shook Patronus’s hand.

“Good to meet you, Jeff,” Patronus said. “Can I ask what your role is in all of this?”

Nate’s face cracked into a grin. “I’m the attorney that’s setting this whole deal up. I write the contracts, negotiate the agreements, and make sure everyone signs everything on the bottom line. It’s simple, right?”

Nate laughed, then answered his own question. “Actually, it’s a huge pain in the ass, but I love my job and wouldn’t want to do anything else in the world. Especially not when I get to work with such wonderful people as Jess here.” He clapped Sophie on the knee.

“I can understand that,” Patronus said with a convivial smile. “It sounds like you must be a man with a great deal of ambition. I think we’re alike in that way, you and I.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it.” Nate rubbed his eyes. “All I know is that we’ve crammed a full week’s worth of meetings into four days, and my sleep schedule is paying the price for it.”

“So what’s next on your agenda?” Sophie said to Nate.

Nate waggled his eyebrows at her. “Got a big meeting with a few whales in just a little bit. It’s up in the Skybox Boardroom at the top of the Omni.” He waved his hand toward the hotel that towered over them a block to the east. The sun gleamed off its curved, glassy facade.

Nate leaned forward. “Between you and me, I think they just like to impress me with the fact that the place they work is right next door.”

“They own the Tin Fish?” Patronus said, surprised.

Nate knew the man wouldn’t be too impressed with people working in a restaurant, but he’d set him up to make the wrong connection. “No, no, no,” he said with a laugh. “They’re ballplayers—with the Padres—but you didn’t hear that from me.”

Patronus sat back in his chair, duly impressed. The Padres played at Petco Park, which sat on the prime real estate right behind the Omni.

“People like that, they’ve got money to spend—to invest, even—but they don’t always know what to do with it,” said Nate. “Their advisers, if they have any, always counsel them to put their money into things like stocks and bonds. T-bills, even.”

“But those kinds of investments aren’t always enough for them,” Sophie said. “They’re too boring. They’re competitors, after all. They want to get involved with something they can understand, like comics.”

“Something with a risk, something that they can win at,” Patronus said, understanding. “I get that. I’m the same way.”

“The smart ones always are.” Sophie patted Patronus on the hand and watched him grin at the contact.

“Here’s hoping they go for it,” Nate said. “That would solve all our money problems quick. News Corp. isn’t going to wait around forever. I have a meeting with them on Sunday, and we need to have this all wrapped up by then, at least on paper. Better to catch them now while they’re caught up in the fever of the show.”

“It is contagious, isn’t it?” said Sophie.

Patronus began to fidget in his chair. He rubbed his chin as he watched Nate and Sophie chat. He wanted to be a part of this deal, Nate could tell. He saw other people making what he thought would be easy money in the industry he wanted to be a part of, and it gnawed at him.

“Just out of curiosity,” Patronus said. “How much are you looking for?”

“Just pocket change for some of these guys,” Nate said with a dismissive way. “A million bucks, maybe two. Scrappy little comic company start-up can roll for a long way on that kind of cash.”

“It’s almost too little money.” Sophie gave Nate a sympathetic grimace. “Investors like that sometimes don’t want to bother their lawyers about the contract until you add another zero to those numbers.”

“True. And comic-book publishers aren’t exactly the safest places to put your money.” Nate sighed, letting Patronus see how tired he was, how much he wanted this deal to happen. “But we’ve got something those T-bills and bearer bonds don’t have: fun. That’s what those guys want, and that’s what I’m going to sell them on.”

“It’s a fine plan,” Sophie said. “I’m sure it’ll come through.”

Nate slumped a little. “Yeah, and the other angle is that if we do wash out entirely, it’s not for that much cash—at least to those guys, right?” He gestured to Patronus. “Guys like us, it’s a whole ’nother matter, isn’t it? But to them—worst case?—it’s an amortizable tax write-off they can use to offset profits from their shares in Apple.”

“Sounds like you’ve got all the angles covered,” Patronus said.

Nate shrugged. “Here’s hoping. My only real concern is that I’d rather have investors with a bit more skin in the game, people the money would matter more to. When guys like that put their cash in, they’re in for the long run. They work hard to make sure their investment flies. They don’t start griping at the first sign of trouble, wondering whether they’re going to have to settle for a ninety-foot yacht rather than the hundred-foot model.”

Nate patted a hand on the table. “Still, their money spends as well as anyone else’s, so I’m off. Wish me luck.”

With that, Nate made to leave, but before he could rise, Patronus put up a hand for his attention. “If that’s your problem, Mr. Mace, maybe I can help?”

Nate sat back in his chair. “Call me Jeff.” He waited for Patronus to continue.

“I happen to be holding a huge auction of original artwork here at the show on Saturday. By the time that’s over, I should have the cash in hand to make a substantial investment in your company.”

Nate’s eyes widened as Patronus spoke. He turned to Sophie. “That true, Jess?”

Sophie gave Nate an apologetic smile. “I didn’t mention that?”

Nate shook his head. “I’m pretty sure I’d have remembered you telling me your new artist client was the guy behind that huge auction they’re holding in the exhibit hall.”

“No harm done.” Patronus grinned. “I’m happy for Jess to think of me as an artist first. That’s my dream. The auction stuff, that’s just a way for me to pay the bills and keep my hand in this industry I love so much.”

Nate mirrored Patronus’s expression. “I like the way you think. I hear that auction of yours might raise a million dollars.”

“At a minimum,” Patronus said. “With some of the high-powered endorsements we’ve lined up here at the show, I’d expect that to go much higher.”

“But don’t you have to pass most of that cash on to the artists?” Sophie said. “I had thought you were selling those things on commission.”

Patronus dismissed that notion with a wave of his hand. “I bought all my inventory direct from the artists or their estates, cash on the nail. Some of them really needed the money, and I didn’t want them to have to wait around to get paid. Setting up an auction like this takes time.”

“What a dirty bastard of a liar,” Hardison said through Nate’s earpiece.

Nate hadn’t realized that Hardison had been listening along. He’d been so quiet up until now. Nate turned to Sophie and nodded in agreement with Hardison’s assessment, though, confident that Patronus couldn’t hear it.

“And he’s also giving a portion of the proceeds to the Hero Initiative,” Sophie said. “He’s a regular philanthropist.”

“Just as long as there’s enough left over in the end,” Nate said as an unfunny joke. Then he sighed. “Trouble is, I really need a commitment on this today. I can’t just blow off all my other meetings for the rest of the week, you see?”

Patronus put up his hands. “I get it. What happens if we get to Sunday and something happens, right? And it all falls through.”

“Right? Not to impugn your intentions at all, of course,” Nate said, “but I’d need some assurances.”

“A handshake’s not good enough?” Sophie said. “It always works for me.”

Nate flashed a wry grin. “You’re an agent, Jess. I’m an attorney. We like paper, and we like it signed. That’s my job, right?”

Sophie gave Patronus a helpless shrug, not bothering to hide her apparent disappointment. “I suppose. I just have more faith in humanity, I suppose.”

“And that’s why you can never be a lawyer.”

Nate folded his hands on the table before him and turned his full attention to Patronus. “Are you serious about this?”

“Yes, I am,” Patronus said without a moment’s hesitation.

Nate could see the man wanted this deal more than just about anything. Not only would it give him the kind of in with a publisher that no editor could ignore, it would also give him a place to stash his ill-gotten gains from the auction. Sure, his marks could try to sue him, but he’d have bought himself an air of respectability that would help deflect the impact of their claims. If he was really lucky—Nate was sure the man thought—the company might actually make back enough money for him to pay everyone off and still leave him in control. And if it failed, he could declare bankruptcy and nullify any judgments against him.

But it was his desire to be a comic-book artist that had caused him to throw caution to the wind. Sophie and the rest of the crew had done such a great job of selling him on his own dream that he’d decided he could ignore the details of the deal, push all his chips into the center of the table, and declare himself all in.

“Good,” Nate said. “I’ll draw up the papers tonight, and I’ll have you sign them tomorrow.”

“Can you bring them by the booth?” Patronus said. “I shouldn’t have been gone this long today. I have to deal with my own whales, and when they can’t talk with me directly, they get nervous.”

Nate sucked at his teeth and tried to come up with some sort of excuse that wouldn’t raise any alarms with Patronus. He didn’t want to go into the convention center. It was crowded and noisy, he knew, and he was sure that by tomorrow it would smell of the funk of a hundred thousand bodies that had been sweating through the first two days in the San Diego sun.

Sophie stopped him cold by putting a hand on his arm, though. She spoke to Patronus, but she kept her eyes on Nate. “Of course he will,” she said.

Nate opened his mouth to rebut that statement, but he hauled up short when he saw the look in Sophie’s eyes. It said, Don’t blow this.

Nate wondered if he should get irritated with her for doing something like that in front of Patronus, something that might give the man pause about taking their bait. Then he realized that Sophie—who was by far the best actress of them all, at least when she was on the job—hadn’t broken character at all. Jess Drew would give Jeff Mace the same kind of look.

Nate swallowed, then looked at Patronus. “Of course,” he said. “When’s good for you?”

“I’m around most of the day tomorrow. How long will it take you to draw up the papers?”

“Not much time at all,” Nate said. “I can crank out one of these in my sleep. I just need to get to my hotel room, tap it all out, and then hope the business center has a decent printer.”

“Oh, I got a printer, all right,” said Hardison, a teasing tone in his voice. “You could have it to him tonight if you wanted to.”

Nate squirmed in his chair. “Yeah, I could get it to you tonight, but I’d rather take the time to get the contract drawn up right.”

“And to give you a bit more time before you got to get your ass into the hall, am I right?” said Hardison. “You really gotta come in here, Nate. This place is fantastic!”

“That sounds perfect,” Patronus said. “Can we shake on it anyhow?”

He stuck out his hand, and Nate took it. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

TWENTY-FIVE

“So how’s this supposed to work again?” Parker said when they were all back in the Field’s upstairs dining room that evening.

Nate had called them all together to make sure they had the plan down. He knew that Hardison and Eliot would disappear for the evening soon, and Parker would wander off and do whatever Parker did in the evenings—maybe climb around the tallest buildings in town for fun. That meant he and Sophie might have an evening alone together, something he was looking forward to. With all five of them sleeping in the same room, there had been damn little privacy for any of them, and he meant to enjoy it, even if only for a little while.

“It’s simple, Parker,” Nate said. “I draw up a contract giving us ownership of all of the artwork or the proceeds from selling it as Patronus’s collateral in our new publishing venture. He signs it, and we’re good to go.”

“And there isn’t anything more to it than that? We don’t have to break into anything or hit anyone?”

Nate shrugged. “Not this time.”

“Huh,” Parker said, nonplussed. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Come on,” Hardison said. “You already got to break into the convention center once, right? No need to be greedy.”

Parker grinned. “Oh, yeah. That was fun.”

“I’m just fine with something being simple and going right for once,” Eliot said. He slouched down farther in his overstuffed chair to show just how relaxed he was. “It’s nice for a change, isn’t it?”

“You don’t want to hit someone?” Hardison asked.

Eliot gave him a weary smile. “I don’t ever want to hit someone. I hit the right people when they need to be hit. That’s all there is to it.”

“I still don’t get it,” Parker said. She flounced down on the folded-up sofa bed, sitting on it with her legs crossed like a pretzel. “Are we going to just let him sell the artwork and then take the money for it? I thought we came here to get the artwork back.”

“That’s an excellent question,” Sophie said. “The people who gave Patronus their artwork to sell don’t want it back, do they? They want the money for it.”

“Right,” said Nate. “That’s why they gave it to him in the first place. But is he really going to do a good job selling it?”

Hardison grimaced. “I gotta say, I think so, Nate. He’s got a lot of buzz going on here at the show. Lining himself up with the Hero Initiative was a solid move. Just about every major comic-book creative who’s here this weekend is helping pimp it.”

“I heard he even got Stan Lee to say a few words before the auction begins,” Eliot said.

“I know! How cool is that, and—hey, how do you know who Stan Lee is?”

Eliot shrugged. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“You said you don’t read comics.”

“I don’t.”

“So? How do you know about Stan Lee?”

Eliot winced. “Hey, it’s not like I’ve never read comics. I did, just when I was a kid. Stan Lee was writing them even back then, right?”

Hardison slitted his eyes at Eliot. “Uh-huh. Right. Go ahead and go with that.”

“I’m just saying. They were good too. You know. For something you read as a kid.”

“Comics aren’t just for kids anymore.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“Have you seen the people at this show?”

Eliot laughed in a way that implied he’d maybe seen a bit too much of them. “Yeah, I’ve seen them. Don’t tell me you’re going to hold up this place as a microcosm of America now.”

Hardison held up an index finger. “I will grant you, if you’re only looking at the older—say, overthirty crowd—yes, most of the people here are white men, but not all.”

Nate scoffed at that in disbelief. “Are you really calling thirty old?”

Hardison ignored him. “However, if you look at the younger crowd, you’ll find there’s a lot more diversity in that cohort.”

Sophie almost choked. “Did you just use the word ‘cohort’?”

“What?” Hardison pretended to be offended. “It’s not like I don’t read. I got a word-of-the-day app on my phone. Is it all right I try to sound a little more educated?”

Nate knew that Hardison hadn’t gone to college. In fact, he’d barely finished high school, and only then because his nana had begged him to. It seemed that the young man sometimes regretted skipping college, not because he needed to learn anything a school could teach him, but because he saw it as something that would have earned him instant respect.

Hardison was as smart and sharp a person as Nate had ever met. He was curious and inquisitive and had taught himself just about everything he knew. He didn’t need school for any reason, and certainly not for anything he could have learned there. Despite his lack of higher education, he’d long ago earned the respect of everyone in the room.

“That’s perfectly fine, Hardison,” Nate said. “I think your point is that people of any kind can enjoy comics—and do, if looking around this place is any indication.”

Hardison slapped his hands together in agreement. “Exactly!” he said. “There’s room for everyone at Comic-Con. It’s downright egalitarian.”

“Assuming you can afford to go,” said Parker. “And get a badge in time. And a hotel room.”

“Um, right,” Hardison said, not sure if she was agreeing with him or not. “Assuming all that.”

“All right,” said Nate. “I’m going to draw up that contract tonight, and I’ll have it ready for Patronus tomorrow. Assuming it all goes well, he’ll hand over the money from the auction by tomorrow night.”

“You know, it’s too bad we don’t have a real comic-book company,” Hardison said. “I have some great ideas for a few new series we could publish.”

Nate shot him a look of disbelief.

“Hey, it would be fun. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Fun?” Eliot said. “Sinking thousands of dollars into a book to have it sell a few thousand copies, just enough that you think maybe people want more but not enough for Diamond Comics Distributors to not drop you like a white-hot brick. And seeing as how they’re a virtual monopoly in the industry, that being it for you, no other shot, good-bye. That sound like fun to you?”

All eyes in the room turned toward Eliot. “I thought you didn’t read comics,” Sophie said.

Eliot looked uncomfortable. “It happened to a friend of mine. Had a lot of talent, but the industry chewed him up and spit him out.”

“Right,” Nate said. “Anyhow, I think that about does it for now. Go out, have some fun, do your thing, whatever the hell that is, and we’ll be ready to get this done in the morning. Then we can beat the rush out of here and get back to Boston.”

“Hey, we’re already here,” Hardison said. “We got badges. I’m staying!”

TWENTY-SIX

After dinner, Nate let Sophie talk him into taking a pedicab out to the Seaport Village shopping center north of the convention center. As their cyclist pedaled them along, Hardison passed them by in another pedicab, heading back toward the convention center itself.

“I told him I’d give him another twenty bucks if he’d beat you back to the hall,” Hardison’s voice said in Nate’s earpiece. “Wanna make him work for his money?”

Nate reached out to tap his cyclist on the shoulder and offer him a hundred dollars to blow past Hardison’s pedicab, but Sophie stopped him before he could do so. “Do you really want to get involved in that?” she said in a soft voice.

Nate opened his mouth to say yes, yes he did, but when he looked into Sophie’s eyes, he realized it wasn’t true. Not today, at least. “I suppose not,” he said as he leaned back farther in the pedicab and put his arm around her shoulders.

A moment later, another pedicab came zipping past, the driver standing up on his pedals, his legs pumping as hard as if he had Lance Armstrong on his tail. Eliot stood tall in the cab, balancing in it like a Roman charioteer in a race, shouting encouragement at his cyclist. He caught up with Hardison’s pedicab within half a block and blasted past it.

“Eat my dust!” Eliot said as he goaded his cyclist faster.

“Hey!” Hardison said in protest. “I wasn’t talking to you!”

Despite that, Nate saw him take a bill out of his pocket and stuff it in his cyclist’s back pocket. “And there’s another hundred in it for you if you beat him!” Hardison said to the pedaler.

The pair of cyclists sped off through the Gaslamp Quarter at top speed, jockeying for position as they raced down Fifth Avenue. When Eliot’s cyclist spotted a traffic jam up ahead, right under the wrought-iron gateway that arched over the entrance to the quarter, he swung his pedicab into a sharp right on K Street and disappeared around the corner.

“Where the hell you going?” asked Hardison. Without waiting for an answer, he pointed his pedicab off to the right too, and the cyclist chased after Eliot and his pedaler.

“Only two ways across the light rail between here and the convention center,” Eliot said. “The one on Fifth Avenue’s clogged. Next closest one’s at First.”

“Now how do you know that?” Hardison sounded offended.

“I don’t just look at maps, like you. I’ve been out getting the lay of the land. Right now it’s laid out before me like a racetrack, and there’s nothing between me and the finish line but open pavement.”

“Isn’t there an afterburner on this thing?” Hardison asked his pedaler. “Some kind of nitrous? How ’bout I buy you a Red Bull?”

Eliot snickered to himself the whole way. Nate couldn’t help but join in.

Sophie reached up and turned Nate’s face toward hers with a gentle hand. “Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked with a warm smile.

Nate considered this for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. We don’t often get a chance to relax during one of these operations. Especially not in such a beautiful place. It’s a nice change of pace.”

Sophie removed her earpiece and gestured for Nate to do the same. He did so, then accepted hers as she held it out for him and slipped them into his shirt’s breast pocket.

“I thought perhaps we could have a little privacy for the evening,” she said, snuggling closer. He squeezed his arm around her shoulders and enjoyed the feeling of her head resting on his chest.

“I don’t mind that a bit.”

She looked up at him. “You do realize, of course, that you’re going to have to go into the convention center tomorrow to deliver those papers to Patronus? The whole plan falls apart if you can’t manage it.”

Nate drew in a deep breath and let it out with a long sigh. “I can do it,” he said. “I think.”

Sophie sat up a little bit so she could look straight into Nate’s eyes. “What’s the problem?” she said. “I’ve seen you enter rooms full of armed men. This is just a hall full of pop culture fans. They’re harmless.”

Nate grimaced. “It’s not the people in the hall that bother me. Well, not all of them. Some of the folks in their costumes set me on edge too, I suppose.”

“Have you been in the hall to see them?”

He gestured with his finger at the whole of the Gaslamp Quarter. “I don’t much have to, do I?”

Sophie craned up her neck a bit and spotted a pair of men in long brown coats escorting a woman dressed in a short skirt, leather bustier, high boots, and goggles up the street. A teenage girl wearing a costume that she recognized as Wonder Woman trotted along behind them.

Sophie laughed. “You seem to be managing just fine out here,” she said. “So what’s the issue, then?”

Nate stiffened for a moment. Then he looked into Sophie’s eyes and forced himself to relax. “It’s about Sam,” he said.

“Your son?” Sophie said.

Nate nodded. Sam had been everything to him. He’d been only nine years old when he’d died, and that event had shattered Nate’s world.

Before Sam’s death, Nate had been one of the top insurance investigators in the world, dedicating his life to finding thieves like the ones he was now sharing a hotel room with, and stopping them. The company he worked for, IYS, had refused to pay for the treatment that had been Sam’s only shot at survival. Despite plenty of evidence that it was safe and had a good chance to work, they’d labeled it “experimental” and declared it outside of Nate’s benefits package.

Nate had been unable to pay for the treatment himself or to scrape up the money for it in time. The irony that in the course of his career he’d saved the company several times over the amount they would have had to pay to save Sam’s life was not lost on him. He’d threatened to quit. That hadn’t moved them an inch, but he’d followed through on it anyhow. He just couldn’t bear to work for such people anymore.

After Sam’s death, Nate picked up a bottle and crawled into it for a couple years. By the time he came back out, his marriage had ended, and he’d ruined just about everything that was left of his life. He made just enough money working private investigations to keep himself drunk, and that had been enough—right up until he’d met the rest of the crew.

A man named Victor Dubenich had hired him as “the one honest man” to keep a group of thieves that he’d brought together in line. At Dubenich’s request, they’d stolen the plans for a rival company’s commuter airplane, which Dubenich claimed had been stolen from him. Reluctant as he’d been to work outside of the law, Nate hadn’t felt so alive and engaged in what he was doing since Sam’s death.

He’d enjoyed it despite himself, mostly because he was able to convince himself—at Dubenich’s prodding—that the system was broken and that bad people were using it to hurt good people, much in the way that IYS had used their policy—a policy of finding any excuse to deny payment—at the cost of Sam’s life. And when it turned out that Dubenich had been lying, that he’d double-crossed them—tricking them into stealing from innocent people and trying to murder them to cover his tracks—Nate had decided that Dubenich had been right after all. He could do some good with his talent for managing such a crew and being the one man they could all trust.

Dubenich had been the first bastard they’d taken down. Nate had been reluctant to continue after that, but the others had convinced him to give it a shot. After all, they’d made so much money by ruining Dubenich that none of them ever had to work again, but every one of them still itched to keep at their individual careers, to keep their skills sharp. With Nate’s direction, at least they’d be doing the world some good.

That had been years ago, and Nate and the crew had done a lot of good for a lot of people since. He’d long lost track of how many lives, reputations, businesses, and dollars they’d saved, although he knew that Hardison kept careful track. To Nate, though, the numbers didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were doing some good.

They’d even taken on IYS at one point, destroying Nate’s old boss, Ian Blackpoole. That had given Nate some closure in the matter of Sam’s death, but there still wasn’t a single day that went by that he didn’t miss his son and wonder who he might have grown up to be—or if he’d still be proud of his dad and what he’d done.

“Sam and I used to read comics together,” Nate said to Sophie. “He hadn’t cared much for reading as a kid. He was sharp enough, sure, but nothing about it really ever seemed to grab him. It wasn’t until I brought home some issues of Spider-Man that it caught fire with him. After that, I couldn’t stop him.”

“And you think going into the convention might be too painful for you.”

Nate nodded. “Sam used to talk about wanting to come here, to this show. He was too young, I thought at first. When he got sick, I promised him that I’d bring him out here the summer after he got better.”

“And that never happened.”

Nate blinked back the tears welling up in his eyes as their pedicab rolled up in front of the hotel. He got out first, then gave Sophie a hand down. He paid the pedaler and gave him a healthy tip.

Nate looked behind them, back down Island Avenue toward the Gaslamp Quarter, whose legendary nightlife was just starting to heat up. He spotted a man in a Darth Vader costume strolling across the intersection, holding hands with a ten-year-old Luke Skywalker. Vader had his helmet off, and he and the boy chatted and smiled as they walked.

“Sam would have loved this place,” Nate said. “Absolutely loved it.”

“Don’t you think he’d have wanted you to come here without him?”

Nate shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t know. I just feel so guilty being here without him.”

Sophie reached out, took Nate’s hand, and walked into the Horton Grand’s brightly lit lobby with him. Instead of steering him toward the elevators, she made a sharp left, which brought them into the Palace Bar. It was paneled in rich, hand-polished woods, and it featured a gorgeous, hundred-year-old “Grand Staircase” that had been restored to its original glory.

Nate didn’t know if it was the mingled smells of wood polish and beer, or just the warm colors of the wood that seemed to cocoon them inside the place, but for some reason it reminded him of John McRory’s Place, his father’s favorite bar back in Boston. Nate had practically grown up in the place, and he now owned it and even lived above it. Either way, the sensation brought him some comfort, even here, all the way on the other side of the country from the city he’d long called home.

Nate wished that he’d been able to take Sam into McRory’s. There were so many things that the two of them would never be able to do together, so many dreams that had been shattered with Sam’s death. The only thing Nate could do now was soldier on alone and hope that he would have made his boy proud.

During Nate’s darkest moments after losing Sam, he had known that his son would have been ashamed of how he’d acted, of how he’d wound up treating his wife, Maggie, Sam’s mother. That knowledge had always crushed him, made him more bitter. He’d barely been able to live with it.

Stepping back now, looking at Sophie, thinking about the rest of the crew and the good work they were doing, Nate couldn’t be sure what Sam would have thought. He knew how proud he was of the crew and their work, though, and he suspected that his son would have felt the same.

“All right,” Nate said to Sophie as they settled in at the bar for a nightcap. “Tomorrow I’m going in.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Hey!” Hardison said to Parker and Eliot over the earpieces. “I just got three tickets to the biggest party of the whole damn show!”

“I thought you already won The Biggest Loser, Comic-Con edition,” Eliot said.

“Aw, man, that’s not fair. Maybe I was a fat kid, and now you just brought all that rushing back to crush me.”

“Were you?”

“What?”

“A fat kid. Were you a fat kid?”

“He wasn’t,” said Parker.

“That is not the point,” said Hardison. “You don’t know me from back then. I might have been a terrified little kid who swallowed all sorts of fatty foods to make up for the fact I didn’t have any friends.”

“Did you?” said Eliot.

“What?”

“Not have any friends.”

“He didn’t,” said Parker.

“That’s sad,” Eliot said. “I still stand by my statement.”

Hardison made a slow-motion fist in front of his face to calm himself down. He wasn’t sure why it worked—or, actually, if it worked at all—but he liked doing it anyhow.

“Do you want to know about this party or not?”

“It’s going to have to be a good one to top what I have planned for tonight,” said Eliot.

Hardison, who was standing in front of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, just shook his head and laughed. “What do you have planned for tonight?”

“Hitting a bar, finding a girl.”

“This is much better than that.”

“You don’t find many girls, do you?”

“I’m a girl,” said Parker. “What’s the party?”

Hardison smiled at that. He could always count on Parker to have his back. “It’s a VIP party to meet the bridge team from, get this: Star Trek: The Next Generation. They’re here at Comic-Con to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the show!”

Neither Parker nor Eliot said a thing.

“What?” Hardison said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you? We’ll be rubbing shoulders, munching shrimp, and drinking stale Heinekens with Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden. Do none of these names mean anything to you?”

“How old is this show again?” asked Parker.

“It’s a classic.”

“It’s as old as you are,” said Eliot.

Hardison laughed. “That’s why it’s a classic. Come on. Even Wil Wheaton’s going to be there.”

“Wil who?” said Eliot.

“Oh, I know him!” Parker said. “He’s on that Big Bang Theory show you watch.” She deepened her voice for an impression of Sheldon on the show and said, “Wheatooooon!”

“Right! And Eureka and The Guild and TableTop. The man’s the geek’s geek.”

Eliot snorted. “So you want us to go with you to this party so you can get your man-crush on?”

“No, no, no,” Hardison said. “It’s going to be a blast. I grew up watching Next Gen in reruns. It was about the only thing on worth watching most days. Hell, LeVar Burton inspired me to become a hacker. You ever seen the things he pulled down in Engineering?”

