The Con Job Read online

  “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 hel
l 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?”