B005J4EW5G EBOK

by Mack Maloney

  Batman and Twitch were stunned—but it only took a few seconds for them to figure it out.

  “DynCorp?” Batman asked the guy. “Or EOD?”

  The guy smiled. “Just for the record, it’s DynCorp. But really, what difference does it make?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” Twitch responded. “Whether its DynCorp, or EOD or Blackwater—we got the same message for all of you.”

  “Oh really?” the guy with the gun said. “And what message is that?”

  “Two simple words,” Twitch replied. “‘Fuck you.’”

  The guy was shocked. “You do see this gun I’m holding on you, right?” he said.

  “Sure do,” Twitch replied. “But what are you going to do with it?”

  “Shoot your ass,” was the guy’s response.

  “Do it then,” Twitch challenged him. “Go ahead—shoot us. I dare you.”

  Batman was trying to nudge his colleague to get him to calm down, but it was a waste of time. And Twitch did have a point. This guy wasn’t an enemy—not exactly. He was just part of one of the other private special ops groups that Audette and the Agency had hired to recover the Z-box—and now the guy was trying to get $100 million for his group by taking it away from Whiskey.

  But would he kill them for it?

  Batman didn’t think so.

  The driver realized this, too—and an awkward moment was upon them.

  “Look, just drive,” Batman said, breaking the impasse. “We’ll figure something out.”

  The driver thought about this. And though he didn’t exactly put the gun away, he did slip the Rolls back in drive and resumed driving down the winding road.

  As they approached the next corner, though, Batman was planning to open his door and jump out, dragging Twitch with him.

  But as they went around the bend they were surprised to see two Fiats with spinning lights on top and three men in police uniforms wearing reflective vests and using flashlights to flag them to a stop.

  The man driving did as told; everyone in the luxurious cab thought it was a simple security check set up in preparation for the big race the next day.

  But then one of the men walked over to the window and told the driver and Batman and Twitch that they all had to step out of the car.

  Batman did not like the sound of this; he and Twitch didn’t move. Neither did the driver.

  But when the guy in the cop uniform pulled out his gun, they all complied.

  It was clear at that point that these guys weren’t cops at all: they were Americans from yet another PSO firm. It was easy to tell.

  All three had their guns out, though, and as soon as the driver climbed out of the Rolls he had his gun out, too.

  Seeing this, Twitch pretended to stumble coming out of the backseat, and doing it only as Twitch could do, knocked into one of the fake policemen—and somehow came up with his pistol.

  Suddenly they were all standing in the middle of the road, three sets of special ops groups, holding guns on one another.

  But despite all the gun waving and posturing, no one was going to shoot; they all knew that. The only danger was if one of them fired by mistake.

  “Which one of you guys has the key?” one of the fake cops asked out of desperation. “We’re from EOD; we can make a deal with you.”

  Twitch kicked one fake cop in the ass and yelled “We got the key … but we know none of you girls will shoot us for it.”

  But no sooner were those words out of his mouth than bullets started flying.

  Twitch was the first to get hit. He was knocked off the side of the road and into the ditch below. The driver of the Rolls went down next, then the three fake policemen.

  In a surreal moment, Batman found himself standing alone, with writhing bleeding bodies all around him. Yet he had no gun—and it wasn’t like the fake cops or the fake cab driver had shot anyone.

  He turned to see a large dark-skinned man standing behind him. He was the player at the gagnant, the guy with all the rings on his fingers. He was holding a smoking Lugar-style pistol. Now he pointed it at Batman and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet hit Batman square in the chest. He was thrown backward and slammed against the side of the Rolls taxi.

  Crumpling to the pavement, the last thing he saw was the man’s hand, with silver rings on every finger, taking the Z-box key from his bloody shirt pocket.

  22

  Somewhere in the Indian Ocean

  NOLAN KNEW HE was dead because an angel was looking down at him.

  She was smiling and laughing and he could see her wings. There was a halo around her head and a bright white light behind her. This light was as bright as the sun and it felt warm and safe and it made Nolan feel like he’d wasted way too many years suffering on Earth, when the afterlife was so much better.

  In the next second, though, he was awake for real, feeling cold and wet, with just about every body appendage feeling like it was falling off.

  But … still, there was an angel hovering over him.

  The blond hair flying everywhere. The enormous blue eyes. The wide smile …

  It was Emma.

  Alive, somehow …

  As soon as he opened his eyes, she hugged him as hard as she could. He thought she would squeeze out what little life he had left in him.

  “How?” was all he could mumble through his salt-cracked lips. “How…”

  “I swam here, silly,” she replied, squeezing him even tighter.