“I’m in!” Parker said. “Sounds like fun.”

Hardison grinned. That was exactly what he wanted to hear. He loved hanging out with Parker, and getting the chance to do this with her would make the experience only that much better.

“What about you, Eliot?” Parker asked.

Hardison held his breath. Eliot knew that he had a crush on Parker—not a man-crush, of course, or a friend-crush, but a real old-school kind of crush. Hell, everyone knew, it seemed, but Parker. For the longest time, Hardison hadn’t even been willing to admit it to himself. He’d just thought he was attracted to her the way he was to lots of women.

As they’d gotten to know each other, though, Hardison realized that Parker was one of his favorite people. While he was still attracted to her, his affection for her had grown into something far more than that. Unfortunately, Parker just didn’t seem interested in any kind of relationship above having him as a friend, and Hardison had been able to wrap his head around that.

Parker didn’t have many friends of any kind, and never any boyfriends—or girlfriends—that Hardison knew about. By allowing him to be one of her closest friends, she’d let him further into her life than anyone else outside of the crew. Hardison treasured that honor and was determined to never do anything that might screw it up. It just meant way too much to him.

Still, he hoped that he might have a chance to spend some time alone with her at the party. While Eliot would be fun to have along, he’d spend the entire time ribbing Hardison about being a geek. True as that might be—and as acceptable as that might be at Comic-Con—Hardison wasn’t sure he was up for dealing with it all night.

“Nah,” Eliot said after a moment’s hesitation. “You two kids go have your fun with a bunch of famous people I don’t know anything about. I’ll go out and have my own kind of entertainment instead.”

“You just don’t want to have to sleep on the floor of the hotel room again,” Parker said in a matter-of-fact way.

“Bingo.” Eliot cackled. “There’s got to be some lovely lady out there who’s bound to be impressed with the way I triumphed at the pedicab chariot races tonight.”

“You mean how you cheated,” Hardison said.

“Hey, I wasn’t the one who threw out the challenge.”

“I was challenging Nate and Sophie.”

Eliot snorted. “Then you were the one who was cheating. You can’t challenge someone when you already know you’re going to win.”

“Nate might have taken me up on it.”

“While he’s riding around with Sophie? Ha! Forget it.”

Hardison decided to drop this line of attack and try something else. “I’ll give someone else your ticket.”

“Please do,” said Eliot. “I’m sure there are a lot of people here who would appreciate it far more than me. I mean far more.”

“Right. You’re not a geek. We get it. You like women and breaking things instead of video games and comics.”

“I don’t mind Angry Birds.”

“Really? Man, that’s barely a game. My nana plays Angry Birds.”

“Your nana’s got good taste.”

“Don’t you start talking about my nana.”

“Good night, Eliot!” Parker said as she walked up to the front of the hotel. Hardison spotted her as she strode up the driveway that ran through the low, palm-tree-covered slope from the street to the roofed-over area where he was standing. He greeted her with a smile, put his arm around her, and guided her into the building through the dark-tinted glass doors.

Eliot gave them a satisfied grunt. “Have fun, you two.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

They took the elevators up to the bar called Top of the Hyatt. Hardison wanted to crack a joke about that, but he kind of appreciated the simplicity of it. “Where you want to meet? Top of the Hyatt? Where’s that?”

Too many things in this world weren’t what they seemed like they should be. It felt refreshing to find something that was exactly what its name said it was. It even gave you its location.

When they reached the fortieth floor, the doors opened, and a wide smile cracked Hardison’s face as the strains of the theme from Star Trek: The Next Generation reached his ears. A man in a Starfleet security officer’s uniform—a black-and-mustard-yellow jumpsuit—greeted Parker and him as they exited the elevator and took their tickets. He then directed them around the corner to the left, and they followed a short hallway until they emerged into a long room lined on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows.

The view of San Diego’s harbor and the wide-open Pacific Ocean beyond beckoned to them, and Parker wandered straight over to one of the windows and pressed her nose against it. “You don’t think there’s any way these actually open,” she said, “do you?”

Hardison smirked. “If there was, I’m sure you’d find it long before I had any chance at it.”

She nodded, still leaving her forehead on the glass. “That’s too bad. I can just imagine stepping out of here and climbing up one of those angled towers along the top of the building to get to the roof. If the view’s this good from here, just imagine what it’s like up there.”

Hardison sucked at his teeth. He didn’t like to talk about it much, but he didn’t appreciate heights the way that Parker did. He preferred to have his feet on solid ground.

Up here, in the lounge, the walls and windows offered enough insulation from the elements that he could ignore the fact that they were forty stories up. In his mind, he could pretend that the fantastic vistas outside the windows were little more than images on gigantic screens. They didn’t affect him at all.

Standing exposed on a rooftop, with no railing and the wind whipping about him, threatening to pull him flailing and screaming to the ground? That held no interest for him. It bothered him that his work with the crew sometimes pushed him into situations where he had to face up to such fears, and tonight he was happy to focus on what was going on inside the building.

From where he stood, Hardison could see Jonathan Frakes and Michael Dorn sharing a drink in a corner with a pair of guests, while Patrick Stewart and Marina Sirtis gabbed with a couple of conventioneers in full Star Trek officers’ dress uniforms. The woman’s outfit had one interesting addition to it: a bridal veil.

Hardison heard Stewart telling the couple something as gently as he could. “While I’m flattered that you’d ask me to officiate at your wedding, I’m afraid that it wouldn’t be legally binding. I only played a captain on television.”

“In any case,” Marina added with a sly grin, “I believe the tradition is that a captain can only marry people on his ship, and we’d have a hard time finding the Enterprise.”

Hardison stifled a grin as he strolled into the room to find a drink for himself and Parker. Since it backed against where he judged the elevator shaft to be, the bar filled the only wall of the room that wasn’t lined with windows. One of the bartenders came over after a minute and asked for his order.

“You got any orange soda?” Hardison asked. He knew that most places didn’t stock the stuff, but he always had to ask, just in case. To his surprise, the bartender smiled at him and reached for the soda dispenser.

“That sounds like a hell of a good idea,” a familiar voice behind him said. “Can you make that two?”

Hardison turned around and saw Cha0s standing next to him, grinning like a hyperactive shark. “Hey, Hardison. Guess they’ll let anyone into one of these things, huh?”

Hardison put his palm over his eyes. “Aw, hell no. It’s a convention of a hundred and fifty thousand people. Don’t you have somewhere else you should be?”

“But this is where all the cool people are! Present company excepted, of course.”

Hardison looked around for Parker. The evening had just turned sour for him, and he wanted to make sure he collected her before he left. He spotted her moving along the windows on the north wall, her face still pressed against the glass. He knew what she was doing: studying the rooftops and imagining how she’d climb up to them and get around them. With Parker, scaling buildings wasn’t just part of her job as a burglar, it was a passion.

“Aw, hey,” Cha0s said. “You’re not thinking about leaving already, are you? This party’s just getting started.”

Hardison gave him a thin, fake smile. “I just remembered. I got to do that thing, you know, with those people, and it’s really, honestly, stick with me now, somewhere else.”

Cha0s shook his head. “Why do you have to be that way? So defensive. Do I look like I’m here to cause you trouble? I bought my tickets to this event months ago. How about you?”

Hardison fidgeted. He’d picked them up from a scalper earlier that day. If Cha0s was following him, he was playing a long game.

“That’s not the point,” Hardison said, which elicited another grin from Cha0s, who knew he’d been right. “The point is that you’re stripping the glossy finish off this party for me. That’s all.”

“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 to 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?”

“Never came back to the hotel last night,” Parker said. She was on her way into the hall too, although from the rear entrance, nearer the harbor.

Nate didn’t want anyone to see him and Sophie with the rest of the crew, especially not accidentally. As far as Patronus or anyone else in San Diego knew, Sophie was a literary agent and he was her lawyer. Hardison and Parker were Warren Ellis’s handlers, and as long as Eliot wasn’t dressed up as Warren Ellis, he was nobody yet.

That was always the trick with these jobs. It was hard to be able to play more than one role in them. Once the mark knew you as one person, you couldn’t just show up someplace else and introduce yourself with a new name. Well, Nate had seen Sophie play identical twins who were never in the same place at once, but most people couldn’t pull that off.

“You say he ditched you at his Star Trek party?” Eliot said. “That doesn’t sound like him.”

Eliot had found a better place to sleep than the crew’s hotel room in the Horton Grand once again. He was walking into the building through a set of doors about a hundred yards south of Nate and Sophie. He’d shadow them from a wide distance, making sure no one connected him. In many ways, he was Nate’s ace in the hole. If something went wrong, he could send in Eliot, and no one would suspect he was with them until it was too late.

“He said he had the chance to go play some kind of a game,” Parker said. “He’s done that before. Sometimes they do take all night.”

“Not like him to shut off his earpiece the entire night, though,” said Sophie. “The rest of us shut ours off all the time, sure, but he’s the hub. He keeps his around night and day.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to disturb us with screaming about his saving throws,” Eliot said with unconcealed disdain. “I warned him about that the last time he did it. What the hell’s an attack of opportunity anyhow? Wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t care.”

“Hardison’s a big boy,” Nate said, as much to reassure himself as the others. “I’m sure he’ll turn up sooner or later.”

“And if he doesn’t?” said Parker.

“Then we’ll go find him,” Sophie said, an edge of steel in her voice.

“Ain’t going to be easy during an event like this,” Eliot said. “A hundred and fifty thousand people wandering around one spot? That’s the size of a small city of folks who aren’t normally here. Lots of crazy shit can happen while you have that many outsiders in a place.”

“We’ll find him,” said Nate. “But first we have to make this meeting. If Patronus doesn’t sign these contracts before the auction, the whole plan’s shot.”

Nate held the door open for Sophie, and she entered the center. They made their way into the exhibit hall and then toward Patronus’s booth. They’d arrived after the initial morning rush through the doors, but traffic inside the hall was worse than they’d seen it all weekend.

“Where did all these people come from?” Parker said. “I don’t remember this many here yesterday.”

“It’s Saturday, Parker,” Eliot said. “Lots of people in this country still have nine-to-five jobs. They can’t always take off a whole week to wander around here, no matter how geeky the rest of their lives might be.”

“I heard the convention people were telling people with four-day badges to skip Saturday and go to Sea World or the zoo to avoid the crowds,” Sophie said. “It doesn’t seem to have worked.”

“Can we just concentrate on the matter at hand?” Nate said. “Or at least cut down on the chatter so Sophie and I can do our part of the job?”

No one said a word. It was so loud inside the convention center that it was hard for Nate to hear anything, even the voices speaking directly into his ear. The lack of them proved a relief.

“Look,” Nate said as he saw Patronus’s booth come into view. “Parker and Eliot, feel free to go hunting for Hardison as soon as we get the signature. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. And I hope to God you find him passed out with a two-liter bottle of orange soda under one arm and a set of dice in his other hand.”

“Amen,” said Eliot. “All right. Let’s do this.”

Nate and Sophie strolled up to Patronus’s booth. This time Nate carried a briefcase he’d purchased just for this meeting. He’d considered battering it around a bit to keep it from looking new, but he’d decided that he wanted to come across as the kind of attorney not afraid to upgrade his briefcase every now and then. He’d dinged it on the doorway on the way in just so it wouldn’t look exactly as it had at the store last night.

Patronus was chatting with a slim, white-haired gentleman as Nate and Sophie sauntered up. He had to be in his eighties, with swept-back hair, large tinted glasses, and a bushy white mustache. When Nate saw the man, he stopped dead, almost tripping over his own feet, and gawked at him.

“What’s wrong?” Sophie stared at Nate with growing concern. “Is this that much harder than you expected it to be?”

Nate shook his head. He’d done his best to come to terms with the fact that he was entering the convention without Sam at his side. He had a job to do—one that he imagined his son would have been proud of—and he was determined to do it.

“Do you know who that is?” he said. “The guy talking to Patronus?”

Sophie looked back at the man and scrutinized him for a moment. “No. Should I?”

Nate coughed as he tried to recover his composure. “That’s Stan Lee, former editor in chief of Marvel Comics.”

“No way!” Eliot said through the earpiece, unable to restrain himself.

“Who?” said Parker.

“Stan Lee used to run Marvel Comics,” Nate said. “He came up with most of their best-known heroes and stories, including Spider-Man.”

“Oh,” Parker said. “Cool.” Nate could hear a smile in her voice.

“And how does our Mr. Patronus know Stan Lee?” Sophie said.

Although they stood only a dozen feet away, Nate couldn’t make out a word the two men were saying. The background noise from the rest of the convention was just too loud.

Nate stood tall and stretched his shoulders back. “Only one way to find out.”

He strode forward until he was sure that Patronus could see him. The man’s face brightened as soon as he spotted Nate, and he stopped himself in midsentence. “Jeff!” he said. “Jess! So glad you could make it. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all morning.”

Nate and Sophie shook hands with Patronus, matching his grin. “It’s a big day for all of us,” Nate said. “Plus you’ve got the auction too, right?”

“Right!” Patronus swiveled toward the man he’d been talking with and then stopped himself. “Oh, Stan! These are the people I was telling you about. I’m so glad you’re here to meet them.”

Stan turned and stuck out his hand. “Stan Lee,” he said with a wide and easy smile. “Very pleased to meet you.”

Nate shook his hand and then relinquished it to Sophie. “The honor’s all ours, sir,” he said.

Stan chuckled at that. “Lorenzo here tells me you’re going to make one another rich.”

Nate tried a humble shrug. “That’s the end goal, sir. Meanwhile, we’re just hoping to make great comics.”

“Well, good luck to you,” Stan said. “It’s not an easy business. Never has been. But you’ll never have more fun doing anything else.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sophie said with a warm smile. “That’s what we’re hoping.”

“Oh, and if you do strike it rich and you’re looking for writers, don’t forget to give me a call,” Stan said with a grin.

“We’ll do that for sure,” Nate said. He felt just the tiniest pang of guilt for leading someone like Stan Lee on, even about such an innocent thing, but he buried it deep.

“I’ll let you kids get down to business, then.” Stan turned to Patronus. “I’ll see you back here at five for the auction.”

“Thanks again so much, Stan,” Patronus said.

“Anything I can do to help.”

With that, Stan Lee walked off and disappeared into the crowd. Despite how famous he was—especially to the people inside that building—he managed to blend in well, like he belonged with them more than with anyone else in the world. A few noticed him and pointed him out, but to most of the people who moved about the room, he was just another longtime fan enjoying the convention.

“Stan’s agreed to say a few words before the start of the auction,” Patronus said. “With luck, that’ll get even more people to show up here at the designated time, which is vital for this all to work. This isn’t like eBay, after all. I can’t just relist things that don’t sell.”

“Excellent point.” Sophie glanced around. “Is there somewhere we can conduct our business? It should take only a few minutes.”

“Sure thing,” Patronus said. “Let’s adjourn to my office.”

With that, he led them through the building to the back of the hall and through a set of doors that led to a flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs, the wide balcony outside of the hall beckoned to them, and Patronus headed for it. He held a tinted-glass door open for Nate and Sophie, then followed them out into the sunshine.

“I got you,” Eliot said through the earpiece. “I don’t see any of his thugs around, and I don’t think anyone else followed you out here. He’s not leading you into a trap. He just doesn’t want anyone else in his booth to know what he’s doing.”

Nate nodded, just in case Eliot was watching them. He couldn’t respond verbally without tipping off Patronus, of course.

Patronus led them to a round white table with a few chairs around it. A number of such tables dotted the wide expanse of open concrete here on the far side of the hall, but this one stood empty and a ways off from the others. A few people, some of them in costume, wandered about on the wide and long balcony, most of them chatting and smiling with their friends.

At one side, a group of cosplayers dressed up as the full cast of the Avengers faced off against a similar group of people dressed up as the members of the Justice League for some kind of photo shoot. To the other side, an outfit of young men and women dressed in medieval costumes faced off against one another in a combat ring, smacking at one another with foam-covered swords. They sweated and cursed as if they were in a real fight, and even though they were in no real danger, the way they cursed in pain when a padded blade connected with them made it sound real enough.

Nate raised his face to the sun and enjoyed the warmth for a moment. It never really felt like this in Boston. Sure, the summers were just as warm, sometimes much hotter, and you could hear the seagulls crying down by the water, just like here, but it smelled different and felt drier, cleaner, and somehow younger. Sam would have loved it.

“How convenient,” Sophie said as they sat down at the table. “Do you have this reserved?”

Patronus snorted. “Most people who come to this show never get much farther than the exhibit hall or maybe into a few of the halls with the panels of celebrities in them. They don’t take the time to wander around outside and enjoy the open air. They don’t ever see this side of the convention center.”

“Those people are missing out,” Parker said through the earpiece. “The top of the building is really cool.”

“So,” Patronus said as Nate put his briefcase on the table between them. “Let’s see that contract.”

Nate reached into the briefcase, pulled out the papers, and laid them in front of Patronus. The wind whipping in off the harbor fluttered their edges, threatening to lift them up and yank them away. Patronus slapped his hand down on them to keep them down and then set to skimming the text.

Nate had cribbed the language from old contracts he kept on file for such occasions. The agreement essentially gave Patronus a minority ownership in a shell corporation that the crew owned. To secure his shares, he had to put up one million dollars. Since he didn’t have that much cash on hand, he would be putting up the contents of the auction as collateral for his investment.

Nate might have felt bad about selling Patronus shares in a nonexistent comic-book publishing company were it not for the fact that the man had stolen everything that he was offering for those shares. All Nate and the rest of the crew were doing was stealing it back. He thought of Simon Curtiss lying in his hospital bed, still mourning for his wife, and any shred of pity that he felt for Patronus evaporated.

“This all looks good,” Patronus said. “Now, as a shareholder in the company, does that improve my chances of working for us as an artist?” He gave Sophie a wink and a smirk.

She smiled back at him. “You’d be surprised how accommodating editors can be when it’s pointed out just who’s helping sign their paychecks.”

Patronus grinned so hard Nate thought his face might fracture. The man was about to get everything he’d ever wanted, or so he thought. All he had to do was sign on the bottom line.

Nate handed him a pen. Patronus picked it up and scribbled his signature across it, figuratively slitting his own throat.

Nate stuck out his hand for the man to shake and smiled. “A real pleasure doing business with you.”

THIRTY-ONE

“All right,” Nate said after Patronus excused himself to get back to his booth. “We got him.”

The man had practically pranced back into the convention center, leaving Nate and Sophie to enjoy the warm ocean breeze and bask in the contentment of a grift well run. They had him by the legal equivalent of the throat, and he’d been only too happy to put the collar around his neck. All they had to do was collect on his contractual promises on Sunday, and they were done.

“Good job, guys,” Parker said. “But what about Hardison? I’m really starting to get worried about him.”

“He’s still not on the earpieces,” Nate said. “Anyone try his cell phone?”

“It doesn’t pick up,” Eliot said. “Goes straight to voice mail. I left three messages already.”

“That means something’s wrong with his phone,” Sophie said.

“He might have just turned it off,” Parker said with a hopeful note that she couldn’t make sound entirely sincere. “He does that sometimes when he really wants to concentrate.”

“Not during a job,” Nate said. “He knows better than that.”

It was time to admit it. Something was really wrong. The only trouble was that they had no idea what.

“Parker, get back to the Hyatt and see what you can figure out. Take Eliot with you. They might still have security footage from last night. Most hotels have a camera focused on the elevators, if not actually inside them. We might be able to figure out who he left the party with.”

“Sounds good,” said Eliot. “What about you two?”

“Sophie’s going to wander the floor and see if she can find any traces of him here.” He reached out and put his hand in hers. “Maybe you can even poke around Patronus’s booth and see if there’s any connection there.”

“You think Patronus had something to do with it?”

Nate shook his head. “I doubt it. He saw Hardison in our stolen booth while he was pretending to be Warren Ellis’s handler. If he’d been involved in Hardison’s disappearance, he never would have signed that contract. He’d have called the whole deal off.”

“Unless he’s a lot sharper than we think, and he’s playing us,” said Eliot.

Sophie shook her head. “No real chance of that, I don’t think. He’s honestly not that clever, and even if he is, what’s the upside to signing a contract with a fictional publishing company?”

“Fine,” Eliot said. “Parker and I will get on it.”

“I can use my FBI badge,” Parker said, “pretend I’m investigating a kidnapping.”

“Good call,” said Nate.

“And where are you off to?” Eliot said.

“I’m going to check the hotel room and make sure he’s not just sleeping off a long night there. That would be the best possible outcome. After that, I’ll look in on the Field to make sure he isn’t waiting for us there.”

Sophie gave Nate a hard look, and he knew just what she meant.

“I will not stay there and drown my sorrows about him going missing,” he said to her. “I’ll look in and leave a message with the management that we’re looking for him.”

“Nate and I should be back in the convention center at Patronus’s booth in time for the auction,” Sophie said. “That’s at five, and I suspect he’ll be expecting us.”

“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” asked Parker.

“Not without Hardison,” Nate said. “And since he’s the one we’re looking for… well, we’ll have to do this the low-tech way. Shoe leather on pavement.”

“I’m wearing sneakers,” Parker said. “They have artificial soles.”

“But you don’t, Parker,” Sophie said with a small grin. “You’ll do just fine.”

“Oh,” Parker said. “Good.”

Nate looked to Sophie, and she let loose a deep sigh before they both stood up. He knew how she felt. Over the years they’d worked together, the crew had become as tight-knit as any family, and Nate didn’t want to bear the thought of Hardison winding up somewhere either injured or dead.

Still, they had to face that possibility, and not for the first time. Their work had an inherent danger. They scammed vicious cutthroats out of their ill-gotten gains, and that often put them at odds with people who’d think little of killing them in revenge.

Add to this the fact that they operated not only outside the law but often in flagrant violation of it, and it surprised Nate that they hadn’t actually lost anyone yet. In his head, he knew that it might only be a matter of time. They played the percentages well and always did their best to keep the odds in their favor, but a job involved too many variables. Even people as good as they were had to rely a bit on luck, and eventually that would run out, right?

“You’re worried about him,” Sophie said softly as they walked back into the convention center.

“Of course I am,” said Nate. “This is not at all like him. Sure, I mean, he’s Hardison. He’s young and can be brash and impulsive, but honestly, never that irresponsible.”

“We’ll find him.” Sophie said. “We’ve had close calls before, all of us. We always get through it because we work together. That’s the magic part about this little group of ours. Alone, any one of us would have long ago been doomed. Together, we’re unstoppable.”

“You really believe that?” Nate said, knowing that she did. The woman never failed to impress him.

“Of course.” She looked up at him with those big dark eyes. “And you know what our secret weapon is?”

Nate shook his head.

“You.” He started to wave her off, but she pressed on. “It’s not that you come up with the best plans or run a great con. It’s because you’re so damned good at improvising solutions. ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy,’ right? You’re always quoting that to me. Isn’t that Napoleon?”

Nate smiled. “Helmuth von Moltke. He studied Napoleon, but he was chief of staff of the Prussian army, which was part of the Ottoman Empire. He also said, ‘Strategy is a system of expedients.’”

“And that’s just how you treat a con,” Sophie said. “You see it not as a single plan but as a system of options, and you come up with new options on the fly. That’s why we never fail, Nate. Because you always have a plan, even when it looks like you’ve run out of options.”

Nate grimaced. “Here’s hoping I come up with something in time for Hardison.”

Nate rubbed his eyes and shook Sophie’s hand good-bye. He wanted nothing more than to kiss her at that moment, but he knew that they had to stay in character, especially inside the convention center.

“You will, Nate,” Sophie said. “You always do.”

With that, she turned and headed off in the general direction of Patronus’s booth. Nate hoped she was right—and he hoped he wasn’t already too late.

THIRTY-TWO

Sophie wandered around the convention hall for a bit, pretending to be someone who had places to be. If anyone had spotted her on one end of the hall, she would have looked like she was on her way to a meeting. If they’d followed her, though, they would have seen that she never actually got to a meeting but instead, reaching one end of the hall, moved down an aisle and came right back the other way.

It wasn’t easy to move fast in the exhibit hall, especially in the middle of a Saturday. So many people spent their time shuffling from one booth to the next, not caring about who might be in a hurry behind them. Couple that with people trying to get through with things like walkers, wheelchairs, and strollers, and traffic slowed even further. Add in people stopping every thirty feet or so to get pictures of young people dressed in outlandish costumes—Hardison had called them cosplayers—and there were points where no one moved at all.

Sophie wasn’t about to just stand there and wait for the people in front of her to start shambling forward again, doing a slow-motion two-step that made her want to scream. She walked forward with a purpose, saying “pardon me” and “excuse me” in a loud, annoyed voice. She decided that if she was playing a New York agent, she might as well act as rude and demanding as such a person might, particularly if that meant she could get through the crowd at a much more reasonable clip.

After walking just a few aisles like this, though, she knew that the chances of her spotting Hardison were slim, even if she’d been sure he’d been in the exhibit hall. It was like hoping to run into someone at random in Piccadilly Circus on New Year’s Eve. It could happen, sure, but it was ludicrous to think that it would.

She soon gave it up as a bad job and decided to stroll back toward Patronus’s booth. She was certain no one would have been able to follow her on her shortened quest, but she kept her eyes open anyhow, not only for tails but for Hardison as well. She wasn’t prepared to give up hope on him entirely—not yet and maybe not ever.

When she reached Patronus’s booth, Sophie kept herself out of his line of sight. He was so busy chatting with people who wanted to ask him questions about the auction and the pieces in it that he had little chance of spotting her, even by accident. Even if he had, he would have been too engaged to come over and see her, she felt sure.

And even if he managed that, she could tell him that she was just checking out the auction pieces in case she decided to make a bid of her own. That seemed like a natural thing for an agent to do, even more so because Patronus was her client and now her business partner. Why wouldn’t she want to come by and support him and have some of the money go to a great cause at the same time?

Patronus didn’t even glance in her direction, though. He was so caught up being the center of attention—and in a good way, for what Sophie suspected was the first time in his life—that he didn’t look around much. The glory of it all had overwhelmed him.

Sophie wondered just how the man expected to get away with all of this. She knew that a lot of the artists who’d given their artwork to Patronus to sell for them had pinned their hopes on this event as the chance for a big payday. That was a pipe dream, of course, a fantasy based on hope and desperation. If the man hadn’t paid them for all the things he’d sold so far, why would he change now?

Patronus didn’t need to pay those people. He just needed them to stay quiet until the auction was over. Then he’d have their money, and there was little they could do except try to sue him.

The irony was that if those artists had spoken up earlier, they might have been able to scotch the entire auction. No one who paid any attention to the industry—like the big-money collectors Patronus hoped to rope into his auction—would have anything to do with him. He’d be faced with either selling the items for a fraction of their worth or giving them back. He’d never return the artwork, of course, but at least the artists would have prevented him from acquiring nearly so much money out of it.

In the end, the crew’s way would be best. She and the others would take Patronus for everything he stole, and then some, and give it back to the men and women who had actually earned it. She’d talked it over with the rest at the Field. Any extra money they happened to accrue would be donated to the Hero Initiative, anonymously.

