by Mack Maloney
“Was your little buddy with you for this?” the agent asked him.
Batman’s head was pounding with pain.
“I’m pretty sure he was,” he replied groggily.
With Audette helping him walk, he staggered to the side of the road.
“The real cops are going to be here at any minute,” the agent told Batman. “We probably want to avoid that.”
Batman tripped over something. He looked to see pieces of Twitch’s artificial leg next to the Rolls taxi.
Then he looked over the edge of the road and saw a crumpled body below. Batman didn’t even think about it. He immediately slid down the side of the embankment, Audette close behind.
He reached Twitch, turned him over and went to feel for a pulse. But his colleague surprised him by sitting up and shouting at him, “What the fuck took you so long?”
Batman almost had a heart attack and came close to dying a second time. He could have punched Twitch right in the mouth.
“I’ve been trying to crawl up this fucking hill for a half hour,” Twitch complained. He seemed not the least bit harmed, except his artificial leg was no longer attached to him. Oddly, the same thing had happened to him on their previous mission.
“You have a hard time holding on to that thing,” Batman told him. “Why don’t you just grow a new one?”
Again with Audette’s help, Batman dragged Twitch up to the roadway. Then they quickly told the agent everything that had happened: winning the gagnant’s buy-in fee, getting into the Palace, playing the very brief game and getting not the Z-box but a key that apparently opens or activates it. The story ended with Batman telling Audette of seeing the man with the rings on his fingers stealing the mysterious key.
Audette listened in disbelief.
“This is the first I’ve heard about any key,” he told them. “But it must have something to do with the Z-box if only because a bunch of people just lost a lot of money trying to get it.”
“Well, we had it, for about three minutes,” Twitch said. “But who’s got it now? And where the fuck is the box?”
“Lots of rings on the fingers sounds like Jihad Brotherhood,” Audette told them. “They’re usually gofers for al Qaeda’s African operations, but it looks like they’ve expanded their sphere of influence and are flexing their muscles.”
“But how the hell do guys like that get into Monte Carlo?” Batman asked him. “Aren’t they all over the watch lists?”
Audette shook his head.
“I’m guessing they slipped through when they let all the vendors in for the race week,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be that easy for them to get out.”
He pulled out a sat-phone and started dialing
“You’ll recall I’ve got a small army of private PSOs running around this city?” he said. “Well, they’re all going to be pissed off these Jihad monkeys just killed some of their brothers up here. So I’m going to use them to seal this place tighter than Tupperware. All the roads, the bus station, the train station — I’ll get people to the Nice Airport. Key or no key, box or no box, those assholes ain’t getting out. And when we’re through beating the crap out of them, you guys can take over…”
Full of rage now, Audette was ready to start giving orders. But his cell phone wouldn’t cooperate. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get a dial tone.
“Are we in a dead zone here or something?” he asked Batman and Twitch, looking in all directions. “I mean, we’re up on fucking hill. What’s blocking the signal up here?”
They both shrugged. “Nothing works when we’re around,” Twitch murmured.
Audette finally gave up and said, “I got to get back to the city and get on a landline. How are you guys feeling? Need to go to a hospital?”
“Not me,” Twitch said.
“Same here,” Batman replied.
At that point they heard sirens approaching.
Audette told them, “OK, I say we all get out of here before the local cops start asking questions we don’t want to answer.”
* * *
It was 3:00 A.M. by this time.
Audette drove like a madman back to Monte Carlo, agreeing to drop them at their hostel.
Squeezing his rented car into the alley nearby, the agent parked next to the hostel’s dumpster long enough for Batman to get Twitch out of the backseat.
Then Batman awkwardly thanked Audette for being there in their time of need. The CIA agent waved off his gratitude and handed him an umbrella. He said Batman might be able to fashion parts of it into a temporary leg for Twitch.
Then the agent drove off with a squeal, leaving Batman with the distinct feeling that he wanted to get away from them as quickly as possible.
Twitch felt the same vibe. “He must think we’re a jinx or something,” he said.
Batman helped Twitch up the seven flights of stairs leading to their tiny room. It was a tough climb. Batman was full of aches and pains, the worst being a huge throbbing in his chest. But it was Twitch who had the biggest problem; without his artificial leg, he needed to hop up each step, one at a time, with Batman holding him under the shoulder for balance.
They finally reached the top floor, sweating, dirty and exhausted. Twitch pushed the door open about halfway when Batman suddenly stopped him. He pointed down at the doorsill. Going across it was the shadow of someone waiting on the other side.
Neither of them was armed, but it wasn’t like they could go back down the stairs either. Batman toed the door open a little more. The shadow did not move. He peeked around the corner and saw the silhouette of a man sitting near the room’s only window, the moonlight illuminating him from behind.
All he had was Audette’s umbrella. He felt its point and found it fairly sharp.
“Unless you’re the cleaning lady,” Batman called out. “Don’t move a muscle.”
The intruder complied, so Batman finally switched on the light.
Only then did he realize their uninvited guest was the man Batman and Twitch knew as “Maurice.”