  “I mean, how did you make it off the boat?”

  “The fat guy threw me on a life raft just as the other boat shot at us,” she explained breathlessly. “But when he tried to jump on, he missed—and that was the end of him. The raft had some bullet holes in it, but it got me far enough away so I could swim for it.”

  She finally released him from the monster embrace and touched his face.

  “At least I was dressed for it,” she said, referring to her very brief bathing suit.

  At this point, at least one of Nolan’s appendages was beginning to get some feeling back.

  “How long was I out?” he asked her.

  “A few hours at least,” she replied. “I looked all over for you.”

  Nolan wiped the grit from his eye. “At least I got some sleep,” he mumbled.

  “Think you can stand up?” she asked him. “You’ve got to see what I’ve found here.”

  “Please tell me it’s a bottle of scotch…”

  “We’re not that lucky,” she replied. “But I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.”

  She got him to his feet and steadied him.

  “Where are we?” he asked her, looking around as his faculties slowly came back to him. The island was like something from a travel brochure, all palm trees and lush tropical vegetation.

  “I’ve got no idea,” she replied. “We traveled a long way last night. I was trying to keep track. I wish I knew how to navigate by the stars, but I think we were going north. Then that storm blew up—and then we got sunk. So, we’re lost, I guess. We could be anywhere.”

  “Sounds like something from a film,” he said, only half-kidding.

  She nudged him. “Please,” she said. “That’s now a four-letter word in my book.”

  They walked up the beach and over a rise. On the other side they could see the northern tip of the island. It was made up of a small lagoon bordered on three sides by tall palm trees and extremely thick jungle foliage. The flora was so dense, it completely hid the small bay.

  A typical pirates’ lair.

  “But I see nothing but more trees and more water,” Nolan said.

  “Come with me,” she told him.

  She led him down a winding path that brought them through the jungle. After a minute or so, they reached a smaller beach lining the lagoon.

  That’s when Nolan saw the bodies.

  There were at least a dozen of them lying in the sand. Some had been shot. Others had been stabbed. Most appeared Asian.

&n
bsp; About a hundred feet out in the bay, partially hidden by a coral reef and overhanging trees, were the remains of a seagoing tugboat. It was about three quarters sunk and had been partially burned. And just at the water’s edge, there were several large deep grooves in the sand, indicating a helicopter had landed here recently.

  Nolan knew what he was looking at. It was the aftermath of a battle.

  But who had fought who—and why?

  Emma walked him over to the nearest body and lifted up an arm.

  “This is totally gross,” she said. “But look at his tattoo.”

  Nolan saw the stylized scrolling on the man’s bicep. It read: Kupak Tangs.

  He couldn’t believe it. The Tang pirates? Here?

  “Aren’t these the guys you’re supposed to be looking for?” she asked him. “The guys who had the box?”

  Nolan scratched his head. “Yeah, these are them. And that tug out there is the kind of vessel that guy at Gottabang said the Tangs were using. But what were the chances we’d stumble upon this?”

  Emma just laughed at him. “After what we’ve been through in the past few days?” she said. “I wouldn’t question anything.”

  They walked further onto the beach. It was clear the Tangs had been overwhelmed by an opponent who had more firepower and who had gotten the drop of them. It was more a massacre than a battle.

  Emma was proceeding gingerly amidst the carnage. She told him: “I want to go on record as saying that being near all of these dead bodies is icky.”

  “Duly noted,” Nolan replied.

  One of the bodies was different from the rest. It was dressed in black camos and the person wearing it was not Asian, but rather looked European. He’d been shot once, and stabbed a few times. But his legs were also broken.

  “This guy is a long way from home,” Nolan said. “Just as the Tangs were.”

  “Just like we are,” she added.

  Nolan tried to take in the whole scene and divine what had happened here.

  “I think the guys in black camos came here in a helicopter,” he began, pointing to the dead European. “They got the Z-box from the Tangs, maybe as a business transaction at first, but then they started shooting. They killed a lot of the pirates, but this guy might have been wounded and fell off the copter as it was trying to get away.”

  “But who were these guys on the helicopter?” she asked.

  It was a good question. Nolan went through the pockets of the dead guy in the black camos and came out with just one thing: a sales receipt. It was for chocolates—and it was written in German.

  Germans? Nolan thought. The ex-Stazi guys from Bad Sweeten?

  Who else could it be?

  “So the Stazis come here,” Nolan said, continuing the reconstruction, “and they rip off the Tangs, take the box and kill them all, with a loss of one of their guys.”