Sophie wondered, though, what Patronus must be thinking now. She and Nate had delivered his dream to him, but if he’d stopped to think about it, he’d have realized how horribly this might blow up in his face. If he kept up his Patronus identity and people discovered that he’d used money stolen from icons of the industry they loved to help set up a new publishing company, they’d tear him to pieces in the court of public opinion.

Perhaps he thought he’d claim it was all a misunderstanding and try to lie his way through it. Or maybe he planned to work for the fictional company under a pen name. He’d probably tell Nate and Sophie—or Jeff and Jess—that he wanted to establish his credentials as an artist without using any of the fame that he’d accumulated for running such a successful auction. Then, once his deception was made public, he’d quietly hide behind the new name. That way, he could start over in the industry he really did seem to care about, once again.

That was the most ironic thing about Patronus, of course. He could have made more money and been a better thief in another industry, but he loved comic books so much that he’d decided to rip off some of the most beloved figures in the business. Sophie found the illogic of it striking.

She’d seen this happen before, and the people who committed these kinds of crimes always had a clever rationale. They often claimed they didn’t have any better options. They knew the industry they cared about better than any other and thought this meant they were in a unique position to exploit it. Some part of them maybe believed that it would all work out in the end and they’d be lionized for their successes, which they’d spin from crimes into accomplishments.

These people were, without exception, amateurs. They let their emotions control their decisions, and they often exposed themselves personally in ways they didn’t need to, but that they found irresistible. That left them vulnerable to true professionals like Sophie and the rest of the crew.

Sophie wandered around Patronus’s booth and examined the artwork on display. While she didn’t have the same passion for comic-book art as Hardison, she could appreciate the beauty of it and the craft that went into its creation. She’d made a fortune committing crimes in the world of fine art, which is one reason she could play the part of Jess Drew, New York art agent, so well, and while comic-book illustrations weren’t in the same class, she recognized their artistry nonetheless.

Patronus had some truly stunning pieces on display. To figure out which ones would be the most valued, though, Sophie studied not the artwork but the people drooling over the individual pieces. She didn’t know Kirby from Kane, or any of the other names Hardison tossed around so casually, but she could spot which pieces the fans were crowding around—and which crowds seemed to have the most money to spend.

She followed in their wake, like a shark swimming among schools of guppies, watching where they fed. As she examined some of the most popular pieces, though, something odd and horrifying struck her. The pieces she was looking at were fake.

She peered at them each again, taking a closer look. Sure enough, the paper stock on which the items in front of her had been made was too new. It hadn’t yellowed a bit or cracked at the edges, although some of that could be explained if the owners had been experts in the preservation of such pieces. When she’d seen the pieces before, though, on Thursday, she’d noticed that many of them had shown signs of age and wear, signs that no longer existed. She was sure if she could get close enough to examine them with a jeweler’s loupe, she’d discover that the paper had been manufactured and bleached using modern methods not available when the pieces in question had been created.

Sophie turned away from the booth and headed for the convention center’s lobby. She didn’t want Patronus or anyone working for him to hear what she had to say.

“Something’s very wrong here,” she said into her earpiece. “Nate?”

“Yeah, Sophie?”

“The pieces on display here in Patronus’s booth? They’re forgeries.”

Nate didn’t say a word for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“I know a forgery when I see one,” Sophie said. “These aren’t even all that good. I mean, they’re good enough that most people wouldn’t notice when staring at them in a glass display case, but they won’t stand up to close scrutiny.”

“That’s damned odd,” Nate said. “We know he has the originals, right? So what’s his game here?”

“Maybe he wants to sell them twice?” said Parker. The tone in her voice told Sophie that even she didn’t believe that to be true. “He was an art forger to begin with, after all.”

“If that was the case, he could just sell them privately, over and over,” Sophie said. “Why risk someone discovering that here? Many of the collectors I’ve seen wandering his booth seem to know what they’re doing. As soon as they get their hands on the actual pieces, they’ll know that they’ve purchased fakes.”

“Unless he doesn’t plan to ever hand them over,” Eliot said.

Sophie nodded. Just as she was about to leave the hall, she turned around and looked back at Patronus’s booth, the glass and silver cabinets sparkling under the spotlights focused on them from above. The burly men who acted as the booth’s security stood there stolid and passive, watching the crowd mill in and out of the area. If anyone stayed focused on a piece for too long, one of them would move in and loom over them until they moved on, made uncomfortable by the large man’s presence.

As Sophie watched this happen, Patronus came over to chat up one of the people the guard had shooed away by his mere presence. Now that the woman in question wasn’t staring too hard at the artwork, he was happy to come over and chat with her about the work for sale. He wanted them looking, sure, but not too close, and he wanted them to come back for the auction.

“He’s working too hard for him to be planning anything before the auction,” Sophie said. “I’ll bet if I came over and asked him about the forgeries, he’d claim that he’d installed them as a security measure, to make sure the convention staff didn’t walk off with anything in the middle of the night.”

“It’s a good cover story,” Nate said. “If he’s that clever. I’m still not sold on that.”

“They weren’t forgeries before, though, Nate,” Sophie said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Now, that is odd,” said Nate. “Maybe he wanted to show the goods to the top collectors early in the show. You know, the people who could spot the fakes easy. Give them a private preview even, make them feel special.”

“Right,” said Sophie. “And then he moves them out of here last night and replaces them with the fakes. It’s simple enough.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble to go to,” said Parker.

“Unless,” Nate said, “he doesn’t think he’s going to get caught.”

“But how’s that going to work?” Eliot said. “He’s got to hand over the goods after the auction, right?”

“Not until the next day,” said Sophie. “A lot of things can happen to a valuable piece of artwork between auction and delivery.”

“Right,” said Nate. “A lot. We need to find those originals if we can.”

“What about Hardison?” said Parker.

“He’s first priority, of course,” Nate said. “We shouldn’t have to worry about the originals until after the auction. Find Hardison first, then find that artwork.”

THIRTY-THREE

Parker and Eliot strode into the Hyatt and walked straight up to the front desk. There was a line of people checking in, but they cut right past it. Parker fished out her false badge and waved it at the manager—a tall Asian woman—who came hustling over.

“Special Agent Hagen with the FBI,” Parker said. She flashed her identification at the manager, whose name tag read Grace, then flipped it closed and slipped it back into her pocket in a polished move. She gestured toward Eliot. “This is Special Agent Fontane. We’ve had a report of a kidnapping here in the hotel last night, and we’d like to review your security tapes.”

“Of course,” the manager said. She did a double take, glancing at the way Parker and Eliot were dressed. “Pardon me for saying, but you don’t look like FBI agents.”

Eliot put a hand on the counter. “We’re under deep cover at the convention, ma’am, in a top-secret operation. They called us in on this assignment because we were the closest agents in the field, and time is of the essence.” He gave her a grim smile. “I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course,” Grace said again, letting her eyes roam over Eliot. His long hair and scruffy whiskers might not scream FBI agent, but she seemed to like them despite that.

Parker repressed an urge to roll her eyes at the woman. Instead, she knocked Eliot’s hand off the counter, getting the woman’s attention. “We need to see those surveillance tapes right away, ma’am. Please.”

Surprised, Grace collected herself and gave Parker a sharp, efficient nod. “Of course,” she said, moving off to the right behind the counter. “Right this way.”

She opened an access door for Parker and Eliot and allowed them behind the counter. From there, she led them into a back-office area. Soon they stood in at the doorway of a brightly lit office without any windows. Instead, one wall of the room was lined with a dozen flat-screen monitors that rotated among a number of views throughout the hotel and its environs at regular intervals.

A man in a security officer’s uniform—navy slacks, blue shirt with navy epaulets, and an unimpressive silver badge for a name tag—sat up from where he’d been slouching in front of the monitors. He brushed crumbs from the front of his shirt. He struck Parker as an athlete who had once taken his job and his fitness seriously but had become bored with maintaining both.

“Hello, Walt,” Grace said in a hostile tone. “These people need your help.”

“What’s up?” he said, suddenly fully alert.

Parker couldn’t tell if he was more nervous about seeing her and Eliot or about having Grace pop into the room unannounced. She suspected the night shift got most of the action around here, especially during a convention as large as this. Things must generally be dull enough during the day that a man could learn to slack off to the point that the manager didn’t care much for him anymore. She supposed it didn’t matter, as long as she could get what she needed.

“FBI,” Parker said. “We need to see your surveillance tapes of the Top of the Hyatt last night.”

“What happened?” The man’s curiosity was up now.

“We have a report of a kidnapping of an African American male, tall, thin, midtwenties,” Eliot said, his voice far more clipped and efficient than Parker could pull off without concentrating. She’d played Agent Hagen before, several times, but usually with Hardison as her partner, Agent Thomas. This made her miss him more than ever.

“He was last seen in the Top of the Hyatt about eleven last night,” Parker said.

Walt reached for the keyboard and mouse in front of him and brought up footage from a black-and-white camera on the monitor in front of him. The movements on the screen were choppy and fuzzy, but it showed the ticket taker in the Star Trek uniform standing in front of the entrance to the elevator that led to the Top of the Hyatt. The camera had been placed over his shoulder at the elevator doors, which meant that they could see the faces of anyone leaving the elevator.

“Hold on,” Walt said. “This is the proper feed, all right. We just need to scan through it then until we find your man. Assuming you have your details correct.”

“We do,” Parker said. Her tone dared the man to contradict her. The look on his face told her he wouldn’t.

Without a word, Walt moved through the images the camera had recorded. The fact that last night’s event had been an exclusive party with high-priced tickets worked in their favor. Parker suspected that on most nights there would have been a lot more traffic in and out of the high-rise bar, but yesterday’s guests were well-dressed fans, including a number in full-on Star Trek costumes.

Most of those costumes looked like they belonged on the cast of the TV show, as Hardison had described it to her. When she’d confessed to never having seen it, he’d sworn that he would introduce her to it once they got back home, but he’d yet to have a chance to make good on that promise. One of the costumed attendees was a tall black man with a high hairline that framed prominent ridges on his forehead.

“That your guy?” Walt said.

“I think we’d have mentioned the fact he was a Klingon,” Eliot said.

Parker shot him a look. “You know this stuff?” she said.

Eliot scowled. “It’s hard to avoid it. Especially with Hardison around. Honestly.”

Walt moved on until Parker spotted Hardison strolling out of the elevator, a wide, happy grin plastered across his handsome face. “That’s him!” she said. “Hold it right there.”

Walt froze the image. “If you say so,” he said. “That’s when he entered the place, though, not when he left it.” He peered closer at the monitor, then glanced back at Parker with suspicious eyes. “That woman with him looks awfully familiar.”

Parker looked closer and saw why. It was her. She opened her mouth to explain, but nothing came out. She looked to Grace, who folded her arms across her chest as she returned Parker’s gaze.

Eliot came to her rescue. “This is an undercover operation, like we said. Do either of you have a security clearance?”

He gave both Grace and Walt a hard stare. They both recoiled a bit and shook their heads.

“No?” Eliot said. “Then I’m afraid we’ve already told you too much. I’m going to rely on your sense of patriotism to keep a tight lid on our investigation. Loose lips about this could blow months of work.”

Grace and Walt exchanged glances. Parker could see that Walt had swallowed the story. As a security guard on the day shift, he was thrilled to have something so important to work on, and he channeled it into being dead serious. That sold Grace on the story as well. She gave Walt an emphatic nod.

“All right,” Walt said, returning to the recording. “We’ll help you find your man.”

After a few more minutes, Parker started to wonder if Hardison had left the Top of the Hyatt by some means other than the elevator. She remembered the stairwell that plunged down at the far end of the room, in front of the windows that looked out over the harbor. Had he somehow sneaked out that way?

But she’d been standing on top of that stairwell for many long minutes. As engrossed as she’d been with studying the rooftops below, she couldn’t imagine that he’d have been able to slip by her that way. Also, he’d told her over the earpiece that he was leaving. If he’d been that close to her, he’d have told her in person, right?

Maybe there had been another way off the floor that she’d missed. If this didn’t work out, she’d have to take Eliot back upstairs to poke around and be sure. The thought struck her that maybe Hardison had never left the bar but maybe been stuffed into a closet up there.

Then she spotted the back of his head on the monitor. “That’s him!” She stabbed her finger at the image on the screen.

Walt froze the playback. It was Hardison all right. She’d know the shape of him anywhere.

Better yet, there was someone with him. It looked like a man, shorter with dark hair, but Parker didn’t recognize him from the back.

“Can’t you turn the image around?” Eliot said. “Is there a camera inside the elevator? We need to see that man’s face.”

“No,” Walt said. “This is the only camera we have in that area. But wait for it.”

Parker narrowed her eyes at the security guard and saw that he was smiling. He pressed the button on his mouse, and the images on the screen started rolling forward again.

“People enter the elevator with their back to the camera, sure,” Walt said. “But almost all of them turn around to face the doors before they close.”

Parker nodded at that and leaned over Walt’s shoulder to stare at the monitor with unblinking blue eyes. Hardison entered the elevator with the other man right behind him. Hardison turned around then, just like Walt had said he would. The other man didn’t, though. He just kept talking to Hardison, who gave him an uneasy smile.

“Come on,” Parker said, unaware that she was speaking out loud. “Just turn around, would you? Come on!”

At the last possible instant, the man with Hardison did spin on his heel and look back through the doors. He looked up like he knew where the camera was too, and all but winked at it.

Parker recognized him in an instant.

“Cha0s,” she said, her voice dripping with venom.

Next to her, Eliot nodded in agreement. “Gotcha.”

THIRTY-FOUR

“So it’s Cha0s?” Nate said over the earpiece as Eliot and Parker walked back to the convention center.

“No doubt about it,” said Eliot. “We caught him cold.”

He wanted to punch something, hard. No, not something—someone: Cha0s. And now he had an excellent reason.

The security chief had been smart enough to not ask any questions about what he and Parker had been after, and the hotel manager had been all too helpful after Eliot had switched from giving her hard glares to warm smiles. People responded to different stimuli in different ways. Just like in a fight, you had to know what pressure points worked best for each individual and then push them in just the right sequence to make the most efficient job of it.

Eliot had never liked Cha0s. He didn’t like hackers in general, people who didn’t do a damn thing for the world but manipulate numbers on their little machines. Guys like himself had to concern themselves with the real word, not the virtual one, the place where people actually breathed and bled, lived and died. Playing around with toys just got in the way.

He’d learned to make an exception for Hardison. The kid was one of the smartest people he’d ever met, maybe too smart for his own good, but he really was just a kid, too young to know better most of the time. Still, he had a proven capability of pushing himself outside of his comfort zone, of taking on new tasks and new challenges in new ways, not just the ways that would have been the easiest or made him the most comfortable, and Eliot respected that.

Cha0s was like the flip side of Hardison, a smarmy, arrogant little bastard who wore his personality flaws like a flapping flag, taking pride in them rather than doing a damn thing to correct them. Eliot had several ideas about how he could apply a few corrective measures to the punk that would force him to figure out how to live without a computer for a few months. It was damned hard to type with ten broken fingers and a pair of fractured arms, after all.

“We should have suspected he’d be trouble the moment we saw him,” Sophie said. “He always is.”

“It was a natural enough thing to see a guy like him here,” Nate said. “We didn’t have any reason to think he’d be involved till now. Cha0s is a lot of things, but he’s first and foremost lazy and greedy. He wouldn’t go after Hardison out of sport, would he?”

“Maybe he would,” said Parker. Eliot knew she was as upset about this as anyone, but she’d managed to hold it together like a marine. He’d never seen her show much emotion about anything, of course, which was the main reason why she was so weird. Oddly, that made her easier to read than most people. When Parker showed an emotion, you knew it had to be so intense that it had knocked down all the barriers she had mounted around her, overwhelming them.

Those feelings were as honest as anything Eliot had ever seen. He’d kept an eye on her since they’d discovered Hardison was missing that morning. She’d not cracked yet, although she’d come close a good few times. He worried for whoever might be in the way when she finally let loose.

He hoped it would be Cha0s.

“Any idea where we can find this bastard?” Eliot said. “Searching for him in this city this week is like looking for a needle-neck in a geek-stack.”

“Really?” Parker said, raising an eyebrow at his simile.

“I’m upset,” he said, flat out. Eliot didn’t care for concealing his feelings unless he was on the job. He thought of himself as a simple man who knew what he wanted out of life, and he worked hard to get it. When letting the people around him see what he was after helped him achieve those goals, he didn’t mind pulling back the curtain.

“It’s a challenge, for sure,” said Sophie, “but maybe we can figure it out if we apply ourselves a bit.”

“Sure we can,” Parker said with a smile. “It’s easy.”

“To find that punk here?” Eliot shook his head. “There’s no better place for him to blend in.”

“True. It would be hard.” Parker fished something out of her pocket, a business card printed with green ink on a glossy black background. She flashed it at Eliot. “But he gave me his number.”

Eliot’s scowl faded, and he picked up Parker and spun her around on the sidewalk between the Marriott—which they had passed on the way back from the Hyatt—and the convention center. He put her down, and they grinned at each other.

“I did good to keep this, didn’t I?” she said.

“You did good, Parker,” Sophie said.

“So should I give him a call?” Parker said. “Won’t that just let him know that I know he had something to do with Hardison disappearing?”

“Maybe not,” Nate said. “He was at the party with you last night, right? It’s not too crazy for him to think you spotted him chatting with Hardison.”

“True,” Sophie said. “Call him and just ask nonchalantly whether he knows what Hardison got up to last night. You can pretend that you’re angry with him for ditching you.”

“Cha0s didn’t ditch me.”

“No, Hardison.”

“Hardison didn’t ditch me either.”

“You just need to pretend, Parker.”

“Wait.” Parker hesitated and frowned. “Did he? He did, didn’t he? Hardison ditched me. Now I am mad at him.”

“Better yet,” said Nate. “Now you don’t have to pretend. Just call the man and tell him you’re looking for Hardison and angry that you can’t find him.”

“You think he’s going to just tell me where he is?”

“Of course not,” said Sophie. “He’ll lie through his scruffy little beard about it. But that’s okay. Lead off with the fact that Hardison stood you up for lunch and you’re starving. That will give him an in.”

“An in for what?”

“He’ll ask you to lunch. Then we have him.”

“Why would he do that again?” Parker’s tone told Eliot that she knew she was missing something, but she just didn’t know what.

He patted her on the shoulder. “Just trust Sophie on this one,” he said. “She knows what she’s talking about. Cha0s gave you that card because he wants to spend some time with you. Make it look like he can do that, and he’ll come running right to us.”

Parker’s face lit up. “Got it!”

She pulled out her phone and dialed the number on the card. It rang three times, which Eliot could hear broadcast through her earpiece. Then Cha0s answered.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Cha0s,” Parker said, putting on a sweet voice. “I wonder if you might know where Hardison is. I’m supposed to be having lunch with him, and he stood me up.”

“Didn’t he come back to your hotel last night?”

Eliot could almost hear the man laughing. It made him want to reach through the phone and strangle him right there.

“He didn’t,” Parker said, sounding disappointed. “I guess he found something better to do.”

“What makes you think I might know where he is?” Cha0s asked.

“He’s playing it coy, Parker,” Sophie said through the earpiece. “You do the same. Don’t accuse him of anything, or you’ll frighten him off. Let him come to you.”

“Didn’t I see the two of you chatting at the Star Trek party last night?” Parker said. “He said something about going off to play a game. I just figured he wound up with you.”

Cha0s cleared his throat. “I was there, yeah, and we did leave together, but I don’t know where he went after that. Said he had to meet up with some people to play Fiasco at the Wyndham, or something like that.”

“Really?” Parker said. “Bummer.”

Eliot mimed rubbing his stomach to remind Parker to mention lunch again. She made an O with her mouth in surprise and nodded.

“I’m getting too hungry to wait for him anymore,” she said. “Guess I’m on my own.”

“Well, hey,” Cha0s said, his voice becoming what Eliot was sure he thought was smooth. “I haven’t had lunch yet myself. What do you say I take you out instead?”

Parker made a face at Eliot. The thought of meeting Cha0s for a date repelled her. Eliot gave her a what-else-you-going-to-do shrug.

“My treat,” said Cha0s.

Parker forced a smile onto her face. “All right,” she said. “Sounds great. I’m just outside the convention center now. Where do you want to meet?”

“How about near the boffer circle?” Cha0s said. “I’ve been practicing that for a bit and just bought myself a whole new rig. You can watch me strut my stuff.”

Parker gave Eliot a crazed look of helplessness. “Boffer?” she said to Cha0s. “Um, I’m not sure I’m familiar with that.”

“It’s the mock-combat arena located on the balcony on the back side of the convention center,” Cha0s said. “Over near the marina. You know, the guys with the foam-wrapped swords?”

“I know where that is,” Nate said to Parker. “Tell him you’ll meet him there in ten minutes.”

“Right,” Parker said. “Got it. I’ll see you there in ten minutes?”

“Sounds great,” Cha0s said. “It’s a date!”

Parker ended the call. “Ew, ew, ew!” she said. “I want to wash off my phone. No, I want to disinfect it. No, I want to throw it into the ocean.”

“When we’re done,” Nate said. “You might need that until then.”

“Great work, Parker,” Sophie said. “You reeled him in well. You could have a future in that sort of work.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Parker said. “For Hardison, I’ll do it, but—ew!”

THIRTY-FIVE

Cha0s was standing by the side of the ring when Parker strolled up to join him. He wore a long white tabard with a massive red cross on it over his T-shirt and shorts, and he hefted a long padded sword nearly as tall as he was in one hand. He had a padded shield bound to his other arm.

Eliot had taken the long way around and come up behind Cha0s, getting into place on the stairwell below the boffer circle, which led down from the balcony to the marina. He surveyed the scene from the next landing down, taking care to not let Cha0s see him. That wasn’t too difficult, as the man had his attention focused on a similarly dressed man coming at him hard with a padded sword of his own.

Eliot watched Cha0s fight. Despite the inherent silliness of the weaponry, he handled it well. He managed to block his opponent’s attacks with relative ease, either on his shield or with his blade, while he waited for an opening. When it appeared, he stabbed forward lightning fast, searching for his foe’s body with the tip of his padded blade.

Cha0s tagged his foe on his left arm, and the man cried out, dropped his shield, and stuck his arm behind his back. Despite that, he continued to fight. Cha0s circled around to the man’s left, though, using the fake injury to his advantage.

Soon his opponent started to grow tired. Rather than let Cha0s wear him down more, he launched into a last, desperate attempt to break through Cha0s’s defenses. Cha0s took a step back as the man came at him, and when his lunge overbalanced him, Cha0s slapped down with his blade, catching the man across his shoulder with a loud smack.

The man cried out in frustration, then danced backward, a wide grin on his face. “Good work,” he said. “I’m dead.”

“Yes,” Cha0s said with a triumphant smirk. “Yes, you are.”

Parker, who had been watching from the sidelines, stepped up then. “That looked like fun!” she said. “You did great!”

“I think these guys are humoring me,” Cha0s said. “After all, I did just drop a lot of money on top-line equipment at their booth.”

“No way, man,” the opponent said as he put his gear back on a rack of equipment close to where Eliot was hiding on the stairs, peeking at them over the balcony’s railing every now and then. “You got some mad skills there. You’ve been training with someone, right? I can always tell.”

“I do a little sparring back home,” Cha0s said with the closest thing to a humble smile he could manage. He stood there in his gear, not quite ready to give up his moment of victory.

“You looked great,” Parker said. “So, where’s Hardison?”

Eliot winced. He’d hoped that she’d be able to resist asking Cha0s that question for a few minutes longer. If she’d followed the plan, she might have been able to finesse the information out of him, or at least get him into a more private place where Eliot could lean on him without fear of interruption. Out here in the open with lots of witnesses about, their options were far more limited.

“I told you,” Cha0s said. “I haven’t seen him since last night.” His defensive tone told Eliot that Parker had already blown the finesse angle.

“You left the party with him,” Parker said. “I saw the recording from the security camera.”

Cha0s hesitated. “Yes, you’re right. I did. But that was the last time I saw him: in the elevator. He got off to play a game with some guys on one floor or another, and I kept going down.”

“You didn’t want to join him for this game?”

“It was late. I was tired. I flew in here from Singapore. I’m still jet-lagged all to hell.”

“You’re lying,” Parker said. She stepped closer to him, a grim look on his face.

“Hey,” Cha0s said. “I know you’re a tough girl—I like that about you, really—but you can’t intimidate me.” He rested his arm on the pommel of his padded sword.

Parker punched at him, but he raised his shield. “Forget it, Parker,” he said. “You’re not going to get anything more out of me. Not like that.” He leered at her. “Now, maybe if you’d like to come back to my hotel room, we might be able to work out an accommodation.”

“Ew!” she said.

Cha0s shrugged. “If that’s how you’re going to be, then I don’t know what I can do to help you. It’s too damn bad about Hardison, though. He was a hell of a hacker.”

“You tell me what you’ve done with him right now,” Parker said. “Or else.”

“Or else what?” Cha0s said. “You going to take me down?”

The man’s mocking tone grated so much on Eliot’s ears that he couldn’t take it anymore. He started up the stairs, picking up a padded sword from the rack as he passed it by. He tested its weight as he marched toward Cha0s, who had his back to him. Its heft and balance surprised him. He hadn’t expected it to be such a well-made weapon.

Parker gave Cha0s a vicious grin. “I could,” she said, “but I don’t have to. That’s his job.”

She nodded over Cha0s’s shoulder, and the man turned around to see Eliot stalking up behind him.

“Oh, hey, wait,” he said. “No one said anything about Spencer being here.”

“Where’s Hardison?” Eliot said. He hefted the sword in front of him, then swung it around, getting a feel for it.

“Like I just got finished telling her,” Cha0s said, gesturing toward Parker, “I don’t know. Last I saw him was last night. He could be anywhere by now.”

“Hey,” Cha0s’s former opponent said. “He looks like he’s pretty good! We got another challenger!”

Cha0s looked a little ill at the thought of taking on Eliot. For his part, Eliot ignored the guy in charge of the padded weapons. He wasn’t here to humiliate Cha0s, although he would take care of that if he needed to. He just wanted to find Hardison.

“Who has him?” Eliot said.

That set off a light in Cha0s’s eyes, and Eliot knew he’d struck a nerve. The bastard had sold Hardison out to someone, that was for sure. Now Eliot just needed to figure out who.

“Tell me now, or I’ll take you apart with this thing.” Eliot waved the padded sword in front of him.

“You really think you know how to handle a boffer sword?” Cha0s said. “I’m the king of the boffers! Just ask any of these people.”

Eliot glanced around and saw that some of the people who’d been lounging in chairs at nearby tables had gotten up to see what was going on inside the combat circle. None of them appeared hostile, although being surrounded never made Eliot comfortable.

“You want to take me on like that, you go right ahead,” Cha0s said, his voice seething with bravado. “No one beats me at this. No one here, and especially not some overmuscled goon like you.”

“Yeah!” the boffer weapons master said, pumping his fist in the air. “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

The small crowd forming in a circle around the ring joined in the cheer. “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Cha0s flung his arms wide, the shield still on one of them, his sword in his other hand. “You want a piece of this? Bring it on!”

Eliot, who’d been dead serious up until this point, cracked a smile. “All right,” he said, hefting his borrowed sword to one side. “Let’s do this.”

The weapons master cheered, and the crowd joined in with him. Cha0s turned and raised his weapon to the people surrounding them, and the roar grew louder.

