Batman 5 - Batman Begins (17 page)

Across the street, Bruce Wayne stood in a doorway, adjusting a directional microphone hooked under his ear and hearing the end of Falcone’s conversation with Flass.
“Sometimes,
” Falcone was saying,
“it goes bad.
”

Bruce switched off the microphone and got into his car parked nearby. He was wearing the black bodysuit and gauntlets. He drove three miles uptown and parked in an alley across from Gotham’s Central Police Headquarters and pulled on a ski mask. He climbed a windowless wall, using the spikes on the gauntlets to pull himself up, topped the balustrade, and ran silently over tar paper until he reached the front parapet. Then he waited. A few minutes later he saw James Gordon park a police sedan in front of the headquarters and enter the building.

Gordon walked past the desk sergeant and up a flight of rickety stairs to the detectives’ area on the second floor and into his office. He slammed the door behind him and slumped into a chair, his back to the single dusty window. He removed his glasses, wiped them on his tie, switched on the desk lamp, and pulled a stack of reports from an in-box.

Suddenly the light went out and someone very close behind him said, “Don’t turn around.”

Something was suddenly pressing against the back of his neck—something that felt like a gun.

“What do you want?” Gordon asked, his voice level, conversational.

“You’re a good cop. One of the few.”

Gordon narrowed his eyes, puzzled. If this were a hit, he would be dead by now. So what kind of caper
was
it?

The person behind him continued. “Carmine Falcone brings in shipments of drugs every week. Nobody takes him clown. Why?”

“He’s paid up with the right people.”

“What would it take to bring him down?”

Should he answer? Why not? He was not saying anything that every beat cop in the city did not know. “Leverage on Judge Faden . . . And a D.A. brave enough to prosecute.”

“Rachel Dawes in the D.A.’s office.” It was not a question.

“Who
are
you?”

“Watch for my sign.”

“You’re just one man?”

“Now we are two.”

“We?”

Gordon felt the pressure on his neck ease and waited for a reply. Finally, he turned around; the room was empty. He ran to the open window and looked down at the street, empty except for parked cars. He looked up and glimpsed a figure silhouetted against the night sky vanishing onto the roof.

He moved, racing across the floor to the stairwell, drawing his pistol as he went. Two uniformed patrolmen saw him and followed, reaching for their holsters.

Gordon, with the two cops only a few steps behind, ran onto the roof and saw someone dressed in black near the parapet. He knew the space between police headquarters and the parking garage next door was too far to jump. He aimed his pistol and yelled, “Freeze!”

The figure sprinted forward and jumped.

Gordon reached the parapet in time to see the man—he guessed it was a man—hit the side of the garage a few feet beneath the roof edge and fall and grab a fire-escape balcony below, then somehow melt into the shadows.

Gordon lowered his weapon.

One of the patrolmen asked, “What the hell was
that
?”

“Just some nut.”

Yeah, Gordon thought,
some
nut . . .

It was not yet eight o’clock the next morning when Bruce Wayne, wearing an expensive, tailored suit, entered Wayne Tower and smiled at everyone he passed. He took the elevator to the basement and entered the Applied Sciences Department. Lucius Fox was already behind his desk.

Fox smiled. “What’s it today? More spalunking?”

“
Spee
-lunking,” Bruce said. “And no, today it’s base-jumping.”

“Base-jumping? What, like parachuting?”

“Kind of. Do you have any lightweight fabrics?”

Fox looked at Bruce over his glasses. “Oh, yeah. Wait here.”

Fox went behind a stack of crates and, a minute later, emerged holding a sheet of black cloth. He gave it to Bruce and asked, “Notice anything?”

Bruce ran the cloth through his fingers and shook his head.

Fox put on a thick canvas glove. “Memory fabric. Flexible, ordinarily, but put an electric current through it—”

Fox pressed a button on the glove and there was a faint
buzz.
The fabric instantly changed shape and became a small tent.