  “So the box was here?” she asked him.

  “It could have been,” Nolan replied. “Take a look at this place. It’s a perfect hiding spot for pirates. It has access to the sea, but you can’t see it unless you’re right up on it.”

  He studied the helicopter marks again and determined they were made by a substantial aircraft, probably something along the lines of a Russian-made Hind.

  He said, “The question is, where did the box go from here?”

  Emma found one more clue. It was a bunch of packing receipts, the kind used for overnight shipments. There were maybe a dozen, held together by a rubber band, not far from the dead German’s body.

  “These must have fallen out of the helicopter maybe?” she said, handing them to Nolan.

  He agreed, but this just made it even more of a mystery.

  “So, the Stazis got the box,” he said. “And they’re going to ship it somewhere. But where?”

  Emma studied the receipts. They were all blank, but she thought she could detect some indentations on the top slip, as if someone had started writing on a packing slip a couple on top of this one, made a mistake and started writing another.

  She took the top slip from the rest of the bunch.

  “I was in a kid’s detective movie once,” she told him. “We solved the case like this.”

  She took a dab of seawater and ran it over the address box of the receipt. Sure enough, some scribbling caused by the indentations on the receipt showed up.

  The package dimensions were filled in—it was four feet by two feet and weighed about twelve pounds. This was just about the size of the Z-box as Audette had explained it to them. But the entire address had not been filled in, only parts of it had.

  What was clear was the street address: 45 Park Place. And the zip code: 10007.

  “10007?” she said. “That must be in the United States. But where?”

  Nolan just shook his head. “You asking the wrong person,” he said. “I’ve been out of the country for more than ten years. But if they’re shipping the box to the United States, where does the Monte Carlo connection come in?”

  At that moment they heard a dull roar approaching from overhead.

  For a second, Nolan thought it might be the helicopter returning to the island. But then the noise changed, got deeper. That’s when they both recognized it.

  They ran—through the jungle, over the rise and back to the place where Emma had found Nolan, half dead on the shore.

  Their eyes skyward, they started waving their arms madly.

  High above them, the unmistakable shape of the Shin-1 appeared and began wagging its wings in reply.

  “They said they’d look for us,” Emma said excitedly. “Isn’t that great?”

  Nolan was torn.

  Here he was, on a quasi-paradise island, with the most beautiful girl in the world—and in a bikini yet.

  Not exactly the best moment to be saved.

  “Duty calls,” he whispered.

  23

  Monte Carlo

  BATMAN FELT LIKE a cement block was sitting on his chest.

  He was lying on his back, barely able to breathe, barely able to open his eyes. He could see the stars, though, and that was strange. They seemed to be spinning and spinning, and getting closer. Or was he falling into them?

  He didn’t know where he was. When he brought his mechanical hand close to his face, he saw its prongs were misshapen and shooting off at weird angles.

  His first thought was: “If I’m dead, why do I still have an artificial hand?”

  Suddenly, the weight was lifted off his chest and he could breathe again. His eyesight started to clear and he lost the sensation that he was falling.

  Someone was slapping his face, urging him to come to.

  At first, he thought it was an angel. But then everything came into focus and he saw this was hardly a seraph hovering over him.

  It was Audette, the CIA agent.

  “Are you still with us?” he was asking Batman. “Can you hear me?”

  Batman finally nodded and, with Audette’s help, was able to sit up.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked the agent, realizing he was lying in the middle of a road.

  “You got ambushed and you got shot,” the agent told him soberly. “But you’re the lucky one.”

  Batman saw four people lying on the asphalt close to him. The taxi driver and the three men who’d impersonated cops. They were all dead.

  “But why not me?” Batman asked Audette.

  Audette held up a thin piece of metal. Batman had to look at it for a few moments before he knew what it was: the platinum players card that Murphy’s beautiful female accomplice had given him when they first went into the penthouse.

  “They tried to kill you, but the bullet hit this,” Audette said, holding the bent and distorted card up to his eyes. “I don’t know what it is, but it saved your life.”

  Batman started breathing deep again. In just a short while, he’d been shot in the back and survived, and now shot in the chest … and still survived.

  “Next time they’ll have to aim for my head,
” he said. He gratefully shook hands with Audette, then asked, “How did you find me?”

  Audette just shrugged. “I’ve been tailing you—I was about a half hour behind. You made some noise in those casinos winning all that money, then I found the taxi drivers you got the clothes from and…”

  But suddenly a panic rose up inside Batman.

  Where was Twitch?

  He jumped to his feet and almost fell over. Audette steadied him.

  “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.”