“You want some?” Cha0s said as he turned toward Eliot. “Come and get it!”

“Why is it that men reduce themselves to one-liners and bad movie quotes whenever they get into a fight?” said Parker. “Is there some kind of script they’re supposed to follow when they get to this point? Or does the raging testosterone just shut down their higher brain functions?”

“That’s an excellent question, Parker,” Sophie said through the earpiece. “Eliot? You’re a fighting kind of guy. What do you have to say about that?”

Eliot snarled at Cha0s, ignoring the women. He held his padded sword before himself in his right hand, in the en garde position, and he beckoned Cha0s toward him with his left.

Cha0s gave him a solemn nod, then screwed his face up into a mask of rage. He let loose with a wild scream and charged straight at Eliot, his sword held high over his head.

Eliot stepped forward as Cha0s came at him, getting underneath the reach of the padded blade. Before Cha0s could correct for his error, Eliot grabbed the hacker by the wrist of his sword hand and yanked him forward. With Cha0s off balance and overextended, Eliot punched him in the jaw with the unpadded pommel of his boffer sword and sent the skinny man sprawling to the ground, blood spurting from his mouth.

“Hey!” the weapons master said. “You can’t do that. It’s a foul!”

Eliot ignored him. “This might be a game to you, but it ain’t to me,” he said to Cha0s. “You tell me where Hardison is, or I’m going to start plucking pieces off of you in front of all these people.”

Cha0s wiped his mouth with the back of his sword hand and then looked down at the blood smeared across it. He scrambled to his feet.

“It’s not a game,” the hacker said. “It’s a sport. A martial art.”

Eliot couldn’t help but snicker at that. Boxing was a sport. Krav maga was a martial art. This was grown men playing with toys.

“You think that’s funny?” Cha0s said. “You couldn’t beat me at this on your best day.”

Eliot snorted and looked at his sword. “My best day wouldn’t involve goofing around with plastic weapons, I’ll tell you that.”

“Hey, man,” the weapons master said. “That’s just not cool. Give me back my gear and get the hell out of here.” The crowd murmured in agreement.

Cha0s flushed red at Eliot’s insult. “No,” he said. “I tell you what. You beat me in a match of this—by the rules, fair and square—and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Eliot considered the offer. It would be simpler to just haul Cha0s down the stairs to the docks and dunk him in the bay until he spilled his guts, but it was the middle of the day with lots of witnesses around. Just about every one of them had a camera or a cell phone with a camera, and Eliot just didn’t need that kind of notoriety. It was one thing to take down some punk with a God complex and a foam sword. It was something else entirely to be recorded trying to drown him. There were just too many ways it could go wrong.

“All right,” he said. “You’re on.”

THIRTY-SIX

Cha0s raised his sword in front of him, doing his level best to look like a vicious veteran warrior out of a fantasy film. Even bloodied as he was, he couldn’t pull it off. Instead of intimidating Eliot, his antics only made him want to laugh.

“You really think this is going to work?” Sophie said. “Can we trust anything the man says?”

“Of course not,” said Nate. “We’re going to need some more leverage over him than this.”

“He keeps glancing over at a pair of huge bags behind the weapons rack,” Parker said. “I’m guessing they must belong to him. Eliot, can you keep him occupied while I go take a peek inside them?”

“With pleasure,” Eliot said, a nasty smile spreading across his face.

“Oh, no,” Cha0s said, thinking Eliot was speaking to him. “The pleasure will be all mine.”

Eliot stood his ground and beckoned for Cha0s to come at him again, but the weapons master stepped between them. “I think it’s awesome you two dudes want to work out your issues in the boffer ring,” he said as he spread his arms wide, holding one palm toward each of them. “Seeing as how the newbie here doesn’t know the rules, though, maybe we should go over them quick?”

Eliot smirked at Cha0s. “No hitting in the head or groin. Tagging a limb means that limb’s out of use. Tag someone in the torso and he’d dead.” He glared at the weapons master. “Close enough?”

The man shrugged. “Good by me.”

“What do I get if I win?” Cha0s said.

“Huh?” Eliot stared at him as if he was the slowest kid in lowest class.

“If you beat me, I tell you about Hardison,” Cha0s said. “What do I get if I beat you?”

Eliot laughed. “That question makes no sense.”

The weapons master spotted Cha0s fuming over this and interrupted before the hacker lost his temper again. “What do you want?”

Cha0s glanced around until his eyes fell on Parker, who stood by the weapons rack, looking over the giant bags of loot Cha0s had hauled out of the exhibit hall. She felt him staring at her and looked up. She flashed him a smile and a little wave.

“Parker,” Cha0s said. “I beat you, she goes and has lunch with me, wherever I want, and you pay.”

“Fine,” Eliot said. “You might as well toss a mansion and a yacht on top of that wish list of yours because you’re never going to see any of it.”

Cha0s set his jaw. “We’ll see about that. This will be a fair fight. Anyone cheats, and they lose automatically.”

Eliot considered this for a moment. If he made an error—if he broke some arcane or obscure rule he didn’t even know about—he’d be letting the man walk off with Parker. Even worse, he’d have to fight conservatively and stretch the bout far longer than he would have liked, as he needed to give Parker a solid chance to get a look inside Cha0s’s shopping bags. Still, there didn’t seem to be a good way out of it.

“All right,” he said. “Done.”

The weapons master looked to Cha0s for confirmation and got it with a silent nod. Eliot figured the man must finally be serious about something. He’d shut his trap rather than keeping it running.

Eliot wondered how much trouble he’d set himself up for. Normally he wouldn’t worry about an adversary like Cha0s. He could snap the guy into pieces like a toothpick and not even break a sweat. As it was, he’d have to be wary.

He decided to stick with his strategy of getting Cha0s as angry as he could. Cha0s was a smart guy—too smart, maybe—but he had a temper. Angry people—even really clever ones—made dumb decisions.

“Sounds good,” the weapons master said. “Ready?”

Cha0s gave him an eager, intense nod. Eliot failed to stifle a yawn, then nodded too.

Instead of beckoning Cha0s to come at him, Eliot ignored him. He stood where he was, looking bored, letting the tip of his padded sword rest on the ground. He took a deep breath and then cracked his neck.

“You’re not fooling me,” Cha0s said, shaking his head. “You think I’ll just charge in again and you can pop me quick before I even see it coming. Not going to happen.”

Eliot shrugged. “I got all day here, punk. You can bring me anything you think you got.”

Cha0s stared at Eliot for a long moment, sizing him up. Then he started forward, his sword held before him, its tip pointed straight at Eliot’s chest. He moved closer and closer, still not daring to take a swing.

Eliot let the hacker get as close as he wanted to—closer even. Once he got within reach of Eliot, to the point where he should have been able to just reach out and touch him with his sword, he hesitated. Eliot noticed then that Cha0s’s sword was trembling.

He smiled, and Cha0s jumped back, fearful that Eliot was about to make his move. When Eliot remained where he was, the crowd of onlookers chuckled at Cha0s’s reaction. The hacker blushed with embarrassment and gritted his teeth, then lunged forward, fast.

Still, Eliot saw his move coming from a mile way. Cha0s might not have been bad for a boffer swordsman, but Eliot suspected that this was a low bar. The man telegraphed his moves from so far away that Eliot felt like he had time to tap out a reply in Morse code on his chest.

Eliot parried the blow with ease and flung Cha0s back hard on his heels. He could have pressed his advantage and stabbed the hacker in the stomach with a quick riposte, but he didn’t want to end the bout that fast. He could see Parker skulking about behind Cha0s, and she still hadn’t had a chance to look into either one of the bags. She glanced up at him and frowned in frustration.

“I can’t just start pawing through his bags,” Parker said. “Even if he doesn’t notice me, someone else will.”

“We got that covered, Parker,” Nate said. “You see that railing off to your left?”

Parker looked around, spotted an aluminum railing on the western edge of the balcony, and nodded. “Got it.”

“Just take the bags and drop them over that, one at a time.”

“Isn’t that going to make a horrible mess?”

“Maybe,” Nate said. “But Sophie and I are down below you. We’ll catch them and let you know what’s in them.”

“Sounds good,” Parker said.

“Just be quick about it,” Eliot said. “I’m starting to get bored here.” He stared into Cha0s’s eyes as he said it, making sure the man would think the words were intended for him.

“Let’s see what we can do about that,” Cha0s said in as menacing a tone as he could manage.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Eliot had been in far more fights than he could count, with weapons of all kinds. He’d taken out the Butcher of Kiev with a frying pan and a chopped lemon. Nothing Cha0s could bring to the fight could scare him. Still, it wouldn’t stop the man from trying. He’d been riding high, having impressed the crowd with his skills, right up until Eliot had shown up. He wasn’t about to just walk away from that.

Of course, the weapons master had purposely allowed Cha0s to win. He’d just sold the man hundreds of dollars’ worth of new gear, Eliot figured. The least he could do was make the hacker feel good about his purchase.

Eliot, though, had no need to boost Cha0s’s already bloated self-esteem. He just needed to drag the fight out a little bit longer so that Parker could do her job. The trick was to do so without letting Cha0s tag him with that damn sword.

Given the rules of this so-called sport, as the weapons master had explained them, it didn’t take much for someone to lose. A single mistake was all that was required. If your opponent capitalized on it, then the match was over, just like that.

Cha0s knew Eliot. He knew how good he was in a fight—or at least how good he was supposed to be. Cha0s was also a cocky little bastard who liked to think he was wise in the ways of the world, and Eliot suspected he could use it against him.

When Cha0s came in for his next attack, Eliot worked his way around so that he was facing the sun. He shaded his eyes with one hand, pretending to be blinded by the brightness coming in behind Cha0s. He threw up a clumsy block, as if blinded.

Cha0s tapped Eliot’s sword lightly, then brought his blade around it and batted him hard on the forearm. Eliot jumped back as if the sword hadn’t been padded at all, hopping and cursing in pain.

Behind Cha0s, Parker picked up one of the man’s shopping bags and dropped it over the railing behind her. Every eye on the balcony was on Eliot at the moment. No one saw her make her move.

Nate grunted into the earpiece. “Got it,” Sophie said. “Ready for the next one.”

“What the hell was that?” Eliot said to Cha0s, who had stood back and was grinning in glee. “You got rocks in that thing?”

The weapons master stepped between the two combatants. “Time out,” he said. “We got an injury here?”

Cha0s backed up another step, giving the weapons master the room to check out Eliot’s arm. “Hey, Parker!” he said over his shoulder, still keeping half an eye on Eliot. “Better start picking out a nice restaurant. We’re going to eat well tonight!”

For his part, Eliot didn’t plan on letting anyone have a good look at his arm. He wanted them to think he was hurt, and a close inspection would show that he wasn’t. Eliot shook his arm hard, as if he could fling the pain straight out of it.

Despite that, the weapons master grabbed at his arm and didn’t give up until he had hold of it. “Stay still,” he said. “I need to make sure you’re fine, or I’ll have to declare your opponent over there the victor.”

Meanwhile, Cha0s turned around and raised his sword and shield toward the sky. He let out a roar of victory, and the crowd responded in kind. As he reveled in the glory, the weapons master took hold of Eliot’s arm and gave it a good once-over.

“Looks fine to me,” the man said in a low, private voice. He looked up at Eliot. “You could take this guy without working up a sweat. You going to let him beat you?”

“What, like you did?”

The weapons master smirked. He continued to speak softly, keeping his eyes on Eliot’s arm as he examined it. “Do me a favor. Kick his ass. It’s not good policy to take down a customer, but hey, he’s not your customer.”

Eliot grunted. “You got it.”

“All right,” the weapons master said in his regular voice. “He looks fine. The battle can go on!”

The crowd cheered, and Cha0s turned back to face Eliot, flexing his arms as he did. With all of the man’s concentration on Eliot, Parker took the opportunity to grab the second bag and slip it over the side.

Nate grunted and then swore.

“Got that one too,” Sophie said. “Might be a little dented.”

“Give him hell,” Parker said.

Eliot gave her a nod and a tiny smile, then squared off against Cha0s. Time to hand the hacker his head.

“You need to put your injured arm behind your back,” the weapons master said. “You use it at all, and that’s a foul.”

“What’s a foul do to me?” Eliot said.

“Cost you the match.”

“Come on, Eliot,” Cha0s said. “Say it. I want to hear it straight from your lips. ‘It’s only a flesh wound.’ Sell that to me.”

Eliot didn’t say a word. He tossed his sword into the air, flipping it end over end, and caught it in his left hand by its grip. Then he put his right hand behind his back and grabbed on to his belt, making sure he wouldn’t accidentally let the hand fly loose.

Left-handed, he slashed through the air in a series of practiced moves designed to intimidate a foe. Cha0s’s eyes widened, and the crowd let out a collective gasp.

“You ready for this?” Eliot asked the hacker. “Or do you want me to fight you with my feet instead?”

“Look here, Spencer,” Cha0s said, his eyes wide and round with fear. “I don’t want any trouble.”

Eliot didn’t say a word. He just gave Cha0s the barest of smirks and then lunged at him.

It was the first time Eliot had gone on the offensive, and for an instant Cha0s froze. He managed to get his sword up just in time to parry the first blow, which smacked into his brand-new sword so hard that it smashed it back into his nose. He stumbled backward, clutching at his face with the hand attached to his shield arm, which barely saved him from Eliot’s follow-up slash.

Even with Eliot fighting left-handed, with one hand stuck behind his back, Cha0s was no challenge. He could have ended the fight any instant he felt like it, but he wasn’t quite ready to let the hacker off the hook. He pretended to forget to account for his unusable arm, and he stumbled.

Cha0s snatched the opening and went on the offensive as best he could. He brought back his arm and hacked down at Eliot as hard as he could, over and over again. Each time Eliot parried his blow, letting Cha0s wear himself down, one swing at a time.

In less than a minute, Cha0s was huffing and puffing, and his swings came more slowly and with less force behind him. The only thing keeping him going was his rising sense of frustration. “Go down, dammit!” he said to Eliot. “Why won’t you go down?”

Eliot smiled. “You’re playing the game wrong,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Cha0s kept swinging away, but none of his attacks came close to touching Eliot. “This is my game. Mine! I! Never! Lose!”

“You’re trying to knock me down,” Eliot said.

He waited for Cha0s to take one last swing at him. This time, instead of blocking the blow, he stepped aside. Cha0s’s blade smacked into the pavement where he’d been standing, and Eliot pinned the sword there with his own boffer blade with a backhand flick of his wrist.

Exhausted and overextended, Cha0s gaped up at Eliot in horror. He tried to pull back on his sword, and when he did, Eliot went with him. He used Cha0s’s own momentum to guide his sword so that he smacked the hacker square in the chest with it and sent him sprawling back across the balcony’s concrete surface.

The crowd stared at the combatants in silent awe for a second, then erupted into an enthusiastic roar. The weapons master leaped forward, grabbed Eliot by his now-freed right hand, and shoved it up into the air. “And we have ourselves a new champion!”

While all the attention was on Eliot, Cha0s decided to leave. Eliot saw him start to scramble away, but he stopped cold when Parker came over and stepped on his boffer sword, pinning it to the pavement.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she said to Cha0s. “And it’s not about any date.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Parker escorted Cha0s down the stairs behind the boffer arena. He was covered in sweat, too tired to argue with her, but when they got to the bottom of the stairs, he glanced back and blanched at the sight of Eliot following them down. That spurred him enough for him to try to make a break for it.

He didn’t get more than three feet, though, before Nate and Sophie stepped in front of him, cutting off his route of escape. Exhausted and discouraged, he threw up his hands. “All right,” he said. “You got me.”

Nate and Sophie led the hacker down another flight of stairs, with Eliot and Parker coming up behind them. They wound up at the marina that butted right up against the convention center. Most of the boats in the area sat floating silent and empty, their local owners wisely deciding to give the downtown area a wide berth this weekend. A few of them, though, had been rented out as party boats.

One of these featured a red, blue, and yellow banner that read CBR TV. Nate spotted a pair of reporters sitting on the back deck, interviewing none other than Stan Lee. Although Nate was sure Stan wasn’t in on Patronus’s plans, he didn’t want the living legend accidentally compromising the crew’s job with an innocent remark before the auction. He led the group on a bit farther, until they reached a less populated part of the wharf.

“All right,” Nate said. “You lost. Now tell us what happened to Hardison.”

Cha0s glanced at each them, looking for some kind of weakness he could exploit, some way he could weasel his way out of having to tell the truth. When he didn’t find any, the wind ran right out of him in a deep sigh. “Fine,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Where did you take Hardison last night?” Parker said.

Cha0s swallowed hard. “You ever heard of a man named Daichi Kanabe?”

Nate masked his surprise at hearing Kanabe’s name, as did Sophie and Eliot, but Parker gasped out loud. “You mean that guy with the nasty comics?”

Cha0s leered at Parker for a moment, until a steely glare from her chased all sexual thoughts from his mind. “Yeah, that’s the one. Do you know what Hardison did to him?”

This time they all nodded. There was no reason to hold back this information any longer, Nate knew.

“Can you get to the point?” he said to Cha0s, letting his irritation show.

“They had a suite in the Hyatt, him and all of the goons working in Patronus’s booth. I brought Hardison down to it, pretending I was heading to a celebrity Dungeons & Dragons game.”

Nate gaped at him. “And he fell for that?”

“Hey,” Cha0s said, offended. “I can be persuasive when I try. I told him Wil Wheaton was going to be there.”

“Who?” said Nate.

Cha0s rolled his eyes. “Never mind.”

“And what happened to him next?” Eliot said, his voice full of menace. “Did you just leave him there?”

“Do you want me to lie to you?” Cha0s said with disgust. “Of course I left him there. I don’t have any desire to be a material witness to a felony of any kind.”

Parker grabbed Cha0s by his ear and twisted it hard. He yowled in pain, but it wiped the smug look off his face.

Nate glanced around. A few people had noticed Cha0s’s plight, but none of them seemed interested in doing anything about it. Maybe they thought it was some kind of cosplay event. He didn’t know or really much care, as long as they kept moving. He shot Eliot a glance, and Eliot leaned over and spoke softly into Cha0s’s other ear.

“I’d stay quiet if I were you,” he said. “My bet is you got some fairly valuable electronics on you that you’d rather not lose the use of.”

“Fine,” Cha0s said. “Fine, fine, fine, fine! Just make her let me go.”

Parker gave the hacker’s ear a final tweak. He stood back up, holding his injured ear as if it might fall off. “Did you really have to do that?” he said.

“Where’s Hardison?” Parker said.

“I don’t know.”

Cha0s flinched as Parker reached up for his ear again. “No, hey, I really don’t. Why would I? I left him with those guys last night. He could be anywhere by now.”

Nate nodded. “Right, but you have an idea, don’t you?”

“Why would you say that?” Cha0s’s tone didn’t fool anyone. He looked like he didn’t even believe his evasions himself.

Sophie held up Cha0s’s shopping bags and glared at him.

“Oh, hey,” he said with an unguarded smile. “I’d wondered what happened to those. Thanks, Sophie.”

“These are filled with pieces of original artwork,” she said, uncharmed. “Most of them were created by the same people Patronus is featuring in his auction. There are even some early Simon Curtiss pieces here.”

“What can I say?” Cha0s said. “I’m a collector, and tell me what you like about Lorenzo Patronus, the man has taste.”

“There must be thousands of dollars’ worth of artwork in those bags,” Nate said. “What’s your angle here?”

Cha0s shrugged. “Just seemed like a wise investment. After the auction, a lot of that stuff’s going to be off the market, right, so it stands to reason that what’s left would go up in value. I figured I’d flip it in a few months for a tidy profit.”

Sophie narrowed her eyes at the man. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. Assuming all those pieces get sold, they’ll flood the market with new pieces from those artists. The value of those pieces you just bought should plummet.”

Cha0s paled at her words. “Oh, wow,” he said. “I am such an idiot. I—I guess I just didn’t think it through.”

That bothered Nate. “Wait,” he said. “You’re a lot of horrible things—unethical, sociopathic, evil even—but you’re no idiot.”

Sophie gasped. “The forgeries. This is all about the forgeries.”

Nate grimaced. Now he understood. He’d seen this kind of scam before, and he kicked himself for not recognizing it earlier. “Patronus wants to get triple paid for all that artwork.”

Parker squinted at him. “How do you mean?”

The way Cha0s squirmed in front of him told Nate he was right. “He replaced the originals with forgeries so he could destroy them. He’s going to do it here, on the floor, during the convention.”

“Right,” said Sophie. “That way he can collect insurance money on them and still have the originals to quietly sell to private collectors on the black market. He can claim that a few of the pieces survived, and he’s willing to sell them for the right price.”

“And if he destroys the fakes after the auction but before he delivers them, he can collect that money too,” Eliot said. “He just disappears and stiffs the buyers out of their refunds.”

“Best of all, no one ever knows about the fakes,” said Parker. “When he destroys them, he takes care of the evidence too. Smooth.” She nodded her head in reluctant admiration.

“And you figured you’d take advantage of some of the spillover effect from that, didn’t you?” Nate said to Cha0s. “You pick up a lot of artwork from the same artists now, before the auctioned stuff is supposedly destroyed, and you watch the scarcity for it drive up the demand of the pieces you bought.”

Cha0s shrugged, disappointed and disgusted but determined not to show it. “And I would have gotten away with it too, if not for you darn kids.”

“So,” Parker said, “where’s Hardison?”

The four of them crowded in around Cha0s, their proximity making him more uncomfortable by the second. “All right,” he said. “I wasn’t lying before. I don’t know where he is—but I have an idea about how you might find him.”

Nate and the others just stared at him and waited for him to crack. He glanced at each of them, decided that they weren’t about to offer him any sympathy at all, and spoke. “Patronus wanted to haul out all of the originals last night, but the security here at the convention center is a lot tighter than you would guess. They kick everyone out—exhibitor badge or not—not too long after the hall closes.”

“Right,” Parker said. “They can’t have the exhibitors stealing from one another. It’d be too easy to just buy a booth and then walk off with whatever you wanted.” She stopped talking for a moment when she realized everyone was staring at her. “What? That’s how I’d do it.”

“So they couldn’t get everything out of the hall last night,” Nate said.

“And they couldn’t just pick up and walk out with it all at once during the middle of the show either,” Eliot said. “Right?”

Sophie nodded. “But they could take it out one or two pieces at a time, maybe in boxes or bags like these huge ones that our friend here has been toting around.”

“Hey,” Cha0s said, “I don’t have any of Patronus’s pieces. I paid good money for everything in my bags.”

“Clean money?” said Nate

“Well, I mean, sure, I didn’t exactly work for that money—you know me—but the stuff I gave the merchants in there is good, all right? No counterfeits, no charge-backs, nothing hinky like that.”

“So you don’t know where they’ve been taking the goods?” Sophie said. “They must be close by if they’re just carrying them out of the hall by hand.”

Cha0s shrugged. “I don’t, but they had so much stuff that they’re probably still toting it out a piece at a time. You head back to Patronus’s booth, you might be able to track them to wherever they’re going.”

Eliot nodded. “Worst case, it means I can get one of those boys of his alone and get him to give up Hardison’s location.”

“All right,” Parker said. “Let’s go get ’em.”

“Hold up a minute.” Nate wasn’t quite ready yet to just leave Cha0s alone. “Tell me. How did you stop Hardison from calling for help?”

Cha0s’s face lit up like a mischievous kid who’d just won first prize in a lying contest. He reached into one of the baggy pockets on his cargo shorts and pulled out something that looked like an old police walkie-talkie, but with three antennae and no speakers. “It’s the coolest thing,” he said. “A portable cell-phone jammer. It’s only good for a few meters, but if you’re standing next to someone, it takes out all of their communication devices: cell phones, earpieces, you know.”

Nate stuck out his hand. Cha0s hesitated for a moment, then laid the device in his palm. “And Hardison’s earpiece?” Nate said. “I think he’ll want that back.”

Cha0s reached into the same pocket where the jammer had been and fished out the tiny device. He held it out between two fingers and dropped it into Nate’s other palm. “It’s a sharp little piece of equipment,” he said.

“Nothing but the best from Hardison,” Parker said.

Nate glanced at the others, ending with Eliot. “Now,” he said, “how do we know you won’t just call up Kanabe and warn him that we’re on our way?”

Cha0s put up his hands in protest. “Really? Do you think so little of me? I’m already done with Kanabe. He paid me for a job well done, and I washed my hands of it. I even spent all the money today. How do you think I paid for all my new artwork?”

“I don’t know, guys,” Nate said to the others. As they spoke they closed ranks around Cha0s, pressing him against the edge of the wharf and cutting off any hope of escape. “Do you think we can trust him?”

Sophie, Parker, and Eliot all shook their heads.

“Hey, look,” Cha0s said, growing more nervous by the second. “I knew it might come to this. I made it easy for you to find me, right? I gave Parker my number, remember? Do you think I did that by accident?”

“I think you were just hitting on Parker,” Sophie said.

“What, me? Why would I do that?”

Parker glared at him. “Is there something wrong with me?”

“What? No!” Cha0s fumbled for the right words to say, the right excuse that would get him out of this predicament. “I just thought that, well, you know, you and Hardison—”

“So you only hit on her because you thought it would make Hardison jealous?” Eliot sneered at him. “You sure you weren’t hitting on Hardison?”

“What? Wait, no.” Cha0s screwed up his face in surprise and disgust. “No, really, that’s not me. I just—I just—”

“You just what?” Nate shook his head. “Forget it. There’s nothing you can say or do to pay back for how you sold out Hardison. And if we find out he’s dead, know this. There is nowhere on this planet you can run and no amount of pain you can suffer to make up for it.”

“Whoa, hey,” Cha0s said, the color draining from his face as he edged farther and farther away. “That’s just—”

Eliot leaned forward then and said one word. “Boo.”

Cha0s jumped a little, despite himself. That little jump was enough to put the heel of his back foot over the edge of the wharf. He windmilled his arms, trying to recover his balance, but to no avail. He even put out a hand to ask for help, for someone to save him, but when he saw Nate and the crew glaring at him, he recoiled again.

That was what finally put him over the edge. He plunged from there into the dark waters below and disappeared beneath the lapping waves.

Nate and the others turned and strode away before he could make his way back to the surface. They didn’t want to be around when the man managed to grab himself a breath and start shouting for help. They pretended not to have heard the splash and walked straight back toward the convention center.

“That water should do a number on all his electronics,” Parker said with a vicious grin. “At least he won’t be calling Kanabe or anyone else when he gets out of there.”

“If he gets out of here,” said Eliot.

“You think he can swim?” Sophie said.

Nate frowned but kept walking without glancing back. “At this point, I don’t think I give a damn.”

THIRTY-NINE

“So what do we do?” Parker asked as they walked up to the back entrance of the convention center.

Far behind them, Cha0s had started yelling for help, which Nate took to mean that the man could at least swim well enough to keep from drowning, but maybe not so well as to be able to haul himself up out of the drink. That made him smile.

Parker grabbed him by the sleeve as they were about to enter the convention center. “I mean, what about Hardison?”

Nate knew she was worried about their friend. Hell, he was worried too. At times like these, the others looked to him for a plan.

Sophie conned people. Parker stole from them. Eliot hit them. Hardison hacked them.

