She took the stairs. I heard the door bang. Smart girl, not taking the elevator.
I hadn’t run in, oh, maybe ever. I could hear my feet pounding and I was wheezing. I pulled open the door to the stairs and the only thing that kept me from pausing there to catch my breath was the thought of Paladin dying because she did something stupid, something I could have prevented.
Like grabbing a bomb out of a hotel and running to the parking lot.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I heard another door bang, and then an emergency alarm go off.
She had gone out one of the side entrances instead of going through the lobby.
I clanged down the metal steps until I reached the door with the gigantic EMERGENCY EXIT sign emblazoned across its large metal handle. Above that sign were several more, warning that alarms would go off if the door was used unnecessarily.
Apparently they went off when it was used necessarily as well.
I pushed the door open and stepped into bright sunshine, which reminded me that I was hungover, and worse, hadn’t seen daylight from the outside for nearly three days.
Paladin had moved to an empty part of the parking lot — actually, the parking lot of a nearby hotel — and had set the box down.
“Step away from it, Paladin,” I shouted.
“Spade,” she said. “I think I know how it works.”
“Step away from it!” I shouted again, louder, even though I was getting closer to her.
“Spade, seriously—”
“Step away from the goddamn box,” I shouted, swearing at her, which was something I had never ever done.
She didn’t move. Instead, she looked at me in shock. “Stay back, Spade,” she said. “If this thing goes, I don’t want it to take you out.”
I ran over to her, even though every bit of my flesh jiggled, even though my Evil Genius T-shirt was soaked, even though I was scared out of my mind.
I grabbed her arm and pulled her away, probably hurting her. I didn’t care. She dug in, and I still didn’t care. She was probably stronger than me, but I was scared and I had adrenaline on my side. Adrenaline and mass.
I won.
“Spade,” she said. “Seriously—”
“No,” I said. “I won’t hear it. You’re not going near that thing. You’re lucky it wasn’t motion sensitive. You’re lucky—”
At that moment, my cell rang. Paladin looked at me as if she expected me to answer it. I expected me to answer it. It was probably the police.
But the minute I let go of her, she would run back to that damn device, thinking she really was a hero out of some old Western television show, and I would lose her forever.
“Get the cell out of my pocket, answer it, and put it to my ear,” I said.
“I’m not your servant, Spade,” she said.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Just do it.”
She must have heard something in my voice she’d never heard before. She grabbed the phone, pressed the screen and had to stand on her tiptoes to put the phone against my ear.
“Spade,” I growled.
“Detective Harold Procalmeyer,” said an unfamiliar voice. “You mentioned an emergency and delicacy? I’m in the parking lot and—”
“Detective,” I said with more relief than I expected. “Can you come to the north side of the building. I have something you need to see.”
Paladin was watching me. Her entire body melted, just a little, as if she finally understood the risk she took. Or maybe she understood that I wasn’t going to let her go, and the cop was going to thwart everything. Or maybe she just got hit with that lethargy people felt after the adrenaline rush ended.
The cop didn’t say goodbye. He just hung up, and within minutes, he walked over — less Columbo and more modem American police detective, pressed khakis (who did that?), suit coat, military haircut — one of those manly men that I would have expected Paladin to prefer.
Instead, she stepped behind me like a scared kid, putting me between him and her.
“Detective?” I asked.
He nodded, showed me his badge, and I explained. I showed him the e-mail — now crumpled and soggy — then nodded toward the box in the middle of the empty parking lot.
I told him about the box upstairs, the fears I had, and I managed to sound like an authority.
He looked around my shoulder. “You’re Paladin?” he asked her.
She nodded, leaning against me.
“You took a hell of a risk, young lady,” he said, as if she were four. “You think I’m going to commend you, but I’m not. That bomb could have been motion sensitive. It could have been—”
“Spade gave me the lecture, thanks,” she said. “And I still think we should do something about it.”
“We’re not going to do anything,” he said. “I am.”
And he did.
CrapCon was the first con I’d ever worked where the bomb squad showed up — not that the attendees ever knew. The con went on as planned. The box upstairs, heavily guarded by hotel security and con security, turned out to be just a box, although it and the sign were taken away as evidence.
The smaller box — the artistic one? The one that Paladin ran with? — that really was a bomb.
Two guys dressed like the cast of The Hurt Locker inspected it, then covered it with some kind of blast-proof thingie, and used remote controls to detonate it.
Seems it was a secrets box, like Paladin thought. Only if you tried to get to the hidden compartment, ingredients flowed together like the ingredients were supposed to do on the failed London airplane bomb in 2007 or the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt here in the States in 2009. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and kablooey! There would have been a hole where the second-floor lobby was, lots of damage to the first-floor lobby, and lots of injured or dead fen.
And oh, yeah, Con Ops, where I usually lived, would have been destroyed.
Paladin and I retired there to wait for the police to finish their work. We watched a lot of it on the security monitors, while we noshed on everything room service could provide, from nachos to baby shrimp to buffalo wings. Apparently sheer terror made us both nervous.
“You have to tell me,” I said after we replayed the explosion for the fifth time, “what this really was about.”
She looked at me sideways. “How come you think I know anything about this?”
“Come on, Paladin,” I said, too tired for finesse. “The e-mail came to you. The women on that lovely box all looked like you. This was about you, and I think you knew it before you even came to get me.”
Her cheeks were red. “My hair isn’t that long,” she said. “And I would never wear clothes like that.”
I waited.
“Don’t you ever get weird e-mail?” she asked, almost plaintively.
Yes, I did. But it was all from friends. Clearly she’d been dealing with this longer than today.
“I trust you brought everything he sent you,” I said.
“How do you know it’s a he?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s that big a guess.”
Paladin had brought her entire laptop with everything in it, from the e-mails to invoices she had sent to clients five years ago. Paladin did not throw away anything.
While I set the laptop up next to the Tower of Terror, I talked. Mostly, I didn’t want her to think I was invading her privacy, even though I was.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what we know. This guy is connected to fandom. He is either an artist or friends with an artist. He probably has a military background, although he could have some kind of chemistry or engineering background as well. He might be a scientist. And he thinks he knows Greek mythology.”