Disclaimer: I don't own Human Target and intend no copyright infringement.
Solemnstone Festival was set to begin at 11 am. The town had spent two years meticulously planning and preparing the event. The municipal county had hired renowned experts, created multiple committees, even consulted a research group from the Texas Tech University in Lubbock to look over everything one more time, just to be on the safe side. Fire brigades and the local PD had spent months practicing and going over various scenarios, from sudden thunderstorms to an accident with the electricity to mass food poisoning from one of the vendor stalls. The hospitals in a 50 mile radius were working with extra shifts.
Unfortunately, you can't think of everything.
They were expecting 400.000 visitors throughout the day and these visitors were supposed to feel at home and safe, so they'd spend as much money in town as possible. The Solemnstone Festival was targeting an older audience, family men who'd like to relive the "good old days" a little, when they had been young and wild. As Ames had already noticed, the festival's organizers had managed to hire some true class acts, even a band reunion was scheduled as one of the event's highlights. Three years ago in the South the Festival had been a huge success, everybody hoped to be able to outdo that and hopefully get even more media coverage.
Be careful what you wish for.
... ... ...
Chance was the first to go into the field. It was his job to establish where exactly Walding would be working that day. Usually they would have pulled that kind of information from the security company's files, but as Guerrero had informed them, a little irritated, their server had gone down pretty much around the time they had the final schedule ready and thus the company itself could only rely on handwritten lists. Quite an amount of paper, with 1300 guards scheduled to appear, and not very handy. The police, whose copy Chance wanted to see, would have trouble establishing how many security personnel when and where they could rely on.
What a timing for a server failure.
"I've got eyes on you", Guerrero told Ilsa via ear piece.
"Do I want to know how?"
"Military satellite, highly illegal..."
She could hear the amusement in his voice.
"I remember. We used that to keep track on Chance when he was rescuing my friend from that South American crime lord. You're paranoid. This is Texas, not the Triple Frontier."
"Better safe than sorry."
Ilsa sighed. There was no discussing security measures with Guerrero. Hopefully they'd find this Sean Walding soon, before his over protectiveness got them all court-martialed.
... ... ...
Out of habit, Ames checked out twitter, just a quick peek at what her friends were up to and maybe a brief look at what the crew of Blood and Bone China had to say about the current financing problems of the show. She was really worried, this was one of her favorite web series...
Huh? Ames frowned, then checked again. Solemnstone festival was one of the top ten wordwide trends... very strange. So far she had regarded the event as some sort of Woodstock nostalgia kind of thing, only with hard rock. It was aimed at a rather specific audience... most of them probably didn't use twitter all that much...
Ames took a closer look at the tweets in question. To her utter surprise, tons of rather young people, late teens, early twenties, were discussing going there. They kept mentioning "flashmob with freebies" and there were also references to facebook.
"You're not pursuing your favorite pastime activity of chatting on a company smartphone while sitting right next to me?", Ilsa asked, furrowing her brows. Ames did like to bend the rules a little, but she usually didn't rub it in so blatantly.
"Look at that!" Ames showed her the facebook page she had found, following the hints on twitter.
"What in the world...?" Ilsa motioned Winston to come over and take a look.
"Flashmob announcement? With the promise of a free party night for those who appear most drunk? Who the hell comes up with such BS?"
"Flashmob announcements come up on facebook all the time, but this looks different." Ames showed them a couple of other pages, for example the call-up to pay the North American Turtle Convention a visit on the International Day of the Turtle.
"See? The Solemnstone one looks way more professional... with detailed information how to get there, where to gather, when...apparently they're planning to appear after the band reunion took place. At least they won't ruin that."
"Those college kids really have too much time on their hands...", Winston grumbled.
They informed Chance about the planned flashmob, but then decided to leave it at that for the time being, although Guerrero announced that he'd keep an eyes on things.
It was strange that someone had poured so much energy in organizing this thing, but as Winston had said, some people just need a real hobby.
Outside the temperature was rising. Drunk people in hot weather. Not an ideal combination.
... ... ...
As Chance entered the makeshift police HQ for the event, he immediately sensed something was wrong. The guard at the entrance barely glanced at his credentials, he just waved him through, even pointed him towards the monitors which, at the moment, were showing nothing but empty lawns and a few technicians doing some last minute set ups.
It all looked very peaceful, but the atmosphere in the HQ was everything but. "Are you kidding me?", a balding middle-aged man yelled at a rather small, more nerdy-like other man. They were both wearing uniforms, but apparently the nerdy-like man was an underling, at least judging from how he tolerated being shouted at. They were both sweating profoundly and, as Chance soon noticed, it was indeed rather warm in the rooms. Was the air-conditioning not working?
"What's the problem?", he asked another officer, filling a cup at a water cooler.
"Some idiot from Equipment distributed cell phones to our units on the ground instead of radio sets."
Chance immediately recognized the problem – with several hundred thousand people in attendance, the local cellular network would become very instable and unreliable. No surprise the officer in charge was going through the roof. The different police units unable to communicate with each other, with the security personnel, with the EMTs and with the fire brigade? Even in the context of a much smaller event, this would have presented a huge risk. Given that they were expecting almost half a million people...
"WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO, SEND SMOKESIGNS?", the officer in charge thundered.