Nate… he made plans. He brought the disparate skills of his crew together and forged its members into a team far greater than the sum of its parts. Individually, no one of them would probably be able to find and save Hardison, but together, they might be able to manage it.

Maybe.

Nate stopped before they entered through the doors of tinted glass and hauled the others over to a quiet spot out of the way of foot traffic. “Let’s assume Hardison’s still alive,” he said. “If they were going to kill him, they’d have probably done it already.”

“In which case, this changes from a rescue mission to revenge,” Eliot said, a fierce snarl on his face.

Nate nodded. “Right, but if it’s revenge, then we take our time with it and get it right. What I’m saying is that we should have a little bit of time here either way. Let’s not rush in and spook Patronus or Kanabe or whoever. If we do that and Hardison really is still alive, they might do something rash, and that could end up getting him killed.”

“We can’t just do nothing,” Sophie said.

“Of course not,” said Nate. “But we’ll need to split up. Sophie and I will go scout out Patronus’s booth to see if we can spot any of his people still trying to slip things out of the booth.”

“You think they’re already done?” asked Eliot.

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, that’s our best place to start.” Nate checked his watch. “The auction’s going to start soon, and Patronus already expects Sophie and me to be there, so that’s perfect.”

“What about us?” Parker fidgeted, even while standing in one spot. Nate wasn’t sure how she managed that, but he knew she needed something to do. “You can’t expect us to just sit out here and wait.”

“No, I need the two of you ready to follow anyone that Sophie and I put you after. If we try to tail one of Kanabe’s men, we’ll call attention to ourselves. Then they’ll never lead us to wherever they’re taking the goods. That’s your job: to go after them and make sure they don’t spot you.”

Eliot nodded. “Once they get where they’re going, though, they’re fair game, right?”

“They might know what happened to Hardison, and I’ll trust you to extract that information from them.” Nate didn’t want Eliot to torture anyone—and certainly not to kill them—but if the people who’d grabbed Hardison sustained a few bruises and even multiple fractures in the course of the crew’s saving their friend, he wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

“Got it.”

Nate glanced at each of the others in turn. “Time is important here. Once the auction’s over, whatever Kanabe plans to do to destroy the artwork in his booth could happen at any moment. At that point, they’re likely to be extremely nervous about making their plan work, and they’ll start looking to tie up loose ends. For Hardison’s sake, we need to find him before that happens.”

Most of the time running cons with the crew was fun, Nate had to admit. They got to experience the thrill of breaking the law and ripping people off while doing some good for the world. This, though, was deadly serious. If they blew it, they might lose one of their own, and they all knew it.

“We good to go?” he asked.

They all nodded.

“Oh,” Nate said, looking down at his hand. He was still carrying the jammer and Hardison’s earpiece. He handed the earpiece to Parker and the jammer to Eliot. “With luck, you’ll see him first.”

“Bet on it,” said Eliot.

Nate turned with Sophie and entered the convention hall, leaving Eliot and Parker on their own. They’d find another way into the hall, he knew. They’d already spent too much time together, just there on the balcony and the wharf, risking others—besides Cha0s—seeing them together. They all had their jobs to do now. He just had to hope that if they did them right they’d find Hardison alive and well.

As they entered the exhibit hall, Sophie took Nate by the crook of his arm to slow him down. “You’re upset,” she said. “You can’t let Patronus see that.”

Nate started to object, to tell Sophie she was wrong, but he knew she’d see right through it. “I just—” He frowned and consciously slowed his pace to match her leisurely stroll. “I just feel so responsible.”

“For what?” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Hardison? He’s a grown man. He made his own mistakes here. He’s just lucky we’re here to help fish him out of whatever well he’s been thrown into.”

Nate gave her a wry look, and after a moment she relented. “All right,” she said. “I feel a little responsible too. Perhaps if we hadn’t taken a break from it all last night, we might have been listening when he started talking to Cha0s. Maybe we could have stopped any of it from happening.”

“Probably not.” Nate patted her hand on his arm. “But I sure would like to think so.”

When they got to Patronus’s booth, they saw that its interior had been roped off, and the large men working for him had started to rearrange the front of it by moving a few of the cases to the sides. A pair of them were unfolding a small, low, collapsible stage, while another wheeled in a narrow podium, complete with microphone and built-in speaker. The transformation from a display booth to a live auction site seemed well under way.

To one side, a woman stood with an iPad in her hand, registering people for the auction. She had the disinterested but pleasant look of a local model who’d been hired to work in the booth for the weekend. She obviously didn’t care about what she was selling but seemed determined to do a good job despite that. As she completed each registration, taking down not only personal information but payment details, she directed the prospective bidders over to another woman, who handed them each a numbered paddle assigned to their account.

Nate guided Sophie over to stand in the line to register for a paddle. Sophie had taken her hand off of his arm before they were in sight of the booth, and standing next to her now, he found he missed it. He wanted the comfort of her touch at that moment, but the identities they’d set up for themselves didn’t allow for it. They might have been able to sell Patronus on the fact that Jess and Jeff were more than just business partners, but Nate didn’t want to give the man any reason to think about them much. The more he saw them simply as uncomplicated people who could make him rich, the better.

So they stood apart and pretended to be business associates and nothing more.

As they waited in the registration line, Nate and Sophie scanned the rest of the booth, looking for signs of the original artwork that Patronus had removed from the display cases. At first, Nate didn’t see anything unusual. Then Sophie nudged him with her elbow and gestured with her head toward one of the small tables that sat between the some of the display cases.

During the rest of the show, these tables had featured stacks of catalogs of the goods to be auctioned, along with brochures from the Hero Initiative. Nate hadn’t given them much thought. Their tops were covered with thin white sheets of vinyl, the cheap kind of stuff that could be torn off and replaced with a new sheet and a staple gun within minutes. The most important detail, though, was that each of the tables also featured a long run of black polyester skirting that ran all the way around them and from the top edge of the table to the floor. This provided a good deal of space under which the people in the booth could hide things.

The man installing the podium got it into place and went searching for an electrical outlet into which he could plug the podium’s onboard sound system. He got onto his knees and pulled back the curtain under one of the tables to find the outlet. He also revealed several cardboard boxes and shipping tubes that had been taped back up.

“I think that’s where our missing goods went,” Sophie said softly.

Nate nodded. “Good. If they still have some of it here, then there’s still a chance for us to follow them back to wherever they’re storing it. All we need to do is wait for one of Kanabe’s thugs here to make a pickup.”

“Hey!” a familiar voice came from behind them. “It’s two of my favorite people. What are you folks doing here?”

Nate and Sophie turned around to see Patronus walking up to them, a huge grin on his face. The man just seemed to be growing happier and happier with every passing hour. Nate didn’t wonder why. After all, he thought all his plans were about to come to fruition and that he’d realize his dream in the bargain.

“Oh, well, we just thought we’d offer some financial support to go along with our moral support,” Nate said. “After all, we’re business partners now, right?”

“Right!” Patronus said, grinning. “But you don’t have to do that. After all, I haven’t put everything up here, right?” He leaned in and spoke in a confidential tone. “Once this is all over, I’ll let you two get first crack at my private collection. Just wait until you see what I’ve held back from this.”

“Really?” Sophie said with ginned-up enthusiasm. “I can hardly imagine. You have so many great pieces on display here already. I’d think this would be impossible to top.”

Patronus clapped her on the shoulder. “That’s one of the dirty secrets of this industry. There are lots and lots of great artists in it, and you know what? They keep making more! I could hold an auction like this every month and still barely put a dent in all the great stuff circulating around out there.”

“Interesting,” Nate said with a weak smile. “I have to admit, I don’t know anything about this side of the business. I’m an attorney. I understand publishing, intellectual rights, contracts, those sorts of things. When it comes to collectibles, though, I’m clueless.”

“It’s all about supply and demand,” Patronus said. “The lower the supply, the higher the demand, and the more you can charge for any individual piece. That’s why the prices for dead artists always skyrocket. The supply’s cut off, permanently. Done. No more. Changes the market for the work entirely.”

Nate thought of Simon Curtiss lying in his hospital bed, Susan sitting next to him, holding his hand, wondering if he’d ever fully recover. It didn’t seem beyond Patronus to have actively tried to herd the man closer to death. After all, what else would cause the value of the works he’d stolen from Simon to skyrocket?

Nate wanted to punch the man out. Instead, he reached over and tapped Patronus on his temple. “Sharp,” he said. “Damn sharp.”

“In any case, don’t made bids just on my account,” Patronus said. “If you see something you want, then sure, by all means, of course, bid it up as high as you like. But after this is all over, I’m going to write you a big, fat check either way.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that you will, Lorenzo.” Nate patted the man on the back. “I have no doubt about that at all.”

FORTY

Parker and Eliot veered away from Nate and Sophie as they entered the building. They walked a hundred yards north and then used the next entrances they could find into the building. From there they made their way back down into the exhibit hall to wait for word from Nate and Sophie.

They hung out in the aisle at the rear of the hall, nearby the entrance to a set of bathrooms. Parker liked the spot; it was quieter and a bit darker. She did her best thinking in places that were dark and quiet.

If anything, the traffic in the hall had only gotten busier during the day. More and more people had streamed into the place, hoping to find the latest and coolest things in comics, games, toys, film, and television and bring them home to enjoy and maybe brag about to their friends. Some of them had come to meet their favorite creators—artists, writers, actors—and maybe get their autographs. Others had shown up in costumes, hoping to insert themselves into the event and play their own role in the grand spectacle.

“We need to find some kind of disguise,” Parker said as a group of girls in Merlotte’s waitress uniforms passed, followed by a band of cosplayers dressed as the nine heroes from The Fellowship of the Ring. These included four children made up as hobbits—wearing shoes that looked like hairy feet—and a person whom Parker guessed was a petite woman in a fake beard, done up as Gimli the dwarf.

“No.” Eliot’s tone told Parker that this was the end of that particular conversation. He didn’t care to argue it with her, no matter how sound her reasons. She’d said her piece, and he’d said his, and that was the end of it.

She decided to ignore him. “What if Patronus comes back here with the guys moving his stuff? They’ll recognize me for sure.”

Eliot looked her up and down. “So what? Hang back, and you’ll be fine.”

Parker shrugged. “I don’t know. This is a big place with a lot of people. A lot of traffic. Kind of easy to lose someone here, even if you know what you’re doing.”

“He doesn’t know what I look like,” Eliot said. “I’ll follow him just fine.”

“But what if they see you with me?” Parker frowned. “Then they might be suspicious of you too.”

“Look, Parker,” Eliot said. “I don’t care how many reasons you come up with. I don’t care how cool you think some of these costumes are. There’s no way you’re getting me to climb into one. Posing as Warren Ellis was bad enough for one weekend.”

Parker kept her mouth shut for a short while. She had a little bit of time left. Not much, sure, but she could be patient, right?

Eliot stood there, enjoying the silence, or at least the dull background roar of more than a hundred thousand voices joined in tens of thousands of conversations. For the most part, that’s how he liked things: quiet. Parker understood that, sure, but she couldn’t let it last. Not when Hardison’s life was on the line.

“I know how you feel,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like I like to dress up at all. Except, you know, in my work gear, but I only wear that when I’m on the job. Like on top of a building. At night.”

Eliot’s eye twitched as she spoke. She knew he was trying to control himself, refusing to respond, but she also knew it was a battle he would lose. It wouldn’t take much for her to push him over the edge.

She’d have to be subtle about it, though. If she blew it, the bad guys might spot them, and then she and Eliot might not be able to follow them, and then they might kill Hardison. If he wasn’t already dead.

“I guess you never did like Hardison all that much,” she said.

Eliot’s knees sagged, and he slumped against the wall behind him. “Ow,” he said. “What the hell was that for? Where did that come from?”

Parker gave him what she hoped looked like an innocent shrug. “Well, you don’t seem too worried about him being killed.”

“He’s not dead, Parker.” He clenched his jaw so hard she could see the muscles working in it.

“Are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

“No,” he said. “I’m saying it to make myself feel better.”

He turned to face her. “Of course he might be dead. But if he is, there’s nothing we can do about it. I’ve lost a lot of friends over the years, Parker. Good men. Good women too.”

“So you just don’t care?”

“Of course I care!” Eliot winced at his own outburst, then continued in a lower tone. “If he’s dead, I’ll hunt down every one of the people who hurt him, and I’ll make them pay. I’ll make them wish they’d turned themselves in right after they did it, just so they wouldn’t have to deal with me.”

Parker gave him a sober, understanding nod. “Do you really think he’s dead?”

Eliot shook his head in frustration. “Honestly? I don’t know. There’s no way to know. But I think Nate’s got this right. We work at this as if he’s alive and waiting for us to rescue him. Even if it turns out to be a waste of time—and I hope to God it’s not—it’ll get us closer to the people who grabbed him. And if it’s not, then we just might save him.”

Parker considered that for a moment. “That sounds right,” she said. “But if that’s so, then why take any more risks? Why not just—”

“All right, Parker!” Eliot cut her off. “I’ll wear a damn costume. Just go ahead and pick one out for me. I’ll even be one of your damn bronies if that’s what it takes.”

That made Parker so happy that she couldn’t help it. She leaned over and gave Eliot a peck on his cheek. She stepped back, a wide, relieved smile on her face, and started to scan the crowd.

“All right,” she said. “Who do you want to be?”

Eliot winced again. “I’m perfectly happy as myself. And what are you doing looking at all these people walking by? We’re not going to mug them for their outfits, are we?” He stared hard at Parker when she didn’t answer. “Are we?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I was just looking for some inspiration. And maybe some guidance.”

“We don’t have a lot of time here, Parker. If we’re going to do this, we have to move on it now. And you realize that if Nate and Sophie tell us that someone’s coming our way, we’ll have to abort and just wing it in our own clothes, right?”

“Right,” Nate said through the earpiece.

“At the moment we’re still looking,” Sophie said. “You should have plenty of time—if you move fast.”

Eliot made a dramatic gesture for Parker to proceed. She ignored him and kept scanning the crowd for costume ideas. She had to find a disguise that she could wear—and that Eliot would wear too.

Most of the costumes were just too complicated or too silly or flat-out impractical. If it involved face paint—like the excellent Joker and Harley Quinn couple that just roamed by—it would take too long to pull it off. If it looked too much like street clothes—like that other couple dressed as Bella and Edward from Twilight—then it was no good either. They needed something that either covered their faces or was so outlandish that no one would be looking at their faces.

Then she found it.

A Star Wars stormtrooper sauntered by with a woman dressed up as Princess Leia in a bikini, complete with a golden hairpiece and brunette wig with a long braid that hung down her back, the outfit she’d worn in Return of the Jedi when she was a slave in Jabba’s palace. Parker leaped off of the wall she’d been leaning against and reached out to get the couple’s attention. “Hey,” she said. “Where’d you get those fantastic costumes?”

The couple stopped, and the woman dressed as Leia smiled at them. Maybe the man did too, but Parker couldn’t see his face beneath his helmet. “We made them,” the woman said. “Would you like to take a photo?”

“You mean there’s nowhere in this entire, humongous hall where I can buy those?” Parker said. “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely,” the stormtrooper said in an amplified voice that made Parker jump in surprise.

“Oh, wow!” she said. “You sound just like the guys in the movies.”

“Integrated speaker system,” the stormtrooper said. Even with the helmet obscuring his face, his pride was evident. “Top-of-the-line stuff.”

“But not for sale anywhere?” Eliot said. He didn’t sound disappointed at all.

“You don’t find too many costumes for sale here,” Leia said. “Most of the cosplayers make them from scratch, and they take a lot of pride in them. They break out their best stuff on Saturday, of course.”

“Because they want to show off to the big crowds?” asked Parker.

“That and because of the Masquerade tonight too,” the stormtrooper said. “I hear Nathan Fillion and Danny Pudi are part of the judges panel this year.”

“Oh, and Phil and Kaja Foglio do such a great job as the MCs,” Leia said with an easy smile. “They’re just so much fun!”

“So it’s a competition,” Eliot said, trying to understand. “That’s why no one sells the costumes? They don’t want to help their opponents?”

The stormtrooper shook his head. “It’s illegal,” he said. “Copyright violation. Most companies don’t care if you make your own costumes, as long as you don’t try to sell any of them.”

“Right,” Leia said. “Then it goes from being just for fun to being a business, and they come down hard. Lucasfilm would have anyone selling unlicensed costumes like ours removed in a heartbeat.” She frowned. “Well, like his. I see knockoff bikinis that look like mine around in booths out there sometimes, but they’re easier to make.”

“I see people in costumes like that at Halloween all the time,” Eliot said.

“Oh, sure, there’s the store-bought kind,” the stormtrooper said. “But those are just cheap crap. No serious cosplayer would ever been caught dead in one of those. You’d be laughed out of the Masquerade.”

“If you’re that interested, you might be able to find things like that on the far north side of the hall,” Leia said. “Honestly, though, I wouldn’t wear them outside of a house party.”

“We may have someone on the move here soon,” Nate said over the earpiece. “I think we spotted where Patronus hid the goods. We just need someone to pick them up and start moving with them.”

“I suspect they’ll do it just before the auction starts,” Sophie said. “All eyes will be on the stage here. They should be able to get away with it without too many questions then.”

“But that doesn’t leave you enough time to get across the hall, buy those costumes, and change,” Nate said.

“Plus you’d look awful in them,” Sophie added. “That woman you’re talking to is right. You’d stick out in a place like this for being so horrible, and that’s the opposite of what you want. Better to go without them at all.”

Eliot nodded along as Nate and Sophie pitched in with their advice. Parker’s frown deepened with every word. It was a great idea, sure, but it didn’t seem like it was going to work. That meant that they would have to risk being spotted, and when she thought about what that might mean for Hardison, she felt horrible.

Eliot patted her on the shoulder to reassure her and then cut right to the chase, which Parker appreciated. Sometimes she got too caught up thinking things over instead of doing them. It worked in her favor when examining and evaluating security systems, but it could slip her up when she needed to move fast.

“We need your costumes,” Eliot said to Leia and the stormtrooper. “How much?”

Leia made an odd face at him, something between disgust and intrigue. “We can’t do that. We just told you. Besides, we need them. We’re going to the Masquerade tonight.”

Eliot turned toward Parker and shrugged. “Ah well,” he said. “I guess we’re out of luck. At least we tried.”

Parker wasn’t ready to give up yet. She pulled a wad of cash out of her pocket and held it in front of Leia and the stormtrooper. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars for your costumes. Right here, right now.”

Leia and the stormtrooper looked at each other. The stormtrooper looked back at Parker. “Make it two.”

FORTY-ONE

By the time the auction got under way, Nate was ready for a drink. His feet hurt from standing on the concrete floor for so long and for walking the long distances around San Diego. It wasn’t that he didn’t walk anywhere back in Boston, but he didn’t walk everywhere, and he usually got to sit down from time to time.

Here it seemed like everything was blocks away from everything else, including one end of the convention center from the other. While he’d have been happy to take cabs around town, the crowds at the convention often made it impossible to find one that was empty. Because of that, he and the others walked everywhere, and his feet were damn sore from it.

He was also losing his voice. The air-conditioning in the hall did a great job of removing the humidity from the air, along with the heat, and the dryness affected his throat. Combine that with having to raise his voice constantly to be heard over the roar of the murmuring crowd, and his vocal cords were just about ready to give out.

A good Irish whiskey would have soothed that perfectly, but the convention didn’t sell drinks in the hall. He’d substituted bottles of water, but he objected to having to pay four dollars for each one, especially at the rate he was guzzling them. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it, but it appalled him on principle.

Given the circumstances, he was content just to stand silent in the middle of the crowd of bidders that had formed up in a rough semicircle around one end of Patronus’s booth, eager and ready to compete for the chance to buy the artwork and other collectibles the man had been displaying all weekend. He wasn’t here for the bidding, of course. He just wanted to keep an eye on Patronus for as long as possible.

“Are you all right?” Sophie said to him.

He cleared his throat and frowned. “Just a little too dry in here.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “I mean, are you worried?”

Nate blew out a deep sigh and nodded. He pointed at his ear so that Sophie would know that he wasn’t free to talk candidly. He didn’t want Parker or Eliot to hear him say what was really on his mind, although he could see that Sophie could read it on his face.

During the four years he’d worked with Hardison, he’d come to think of the young man as — well, not as a son. For one, there was no way anyone would ever replace Sam in Nate’s heart, and for two, Hardison was just too old.

Sure, technically Nate could have been Hardison’s father, but never mind the math. It just didn’t feel that way. When they’d started out, Hardison had been a cocky kid, a bit of a loose cannon, a little too smart for his own good. He’d relied too much on his technical knowledge and his gadgetry and not enough on his wits.

Over the years, things had changed. He’d started to take his work more seriously, perhaps because he was working as part of a team and had other people—people he’d come to care about—depending on him. He’d become more responsible, and he’d shown a particular willingness to take on new challenges and expand his horizons, becoming in the process a better man.

In many ways, Hardison had become Nate’s protégé, the student he’d never known he wanted. The others just didn’t fit the role. Sophie and Eliot were closer to Nate’s age, and he considered them peers. Parker was young enough for him to mentor, sure, but Parker was Parker.

Besides, Parker already had a mentor, the legendary thief Archie Leach. He’d taken her under his wing at a tender age and molded her to be the perfect thief. Because of that, she didn’t need Nate, at least not as a teacher or role model.

Recently, Hardison had even been lobbying to run jobs himself, to take the lead away from Nate, at least for a job here and there. Nate had resisted at first, but Sophie had pointed out that he wasn’t being fair to Hardison. He realized that if he didn’t give the young man the chance to grow, he’d either become stunted and bitter or strike out on his own.

Nate hadn’t liked either of those options, so he’d finally acceded to Hardison’s request. It didn’t hurt that his decision had stopped the hacker from bugging him. Of course, the first time out, things hadn’t gone so well, and the crew had needed to fall back on Nate to get the job done.

While that hadn’t hurt Nate’s ego at all, he’d not rubbed Hardison’s face in it. In fact, he’d stepped up his mentoring of the young man instead. In the process of handing things over to Hardison, even temporarily, he’d realized that the crew needed someone who could step in and take over for him if he was incapacitated.

Over the years, they’d all started to share their skills and expertise with one another. Hardison had taught them all a bit of hacking—at least enough that Nate could find his way around a smartphone with ease. Eliot had given them all tips on how to handle themselves in a fight. Parker had taught them about security systems, mostly as a result of her sheer enthusiasm for them. Sophie had educated them in the art of the grift.

Nate had shown them how to plan, how to think on their feet, how to evaluate an ever-changing set of options and opportunities and come up with new ideas for how to handle them on the fly. But he hadn’t relinquished these duties to them often. If they managed to rescue Hardison, he promised himself that he’d loosen his grip on that part of the job. With enough time and patience, he guessed that Hardison might one day surpass him at their trade. It surprised him how much this thought made him want to smile.

Just then Sophie elbowed him in the ribs. “If you’re done with your little reverie,” she said, “I think things here are about to get started.”

Nate glanced up to see Patronus standing near the podium, chatting with one of the models. He seemed to be instructing her on how she should present the auction items while he spoke to the audience. From the bored look on the woman’s face, it seemed it wasn’t the first time he’d gone over this with her.

“Not him.” Sophie nodded toward a burly man making his way into the back of the booth, which was now roped off from the public. “Him.”

The man knelt down next to one of the tables and drew its skirt aside, exposing the piled cache underneath it. Then he started to pull the boxes and tubes out from behind the skirt and stack them on the table’s white surface. Three of the other men who’d been working security in the booth stepped forward and took the items from the table, loading up their arms with as many as they could manage.

As they worked, Patronus stepped up to the podium and tapped the microphone twice. “Is this thing on?” he said. It was.

“All right,” Patronus said. “Welcome to the first annual Patronus Collectibles Auction. First, I want to thank each and every one of you for taking the time out of your busy Comic-Con schedule to be here. I know there’s a panel with the stars of The Big Bang Theory going on in Hall H right now, and if I didn’t have to be here, I’d probably be over there myself.”

Nate knew that this was meant to be a joke, but no one laughed.

“We only have until the hall closes tonight, and we have a lot of merchandise to get through, so let’s get started. Before that, though, just let me remind you that ten percent of all purchases tonight go straight into the coffers of the Hero Initiative, the charity set up as a safety net for our industry’s elders, for the people who have brought us all so much joy over the years. So don’t be afraid to bid high.”

That got a laugh from the crowd, though it may have been one that Patronus wasn’t looking for. Nate couldn’t help but chuckle along with the rest of the bidders. He noticed Sophie do the same.

“Eliot? Parker?” Nate said in a low voice. He turned toward Sophie so that anyone nearby would think he was talking to her. “They’re on the move, heading toward the rear of the hall. Four of them in Patronus shirts, all loaded down with boxes and tubes.”

“Got it,” Parker said.

“On our way,” said Eliot. His voice seemed both muffled and as if it had an electronic echo.

Nate stifled a smile. “How does he look in his outfit?” he asked Parker.

She hesitated for a moment. “Evil.” She made a curious noise. “Wait. The stormtroopers are the bad guys, right?”

“Yeah. Well, in all the good Star Wars movies. They’re the good guys in all the bad Star Wars movies.”

“Hmm,” Parker said. “Funny how that works.”

FORTY-TWO

Eliot did not like wearing stormtrooper armor. He couldn’t say if he didn’t like it in general or just didn’t care for this set, which had been custom made for a man more than a little heftier than him, but he suspected he wouldn’t much care for it either way. Maybe if it was real stormtrooper armor rather than this white vacuum-formed plastic, he’d enjoy it, but this stuff was so flimsy it didn’t offer him a lick of protection. It just got in his way.

“A real stormtrooper?” he muttered to himself. “I can’t believe I’m even thinking this stuff.”

“You okay in there?” Parker asked. She leaned over and peered up at him through the eyeholes in his helmet.

He couldn’t stand how hard it was to see out of the helmet, or the crazy way it made his voice sound. He nodded at Parker anyhow. “Considering I’m wrapped in a plastic case in San Diego in the middle of the summer, yeah,” he said with barely controlled anger. “I’m doing fine.”

“You don’t have to get all snarly about it.”

She backed away, and Eliot had to admit two things to himself. The first was that he shouldn’t take his anger out on Parker. He was getting ready for a fight, and that always put him a bit on edge.

He didn’t mind that, though. He was used to it. He knew how to take the anger and channel it into adrenaline, which he could use to move faster and ignore pain. He’d learned the technique years ago, and while it wasn’t for everyone, for him, it worked.

Second, Parker looked damn good in that slave Leia outfit. It was pretty much a bikini with a long skirt slit all the way up the sides of both legs, along with some metallic decorations around her arms, hair, and bra, but she made it work. Or maybe it was the wig that did it.

He didn’t generally think of Parker in that way, of course. She was just a kid. But in that outfit, she didn’t look like Parker; she looked like a young Carrie Fisher. He’d had a wonderful crush on that woman when he was a kid.

When Parker opened her mouth, of course, she shattered that illusion. That put Eliot right back to remembering who she was to him: the crazy thief with the wild ways and the private heart. The little sister he’d never had.

“Keep your eyes open for those guys,” he said. “They should be coming up this aisle, but you never know. They might juke left or right, especially if they hit traffic. They look like they were in a hurry, Nate?”