When Twitch realized who it was, he grabbed the umbrella and lunged at him, hoping to stab him with the sharp point. But he wound up falling to the floor just two feet into his attack.
“Help me up so I can kill this guy!” Twitch yelled at Batman.
But the little old man just smiled. He didn’t seem nervous or scared. But he did look worried.
“So, we meet again,” he said to them shyly.
“This already makes it once too often,” Batman replied, helping up Twitch and settling him in a chair on the opposite side of the room. “And if you’re here to scam us out of the key, you’re too late. We just got our asses kicked and saw four other guys get shot down by someone who wanted the box just as much as we do.”
The little old man nodded glumly.
“I know all about the key,” he said. “Last time I talked to her, my person at the gagnant gave me full report. My people are out there trying to find those guys who robbed you.”
“So, you are ‘Bobby Murphy’ then?” Batman asked him.
The little man bowed slightly. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
Batman studied him for a few moments, contemplating him now in a different light. He was dressed the same as when they first met him, except now he had a tie on. And despite all he’d heard about him, the little man still looked very ordinary. Like the retired neighbor you chatted with over your back fence.
“That was quite a sting you pulled off at the Grand Maison,” Batman finally told him. “You had us looking like assholes right from the start.”
Murphy shrugged. “It’s just what we do,” he said apologetically. “We’ve whacked al Qaeda financiers in just the same manner, after we’ve robbed and beat them first, of course. You go with your strengths.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Twitch told him harshly. “For all we know, you’ve just been making it up as you go along. Or maybe you’re double-dealing with these Jihad assholes somehow.”
Murphy stared at him for a long moment. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never ‘treasonous.’”
“How did you find out about the Z-box then?” Twitch challenged him. “Or about the gagnant or even any Monte Carlo connection?”
Murphy almost laughed. “You really want to know?”
“I sure do,” Twitch shot back.
Murphy shrugged again. “Me and my people have been listening in on the CIA for years,” he said starkly. “At Langley; their field stations. While they were busy trying to figure out what bin Laden had for breakfast, we’ve had our ears to the wires, taking it all in, blow by blow.”
Twitch laughed at him. “Eavesdropping on the CIA? I’m sure…”
Murphy straightened his tie. “Do you really think their crappy sat-phones made by the Chi-Coms are so impenetrable?” he asked. “Do you think no one can hack into their field stations’ database? Into Langley’s database? There are hundreds of people around the world who will do just that for a price and we paid a few of them to do it for us.”
“Well, I’m guessing that’s total bullshit,” Twitch declared.
“If you don’t believe me,” Murphy countered. “Perhaps you’d like me to recite word for word the action report the crew of that spy ship had prepared to release after the Agency had sent the Z-box and the fake pirates to the bottom of the Java Trench? That thing had everything but dancing girls and a sound track.”
Twitch fell silent for a moment. Audette did tell them such an action report was written and possibly lost somewhere in cyberspace, but very few people knew about it beforehand.
But then Twitch erupted again: “Well, asshole, if you’re here looking for more money, we’re tapped out. That’s what happens when someone steals ten million from you and then you almost get killed figuring a way to get it back.”
Murphy was in full agreement. “I’m very sorry about that,” he said. “But you have to remember, while I have the same goals as you, I don’t have the CIA approaching me to do their dirty work for them. I’m sure you know all about my group by now. We might be the best PSO around, if I say so myself. But because of politics, we’re on the outside looking in. No one gives us funds; no one approaches us with multimillion-dollar missions. So, unfortunately, we have to get in between the seams.”
“So—why are you here then?” Batman asked him. “To gloat?”
“To the contrary,” Murphy replied. “In light of the key slipping through your fingers and its obvious connection to the box, I came here to urge you to pool your talents with me and try to get it back immediately.”
Twitch laughed. He said, “Translation: He wants a cut of our payment if we wind up recovering the Z-box.”
But Murphy was emphatically shaking his head no. “Not exactly,” he said. He thought a few moments, then went on. “Remember when I saw you guys the first time? I listed three groups of people who might want access to the Z-box: People who thought it was a terrorist weapon and wanted to use it against the U.S. People who wanted it to sell back to the Agency at a high profit. And people like you guys who’d been hired to recover it for a fee.
“Back then, I admit I thought of myself being in that middle group. If I got it I would have ransomed it back to the U.S. — for twice or more of what you guys were getting paid. That was an important thing for me. But I would have used that money to continue my private war against al Qaeda, because that’s what we do best. We do it better than the whole freaking U.S. government. But yes, I would have extorted as much money out of them as I could.”
He paused a moment, collected his thoughts, then went on.
“But now — things have changed. Because now I know what this thing is. I know what’s inside the Z-box. And now I don’t care about the money so much. It’s secondary, down a bit on the list. Now, priority number one is, I just want to prevent a catastrophe. Something a thousand times worse than 9/11.”
Batman and Twitch were stunned. Suddenly the hostel began shaking again. There was a huge sound coming from the harbor.
“But how could you know what’s in it?” Batman asked him. “I mean, even the Agency doesn’t know that — or at least their field agents don’t. So it wasn’t like you picked it up sniping their communications.”
