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