“They moved like professionals,” Nate said through the earpiece. “They have a job to do, and they set about doing it.”

“Right,” Sophie said. “Fast without rushing.”

Eliot smiled under his helmet. He liked working against professionals. They were rarely as good as he was, but they did things the way he expected them to: rationally.

Amateurs were usually easier to handle, toe-to-toe, but they had a habit of doing things that no one would ever expect. They literally didn’t know what they were doing, and that made them dangerous, as much to themselves as to anyone else, much of the time. Professionals were far more predictable.

Eliot had checked out Patronus’s muscle—or more like Kanabe’s—on the show’s opening night. They were big guys, the kind who tended to rely on sheer intimidation to keep people away from them. Eliot wasn’t the kind to scare easily, though, and in his experience guys who depended too much on their size often neglected to develop any serious skills.

He hoped that was the case here. If so, they might not prove to be too much trouble, even though they outnumbered him by at least four to one. He’d seen more like eight guys going in and out of Patronus’s booth on preview night, but he didn’t know how many of these were Kanabe’s guards. Probably all of them, but he couldn’t discount the chance that some of them were Patronus’s.

“You’re going to have to guide me here, Parker,” Eliot said after a minute. “I don’t have any peripheral vision in this damn thing.”

“I just spotted one of them coming this way,” she said.

“Did he get separated from the rest?” Eliot frowned. “Nate said there were four of them.”

“They didn’t all walk off together,” Nate said. “They left whenever there was enough stuff out for them to carry. They shouldn’t be more than a few seconds apart from one another.”

“Good to know,” Eliot said. “It’s harder to follow just one guy, though, especially in this getup.”

“I got him,” Parker said. “There’s no way I’m letting him get away.”

She grabbed Eliot by the hand and dragged him south. That brought them straight to the dining area near the main concession stand area, a sea of white tables, curtained off by yellow fabric hanging from waist-high poles and filled with people who had waited too long to pay too much for substandard food. Eliot supposed it beat having to walk a half mile to the nearest real restaurant, but only in emergency cases.

As they skirted around the dining area, a couple of teenagers with cameras stepped in front of them. “Oh, wow,” they said to Parker. “You look amazing! Can we get your photograph?”

“No time now,” Eliot said. “We’re in a hurry.”

Maybe he was too brusque, but they really didn’t have the time to stop and pose for an impromptu photo shoot, no matter how good the costumes might be.

“Hey, stormtrooper,” the bigger of the two teens said, stepping into Eliot’s path and stopping both him and Parker cold. “I don’t think we were talking to you.”

Eliot considered knocking the kid cold. One swift punch to the solar plexus, and he’d be down on the ground and gasping for air for the next five minutes. That might cause a hell of disturbance, though, and he and Parker couldn’t risk having security chase after them while they tried to tail this guy carrying two boxes and three tubes he seemed in constant danger of dropping.

Maybe he should just break the kid’s finger. Or grab his camera and toss it into the crowd. Both of these solutions would be satisfying in a deep way, but they’d also put a real crimp in what he and Parker needed to be doing.

Eliot stopped in front of the kid and raised his hand, two fingers out. Then he moved the hand from left to right as if he were sliding a switch with those fingers. “This is not the Leia you’re looking for.”

The teenagers froze for an instant, then burst out laughing. As they did, Eliot moved past them, bringing Parker up behind him. The kids let them pass, clapping Eliot on the back of his armor at the joke.

“I still got an eye on him,” Parker said as she moved around Eliot to lead him. The way the helmet was messing with his vision, he didn’t object. “He just ducked into the back hallway.”

“Don’t lose him,” Nate said.

“We won’t,” Eliot said. He was this close to ripping off his helmet, chasing the thug down, and beating Hardison’s location out of him, but he opted for trusting Parker instead. She had eyes as sharp as anyone, and he’d never known anyone who could top her instincts when it came to finding a way through buildings.

Parker pulled Eliot out of the exhibit hall and through a black curtain into the back hallway. The public wasn’t supposed to go back here, but a few exhibitors and convention center staff strolled through the walkway, ignoring them. The hall was wide enough to accommodate a semitruck if necessary, although there were only a few electric carts and handcarts for moving pallets parked back there at the moment.

“Dammit, Parker.” Eliot glanced around. “Where’d he go?”

“Maybe you should go back and look for one of the other guys,” Sophie said.

“No,” Nate said. “By the time you do that, they might all disappear. Find the guy you’re on.”

“The freight elevator’s just up here.” Parker led Eliot over to the closed doors. He looked up and saw that the elevator was heading down. “It’s the only place he could have gone and disappeared that fast, especially with all that junk he was carrying.”

“So we just wait here for the car to come back up so we can try to follow him?” Eliot said. “We’ll lose him for sure.”

Parker grabbed Eliot and hauled him away from the door, around a corner, and into a stairwell. “This should let us out near the elevator doors,” she said. “If we hurry, we’ll be right behind him.”

“How the hell do you know this building that well?” Eliot said.

“What do you think I do while you’re out looking for a place to sleep at night?”

Eliot shrugged. He wouldn’t have traded places with her, but he had to give her that one.

Parker led him down the concrete stairs into the underbelly of the convention center. He held on to the railing to make sure he didn’t trip up with all this stormtrooper gear on. The last thing he needed was to take a tumble, custom-made helmet with integrated speaker system or not.

“There are two underground parking levels here,” Parker said as they reached the landing next to the first set of doors. She threw them open and hauled Eliot through.

“It’s pretty amazing. They must be down below the water table here,” she said. “After all, the ocean’s just a hundred feet or so behind us.”

The dank scent of damp concrete permeated the parking level. The place was only dimly lit, with banks of lights spaced far enough apart to give room for plenty of shadows. Their footsteps echoed against the hard surfaces as they hustled through the place.

Eliot had been hoping to sneak up on the thugs, but that was now impossible. The chances of someone not hearing their footsteps were zero. On the flip side of that, the people they were following would be easy to hear too.

Parker snaked around a corner, and Eliot saw a pair of elevator doors slide closed before them. “Dammit,” he said.

Parker cupped a hand to her ear and whispered into the earpiece. “No, that’s good. Look at the display. The elevator’s going back up. He got off here.”

Eliot smiled inside his helmet. The girl was good.

“You hear him?” he said. “It’s not so easy in this thing.”

“I would if you’d be quiet,” she said with a hard edge in her voice. Eliot didn’t blame her. Hardison’s life was on the line, and he’d interrupted her.

She stood stock-still, her head cocked to one side, her ear still cupped. Then she burst into movement. “This way,” she said.

She turned left, moving north along the long lane that ran past the perpendicular aisles of cars, vans, and trucks packed tightly into the place. She moved with purpose, striding fast, like a speed walker, but stopping shy of breaking into a run. Smart girl that she was, she didn’t want the guy they were following to hear the staccato beat of the footsteps of someone hurrying after him.

“There he is,” Parker said in a soft voice. “Just up ahead and to the right.”

Eliot spotted him too. The man turned to the right, moving up an aisle of parked cars and into the darkness. He moved with purpose but not as fast as the two of them.

Parker kept going past the point where the man had turned off, and Eliot followed her without a word of complaint. She turned right down the next aisle. In this way, they could see the man and track where he was going but reduced the chances that he would figure out that they were on his tail.

The man sauntered down the aisle, all the way to the far end, then turned left, which put Eliot and Parker on an intercept course with him. Parker slowed her pace so that they wouldn’t run directly into the man, then slung her arm around Eliot’s armored shoulders and started to giggle.

“Oh, quit it!” she said loud enough for the man to hear. “Not here. Not on your life. Wait till we get home!”

The man glanced at them as Eliot put his arm around Parker’s bare middle, then slowed down to leer. Eliot tolerated this for a moment, then glared at the man through his helmet and said, “What do you think you’re looking at?”

The man’s face fell, and he scurried away with his boxes in his arms. An instant later, Eliot and Parker moved after him.

They watched from the corner where the aisle they were in intersected with the main lane. The man walked along it, not looking back, until he reached the far wall. Then he turned to the left again and moved back down the final aisle.

Eliot and Parker walked arm in arm, still leaning on each other, until they reached that last corner. They stopped there for a second, time enough for Eliot to give Parker a squeeze and for her to let out a delighted giggle. And also so they could see what the man with the boxes was up to.

The other three men had arrived at the spot first and were unloading their boxes into the backs of two identical vans parked next to each other. They were a pair of extended-cab cargo vans, the kind that contractors all across the country use to haul goods, tools, or even people. Although the backs of the vans had no windows, or any markings either, they would have fit in at any construction site in the nation.

Two men—ones Eliot had seen working around Patronus’s booth on Wednesday night—held open the back doors of each van while the other four unloaded their burdens into the vehicles. Eliot noticed that they put the heavier boxes into the van on the left, a little farther down the aisle, while the lighter ones went into the van on the right. He couldn’t see inside the vans from where he stood, as the open doors blocked the line of sight, but by the way the thugs were struggling to get anything into the farther van, it had to be pretty full.

The men holding the doors turned to glare at Eliot as the others finished their work. They meant to intimidate Parker and him into turning around and walking way, but Eliot wasn’t having any of that. With a deep chuckle, he pulled Parker tighter to him and started to stagger down the aisle.

FORTY-THREE

The first items had sold for good, if not spectacular, prices. The crowd assembled around Patronus’s booth clearly wanted what he had to sell, but he’d saved many of the best pieces for later in the night. Now the time had come to auction them off.

Patronus clapped as the woman working on the stage with him carried the last item back to its spot in the display cases and returned with a stack of original art pages, each carefully sealed in its own plastic bag along with a certificate of authenticity. “And now,” Patronus said, “we have one of the great lots that you’ve all been waiting for: the early work of the legendary artist Simon Curtiss!”

This drew a huge round of applause from the crowd, including some howls and whistles. Sophie chuckled at the noise. “This is a far cry from the staid halls of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, isn’t it?” she said. “Still, I can’t fault them for their enthusiasm.”

“No one gets more excited about their collectibles than comic-book fans,” Nate said. “It reached a fever pitch back in the nineties. The bestselling comic book of all time came out back in 1991, X-Men Number One by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee. It sold more than seven million copies.”

“That seems like an awful lot,” Sophie said.

“It was,” Nate said. “Way too much. Today, the top comics usually sell around a hundred thousand copies. The comics market in the 1990s was driven by speculators, people who remembered how valuable those old Superman and Batman comics their mothers had thrown out would have been if they’d managed to keep them.

“Trouble was, they forgot basic economics, the laws of supply and demand. Those comics grew so much in value because no one ever thought they would. Most people just threw them away when they were done with them.”

“So the ones that remained shot up in value.”

“Right. Trouble with something like X-Men Number One is that there aren’t seven million people who want a copy. When it came out, people bought ten, twenty, even a hundred copies and put them away in hermetically sealed bags, thinking they’d eventually pay for their retirement or their kids’ college education.”

“But that would make the supply far outstrip the demand.”

“Yep. So you can now find copies of that issue here in the hall for a buck or two, about what it sold for back in 1991. Just about anyone who ever wanted one has a copy, so they’re worthless.”

“You sound an awful lot like Hardison,” Sophie said with a soft smile.

Nate bowed his head. Maybe Hardison hadn’t been the only one who’d learned something in the years of their friendship. “Back when I was an insurance investigator, I had a case in which a man had lost a thousand copies of the comic in a fire and was claiming they were worth a hundred dollars each.”

“And you learned all this then? And remembered it?”

He looked at her. “Hardison and I chatted about it on the plane out here.”

Sophie put her hand on Nate’s arm and gave him a look that he could interpret in only one way. “Are you worried about him?”

He frowned and nodded.

Hardison was a grown man, and he made his own decisions. But Nate still considered him—hell, everyone on the team—his responsibility. If they discovered that Hardison had been killed, he wasn’t sure how he’d ever be able to forgive himself for it.

And then Patronus said something in a loud voice that got Nate’s attention. “Before we move on with the rest of the auction, though, I’d like to take a short break to have a great man say a few short words about the Hero Initiative. Please welcome none other than the Man himself, Stan Lee!”

Stan made his way to the short stage and shook Patronus’s hand before taking over the microphone. The crowd went wild, clapping like crazy. Even Nate got into the act, putting his fingers between his teeth for a loud whistle.

“Thanks so much, Lorenzo,” Stan said as the noise died down. “For those who don’t know me, I’m an old man who used to make a lot of comics with a lot of great people. I’m going to turn ninety years old at the end of this year, and I’ve been working in comics for, let’s see, seventy-three years now, my entire adult life.”

The crowd again burst into applause, but Stan waved them down to silence. “Please,” he said with a mischievous smile. “I just told you how old I am. If you keep this up all night, I might not make it to that big birthday.”

The audience laughed but quieted down.

“As many of you already know, the Hero Initiative is a charity near and dear to my heart. I grew up in this industry, and I’ve made so many friends in it over the years, met and worked with so many wonderful people. But as they reach their golden years, not all of them are doing as well as we would all hope. That’s where the Hero Initiative comes in.

“The Hero Initiative provides financial assistance to those creators who need it most, the men and women who created many of the heroes that we all grew up with. Just as they provided us with inspiration and hope, it’s our turn to give that back to them. Through auctions like this one and the sale of special Hero Initiative merchandise, we’re able to do just that.

“So dig deep, buy lots of wonderful artwork, and stop by the Hero Initiative booth in the hall tomorrow for your last chance to grab some great things to take home from the show. Or go to HeroInitiative.org when you get home and join the cause there. Every dime of the sales from our booth and our Web site goes straight to the organization, and you’ll get some great mementos out of it too.”

Stan paused for dramatic effect and spread his hands out to take in the entire convention center. “Together, we can do some real good for the people who made all of this possible. Because everyone deserves a Golden Age.

“Excelsior!”

The crowd erupted into applause that lasted until Stan Lee left the podium with a big wave and a grin. The clapping died down as Patronus replaced him on the stage and said, “Thanks, Stan! You’re still the Man. Now get ready, everybody. We’re about to dig into the rarely seen collection of Simon Curtiss!”

As the crowd settled down and got ready for the bidding to begin again, a curious thought struck Nate. He turned toward Sophie so that anyone watching him would think he was speaking to her.

“Hey, Parker,” he said into the earpiece. “Where exactly are you right now?”

“In the parking structure below you,” Parker said, her voice low. “Haven’t you been listening?” She giggled loudly then—for the benefit of the men loading the van, Nate guessed.

“I mean, exactly where. You’ve been studying the place since we got here.”

“Below you. Just like I said.”

“Directly below us?” Sophie said.

“Yep. One level down.”

“That’s a heck of a coincidence,” Nate said, more to Sophie than anyone else. “Why do you suppose that is?”

“Last place left to park?” said Eliot. “This place is packed to the gills.”

“They could have come in early and parked the vans there before anyone else came into town,” Nate said. “If they really wanted those spots.”

“But why?” said Sophie. “There’s no way to get from there to here, right?”

“Not unless you want to drill through several feet of solid concrete,” Parker said. “The floor of that place is rated to hold up to three hundred and fifty pounds per square foot. You could drive a loaded semi across it. It’s brutally thick.”

Nate furrowed his brow. “It doesn’t make a bit of sense, does it?”

“I don’t suppose it matters now,” Eliot said. “One of those guys is coming toward us. Time to make our move.”

FORTY-FOUR

As Patronus’s men in the parking structure finished loading their things into the two vans, one of them spotted Eliot and Parker hanging out at the corner at the end of the aisle and started to glare at them. He didn’t say a word, just tried to scare them off with the meanest, hardest expression he could summon. Most people who saw something like that on the face of a man that size would have found a good reason to exclaim that they’d forgotten their keys and needed to go back and look for them. Now.

Eliot, of course, ignored him. Instead, he held Parker close to him and pretended to be raging drunk. “C’mere, baby,” he said loudly. “C’mon, my little prisoner. Give me a kiss.”

Parker caught on immediately and started to giggle in mock protest at Eliot. “Oh, please, Mr. Stormtrooper,” she said. “Don’t throw me in the pit with that big, bad monster. The, um, sarlacc! He’ll tear me to pieces!”

“C’mon, baby,” Eliot said, snorting. “Give me some of that Alderaanian sugar.”

Parker squealed in laughter and slapped her hands against Eliot’s shoulder pads, then beat them like a snare drum. Over her shoulder, Eliot saw most of Patronus’s men look over and roll their eyes at the pair of them. One of them actually laughed along with Parker.

That first guy, though, he kept staring at them like a statue, unmoved in any way.

“We’re almost ready to go,” one of the other men said to the glowering sentry. “How about you?”

“Just let me take care of this,” he said.

Eliot groaned inside. He’d hoped to get a few of the men closer together and take them all out at once. Instead, this clown was going to try to shoo them away. That meant the time to move was now.

He stumbled forward, and Parker reached out and caught him. He laughed out loud, then tripped forward again. This time Parker lost her grip, and Eliot had to catch himself on the bumper of a nearby car. That brought him closer to the thug strolling toward him. Almost there.

“Oh, hey!” Parker said with a wild giggle. “My captor has fallen over! Perhaps I can get away. Ha! But he’s my ride!” That sent her into a fit of laughter again, doubling her over as she stumbled after Eliot.

Eliot pushed off of the car he’d fallen against and staggered forward again, putting himself on a collision course with the angry thug. “You can’t catch me,” he said. “I had friends on that Death Star!”

Eliot glanced back at Parker and saw her still following him. It gave him a convenient excuse to charge straight into the thug coming at them.

The man had stopped in his tracks, though, to watch Eliot and Parker come to him, which meant that Eliot wound up misjudging where he was going to be. Rather than stumble into the guy’s arms, he tripped up and fell to his knees at the man’s feet.

The man sighed. “Hey, kid,” he said, “aren’t you kinda clumsy for a stormtrooper?”

“Oh, wow,” Eliot said, pretending to be dizzy. “Can someone make this fully armed and operational battle station stop spinning? I want to get off.”

The man reached down and grabbed him by the front of his armor and hauled him to his feet. Then he said the words that Eliot least expected. “You’re a disgrace to that uniform, you son of a bitch.”

“Huh?”

“For one, that FX helmet was deprecated a while back. For two, no stormtroopers ever came anywhere near Princess Leia in that slave-girl outfit. That happened in Jabba’s palace, not the Death Star. You’re totally breaking the setting.”

“Dude,” Eliot said as he grabbed hold of the man’s shirt to help keep himself upright. “Lighten up. It’s just a freaking costume.”

“And I suppose next you’ll tell me it’s just a freaking movie,” the man said. “You disgust me.”

“Hey,” Parker said as she weaved up behind Eliot. “It’s my big brother’s outfit. Give him a break.”

“And you,” the man said to Parker, his lips curled into a sneer. “It’s the rancor pit they threaten to toss you into, not the sarlacc pit. That’s the one that Jabba wants to make Luke walk the plank into.”

The man pulled Eliot’s helmet off his head and glared at it. “See? It’s way too wide, and the eyeholes are all wrong. The angles are all off.” He looked down his nose at Eliot. “And you two call yourselves fans.”

Eliot reached up to snatch the helmet away from the thug. “Gimme that,” he said. “I need something to be sick into.”

The man laughed and let Eliot take the helmet. “Go right ahead,” he said. “That’s about all it’s good for.”

Then he turned and looked Parker up and down. “Girl,” he said, “I don’t even know where to start with you.”

Eliot took the helmet in a two-handed grip and smashed it into the man’s face. He wasn’t expecting the blow, and it caught him cold and laid him out flat on the ground.

“Hey!”

One of the other men shouted at Eliot and started toward him with three other guys in tow. He and the others had been watching their compatriot give Eliot and Parker a hard time, waiting for him to finish so they could leave. From the way they were stalking toward Eliot, they’d given up on that plan and swapped it out for the chance to beat him to a pulp while Parker watched.

“Hey, you!” Eliot said, still staggering about. “This jackass just insulted my girl!”

Eliot noticed that all of the men had been standing outside of the van closest to him. As far as he could tell, none of them had gotten into the other van at all. He wondered why that might be, but he didn’t have the time to think much more about it.

“That ‘jackass’ is with us,” said the man in the lead of the four coming at Eliot. “And you and that helmet of yours just bought yourself a lot of trouble.”

Eliot gave the men an angry grin and then set to work.

He tossed the helmet up into the air, and the man in the lead of the four thugs put out his hands to catch it. While he was occupied with this, Eliot charged the man standing next to him while shouting at the top of his lungs. Surprised, the man started to back up, which was both exactly what Eliot had been hoping for and the worst thing he could have done.

Eliot smashed into the retreating man like a linebacker and drove him backward, hard, his legs pumping like pistons. The thug retained his balance for a few steps, but that only allowed Eliot to shove him straight into his friend behind him and keep going.

The man in the rear of the line tripped over his own heels as he got knocked backward and went down hard, his friend falling over on top of him in a tangle of arms and legs. His head cracked against the van’s rear bumper as he went down, cutting open his scalp and knocking him silly.

Eliot let go of the man on the top of that pileup and turned his attention to the fourth man, who was now standing next to him, gaping at what had happened to the two guys Eliot had just attacked. Eliot stood up and punched the man in the throat with a sharp, vicious move. The thug bent over, clutching at his neck and gasping for air, probably wondering if he could survive having his Adam’s apple crushed.

Eliot hadn’t hit the man hard enough to kill him, although he could have. It wouldn’t have taken much more force, though, and he knew it. He had held back, out of professional courtesy if nothing else. These guys were young. They might still learn something from this altercation and decide to go into another line of work.

Also, he didn’t need any more blood on his hands, figuratively or literally. He’d seen enough of that to last him a lifetime.

Of course, if these men had killed Hardison, there wouldn’t be enough planet left for them to hide on. He’d track them down and make sure they paid for everything they’d ever done, every sin they’d ever committed, and he’d make sure it hurt too.

The man holding the helmet spun about and stared at what Eliot had done. He clearly hadn’t expected any trouble here, especially from a guy in crappy, ill-fitting stormtrooper armor.

Eliot snatched the helmet from the man’s hand and spun around in one smooth movement. As he did, he cracked the top of the helmet against the jaw of the man he’d charged into a moment before. He’d been getting up off of his friend who’d banged his head against the van’s bumper, and Eliot caught him just before he could launch a counterattack.

The impact sent Eliot’s attacker spinning around, unconscious before he hit the ground. Landing on his face on the cement put a fine point on that, as well as knocking out one of the man’s teeth.

Eliot spun back around to find the man who’d been holding his helmet gawking at him. Eliot stood in front of him and said, “Next time, tell your pal to not be such a jackass. It’s a great movie, but it’s just a movie.”

“Aren’t you going to hurt me?” The man trembled as he spoke. He had seen Eliot take out three of his friends—three large, burly brawlers like him—in the space of a few seconds. He thought he knew what he had coming.

“Nuh-uh,” Eliot said, pitching his helmet around the side of the shaken man. “That’s her job.”

“Huh?” The man turned around right on cue, and Parker—who had taken the helmet in a solid, two-handed hold—swung it like a baseball bat and flattened the man’s nose. He crumpled to the ground in a heap.

“Would you look at that?” Parker tossed aside the helmet. It had cracked in half, right down the middle. “He was right. What shoddy workmanship.”

“There’s one more,” Eliot said. He pointed to the van the men had been standing next to. “Behind the wheel.”

The driver opened the door to the van. He had a gun.

FORTY-FIVE

“Move!” Eliot pushed Parker aside as the driver opened fire. She wound up moving past the other van, which sat there with its back door closed. She glanced back and saw Eliot take a round in his shoulder that spun him around and knocked him to the ground.

Eliot growled in pain and frustration as he crawled away from the gunman on his knees and the hand beneath his one good arm. From the bloody hole that had appeared in the back of his left shoulder pad, Parker could see that the bullet had passed right through his arm and out the other side. That would make it easier to treat and for it to heal, she knew, but this only mattered if they lived long enough for it to happen. In the meantime, the twin entry and exit holes meant that Eliot was bound to lose blood.

Parker slipped around the other side of the van, putting it between her and the gunman. She didn’t know if she could get away from the man this way, but she knew that if she tried to run, he’d have a clear shot at her and would put her down, Princess Leia costume or not.

She peeked around through the driver’s-side window of the second van, hoping she could spot the man through the opposite window. Instead, she found Hardison sitting in that van’s driver’s seat.

Hardison’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Parker, and she had to stifle the reflex to scream. With a quick glance, she saw that his hands had been bound to the van’s steering wheel and that someone had covered his mouth with duct tape. She had no way of knowing how long he’d been there, but he looked tired and scared.

She wanted nothing more right then than to open the door and free her friend, but she couldn’t ignore the man with the gun. She held a finger to her lips for Hardison to be quiet, then ducked down on her hands and knees and slid underneath the van.

From down there, she could see the gunman’s feet as he crept toward the stretch of open concrete in the aisle where all his friends (coworkers?) lay battered and unconscious. The man had to know that he’d hurt Eliot. Even if he hadn’t seen the damage the bullet had done, the splatter of blood he’d left on the ground should have been enough of a clue.

“Come on out,” the man said, his voice steady and confident. “I won’t hurt you.”

The audacity of that lie impressed Parker. She didn’t know if she could have managed telling someone that she’d just shot that she wasn’t going to hurt him. The idea was just too ludicrous.

The man crept toward the back of the van and popped out around its bumper. He moved like he knew how to handle a gun, at least as far as Parker, who was only able to see his feet, could tell.

He had to be in a hurry, right? Someone had to have heard the gunshot, and that would bring people running over here to check it out right away. Even if no one in the area was brave (stupid?) enough to do something like that, somebody was sure to alert security or call 911. And once the call was answered, whatever the man and his friends were planning would come to an end.

Right?

Of course, Parker couldn’t afford to just wait him out. On the off chance she was wrong, the man’s friends might start recovering soon and get up to help him. And if they managed to kill Eliot or Hardison or even Parker herself, it wouldn’t matter much when the police arrived, at least not to the dead.

“Come on, guys,” the gunman said. “Get up. That little stormtrooper of yours isn’t going to hurt you anymore. You can stop shamming.”

None of the five other men moved. Eliot and Parker had done their job well.

“Shit,” the gunman said. He made a sudden move around the back of the vans and, as far as Parker could tell, swept his gun left and right, searching for either her or Eliot. He found neither.

“Come on out,” the gunman said. “I promise to make it quick.”

He stepped forward into the aisle, looking for someone—anyone—to shoot at. Parker hoped that no one innocent came rushing up at that moment, because the gunman was as likely to shoot him as say hi.

The gunman kicked one of his friends on the ground. The man didn’t even groan.

“I did not sign on for this,” the gunman said, growing more agitated by the moment. “I warned each and every one of you bastards that this was going to go wrong, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

Parker slipped out from beneath the van, right behind the man. She didn’t know what he might do next, but if he’d started to look underneath the cars, he’d have found her for sure. Much as she didn’t mind tight spaces, it was awful hard to get away from a gun when you had a van on top of you.

She didn’t have anything to hit the man with. She was just going to have to improvise, use some of the training that Eliot and even Archie had taught her over the years.

If she were to listen to Archie right now, though—or at least his voice in her head—she’d hide away someplace tight where no one would think to look, a place too small or too uncomfortable or just too plain crazy for anyone else to fit. And she’d have stayed there until the man with the gun gave up and went away, and if his friends woke up, she’d outstay them too.

