Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

“Is that a vampire?” Sam asked.

… Brent’s Goth pal King Thomas, who, after he realized there was a gun pressed to his head, began screaming, as did his friend, but his friend managed to scream and run at the same time, dropping his end of a very large fake check in his wake.

“Calm down,” I said to Thomas. “I’m not going to shoot you.”

“Then why do you have a gun pointed at my head?” It was a good question. I put my gun down and picked up the other side of the check so it wouldn’t get dirty on the ground.

“I take it Brent asked you to make this?”

Thomas nodded. “Is he okay?”

“He’s not here,” I said.

“But he said he was going to be here,” Thomas said.

I stepped out on the landing and gazed down toward the street. Thomas’ friend was nowhere to be found. That or he’d already turned back into a bat. “Thomas,” I said, “it’s not safe here. Brent will get in contact with you tomorrow. Until then, you don’t know where he is and you haven’t seen him in days. Do you understand?”

Thomas nodded.

“And tell your friend the same thing, okay?” I took a look at the check. It was very well done. “Nice work here, Thomas,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

“I could have done more if I had more time,” he said. “It folds so that you can put it in a briefcase. That was my idea. I’m good with thinking ahead about how someone might, you know, carry things in such a way as to conceal them.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Like, I could make smaller checks, too, is all I’m saying,” he said.

“I get it. Now go.” I went back inside and closed the door. “Was someone going to tell me about this delivery?” I asked.

Brent looked over the railing from upstairs. “Oh, sorry. Barry was like, you know, we need a big check and I was like, I know a guy who is really good with arts and Barry was like, okay, and I was like, okay, and so I called him and…”

Fiona covered Brent’s mouth with her hand. “Say you’re sorry,” she said to him and then removed her hand.

“I’m sorry,” Brent said.

“The vampire lord almost ate a bullet,” I said. “We have to be on our game tonight and that includes you, Brent. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now get your tie right and let’s go. We have ten minutes, people.”

Brent didn’t shrug, he didn’t say anything was like anything else, he just stepped away from the railing and did what he was told.

Fiona came down the stairs a few moments later, just as I was tying my own bow tie. She stood in front of me and straightened my collar, then wiped lint from my shoulders. “You look very handsome,” she said quietly. She looked pretty good, too, in a simple black evening gown that was part Audrey Hepburn, but all Fiona.

“Everyone looks good in a tuxedo,” I said.

“Take the compliment,” she said.

“Thank you, Fiona,” I said.

“Things get close in there tonight,” she said, her voice still quiet, “you protect Brent first and foremost.”

“Fiona,” I began, but she put a finger to my mouth.

“I can take care of myself. Sam can take care of Barry.”

I didn’t say anything. I just nodded once. But when she walked away, I said, “Where do you have a gun hidden in that dress?”

“Be good and maybe I’ll show you,” she said.

Normally, when shaking down an organized-crime figure, I prefer not to have three crisscrossing searchlights pinpointing my location, but when we were still a mile from the consulate and I could see the sky was lit like the blitz on London, I knew things weren’t going to be exactly like my past experiences.

The street in front of the consulate was nearly empty of traffic at this hour, save for the slow trickle of cars pulling into the valet station. It was seven fifteen and the event wasn’t to start until eight o’clock, which meant the fashionable and the powerful wouldn’t arrive until eight thirty. Sugar drove the Navigator past the valet station and there, directly in front of the consulate, and directly next to Mr. Sigal’s empty spot, was a sign that said NO PARKING-RESERVED FOR DR. BENNINGTON. Reva had done well.

There was a short line of people waiting to get into the consulate, which was surprising this early until I saw the reason why. There was a man standing out front in a yellow PRIVATE EVENT STAFF jacket with a metal-detecting wand in his hand scanning each person as he or she walked in. I watched him go over a few people and noticed he tended to take more time on the women, which wasn’t much of a surprise. You make eight bucks an hour, you find your thrills where you can.

“That’s a problem,” I said.

“Mikey,” Sam said, “we get caught bringing guns into that place, it’s basically an act of war.”

Sam was right, but we weren’t going to go into a meeting with Yuri with only our wits and the laptop computer Big Lumpy gave us.

“I’m happy to hide more guns on my body,” Fiona said, which made everyone but me turn to look at her in the backseat.

“That would be bad,” I said, “since Officer Friendly there seems to prefer the ladies.”

“You leave your piece with me, Mike, and then you just give me a sign and I’ll blow a hole in the sky,” Sugar said. “Word is bond on that.”

“Let me take that under consideration,” I said.

Getting past a metal detector isn’t easy. At an airport, it’s nearly impossible because of the kind of metal detectors they use, which are full-body scanners tweaked high enough to pick up a bit of tinfoil stuck to the bottom of your shoe. The wands they use at the airport are also the highest grade possible and can’t be purchased commercially, lest a terrorist be able to figure out how to jam their signal.

So if you want to defeat a metal-detecting wand, you have to hope that the one being used is commercial grade, the kind they hand to guys in yellow jackets outside concerts and sell to private security companies. The kind that are used to provide the idea of security, if not a total assurance of the same.

You can attempt to cloak the metal by surrounding it in gelatin or even slow-drying concrete, neither of which I had in the car. Or you can disrupt the wand’s ability to “read” the metal by creating an electromagnetic field around the gun. To do this you need a strong magnet and the ability to conduct electricity around it.

The magnets on your refrigerator will not suffice for this, and if you don’t have easy access to a storage container filled with neodymium magnets and a good pair of a safety goggles, you need to improvise.

“We need to rip the speakers out of this car,” I said. “And I need everyone’s BlackBerrys and iPhones.”

Speakers contain both electromagnets and permanent magnets, which essentially cause the speaker to function like a piston by virtue of the constant tug and release of the magnetic field. The sound waves come through a coil, and as the magnets piston away, the air in front of the coil vibrates, creating the sound. The bigger the speaker, the larger the magnets.

Commercial metal detectors generally use VLF technology, which is just a fancy way of saying “very low frequency.” The metal detector sends out an electromagnetic wave of its own so that when it hits upon a metal object a current is sent back to the device… and that’s when the beeping begins. To disrupt the metal detector, the same basic principle is at work, except that the field created by the magnets disperses the reading into unreadable garble, provided the field you’ve created is strong enough.

Which is where the cell phones came in. We’d attach the magnets using the voice coils from the speakers into the cell phones. A smartphone like a BlackBerry or an iPhone runs a one-gigahertz microprocessor, more than enough to create the disturbance we’d need. If I’d had a blowtorch and time, I could have made sure of this. As it was, I’d just have to hope it would work.