to their crummy little hostel room, especially for Twitch and his artificial leg.
They set off, though—and immediately began imagining that people were following them.
Then a bit of luck: Looking over their shoulders about a minute into their journey, they saw headlights approaching. It was a Rolls taxi coming down the road. They flagged it down.
Batman explained to the driver they were heading for the east side of Monte Carlo. The driver indicated they should jump in. They did so and finally felt safe.
They began making plans: They would go to the hostel, pay the owner the money they owed him and then get information about flying out to Aden. Monte Carlo didn’t have an airport, so they would have to get to Nice, France, to catch a flight. But that was not a problem as there were both train and bus services that would get them there quickly. Before all this, though, they would use some of the money left over from their casino winnings to call someone at Kilos Shipping who could get a message to Alpha Squad telling them that Beta had made some progress.
They’d ridden only about a few hundred feet when the taxi driver suddenly pulled to the side of the road. Batman thought he was stopping to pick up someone else—something Batman was definitely not in favor of.
But instead the man put the car in park and turned around to face them. He was holding a massive .45 automatic.
“OK, guys,” he said in an American accent. “Let’s make it easy and just turn over the key.”
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