“I know because we did something those guys should have done a long time ago,” Murphy replied strongly. “I sent two of my best operatives into the worst part of Bangkok. And not ten blocks away from the CIA station there, we found the guy who dreamed this whole thing up back in 1968.
“He’s an old, old guy now, and he’s got a very bad opium addiction and a huge drinking problem, afflictions that are the direct result of him coming up with the original Z-box design and what it was built to do. He was so ashamed of himself that he couldn’t go back to the U.S. after the war was over. He had to keep the secret inside, especially after the Goddamn box got lost. But, let’s just say, when he met my two guys, they persuaded him to educate us.”
Murphy pulled out a small DVD player from his coat pocket and activated its screen. Then he revealed two unmarked DVDs.
“I just got these,” he said. “And they’re both bombshells.”
He pushed one into the DVD player and hit play. The screen filled with static, but then slowly, a grainy video materialized. It showed a hotel room smaller and grungier than the one they were in now. Two men in ski masks and black clothes were talking to a third man, who happened to be tied to a chair.
This third man was elderly and looked sick, both mentally and physically. He had long scraggly gray hair and a beard to match. He was wearing a traditional Thai silk shirt and yoga pants, but they were stained and ripped and filthy.
The men in masks were injecting him with something: narcotics, truth serum, a little of both? It was impossible to tell. But after a few editing dissolves, the old man started talking
“The box was designed to be the ultimate booby trap,” he began in a raspy voice, with captions appearing at the bottom of the screen. “The idea was to turn the North Vietnamese Army’s worst weapon on themselves. So many of our guys had been killed and maimed by their booby traps. We wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine — but just do it in spades.
“The packing case was exactly the same kind used by U.S. troops to transport classified material, documents, even secret weapons in and around Vietnam. These boxes were built of the same material as an airplane’s black box, and they all had a small ‘artificial atmosphere’ inside to preserve the contents over long periods of time.
“Several had been captured by the communists during the Tet Offensive, and a bunch of our secrets were compromised. We learned Hanoi had ordered its troops in the field that should they find one of these boxes, they were not to open it, but rather get it and if possible, the key, back to Hanoi as quickly as possible.”
The old man started mumbling, so one of his interrogators gave him another shot in the arm.
“Remember the neutron bomb?” he started up again. “It kills people, but leaves the buildings standing? That’s approximately what we dreamed up. Again, that box was the ultimate booby trap. An atomic booby trap. But of course, it was also against the Geneva Convention.”
That’s where the first DVD ended. Murphy put in the second one. It was a black and white film converted to video.
“He had this with him,” Murphy told the others. “It’s a Z-box test from many years ago.”
The footage showed a flat, snowy, frozen setting, perhaps in the arctic. There were hundreds of steel cages arranged in a huge circle within camera range. They contained everything from dogs and cats, to birds, rats, and larger mammals like a bear, and many, many chimpanzees.
The Z-box was placed on the back of a jeep by men in hazmat suits. The jeep was then driven into the center of the animal cages and parked. The driver got out and quickly walked away.
An undetermined amount of time went by, and then a timer appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. It began tick
ing down from thirty seconds. On reaching zero, there was a tremendous flash of light, so much so it blinded the camera lens for at least a minute.
When the image could be seen again, it showed some fire, some smoke, but mostly just a thirty-foot-deep crater where the jeep had been. Also many of the hundreds of animal cages around the crater had been destroyed, their occupants incinerated. But just a few hundred feet farther out from the center of the blast, many of the cages were still intact and their occupants alive but in a very high state of agitation.
Someone pushed a button somewhere and all the animals that survived were released from their cages. But on getting out, all of them began flopping about, stumbling or moving in a highly disoriented manner.
“What’s the matter with them?” Twitch asked. “Are they irradiated?”
Murphy just shook his head slowly.
“Worse,” he said. “They’re blind. Permanently blind … from the flash.”
Batman and Twitch were shocked.
Batman said, “We had no idea this is what the box contained. Whatever it is.”
“It’s a nuclear weapon, is what it is,” Murphy told him strongly. “But not a typical one. Even Nixon knew if he started lighting off tactical nukes in Vietnam, the Russians or the Chi-Coms would probably supply small nukes to the NVA and then we would have had nuclear-armed guerillas running all around southeast Asia. But somehow the Agency talked Nixon into this weapon disguised in a Z-box.
“Technically, it’s called an ‘extremely low-yield gamma-neutron TNW,’ for tactical nuclear weapon. It was built to do three things: First was to explode in such a way that it would be very hard to prove if it was even nuclear. You can see it had a relatively small blast area, maybe a quarter mile or so. We had some conventional blockbuster bombs in Vietnam that could do at least that much damage and probably more.
“Second, this bomb would also send out vast quantities of neutrons that would kill many people while leaving structures relatively unaffected. But third, and the worst of all, it was built to release huge amounts of gamma rays as well. Anyone within twenty miles of the explosion, who looked at the flash even for a second, would be rendered permanently blind.