The trouble with that plan, of course, was that Eliot and Hardison couldn’t join her in it. If she hid, she’d wind up letting the man with the gun hunt down Eliot, who was already wounded, and maybe shoot him dead. Sure, Eliot was a tough man—the toughest person Parker had ever known, which counted for something—but even he could be killed, she knew.

And Hardison sat there, gagged and bound and tied to that steering wheel in the van that the bad guys had been about to leave behind. She didn’t know if the man with the gun would take the time to shoot Hardison before he left, but he and his friends—or Patronus or Kanabe or whoever—clearly had something horrible planned for him. She couldn’t abandon Eliot or Hardison to that. Neither of them.

So instead of listening to Archie’s voice, which practically yelled at her to hide away—which, she recognized, he did out of some twisted sort of love—she crept up behind this man with the gun and figured out how to take him down.

She decided that she’d hook her foot around his ankles and then push him forward onto the cement. With luck, he’d drop the gun when he fell, or maybe it would go off in his hand and cause him to shoot himself, which would take all the hard work right out of her plan. No, she didn’t really expect that or anything so fortunate to happen, but a girl could hope, right?

Parker took a deep, silent breath and got ready to make her move, just when a blaster rifle came sailing out of the someplace beyond the gunman. It didn’t quite clip him in the head, and on reflexes alone he turned to see where the thing that someone—it had to be Eliot—had thrown at him had gone.

And, of course, he spotted her standing right there behind him.

While seeing the man turn around had surprised Parker, seeing her there had surprised him a lot more. He froze for a second and then tried to bring his gun around to bear on her.

This time, listening to Eliot’s voice in her head, Parker lashed out with her left hand and knocked aside the man’s right hand, the one with the gun in it, as hard as she could. Luck was finally with her, and she smacked his wrist hard enough into the van he’d been about to escape in that she heard it crack. He dropped the gun, and it clattered on the cement near his feet but did not go off.

He reached out with his left hand then and caught Parker around the throat. She thrust out with her leg, trying to kick him in the crotch, but he turned his thigh toward her at the last instant and deflected the blow. As she brought her leg back down, he took advantage of the fact that she was on only one foot to reel her in, bringing her close enough to his wide chest that she could not bring back an arm or leg far enough to get a good blow in.

Once he had her like that, he squeezed her throat as hard as he could. She tightened the muscles in her neck against the pressure, striving to grab whatever air she could, but he was so big and so strong that it barely helped. She could feel her pulse pounding in her head, and the edges of her vision began to grow dark.

She knew she didn’t have long. She tried to stomp on the man’s feet, but he moved them back, out of her reach, and leaned down on her so hard that she couldn’t lift her feet again without him falling on top of her and crushing her with his full weight.

Parker wished that she’d had a chance to say good-bye to the people who mattered to her: Sophie, Nate, Eliot, and Hardison. Especially Hardison. She’d come so close.

Then she spotted a pair of white boots topped by white leg greaves next to the shoes she’d been trying to stomp on, and she heard Eliot’s voice.

“Let. Her. Go!” he said. And then he hit the man with something, maybe just his armored fist, and bits of white plastic cracked and splintered and fell to the concrete floor.

The man let go of Parker’s throat so that he could deal with Eliot, and he swung her around, putting her between him and her friend.

Eliot looked so pale, and not just because his stormtrooper armor was white. There was a bullet hole in his shoulder pad, and blood had poured out of it, coating his armor in crimson and turning his black undershirt a glistening mess. He didn’t have much fight left in him.

Looking at Eliot, Parker could hardly believe he could stand. He’d managed it, though, to try to save her, even though it would have been a whole lot easier to let himself pass out and hope that it wouldn’t be the end. Now that he’d given her a chance, though, she meant to make the most of it.

The thug froze when he saw the mess he’d made of Eliot, and that’s when Parker made her move. She stomped down on the inside of the man’s shoe, crushing his arch.

The man howled in pain and let Parker go. He reached for her as she broke free, and if she’d tried to run, he would have caught her for sure. Instead, though, she pirouetted like a ballerina—like the gymnast thief Archie had taught her to be—and planted her elbow right into the man’s nose.

She felt the bones in the man’s face give way with a sickening yet satisfying crunch. He toppled over then, his hands falling from her.

Ignoring him, Parker rushed over to Eliot, who’d fallen to his knees. “Don’t,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

He adjusted the shoulder pad lower. “This damn costume’s coming in handy for a little direct pressure.” He gritted his teeth in pain as he pressed down on the wound. “Go check on Hardison first.”

“All right,” Parker said, her voice coming out as a croak. She felt horrible about leaving Eliot there bleeding. She didn’t believe him when he said he’d be all right, but she trusted that he wouldn’t die before she got back.

“What the hell’s going on down there, Parker?” Nate said to her through the earpiece.

“We’re okay,” she said in a voice the gunman had made rough by trying to strangle her. She cleared her throat and tried again. It was better. “Okay, Eliot’s been shot, and Hardison’s tied up in a van, but we’re all going to live. I think.”

“Do you need us down there?” Sophie’s voice ached with concern.

“I think we got it,” Parker said as she walked over to open the driver’s-side door of the van in which Hardison had been bound. “The bad guys are all down. Once I get our guys out of here, I’ll phone it into 911 for cleanup.”

“Good work, Parker,” Nate said. “How’s Hardison?”

Parker opened the door and saw him. He had bruises on his face, and one of his eyes was swollen and shot through with blood. She reached up and ripped the duct tape from his face.

“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 spoke 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, even 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.

“Once again, ladies and gentlemen,” Patronus said, looking directly at Sophie. “This is a Tim Bradstreet illustration of the Punisher, made especially for this auction. I’m going to start the bidding at one thousand dollars for this incredible piece by Tim Bradstreet.”

Sophie pretended not to notice Patronus’s words. She leaned over and spoke to Nate. “It’s time,” she said. “He wants me to call Jim Lee for him,” she said.

“Which will set off the bomb,” Nate said with a grim nod.

“Don’t do it!” Hardison said, panic cracking his voice.

“I think we got that part,” Nate said.

“Patronus gave me both his phone and the number,” Sophie said. “We should be safe.”

“Sure,” Hardison said. “Unless he’s memorized the number. And can find another phone.”

Sophie glanced back at Patronus and saw him trying to signal her. She decided that it was better to acknowledge him rather than have him fly into a panic and grab any phone around him. Given how many people carried phones these days, it wouldn’t take much effort. In fact, he might even have a second phone of his own.

“Oh!” she said with a startled jump. She reached into the pocket of her jacket and found Patronus’s phone there right where she’d put it. She fumbled it out and pretended to dial, taking great care that she didn’t accidentally do so. She didn’t want to discover the hard way that Patronus had put Jim Lee on some sort of speed dial.

She held the phone up to her ear then and pretended to be listening to it ring. She stuck a finger in her other ear, as if she was having a hard time listening to something over the roar of the conversations in the exhibit hall. Then her face lit up as if she’d gotten someone.

She spoke clearly into the phone and started to walk around the edge of the crowd of bidders, making her way toward the back of Patronus’s booth again. “Mr. Lee? Mr. Jim Lee? Hello, this is Jess Drew? Yes, sir, I’m a friend of Lorenzo Patronus, the man running the charity auction for the Hero Initiative.”

She stopped as if to concentrate. From the corner of her eye, she spotted Patronus leaving the podium again to approach her. She acknowledged him with a lift of her eyebrows, then turned away, as if she couldn’t quite make out what the person on the other end of the line was saying.

“I’m sorry, what was that? I couldn’t quite make that out.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

“Oh, that’s just too bad, sir. I’m sorry, Jim.

“Yes, of course. Of course, I think he’ll understand. What choice do any of us have, right?”

Patronus reached the inside of his booth then and held out his hand toward Sophie for the phone. She kept ignoring him.

“All right, Jim. Thanks for all your kindness. We’ll see you at that party you mentioned tonight. Good-bye!”

She spun around then, making sure to keep the front of the phone away from Patronus so he couldn’t see that she’d been faking the entire call. She put a pained look of sympathy on her face to brace him for the bad news.

“I’m afraid he’s not coming,” she said. “He had to take care of an emergency out near the airport, and he thought he could make it back in time. Sad to say, he’s stuck in traffic now and won’t be here in time.”

Patronus’s face fell. “Aw, that’s too bad,” he said with a sharp frown. “I was really looking forward to meeting him.”

Sophie’s face lit up. “Well, then, there’s good news on that front. To make up for his absence, he invited us to a party tonight.”

“The Entertainment Weekly bash at the Hard Rock Hotel?” Patronus’s frown transformed into a silly grin. “That’s fantastic! I hear all sorts of celebrities will be there.”

“I believe he also mentioned poker in his suite after hours,” Sophie said, mirroring his grin, as she slipped his phone back into her pocket. He was too happy to notice, but if he called her on it, she was ready to claim absentmindedness over her happiness for him. “Better take care of business here fast. It’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes, it is.” He pumped his fist once and then charged back to the podium, eager to make the most of his scam.

“At least we don’t have to worry about Patronus blowing us up anytime tonight,” Sophie said into her earpiece.

“True,” said Nate, “although that doesn’t rule out anybody else.”

FORTY-NINE

Eliot had wound up wedged halfway in the passenger’s-side door, caught by the edges of his armor’s breastplate. Parker vaulted over his head and out of the van, then knelt down next to him. “Eliot?” she said as she shook him. “Eliot!”

“He’s out cold,” Hardison said. He hoped he was right, that their friend was just unconscious and not dead. If they didn’t find that jammer fast, though, it wouldn’t much matter. “Search him. This is no time to be shy.”

Parker checked over Eliot. He’d lost his helmet in the fight with the thugs. She didn’t think the jammer would have fit inside of that anyhow, and it hadn’t fallen out of the thing when it had split in two. The rest of Eliot’s armor was loose on him, built as it had been for a bigger man. It was possible he’d hidden it under there somehow.

Parker pulled off the breastplate, which turned out to be fastened on with straps made from black Velcro. As she did, she saw how much Eliot had bled down the inside of the plastic, and she gasped. The jammer, though, was not there.

She knew the thing was too big to fit under the armor’s bracers or greaves. It would have been way too bulky and noticeable. That left only one place to look: the armor’s codpiece.

“Sorry about this,” Parker said as she reached down and tried to figure out how to undo the damn thing. It turned out that the codpiece was actually part of an abdominal plate that ran down from the front breastplate to cover the groin, but it had a belt that went over it that had to be removed before Parker could take the plate off.

“This is a much more complicated costume than mine,” she said. Of course, she was wearing only a bikini and a skirt—well, and the wig and the arm bracelet and the shoes and—whatever.

“What’s taking so long?” Hardison said.

“Only place left to check is his underwear,” Parker said as she worked. “But I have to get his belt off first.”

“Wish I hadn’t asked.”

Parker yanked the belt off Eliot, then grabbed the abdominal plate and pulled as hard as she could. The Velcro straps gave, and she flung the plastic piece aside. There sat the jammer, tucked into the waistband of his long, black underpants.

Parker plucked the device free and held it up into the air in triumph. “Got it!” she said. “How does it work?”

“Hardison?” said Nate.

“It’s damn simple,” Hardison said. “You turn it on, and you get it as close to the cell phone as you possibly can.”

“Is there any kind of danger of the jammer accidentally setting off the phone?”

“Supposedly not,” Hardison said. “For sure it’s no more dangerous than not turning it on and hoping that Kanabe doesn’t get too impatient and call in the bombing run himself.”

“Good point,” Parker said as she crawled over Eliot and back into the van. Once there, she found the switch on the side of the jammer, and she turned it on.

“Great,” Hardison said. “Now hold it up to me for a second.”

Parker did as he asked, and he checked out the readouts on the device’s display. He glared at them hard for a moment, then gave Parker a firm nod. “It’s all good,” he said. “Now that thing has a damn short range on it. Put it down right there next to the detonator, as close as you can reasonably get without touching it.”

“All right.” Parker did just as he asked. It didn’t seem like it had any effect at all on the cell phone, which she supposed was the point. As long as the little box kept any signals from coming in to the cell phone attached to the detonator, they’d be okay.

“Thank you, girl,” Hardison said. “Now, can you figure out a way to get me free? There’s got to be a box cutter around here somewhere. Or on one of those bruisers out there.”

“I’m on it,” Parker said.

“And, hey, look for some keys while you’re at it. We’re going to need a ride out of here. We need to get Eliot to a doctor, fast.”

“Already on it,” Sophie said over the earpiece. “I just so happen to know a vet who works out at the San Diego Zoo.”

“And how is that supposed to help Eliot?” Hardison said.

“This man has stitched up plenty of gunshot wounds in his life,” Sophie said. “And vets aren’t required by law to report gunshots, the way every hospital in America must.”

“Hey,” Parker said. “That thing runs on batteries, right?”

“You mean the jammer?” Hardison said. “Yes it does. Why?”

“And how long do you suspect those batteries might last?”

“Two hours,” Hardison said, “tops.”

Parker didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “Any idea how much charge might have been left in that thing?”

For a long moment Hardison didn’t say a word. Parker didn’t let that slow her down. She found the keys for the other van in its ignition, and there was a box cutter on the floor between the seats. She snatched it up.

“All I can say is that we’d better get moving,” Hardison said. “As fast as we damn well can.”

FIFTY

Lorenzo Patronus had never had such a great day in his life. He’d pulled off the greatest scam of his scummy little career, and he’d gotten to rub shoulders with countless comic-book celebrities as he did it. Every time he thought about his good luck, he just couldn’t help but smile.

He almost felt bad for those old coots he’d conned out of all their artwork, but hey, it hadn’t been him who’d screwed them all over. They’d done it to themselves by signing rotten work-for-hire contracts with the comic-book publishers, agreements that paid them for their services creating stories and artwork that entertained and inspired millions of kids, from nine to ninety, but didn’t give them even the tiniest sliver of the action. They should have known better than that, right? Even if most of those old fogies had started their careers long before anyone had ever thought of comics as anything more than disposable stories for children and men who never grew up.

When the auction was over, Patronus hadn’t even wanted to total up all the money they’d earned. There would be time enough for that later. He’d turned a huge profit on this venture one way or the other.

After all, he hadn’t put a dime into the booth or the staff or the rental of all the furniture and display cases. Mr. Kanabe had put up all the cash. Kanabe liked to think of himself as Patronus’s partner, but Patronus saw him as an investor, someone who had put money into the venture with a reasonable expectation of a decent return.

Kanabe didn’t know that Patronus planned to stiff him too. After all, he’d taken the artwork from those legendary artists. Why should he share it with some talentless thug? He was about to walk off with the money from auctioning off all those goods, plus the fantastic pieces all those younger artists had contributed to the auction to benefit the Hero Initiative.

Kanabe liked to think he was a dangerous man, but Patronus knew a blowhard when he saw one. Throwing around money to hire all sorts of muscle didn’t impress him. He’d seen plenty of guys like that with enough steroids in their veins to cut off the flow of blood to their brains.

Besides, those guys all listened to him instead of Kanabe, right? They took orders just fine either way, never asking any questions. He liked that about them at least. Maybe steroids didn’t make you deaf.

Kanabe had already washed out of the comic-book industry once. That’s why he needed Patronus as his front. He couldn’t get back in on his own, but once the auction was over, Kanabe planned to quietly release the fact that he had been the moneyman behind it. He thought that would buy him the respectability he craved so much, but he didn’t realize that Patronus’s real plan would ruin that for him too.

That must be why Kanabe had been so angry about that hacker going in and finding his secret Web site with all that obscene manga on it. Just when he thought he was back on the brink of respectability, that scandal came and hauled him back. He might never live it down.

It was one thing to have a business like Kanabe’s manga publishing fail. That happened all the time. But to be outed as the premier supplier of Asian smut comics? That wasn’t going to wash away anytime soon.

Patronus shook his head. He would hate to be that hacker if Kanabe ever got his hands on him. Kanabe might be mostly harmless, but push any man into a corner like that and you never knew what the results might be.

Patronus thanked the booth babes for all their help. He’d tried to get personal phone numbers from a few of them on the pretense that he might have some after-hours work, but they’d all been firm about sticking to their agency’s policy of zero fraternization with clients. He didn’t understand why they wouldn’t make an exception for a guy like him, but that was their loss, right?

As he closed down the rest of the booth for the night, Patronus wondered where all his men had disappeared. Maybe they’d misunderstood his directions and decided to wait for him in the parking structure rather than come back up here to escort him and the cash box to the van. They weren’t the sharpest blades in the razor.

He hated the idea of having to walk down to the parking structure with so much money on him without any kind of guard, but he didn’t see that he had much choice. He decided to call the main guy in charge of security—Mike, he thought the name was—but when he reached for his phone, he discovered it was gone. The last time he’d seen it, he’d given it to Jess. Had he forgotten to ask for it back in all the excitement?

That didn’t matter. He supposed he’d see her at the party tonight.

That put a grin on his face. He’d be drinking with Jim Lee! And who knew how many other celebrities? Warner owned DC Comics, which meant all sorts of people might be there: film and TV stars, singers, models. And since Entertainment Weekly was hosting the party, there would be all sorts of A-listers competing for the limelight.

Unable to call Mike or whatever his name was, Patronus decided he had no choice but to walk the cash box down to the van himself. It wasn’t like he could just leave it at the booth.

Tomorrow morning, he planned on meeting with Jeff Mace to turn over an even million dollars. Later in the day, he’d be in the booth, giving the winning bidders their counterfeit art. His van, containing all of the merchandise he’d supposedly auctioned off, would be safely parked in a secure lot in La Jolla. Originally, he’d intended to take the money, the art, and himself to some tropical paradise that had no extradition arrangements with the United States. Now, though, he had to find a way to stick around, to reinvent himself as a hot new artist just discovered by Warren Ellis.

He’d done a fine job with the forgeries, if he did say so himself. He knew they’d never hold up under close inspection, but in the craze of the last day of the show, he doubted that anyone would notice. Later, though, there’d be a hue and cry.

But Patronus had a plan for that. It might take some fancy footwork, but he intended to see that Kanabe took the fall. The first step would be to direct attention toward him as the moneyman behind the venture. He intended to talk a lot about that at the party.

Patronus tucked the cash box under his arm and headed for the back aisle. As he did, a tall man with shoulder-length sandy hair, wire-rim glasses, and a thin goatee approached him. Patronus tried to veer away from him, but the man came right at him anyway. He wore a press badge.

“Mr. Patronus?” the man said in a British accent. “Rich Johnston of BleedingCool.com. I wonder if I might have a word with you about the auction?”

Patronus stiffened for a moment at the idea of speaking to a reporter of any kind—especially a muckraker like Johnston, whose work he knew all too well—but then he warmed to the idea in an instant. This chat could come in very handy.

“Can we walk and talk?”

“Certainly.” Johnston fell into step behind him, pulled a small digital voice recorder out of his pocket, and thumbed it on. “So, I heard the auction did extremely well for you. Any estimate of how much you brought in?”

Patronus shrugged. “I don’t have the final figures yet. I won’t until I get back to my hotel room and count it all up. All told, though, I’m sure that we raked in well over a million dollars.”

“Excellent,” Johnston said. “And just how much of that will be going to the Hero Initiative in the end?”

“That’s an even tougher question to answer. Of the lots I supplied for the auction myself, at least ten percent goes to the Hero Initiative. More in some cases. When it comes to the donated pieces, though, all of the funds from those bits go to the cause.”

“Understood. And can I ask how you managed to get all of that artwork lined up for the show? It seems like you managed to pull in pieces from an astounding number of Golden Age legends.”

“Just hard work and good luck, I guess.” The question made Patronus a little uneasy, though, and he tried to switch the subject. “I couldn’t have possibly managed it without the help of Daichi Kanabe, though. He put up all the money for the booth as a donation to the cause and even let us use his booth priority from the previous years when his old company had a presence here at the show.”

“Kanabe of MangaWorks? I remember interviewing him a few years back. Quite a spectacular meltdown the company had. I’d thought he’d gotten out of the business entirely.”

“He had,” Patronus said, “up until this weekend. Honestly, he was a godsend.” He patted the cash box. “None of this could have happened without him.”

“What about the scandal that erupted this weekend over the fact that Kanabe’s been illegally selling pornographic manga on the Internet? Bit of bad timing that, if this was meant to be his return to the comic-book community.”

Patronus shrugged. “I didn’t know about any of that until I read it in the papers.”

Wouldn’t it be great if he was able to throw so much of the suspicion onto Kanabe that he himself came out of the mess smelling like a rose? That way he maybe could even manage to keep using the Patronus name. Despite the uproar that was certain to occur after it became obvious that the auctioned pieces were forgeries, if he could pin the blame on the disgraced Kanabe, it would put him in the clear. It might even make him an object of sympathy, the noble artist who devoted so much of his time to helping the Hero Initiative only to be ripped off by the disgusting Mr. Kanabe.

“All I know is that Mr. Kanabe has always been the real force behind this auction,” Patronus said. “If it wasn’t for him, there wouldn’t have been an auction in the first place, and I’ll forever be grateful to him for that. After I turn this money over to him tonight, we’ll have a chance to celebrate. I cannot wait to see the big check he’ll be presenting to the Hero Initiative.”

“That’s good to hear,” Johnston said as they reached the entrance to the back hallway.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here, Mr. Johnston,” Patronus said. “It was a real pleasure to meet you.”

“Oh, you don’t remember? We’ve met before.”

Patronus’s smile faltered. “Forgive me. I—I think I’d remember something like that.”

Johnston smiled. “Well, we’ve never actually met in person, but we’ve exchanged many e-mails over the years, haven’t we? After all, I was the one who exposed you for trying to pawn off your artwork as the creations of some of the biggest names in the industry while you pretended to be an agent for them. What was the name you were using back then?”

Patronus glared at Johnston. He knew exactly what the reporter was talking about, and he also knew that he was trying to trick him into confirming that he had been the one who had committed those frauds. He wasn’t going to fall for that.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Patronus struggled to keep his voice from shaking. “And now I really do have to be going.”

“You probably blame me for blowing that for you, and I’m happy to take some small credit for it,” Johnston said. “But you know, you would have been found out soon enough anyhow. You’re not nearly as good as the people you claim to be.”

“What?” Patronus couldn’t believe the man would insult him like that.

Johnston shrugged. “I’ve seen the stuff you tried to submit. It was—what’s the right word? Oh, yes: rotten. My eldest daughter has posted material with a better sense of anatomy and perspective on our refrigerator, and she’s only seven.”

“You son of a bitch.” Patronus’s face turned red as his temper seethed. “I put a lot of goddamn work into those pieces.”

“Ah, so it is you after all.” Johnston grinned at him. “So good to finally meet you in person after all these years.”

“Go to hell! You and your damn Web site. And if you print a single word of this, I’ll track you down and kill you and your little girl too.” With that, Patronus turned on his heel and stalked off, leaving Johnston standing there chuckling over his little victory.

“There are two of them, actually,” Johnston called after him. “And if you fight as well as you draw, I think they might be able to take you on their own.”

Patronus kicked himself for not sticking to his denials. He’d let the limey bastard get to him, and now he was going to have to deal with it. He figured at the least he’d simply deny that it was his voice on Johnston’s recording. After three and a half days of the show, it was shot and he didn’t sound much like he usually did anyway. He’d claim he’d never met Johnston and that the reporter was just fabricating a story to garner hits for his Web site from a bogus scandal.

And to think that Johnston would attack him, Patronus, with such allegations in the middle of his trying to sort out the aftermath of Mr. Kanabe’s betrayal of both himself and the Hero Initiative. How dare he?

Patronus was smiling again by the time the freight elevator reached the parking garage. Johnston couldn’t touch him, not if he didn’t let him, right?

He walked over to where the van was parked at the far north side of the underground lot. Most of the people parked in that area had driven in before the show and weren’t planning to leave until tomorrow evening after the convention ended. There was barely any foot traffic back in the last aisle all weekend, and none now.

As he approached the van, he slipped in something wet on the concrete and almost went down. It looked almost black against the concrete in the dim light, but it had a red tinge to it and smelled like copper. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought it was blood.

When he reached the van, he pulled out his keys and pressed the fob to unlock the doors, but nothing happened. He tried it three more times, getting closer every time, until he finally gave up. He wondered if maybe the battery in the fob had run out or if the thing was just broken. The van wasn’t that old.

The men should have been waiting for him, but he didn’t see anyone standing there. He wondered if they’d at least locked the damn doors before they ran off to the nearest bar or wherever the hell they’d gone. He tried the back door of the van, and it was unlocked.

He cursed the thick-necked morons for their carelessness as he pulled open the door. Inside, the van was stacked from top to bottom with boxes that he didn’t recognize. Maybe some of them had been in the booth—he wasn’t sure—but he didn’t see any of the tubes that he’d placed so much of the original artwork into.

He growled in frustration, wondering if the bastards had ripped him off. He wouldn’t have put it past them. If he had his phone with him, he’d call them up and chew them raw.

Instead, he stalked around to the front of the van to climb in and drive off. As he did, he spotted one of the men in the driver’s seat. He grabbed the door’s handle and flung it open. “What the hell is wrong with you guys?” he said with a snarl.

It wasn’t until then that he saw that the man was bound to the steering wheel with zip ties and that his mouth had been duct-taped shut. Patronus peered at him in stunned fascination and saw that his nose had been flattened and he’d bled all over the tape. Another one of the guards sat in the passenger seat, and the same thing had been done to him. The men stared at him with wide, terrified eyes, pleading with him to do something to save them, to at least set them free.

Patronus almost dropped the cash box but caught it just in time. The adrenaline that was pumping through his bloodstream prodded him to reach up and strip the tape from the driver’s mouth in one sharp, painful move. “You got to get us out of here,” the guard said in spluttering panic. “We’re sitting on a bomb!”

This time Patronus did drop the cash box. “What?”

“They beat us up and took the other van. They tied up the other guys and shoved them under this one. They taped them to the chassis!”

“What bomb?”

The man jerked his head toward the rear of the van. “Those boxes, we moved them in here all weekend long, right under your nose. Hell, under everyone’s noses. No one looks at a guy carrying a single box in or out of the con. Not if you got an exhibitor badge.”

“What’s in the boxes?” The level of betrayal here stabbed through Patronus. Not only had they not moved the artwork down here—his artwork—but they’d stuffed the van with something else.

“Haven’t you heard a damn thing I said? You got to cut me loose. Get us out of here, now!”

Patronus leaned into the van and slapped the man across the face. “What’s in those boxes? Where’s my art?”

“It’s gone!” the guard said. “They took it! They only left the dynamite!”

Patronus staggered backward, his jaw loose and hanging open. Everything had gone from good to bad so fast that it left him dizzy. He needed to get out of here, to find someplace safe to think.

He reached down and scooped up the cash box, then turned to go.

“No!” the guard said. “You can’t leave us here. It ain’t human! That bomb could go off any second!”

Patronus ignored the man’s pleas. These men had betrayed his trust, and as far as he was concerned, blowing up in a fiery explosion was a perfect reward for them. He just wanted to be far, far away when it happened.