“The molecules align and become rigid,” Fox concluded.

Bruce pressed his fingers on the fabric tent. It did not bend. “What kind of shapes can you make?”

Fox again touched the tent with the electrified glove and the tent reverted to being a square of black cloth. “It could be tailored to any structure based on a rigid skeleton.”

“Too expensive for the army?”

“Yeah. Guess they never thought about marketing to the billionaire base-jumping, spelunking market.”

“Look, Mr. Fox, if you’re uncomfortable . . .”

“Mr. Wayne, if you don’t tell me what you’re really doing, then when I get asked, I don’t have to lie. But don’t treat me like an idiot.”

“Fair enough. Anything else a billionaire, base-jumping, spelunking wastrel might want to see?”

Fox gestured to something covered by a tarpaulin. “I could show you the Tumbler . . . but nah, you wouldn’t be interested . . .”

“Show me.”

They had the Tumbler loaded onto a flatbed truck and followed it in Fox’s car to a test track near a small airfield, where the Tumbler was downloaded. Fox, with a bow and a flourish, swept away the canvas cover to reveal the strangest vehicle Bruce had ever seen.

“It looks like a cross between a Lamborghini Countach and a Humvee,” he said to Fox.

Bruce and Fox climbed into the Tumbler and Fox began explaining the controls. When he was finished, he said, “She was built as a bridging vehicle. You hit that button—”

Bruce put his forefinger out and Fox shouted, “Not
now
!”

Bruce jerked his finger back.

“It boosts her into a rampless jump,” Fox continued. “In combat, two of them jump a river towing cables, then you run a bailey bridge across. Damn bridge never worked, but this baby works just fine.”

Bruce settled into the driver’s seat and tested his reach to the various buttons and levers. The fit was perfect; it was as though the Tumbler had been built for him.

“Would you like to take her for a spin?” Fox asked.

Bruce pushed the ignition button, eased the stick into first gear, and toed the gas pedal. The Tumbler shot forward. To Bruce it seemed like the first bend in the track was in his windshield immediately. He tapped the brake pedal and the Tumbler skidded to a halt.

“I forgot to tell you,” Fox said. “She’s kinda peppy. What do you think?”

Bruce inched the Tumbler forward and smiled. “Does it come in black?”

Three days later Bruce and Alfred were in the cave below the mansion, bent over a workbench they had installed, examining what looked like a batter’s helmet. As Bruce watched, Alfred picked up a baseball bat and slammed the helmet-thing, breaking it in two.

“Problems with the graphite mixture,” Alfred said. “The
next
ten thousand will be up to specifications.”

“At least they gave us a discount,” Bruce said.

“Quite. In the meantime, might I suggest you try to avoid landing on your head?”

“Good idea.” Bruce moved to where the utility belt and grappling gun were hung on a mannequin. “Time to begin testing.”

He removed the utility belt, now freed of the harness, from the mannequin and strapped it on, shaking the gun to be certain that it was firmly nestled in its buckle holster. He went back to the bench and put on a pair of gloves, one with electric contacts in the fingers and a tiny but powerful battery on the underside of the wrist. Each glove had scallops like those on the gauntlets he had worn at Rā’s al Ghūl’s monastery.

“Devilishly handsome, if I may say so, Master Bruce,” Alfred commented.

“Emphasis on the ‘devilish,’ I assume.”

Bruce lifted a curved metal object from the bench, hefted it, and threw it at a stalactite. It whistled across the cave and bit deep into the stone.

“Your boomerang did not come back,” Alfred said.

“It’s not supposed to, unless it misses what I’m aiming at. By the way, Alfred, I’m thinking of calling these things ‘Batarangs.’ What do you think?”

“Devilishly
clever,” Alfred said.

The following morning there was a small item buried in the local gossip column of the
Gotham Times.
It told the world that Bruce Wayne, newly returned to the city, was leaving again for a brief vacation in northern California. He planned to see the sights in and around San Francisco and was considering a few days’ hang gliding at Mount Tamalpais.

