Operation Caribe - By Mack Maloney Page 0,37

friend sitting on his bunk, eye patch in place, staring into space.

“Are you ready for this?” Batman asked him.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Nolan replied.

Batman said, “I mean, are you sure you want to go through with it?”

Nolan shrugged. “No, I’m not—but I’m going to do it anyway.”

Batman shook his head. “You realize we’re not so deep into this thing that we can’t call it off. Who would know?”

Nolan shrugged again. “Well, I’d know. And so would all the people this guy has terrorized or will terrorize. It’s a long list.”

Batman started to say something but stopped. He knew it was virtually impossible to change Nolan’s mind once it was made up. Still, he felt he had to at least talk to him about it.

He pulled out a joint, lit it and offered Nolan a toke. Nolan just waved the smoke away.

“Don’t let those SAS guys see you smoking that,” he told Batman.

Batman laughed. “Who do you think I got it from?”

Nolan retrieved a beer from his fridge and opened it. “Just what I want to hear,” he said glumly.

He still hadn’t gotten over the strange incident in the Bahamas a week before. The non-attack on the Muy Capaz hideout kept replaying over and over in his mind, taunting him, making him more uneasy than usual. Things just hadn’t seemed the same since.

Batman started up again. “We’re talking about something pretty drastic here,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it since we dreamed it up. We’ve all done undercover stuff before, as well as the disguise thing—but never to this degree. You’re the group leader. Nothing says you have to go.”

Nolan drained his beer and opened another. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately either, always a bad sign.

“We’ve gone over this a hundred times,” he told Batman wearily. “Two people have to do this gig. Twitch can pass for just about any race on Earth and he speaks a bit of the language—so, aside from the fact that he’s freaking nuts, we’re lucky there. But he can’t go alone; someone has to watch his back. Gunner would be perfect, but he’s just too big for this part of the world. Crash admits he wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut, and neither could you. So, that leaves me.”

“Leaves you doing a charity gig, you mean,” Batman reminded him. “They’ll be no payday for this one. No tip. In fact, it’s costing us money.”

Nolan drank his beer. “We already got a pile of money in the bank. It won’t hurt us to do a freebie every once and a while.”

“OK, Charlie Chan,” Batman finally told him, taking another toke and then stubbing out the joint. “It’s your fortune cookie.”

Nolan finished his second beer, crushed the can and fired it into his wastebasket.

“Just show me the weapon,” he told Batman.

Batman took a small plastic case from his pocket. He opened it to reveal a tiny white ball, no larger than the head of a pin. Nolan had to get his good eye up close to it to even make it out. “You sure that isn’t a head louse or something?” he asked.

Batman picked up the tiny ball with his fingertips. “It’s ricin, compliments of your friend, Bebe. One of the most lethal poisons on earth. If you look closely, you can see it’s embedded in a tiny sphere of wax. Now, that wax outer coating is tough, but it will dissolve in about a second in the presence of heat. So, if this goes into hot food or drink, it will work in a few minutes. But if it’s somehow injected into the blood stream, it will work almost instantaneously.”

Batman put the tiny ball back into its case and gave it to Nolan.

“Uric acid will neutralize it,” he said. “But even then, it’s still hazardous. So, be careful with it at all times. It’s very nasty stuff.”

* * *

FIVE MINUTES LATER, Nolan and Batman walked into the ship’s makeshift sick bay.

Stevenson and Mace were waiting for them. Both physicians were wearing scrubs, rubber gloves and untied surgical masks. Both looked particularly grim.

The first thing Mace did was show Nolan a large syringe, big enough to treat a horse. It was filled with a clear fluid.

“This is methoxsalen,” Mace said. “It’s an anti-vitiligo drug. It’s been around for years and has no side effects—except the obvious reaction. With your permission?”

Nolan rolled up his sleeve and allowed Mace to inject him. He was then led over to a hastily prepared operating table

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