The thing that astonished him next was that he didn’t hear the sirens. He supposed the cops didn’t have them on. One second he was leaving the bastards who’d betrayed him behind, strapped to a van filled with high explosives. The next, squad cars appeared at both ends of the aisle and blocked them off while a well-armed squad of SWAT officers stormed between the cars in the aisle across from him, bellowing at him to put down the box and lie down on the ground.

Patronus did as they demanded. He didn’t understand how his life had all gone so wrong so fast. There was only one person who could have done this to him, and he vowed to make him pay.

Kanabe.

FIFTY-ONE

Daichi Kanabe had not had a good convention. He’d come into it like most people at the show, full of plans and hopes, but now, on Saturday night, they all seemed to have been dashed.

On Wednesday, he’d been sure that it would all go right. The men he’d hired as Patronus’s security were all seasoned professionals, and at the prices he was paying them, they’d have strapped their own mothers to the bomb he had them build. As for Patronus, he’d proven to be the perfect patsy, one who thought he was actually betraying Kanabe instead of the other way around. And if the plan had gone off properly, Patronus would have taken the blame for everything.

A disgruntled fraud in the comic-book industry robs many of its legends blind and then runs off with the funds from a charity auction meant to benefit them. But to crown his revenge, he wants to blow up the convention center as well. It would only be seen as ironic that the bomb had gone off too early and killed him along with everyone else.

When the bomb had failed to go off on schedule, or even close to it, Kanabe had taken matters into his own hands, and not even that had worked. No matter how many times he’d called the phone attached to the bomb from his hotel room in the Hyatt, it hadn’t detonated. He would have liked to think the problem was with the cheap phone he’d had the guards pay for with cash, but the other ones he’d purchased seemed to work fine.

He had to assume that everything had gone bad, and that meant he had to leave. He could be at the airport in less than fifteen minutes, and he would simply bump up his flight back to Japan by a day, explaining that he had a family matter to attend to. No one would suspect a thing, and if and when they did, he’d already be out of the country.

He stood outside and waited for the valet to bring his Lexus up from the parking lot. It seemed to be taking forever, and he’d already decided to stiff the person on the tip. So what if the entire downtown area was packed right now? It wasn’t his problem.

When the valet—a woman, it turned out—arrived with his car, she was just as bumbling as he expected. First, she parked the car as far from the front doors as possible. Then she fumbled with the trunk, dropped his luggage, and even tripped into him as she tried to catch it before it hit the ground.

After the kind of day he’d had, such incompetence was intolerable. He considered slapping the woman but decided he’d settle for her job. “Do you have a manager?” he said to her instead. “Bring him to see me immediately!”

She scurried off like a frightened mouse and spoke to a man who had been sitting on the edge of a planter near the hotel’s front entrance. He leaped off it and sauntered over to Kanabe, a sour look on his face, as the woman scurried back to the car again, probably to scratch it, not from malice but out of sheer incompetence.

“Do you have a policy for hiring the mentally handicapped?” Kanabe said.

“Oh, I’m not her boss,” said Nate.

“As I said to her, I demand to see her manager immediately!”

Nate shrugged as he watched Sophie over Kanabe’s shoulder. She held up the passport and wallet she’d picked from the man’s pockets, then tossed them into the car. “She doesn’t even work here,” he said.

Kanabe glared back at Sophie, who was already striding away from the car, her back to him. He didn’t understand what was going on here.

“Do you have any idea who I am and how angry you’re making me right now?”

Nate gave the man a wry smile. “Of course I do, Mr. Kanabe. You see, I always make a point of doing my research, especially when it comes to people who kidnap and beat my friends and try to frame them as terrorists.”

Kanabe glanced around, wondering if this man could be with the police. Was the game finally up? He had thought he had more time.

“The hacker,” he said. “He was a thorn in my side. I removed it. It is only business.”

Nate leaned in close. “He’s a good friend of mine. The best. And I take it personally when someone tries to kill my friends—along with a lot of other innocent people.”

Kanabe snorted at the man’s bravado. “If I can do that to him, what makes you think I won’t do it to you? Do you have other people you care about? I can kill them for you—all of them—one by one.”

Nate grimaced at Kanabe. “You’re making this a lot easier than I thought.”

In his head, Kanabe was already killing Nate and anyone close to him. He’d start with the valet and then work his way closer and closer, saving the coup de grâce for this insolent bastard who was standing before him.

Unfortunately, he’d let his temper get ahold of him for a moment. Better to play it cool for now and have his revenge at his leisure, later. He could afford to be patient. He just needed to leave town first, fast.

“You don’t have a shred of proof for any of your accusations,” Kanabe said. “None of them will hold up in a court of law.”

Nate laughed. “You think we’re going to turn you over to the law?” he said. “Oh, no, we’re much more dangerous than that. And as for evidence, I think a full confession from your friend Lorenzo Patronus might do the trick.”

Kanabe had negotiated hundreds if not thousands of business deals over the years. He could read people like traffic signs. He wasn’t about to let this man intimidate him. “You’re bluffing.”

“I am?” Nate shrugged. “I suppose I could be. Why don’t you call him and find out?”

Kanabe grunted. This fool expected him to take his word for what had happened. He had gall to tell him to call Patronus, figuring that he wouldn’t dare do so for fear of being connected somehow to him. Kanabe knew, though, that it was far too late to deny that connection. He’d forged it on purpose anyhow, planning to portray himself as the silent business partner of a madman, who, it turned out, had duped him, just as he’d duped so many others, including all those artists who supposedly donated their work to the auction.

“I will,” Kanabe said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He took great care not to hit the redial button, which would have placed the call to the bomb in the van again, or at least tried to. Instead, he looked up Patronus’s number in his recent-call list and prepared to tap the man’s name.

Nate smirked. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Kanabe said. “But I’m all too happy to expose you as a liar.”

“I’m not lying,” said Nate. “And when all this is over, I want you to remember two things. First, if you ever go after Hardison or anyone else associated with him again, I’ll burn everything you love to the ground.”

Kanabe wasn’t impressed in the least. “And second.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Nate turned around and walked away, back toward the hotel. Kanabe laughed at him in triumph as he tapped Patronus’s name. So much for this stranger and his threats.

He put the ear to his phone. It started to ring.

His car exploded.

It wasn’t a huge explosion, not like the one he’d planned with the van, but it was enough to knock him forward a couple feet and to destroy his car. Every bit of glass in the car shattered outward, and the whole thing went up in a ball of flame that erupted into the dusky sky. Then the Lexus burned, the heat from it so hot that Kanabe couldn’t help but stagger back as he stared at it in despair.

“My car,” he said. “My car!”

The police officers who were racing toward the blazing machine changed course and converged right on him. “You say that’s your car, sir?” the younger of the two men said. “Can we see some ID?”

Kanabe reached for his passport and discovered it was gone. The same was true of his wallet. He had no way to prove who he was, and worse yet, with those two items gone, he had no means of leaving the country. He was doomed.

The older police officer put a hand on Kanabe, which he tried to shrug off. “Sir, you need to calm down—and I think you’ll need to come down to the station with us too.”

“You bastard!” Kanabe screamed after Nate, who had already disappeared, along with that rotten valet. “You absolute bastard!”

FIFTY-TWO

Nate grinned all the way back to the Horton Grand, and Sophie grinned right along with him. “All in all, a good few days’ work,” he said as they neared the Gaslamp Quarter. “Wouldn’t you say so, guys?”

“Damn straight,” Eliot agreed over the earpiece. “Although I could have done without getting shot again.”

“Doc says he’s going to be all right, though,” said Parker. “After fixing up both Eliot and Hardison, he says whatever he owes you is done.”

“Fair enough,” Nate said. “Be sure to thank him for his services. Hopefully we’ll never need them again.”

“We’re just glad that everyone’s going to survive,” said Sophie. “We weren’t down there in the garage with you, but it seemed like a close business for a moment.”

“Closer than I like to think,” said Hardison. “Eliot’s even tougher than I figured him for.”

“Let’s not make a habit of this, all right?” Eliot said.

Hardison laughed. “And yet, the painkillers don’t seem to make him any more mellow. That’s how tough he is.”

“So you have the van full of artwork?” Nate said.

“Yep,” said Parker. “Your friend says we can leave it here tonight. He lives way out in the middle of nowhere, and no one’s going to see it here.”

“How are you getting back into town, then?” Sophie said.

“He’ll put us up here for the night too,” said Hardison. “He wants to keep Eliot overnight for observation anyhow.”

“I’ll be fine,” Eliot said. “I’ve had worse scratches before.”

“Listen to him,” Nate said. “The doc’s a vet, not a battlefield medic. If he made a mistake, you’ll wind up in a hospital someplace, and we’ll have a lot of explaining to do. You can’t exactly claim you shot yourself in the shoulder while cleaning your gun, and even if they buy that, they still have to alert the police.”

“All right,” Eliot said. “Fine. I get it. An evening off is fine with me.”

Nate held Sophie’s hand as they walked under the arched, wrought-iron entrance to the Gaslamp Quarter. “I don’t think we have any more to do here anyhow,” he said. “Patronus is in custody, along with the guys who tried to kill you.”

“And the police picked up Kanabe as well. Is there anyone we’re missing?”

“What about Cha0s?” Eliot said. He sounded like he wanted to take out all the frustrations from being shot on the hacker, one painful punch at a time. Nate didn’t see any reason to stop him from doing so—after he’d healed.

“He’s long gone by now,” Hardison said. “If he knows what he’s doing, he’ll stay that way too. I owe him. A lot.”

“What about the money from the auction?” Parker said.

“The police recovered it when they arrested Patronus,” Nate said. “It’ll take a little while for the accountants to work it out, but all of the funds should wind up with either the Hero Initiative or the individual artists whose work was stolen.”

“But we still have that artwork in the van,” Hardison said. “What do we do with it?”

“We just leave it someplace tomorrow and make sure the police find it,” Sophie said. “They should distribute the artwork to the people who bought it at the auction. Seems fair, right?”

“I thought maybe we would give it back to the artists,” Parker said, “but I suppose all those people at the auction didn’t know they were buying stolen goods—and getting counterfeits in their place anyhow.”

“Right,” said Nate. “Plus those artists all gave Patronus that artwork to sell anyhow. Despite the fact that he was going to keep all the money for himself, he did a fine job at the auction. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed with the results.”

“Can Simon Curtiss afford to wait until the money gets released to him?” Eliot said. “He seemed like he was in a tight spot.”

“He’ll be fine,” Hardison said. “I, ah, arranged to take care of his expenses for a while. He didn’t want to take it all, though, and his daughter refused too. She said we were doing enough for them already.”

“So how’d you change her mind?” asked Nate.

Hardison chuckled. “I can hack money out of banks, folks. Putting it in is easy. A direct deposit showed up in Susan’s bank account, made from a mysterious bank account that was then closed.”

Parker laughed too. “So she has the money now, and no way to return it.”

“Exactly. They should have enough to hold them over until the money from the auction arrives.”

“You think they made enough from that to make a difference?” Eliot asked. “Medical bills and funeral expenses can eat up cash faster than a fire.”

“I can guarantee it,” Nate said. “The Simon Curtiss lot set the auction’s record last night, by far.”

“Wow,” Parker said. “I didn’t realize that he had such a rabid fan base. That’s so cool!”

“You don’t need a whole lot of fans to make something like that happen,” said Nate. He looked into Sophie’s eyes and smiled as she grinned back at him. “Just two very determined people.”

“What’s that famous line from Spider-Man?” Sophie said.

“With great power there must also come great responsibility,” said Nate. He’d read a lot of those comics with Sam, and he knew the words by heart.

“It’s too bad more people don’t remember that when they’re in power,” Eliot said.

Nate chuckled as he and Sophie walked arm in arm into the Horton Grand for a night all to themselves. “Rich and powerful people are always going to screw that up,” he said. “And when they do, we’ll be there to stop them.”

FIFTY-THREE

Weeks later, a large flat package showed up at Nate’s apartment, and he brought it upstairs to unwrap it before he and the crew sat down for their next briefing. He set the box on the counter and opened it with a knife while the others watched.

“What you got there, Nate?” Parker asked with a curious glint in her eyes.

“Just a little present from a friend,” he said. “You remember Simon Curtiss?”

“How could we forget?” asked Eliot as he rotated and flexed his shoulder. The wound had healed perfectly, but he still tested it every now and then to make sure.

Hardison cocked his head at Nate. “What did he send you now? I thought you returned all of his artwork you bought to him.”

“That we did,” Nate said. Part of him regretted this, as the Curtiss lot had contained some fantastic pieces, but he didn’t have the space to give all that work a proper home anyhow. Better Simon get it back to do with as he pleased. “But he insisted on drawing us something to say thanks. Even had it framed.”

“So?” Sophie said. “Let us see.”

Nate pulled the frame from the box and held up the piece. It showed Spider-Man bouncing on the end of a long lever wedged over a fulcrum. At the other end of it, a panicked Lorenzo Patronus catapulted high into the air, sacks of stolen money scattering all around him.

Nate, Sophie, Eliot, Parker, and Hardison all took in the image and laughed.

“There’s a caption below it,” Sophie said. “What does it say?”

Nate peered down at the bottom of the page. “‘With great leverage comes great justice.’ And it’s signed, ‘Thanks, Simon Curtiss.’”

Nate walked the artwork over to a blank spot on the wall that he’d prepared for it. As he did, he knew one thing for sure. Sam would have loved it.

Keep reading for a special excerpt from

THE ZOO JOB

Coming March 2013 from Berkley Boulevard!

Zoe Kerrigan held up her cell phone, currently in picture-taking mode, finger poised over the camera icon, waiting for the red panda to wake up.

It was her fourth trip to the Brillinger Zoo since she and Dad moved out to this central Massachusetts town, also called Brillinger, a couple of years ago. They’d lived in Boston all their lives, but after Dad’s car accident, and after he’d had to testify in court against his former boss—and after they’d gotten all that money—they moved out here.

Zoe didn’t want to leave Boston, but Dad said he didn’t feel safe there anymore, which was silly, since the bad guys who hurt them were now in jail. But Dad said it was best, so they moved.

She still mostly hated the place, but she loved the zoo. For the first year, she hadn’t even known it existed. After she started high school, she spent an entire class day on a field trip to the Brillinger Zoo, and she got to see the giraffes and the bears and the lemurs (though they called them something else, but they looked like lemurs) and the red panda.

Unfortunately, the red panda was asleep that day. Mind you, it was so totally cute when it was asleep, but she wanted to see it awake and moving around and stuff.

She begged Dad to take her back, and eventually he gave in and they returned to the zoo on a chilly Saturday afternoon.

Once again, the red panda was asleep. However, Zoe convinced Dad to pay for the two of them to become Zoo Boosters, which gave them free admittance to the zoo anytime and a discount on merchandise from the zoo store.

The third time Zoe visited the zoo, the red panda was again asleep, but this time it was on a different tree branch. Same thing for the fourth trip.

This time, though, she was bound and determined. When they’d arrived at the zoo on this lovely spring morning, she made a beeline for the red panda. Bypassing the reptile enclosure, the bear preserve, and the lemurs-that-weren’t-actually-called-lemurs, she walked up the paved hill to the wooden fence that separated the red panda from the people. She didn’t bother reading the placard telling the history of the red panda, as she’d long since memorized it. Zoe was fully aware that this red panda was named Mei, which was Chinese for “beautiful,” and that it came from China, mostly ate bamboo, and was more related to a raccoon than to the traditional black-and-white panda.

Of course, Mei was asleep. As usual. Zoe took out her cell phone, put it into camera mode, and waited.

The second the red panda woke up, she was going to take a picture. With her phone, which it had taken her a year to convince Dad to get her. He didn’t give in until right before she started high school. The online forms Dad had to fill out included a mandatory field for the child’s cell-phone number (in case of emergencies), so he couldn’t even place her in the school until he got her the cell phone she’d been asking for since forever.

Speaking of Dad, he’d gone off to the bathroom. When he came back, he asked, “Hasn’t he woken up yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Honey, maybe we should go see something else.”

“I want to see the red panda wake up!”

“We can go look at the giraffes, and maybe the aye-ayes.”

She turned to stare at Dad. “The what?”

“The aye-ayes. Y’know the things that look like lemurs.”

“Those are lemurs, Dad.” She sighed loudly and turned back to look at the red panda. It still lay sleeping, its paw over its eyes, curled up on a tree branch and looking incredibly adorable.

But she’d seen this adorable four times now. She wanted to see the red panda be adorable while awake.

Dad took his own cell phone out of his pocket and checked the display, then put it back. “It’s already afternoon. Surprised there aren’t more people here.”

Zoe said nothing, but she was surprised too. The most crowded she’d ever seen the zoo was the time she came with the class—but then, she was with the class the entire time. Each time she’d come with Dad, it was emptier.

A woman came walking up the incline toward the red panda exhibit. She wore a denim blouse and those beige pants that had lots of pockets. The blouse pocket had an ID clipped to it that looked a lot like the badge Dad wore to work, but it had the zoo’s name on it. It was a different color from the ones worn by the other zoo staff, though—gold instead of silver.

She was the same height as Zoe and had a big smile on her face. “Hi there! I hope you’re having a good time.”

“The red panda won’t wake up.”

Dad made a funny face at that. “You’ll have to excuse my daughter, she’s a bit… er, single-minded.”

The woman laughed. “I understand. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Zoe. Zoe Kerrigan.”

She put out her hand. “How are you, Zoe. I’m Marney Brillinger—I’m the general manager of the zoo.”

Zoe hadn’t particularly wanted to talk to the woman until she said she was the zoo manager, at which point she returned the handshake. “Very pleased to meet you, Ms. Brillinger.”

“The pleasure’s all mine, Zoe. And please call me Marney. Have you been here before?”

“Mm-hmm. And the red panda’s always asleep!”

Dad added, “It’s our fourth trip, and Mei here’s been out like a light each time.”

“Fifth,” Zoe muttered. Dad wasn’t there for the class trip, of course—he couldn’t chaperone like Barry Willcott’s dad and Laurie Kornetsky’s mom because he had to work. Zoe didn’t understand why Dad got the job—as a tax accountant at that little place on Main Street—when they had all that money from when he turned his bosses in, but Dad said that that money was going to pay for Zoe’s college.

“Have you always been here around this time of day?” Marney asked.

Zoe nodded.

“Well, Zoe, that’s the problem. See, red pandas are nocturnal. That means—”

“They sleep mostly at night, right?” Zoe remembered that nocturnal referred to night.

“Not quite.” Marney smiled. “A nocturnal animal is one that’s awake at night.”

“Oh!” Zoe blinked. Now she just felt stupid.

“Tell you what,” Marney said. “Why don’t you go off and look at the rest of the zoo, and come back here around four o’clock or so? By then, I bet that Mei’ll be wide-awake, and maybe you can see him eat something.”

Zoe started to say “Awesome!” but stopped herself. Barry Willcott always said “Awesome!” and he sounded like a total dork. “That’s great!” she said instead, and put her cell phone back in her purse.

“Thank you, Ms. Brillinger,” Dad said to Marney. “I honestly thought her arm was going to fall off holding her phone up like that.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. “Dad…” She put her hand in his, and they started walking away from the slumbering red panda.

“That’s quite all right, Mr. Kerrigan.” Marney followed them as they headed back the way they came.

Looking at Dad, Zoe asked, “We gonna see the lemurs?”

Dad started to nod his head, but Marney said, “Actually, they’re aye-ayes.”

Zoe couldn’t correct her the same way she’d corrected Dad because Marney kept talking as they walked slowly down the tree-lined, paved path.

“They’re just one type of lemur, and the only kind we have here at the zoo, unfortunately. People keep asking why we don’t have lemurs that look like King Julien in Madagascar.”

Frowning, Zoe said, “I didn’t like that movie. Dad made me watch it.”

Marney looked at Dad. “That’s odd—it’s usually the other way around: kids make their parents watch it.”

Dad shrugged. “I like the penguins. They kind of remind me of this group of people I met in Boston. If you don’t mind my asking, Ms. Brillinger—”

“Just Marney. Please.”

“Marney, then—I assume you’re part of the same family that founded the town and the zoo?”

Nodding, Marney said, “Chester Brillinger came over on the Mayflower in 1620. He was a Stranger, not a Saint.”

Dad frowned. “Beg pardon?”

Zoe smiled. “That means he wasn’t one of the religious Pilgrims, he was one of the other people on the trip.”

Nodding, Marney said, “That’s right, Zoe. Very good. You learn that in school?”

“No,” she said emphatically.

“My daughter’s a history buff—this year.” Dad grinned. “Last year she was a math geek.”

“Hey, I still like math!”

Marney laughed, then continued. “Well, anyhow, Josiah Brillinger sailed for the crown and was given a land grant in return in 1745. He founded the town.”

Zoe asked, “He was a privateer?”

“Yah. Then Ezekiel Brillinger built an estate north of town in 1831. He was a naturalist, so he collected a ton of plants and animals, which Thomas Brillinger turned into a zoo in 1897. That’s why it’s his name in big letters on the front gate. Ezekiel’s name is in smaller letters, so fewer people point at his name and laugh.”

Dad nodded. “Kids tend to make fun of things they’ve never seen before.”

“Actually, it’s the adults who tend to ask me why anybody would name their kid Ezekiel. The kids think it’s cool.”

Zoe looked over at Dad. “Isn’t Ezekiel from the Bible?”

Again Dad nodded, smiling this time.

They arrived at the small building with the tiny sign that read little madagascar. Dad pushed the door open, and Zoe let go of his hand and ran right up to the metal fence that separated the people from the animals. Well, that and the wire mesh. She took out her cell phone and started taking pictures of the three lemurs—or rather, aye-ayes. She was the only one in the room, aside from Dad and Marney.

“I, uh, can’t help but notice how poor the attendance is,” Dad said. “Partly because the general manager has time to come over and tell my daughter about the sleeping habits of red pandas and her complete family history back to the Mayflower. Mostly because you’re practically the only other person I’ve seen since we came in.”

Marney sighed. “It’s been rough the last couple of years, with the economy and all, and these aye-ayes were our last new attraction—and we got them five years ago. It’ll be okay, though. We’ve got two black rhinos on their way from Malani today. That’s why I’m wandering around the zoo—I was going stir-crazy sitting in my office waiting for my guys to call from the docks in Boston. We’re having the big opening next month.”

Just then, one of the aye-ayes ran up a tree branch, then jumped down and ran through a hollow log. To Zoe’s surprise, it then ran back up the tree branch, jumped down again in the same spot, and ran through the same hollow log. It did this several times, and Zoe decided to start filming it with her phone.

She was startled to hear a song start playing. It turned out to be Marney’s own cell phone, playing some guitar riff that Zoe didn’t recognize.

Marney put the phone to her ear, a huge grin on her face. “Talk to me, Bobby; have we achieved rhino?”

Zoe could actually hear the person on the other end, though his voice was tinny. He sounded like he was almost shouting. “They’re not here, Marn.” He had a thick accent, and his nickname for Marney sounded more like mahn than marn.

The grin disappeared, and Marney now looked the way Dad did whenever he thought about Boston. “What do you mean they’re not there, Bobby? Did the ship come in?”

“Oh yeah,” Bobby said, “the ship showed up, but there ain’t no rhinos on it. Cap’n said they never got no rhinos in Malani. We’re wicked screwed, is what I think.”

For a moment Zoe heard only the rustling of the branches as the aye-ayes ran around the enclosure.

Bobby’s little voice asked, “Marn, you there?”

“I’m—I—dammit! I don’t understand, how can this have—I don’t even—”

“Look, Marn, you gotta call Father What’s-His-Name. He was supposed to put ’em on the ship in Malani, right? ’Cause this is crap right here.”

“Oh, I’m going to call him, believe me.” Marney started walking out the door of Little Madagascar, phone glued to her ear.

“We gotta get back in the truck and hit the road, but this really blows, Marn. You need to—”

Zoe didn’t hear the rest of what Bobby thought Marney needed to do as she left Little Madagascar. Dad stared after the zoo manager, looking worried.

But he seemed to shake it off in a minute, and he and Zoe wandered around the rest of the zoo. She enjoyed the giraffes and the bears—she got a great video of the brown bear swimming—and they had a late lunch at the Pink Flamingo Café. The café was empty except for the staff and a mother with a kid who Zoe figured was her son. The boy was eating soft-serve ice cream and the mother was playing with her phone.

For her part, Zoe had set her phone’s alarm to go off at 3:45 so they’d be able to get back to the red panda in time. When it went off to the sound of her favorite Katy Perry song, she tugged on Dad’s shirt to go see Mei.

The red panda was still asleep when they got there, but he looked like he was moving. Zoe whipped out her phone and started recording. One of Mei’s eyes opened, and then the red panda opened and closed its mouth a few times, making a tcha noise each time, then it yawned.

It was quite possibly the cutest thing Zoe had ever seen in her life. And she recorded it all! She couldn’t wait to put it online.

She and Dad walked toward the exit, hand in hand. “Thanks so much, Dad!”

“My pleasure, honey. Now c’mon, let’s go…” Dad’s voice trailed off, and he stopped walking.

Looking up, Zoe saw that Dad was looking at something. Following his eyes, she saw that what he was looking at was Marney, who was standing near the entrance, having an animated conversation on her phone.

“Yes, I know that you can’t refund—” She cut herself off, listening to someone talk, but Zoe couldn’t understand it this time. “Look, I just want to know what happened to—hello? Dammit!”

After saying that last word, she put the phone back in her pocket.

“Is everything okay?” Dad asked her.

“What?” Marney turned angrily on Zoe and her dad, then her face got nicer when she saw who it was. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr.— uh…”

“Kerrigan. What’s wrong? Is it the rhinos?”

She nodded. “They’re gone. The person I got them from said he put them on the ship, but the captain says he never had it. He never even spoke to the person I got them from. This wasn’t an official deal with the government, it was through a—a private buyer, so I don’t really have much legal recourse. We’re on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and no black rhinos to show for it. We’re so screwed.” She grimaced for a second then shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t be telling you all this. Everything will be fine, just—”

“Dad,” Zoe whispered.

“What is it, honey?” Dad asked.

“We should tell her about—”

Dad interrupted quickly. “Zoe, I’m not sure that this is any of our business.”

“But, Dad, he helps people! He helped us!”

Marney was frowning now, and turned to walk back into the zoo. “I’m sorry, but I should go.”

Zoe looked firmly at her father. “C’mon, Dad!”

Hearing these words, Marney turned around. “Honestly, we’ll be fine. I’ll figure something out. This zoo has survived for over a hundred years, it’ll survive this, too.”

Dad looked all weird for a second. Then he set his jaw the way he did when he decided he was going to do something—his jaw had looked just like that when he decided he was going to fink on his old boss—and said, “Maybe you will, but if you don’t, I know a man you need to talk to. You can find him at McRory’s pub in Boston.”

“A guy who hangs out in a bar is supposed to help me?” Marney didn’t sound convinced.

“He and his friends can,” Zoe said emphatically. “Dad told me once that there are wolves in the world and these people stop them. If it wasn’t for them, Dad would be dead!”

Dad put a hand on Zoe’s shoulder. “Zoe’s exaggerating, but—well, this man helped me out when I was in a bad way. It was the kind of trouble that could’ve gotten both Zoe and me hurt very badly. In the end, the people responsible paid for it, and we were able to start over here in Brillinger. Trust me when I tell you, Marney, this man will help you.

“His name is Nathan Ford.”