wire transfer notice that means time will run out, we won’t know where this game is being played, and the whole thing is fucked.”
Batman sipped his water. “As far as we could tell, this guy was just getting word of the Monte Carlo connection while he was briefing us,” he said. “That’s why this is all very new to us.”
“Let me tell you something,” Maurice replied irately. “I’m used to that kind of bullshit inside the Agency with these station chiefs. Something gets fucked up, you have someone call you, ‘Oh—really—I’m just hearing about this now.’ In the Agency, it’s not only what you know, but when you can deny you knew it. In this case, I guarantee something got fucked up along the way.”
“But, what’s the problem?” Twitch asked. “Just get us another ten million and we’ll go ahead with the charade.”
Maurice was shaking his head.
“But don’t you see?” he said, lighting yet another cigarette. “We can’t get you another ten million. We were lucky to scrape together the ten million that asshole was supposed to give you, and that was by pure stealing from other departments. No one at Langley or at the Pentagon or in the White House even knows this goddamn thing is happening—and believe me, the way things are now in Washington, if we filched another ten million from somewhere, inside two minutes, a hundred people would know and they’d start asking questions about where it went.”
“So, do you think Audette stole it?” Batman asked him. “Had it wired into his own account or something?”
Maurice just shrugged. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “But nothing would surprise me at this point. I mean, this thing has been screwed from the start. That much I do know. The whole thing with staging a fake battle with the pirates? Sinking a ship over the Java Trench? I mean, they don’t even do stuff like that in James Bond movies. It’s crazy.”
Batman opened another bottle of mineral water.
“But what if we had bought a seat at the game,” he asked Maurice. “And you couldn’t sniff this thing out before the game started? What would have happened then?”
Maurice shrugged again. “Then we would have found you both tuxedoes, you would have showed up for the game, infiltrated the location, then identified and pursued whoever won the box.”
Batman thought a moment. “And what would have happened if we’d made it into the game and actually won the damn thing?”
Maurice laughed.
“Well, that would have been heaven,” he said. “Neater and sweeter. You would have gotten your fee, we would have gotten the box and western civilization as we know it would have been saved. The money would have flowed then, my friends—and whatever the Agency said they were going to pay you, you would get. But it’s back to the drawing board now.”
Maurice looked genuinely disheartened. He eyed the bar. “Do you mind?” he asked.
“Help yourself,” Batman told him.
Maurice poured out two fingers of Macallan and downed it.
“And you don’t know what it is?” Batman asked him earnestly. “The box, I mean?”
Maurice slowly shook his head no. “My pay level doesn’t go that high. Just some kind of scary weapon someone dreamed up long ago that might still be functional. That’s all I know and frankly, that’s all I want to know. Anything beyond that is just too disturbing to think about.”
Batman thought deeply about all this. The sun was reflecting off one of the shiny buildings nearby, warming his face in a very pleasant fashion. Words started coming to him, phrases from the past: One for ten split; Low risk assessment; Cash-rich environment; Government-backed funds upon transaction completion; No tax exposure.
Suddenly he said: “OK—let’s do it.”
Maurice was confused. “Do what?”
“Do the buy-in,” Batman said. “We got money in the bank. We’ll pay the entrance fee and we’ll pretend to get into the game.”
The little man didn’t believe him. “You’re kidding, right?”
Batman shook his head. “If you know so much about us,” he began, “then you must know that we just made ten million for saving America’s sweetheart—and that was just one of a few very lucrative jobs we’ve had lately. You must also know that before I got into busting pirates I was busting nuts on Wall Street. If someone came to me and said I could put up ten million to make a hundred—and get my initial investment back—all of it tax-free? I’d do it in a heartbeat. In fact, I used to do it all the time, sometimes