Reading the snippet on a westbound plane, Bruce thought it a mistake to have leaked the part about hang gliding because it might call attention to abilities he wanted to remain hidden.

He was living and learning.

He returned from Mount Tamalpais a week later by commercial carrier. He told the perky young woman behind the airline’s ticket counter that his wallet with his credit cards and ID had been stolen but, fortunately, he always carried emergency cash in his sock and would five hundred be enough for passage to Gotham? It was highly irregular and the perky ticket seller had to confer with her supervisor, but finally Bruce was allowed to board the plane.

He arrived at Gotham International at four in the morning, his only concern that he might run into someone he knew in the terminal. He did not want anyone to know he was back yet because his alter ego was about to reappear and he was afraid that someone—that smart cop Gordon, for example—might connect Bruce Wayne’s return with the mystery man. Sooner or later, he would make a big, clumsy deal of the wastrel’s homecoming—do something stupid, maybe.

He need not have worried. No one was in the terminal except a few indifferent maintenance workers, and the following night no one saw him enter several of Carmine Falcone’s habitats and vehicles and install tiny microphones.

At his last stop, an apartment Falcone owned near the theater district, Bruce placed his bug and went up the fire escape to the roof. He waited, a small receiver in his ear, until the sky began to lighten.

Time to pack it in
. . .

Through his earpiece, he heard the sound of a door opening, the clink of glass against glass, and two voices. He recognized Falcone’s: “Tomorrow night, pier fourteen. Tell your guys.”

A second voice: “Don’t worry, Mr. F. They’ll be there.”

Tomorrow night. Pier fourteen. It’s a date . . .

An icy wind was blowing off the bay. Already, the dock area was chilled; soon, the wind would chill the entire city. A wispy mist blurred the streetlamps and softened the edges of the large cargo container, one of dozens of similar containers.

Bigger, Alfie, and Steiss were finally working, unloading boxes, and it was about time. They had arrived at pier fourteen at eight-thirty, as Mr. Falcone insisted, and then waited around for three hours until the huge overhead crane had swung a cargo container from the deck of a freighter onto the dock. The night was growing cold and Steiss and Bigger pulled the zippers of their jackets higher. Suddenly headlights from an approaching sedan lit the scene and the three stopped and for several seconds did not move.

Detective Flass got out of the car and strode briskly to one of the unloaded boxes. He parted its flaps, reached inside, and brought out a stuffed bear. He tossed it onto a nearby pile of bears. Next to the bears was a pile of stuffed rabbits.

“Cute,” he said.

He went to where a limousine was parked at the curb and let himself into the backseat. Carmine Falcone was already there, a stuffed rabbit in his lap.

“Looks fine out there,” Flass said. “So the bears go straight to the dealers—”

“And the rabbits go to our man in the Narrows,” Falcone said.

“What’s the difference?”

“Ignorance is bliss, my friend. Don’t burden yourself with the secrets of scary people.”

“Scarier than you?”

“Considerably
scarier than me.”

Outside, the work of unloading the containers continued beneath a single overhead lamp. Steiss handed a box to Bigger, who took it away down a narrow passageway between the stacked containers. Steiss turned back to the darkness in the open container and was yanked inside.

A moment later, Bigger heard a muffled groan. He set the box down and called, “Steiss?”

There was no reply. Bigger pulled a gun from under his jacket and nodded to Alfie, who was coming from the docks.

Bigger said, “Come on, we gotta—”

Alfie drew his own gun and together they moved toward the open container.

Behind them, something whistled from the shadows and the overhead lamp shattered. The two men jerked around, raising their weapons. The thing that had hit the lamp fell to the ground and Alfie lifted it, trying to see exactly what it was in the darkness. His gaze went past it to the huge crane that loomed against the sky and the winged shape that hung from it.

The shape moved.

Alfie blinked and whispered, “What the hell . . .”