Paladin had her back to the Tower of Terror. She sat cross-legged in my chair, managing to look like a small but powerful child ruler of a small but formidable foreign country. Or she would have, if she didn’t have powdered sugar on the tip of her nose.
“What’s this emergency?” I said grumpily. Not that I was feeling grumpy (despite the remnants of the hangover). I never felt grumpy when I saw Paladin. But I’d found that grumpy was a great defense with beautiful women because that way they’d never know how pleased I was to see them. Pleased never got me anywhere. Grumpy always got me a normal conversation and a good friendship.
She eased herself up slightly and reached into her back pocket, pulling out a folded piece of paper. She handed it to me.
I took my own Krispy Kreme as I unfolded the e-mail. I munched as I read.
The subject header was “Pandora’s Box.” The body of the e-mail read:
The Evils have already Flown. I leave you this one Hope in the form of a warning:
Today’s Bomb, which I will Place in the — Hotel in your honor, will be a small one.
“Good Lord,” I said. “Did you call the cops?”
“What was I supposed to say?” she asked. “I got an e-mail bomb threat? They’d think I was threatening the convention. Have you ever seen what cops do when they think you’re issuing a bomb threat?”
I hadn’t. I didn’t want to. “It sounds like you have.”
“They want to solve things easily. Ergo, the person who mentions the threat is the person who issued the threat.”
I liked the “ergo,” but I didn’t say so. I just gave her a rueful smile. “So this has happened to you before.”
“Spade!” she snapped. “Focus.”
I blinked and grabbed another Krispy Kreme. My first seemed to have disappeared. Then I took the coffee that she had brought for me and put it into the ancient microwave OPs kept near the back of the room. If anything was going to explode, it would be that old machine.
“I took the liberty of scanning security footage while I was waiting for you,” she said. “And before you ask, I arrived with the damn Krispy Kremes. I didn’t see anything.”
“In the security footage,” I said.
“Anywhere,” she said.
“And, I take it, you have no idea who sent this e-mail.”
“The URL is spoofed,” she said. “I tracked the real URL through three countries. Whoever it is, they know what they’re doing.”
“You don’t have any idea who it is?”
Usually, if someone went to the trouble of threatening me, I had an idea who they were.
“No,” she said a bit too curtly.
“I didn’t see your name on the guest list,” I said. “How did they know you’d be here?”
“I wasn’t supposed to be here,” she said.
“Then why target this hotel this weekend?”
“Probably because they knew you’d be here,” she said.
I stared at her. The question on the tip of my tongue was, why should that matter? But I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask it, in case the answer was, Jesus, Spade, it’s a science fiction convention. Fen would die. Without — of course — any mention of me.
“Well,” I said, trying to sound calm, “that narrows the possibilities to someone in fandom.”
“Or someone newly on the outs with fandom,” she said.
“Or someone with a longtime grudge against fandom,” I said.
“Or someone who hates fandom,” she said.
“Or someone with a grudge against you,” I said.
“But it doesn’t matter who,” she said. “Not if they’re serious. We have to find this thing and get it out of the hotel.”
“It might not be that simple,” I said. Bombs aren’t always carryable. “Let’s find it first, then decide what to do with it.”
She bit her lower lip and sighed. I frowned: She hadn’t moved out of my chair. Was she frightened? I’d never actually seen Paladin frightened before.
“What’s this really about?” I asked her softly.
“I don’t know.”
“But you have an idea,” I said.
“I don’t know”, she repeated in a do-not-ask-me-again voice.
“I’m going to contact hotel security and con security. We need eyes on this thing. You need to check the children’s areas now. Day care’s not open yet. If this is a real whack job and not some fan with a grudge, they’re going to go for the soft target.”
Paladin’s mouth opened slightly. Then she hustled out of the chair and launched herself across Con Ops. I’d never seen her move so fast.
That scared me.
So I called the cops.
I didn’t say we had a bomb threat. I didn’t use the word “bomb” at all. I said that we had a delicate situation, one that required finesse, that we had two thousand guests at our convention, and if they got wind of this, they’d panic. I said we needed someone who was of rather high rank in the police department, not just beat cops, but someone who could make a decision quickly, and I needed that person to get in touch with me, and me alone, when they got to the hotel.
Then I gave them my cell number, the hotel’s security line, the convention security line, and told them that I’m Spade. No one asked my real name. No one even asked for my first name.
But they did take me seriously, and promised someone would be at the hotel immediately.
That was why Paladin needed me. She was, as she once told me, a bulldozer, with no finesse at all. Sometimes I thought I was all finesse. But finesse was what we needed here to find the bomb (if there was one), catch the real culprit, and keep one of us from going to jail for instituting a bomb scare.
Not to mention the fen stampede if anyone mentioned the word “bomb” at a science fiction convention.
In the meantime, I contacted hotel security and convention security, neither of which were very secure. Hotel security was two middle-aged guys so tough that I could probably take them one-handed, and con security was two old-timers and anyone who wanted to work for a free membership.
Which was how we ended up with Phil.
Who was really starting to panic.
Paladin was still crouching over the bomb, hand extended.
For the record, she hadn’t discovered the bomb. She’d been checking the vulnerable areas — day care, kids programming, gaming — while both types of security scrounged the rest of the hotel, particularly the public areas, looking for “suspicious” items. In this, con security did better than hotel security. To hotel security, the whole damn convention looked suspicious.
But the bomb itself — well, that proved not so hard to find.
At least for me. Security — both kinds — had walked past it twice.
Seems we hadn’t told them about the Pandora’s Box label on the e-mail. It would have been helpful, since a small sign stood just behind the boxes reading... of all things... Pandora’s Box.
I noticed it immediately, on my first pass through the hotel.
“I think if I move this,” Paladin said, her hand a little closer to the box now.
“No!” we all said in unison.
“Seriously,” she said. “It’s not attached to anything. Besides, I think it’s a secrets box—”
“No!” we said again.
“You guys are wusses,” she said, then she snatched the box and sprinted for the stairs.
“Paladin!” I shouted. “Paladin!”
Stupid woman. Didn’t she know that some bombs were motion sensitive? Some could be set off by cell phones? Some could—
I gave up arguing with her in my head and ran after her. No one else did, which was either just as dumb as my move or just as smart. The lower box could have blown when she picked up the upper box. The lower box could blow seconds from now. The upper box could blow at any moment — and she had to run through the lobby — and we would all die.