CHAPTER 4

When the alarm went off, Dick’s hand reached out from beneath the covers and slapped the clock like he meant to kill it. It stopped at once, and he lay there in his bed, the sheets twisted and mangled all around him like a python halfway through its attack, and he just stared up at the ceiling and gazed at the crack where the ceiling met the wall, one he had noticed his first morning at Wayne Manor and for some reason caught his attention every morning since. Lots of things did this to him now, locked his focus into a loop.

He hadn’t slept at all. He had thrashed unhappily all night long. Insomnia. He was pretty sure he had it bad. He’d looked up the symptoms online but had found what seemed like a hundred different types of insomnia, and couldn’t decide which one he had or if he ought to take medication for it.

After a few minutes, Dick finally tore the sheets off of himself and swung his legs over the side of the bed, where they touched the rug his mother had woven for him three summers ago while they were on break from the circus. It was the only thing he’d really had to bring with him after…well, just after. That is, back in their travel camper at Haley’s Circus, there had been his mother’s blow drier and his dad’s shaving cream, stuff like that, but nothing really to remember them by.

The rug wasn’t anything special. His mother had been a tightrope walker and trapeze artist, not a master at rug-weaving. Mary Grayson’s talent had been to wow audiences with her nimble body, hanging by one arm or a leg while contorting herself into shapes that hadn’t seemed humanly possible. She had been an enterologist, capable of squeezing herself into small boxes, with the will to train every day. Her truest gift to him hadn’t been any rug, it had been the training mindset and the discipline it takes to be truly good at something.

No rug could replace all that, yet he kept it anyway, despite the fact that he’d never really been the sentimental type.

There was a knock at his door. “Come in,” he said. Predictably, it was the butler, arriving just as Dick was finishing getting dressed.

“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” the old man said, entering with a tray. It’s like he has a sixth sense for when people are just getting up or are hungry, Dick thought, thinking about the timeliness of Alfred Pennyworth. The butler was an apparition, sometimes passing wordlessly from one hallway to another, sometimes acknowledging Dick from the other end of a large room where he was dusting, and sometimes ignoring him even when the boy was right beside him.

“Looks like pancakes this morning,” Dick said, walking over and taking a big sniff of his plate. “I approve.”

“Very good, young sir.”

Dick took a seat at the table where Alfred had set his breakfast. “Why do you say that?”

“Say what?”

“Young sir.”

Alfred shrugged. “It’s proper etiquette.”

“Proper etiquette?” Dick said, now spreading maple syrup over his pancakes. “Like, did someone teach you that in school or something? Like a butler school?”

“Actually, I was taught that in the British Army. Butler school came later, and was way more difficult than Army training.”

Dick chuckled, taking his first bite of the pancakes, which were so delicious that his eyes widened to match his astonishment at Alfred’s claim. “You’re kidding, right? You were in the military?”

“Very briefly, yes.”

“What did you do? Were you a cook?”

“I disarmed mines.”

“Bullsh—I mean, no way!”

“Yes way, young sir,” said Alfred, moving over to the bed to make it. Alfred had to know by now that Dick was actually kind of a neat freak, and would always make the bed himself if given enough time, but Dick was starting to believe that the butler was very OCD about keeping things in order. “I did it all for the British military,” he said, flapping the sheets.

“That’s incredible,” Dick said through a mouthful of pancakes. “These pancakes are amazing! I ever tell you that?”

“Often, young master.”

“They teach you to make pancakes like this in the military, too?” he laughed.

“No, sir. That I learned from the British Butler Institute.” Dick froze halfway through chewing another bite, and then started laughing much harder than before. The butler paused midway through smoothing the sheets across the bed, and looked up at him, almost startled. “Did I say something wrong, sir? A word that doubles as a bit of slang for something sexual and grotesque these days?”

“No, I’m just…hahaha! There’s a British institute for butlering?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Alfred said. “They train you in chef’s work, chauffeuring, housekeeping, nanny work—”

“Nanny work? Nannies get trained?”

“Of course, young sir. You don’t think people like Bruce Wayne just put out an ad in the newspaper, do you? Never know what sort of crazies might turn up, hoping to gain access to a house this loaded with wealth, rare art, expensive furniture, things like that.”

Dick’s smile died. He felt a bit stupid now. “Oh, yeah. Guess I didn’t think o’ that.” He felt self-conscious now, took another mouthful of pancakes, and said, “Sorry if all that laughing offended you.”

“Not at all, sir. You’re both young and stupid. It’s a common affliction and completely curable.” Dick stared at him blankly, afraid he’d overstepped some bounds. Alfred smiled at him. “That was a joke, young master.”

“Oh!” Dick said, relieved. Then he chuckled. “You’re all right, Al. I mean, for an old dude.” He caught himself too late, realizing that it sounded like another jab, but the butler laughed and finished fixing up the pillows. “So…why did you leave the military?”

Alfred sighed, “Oh, I just got tired of the all the politics. You don’t know what that word means yet, not really, but just know that it means bullshit.” He smiled. A very cool old dude, Dick thought. “In the end, I left just after they put me through butler schooling.” He shrugged.

“Wait,” Dick said, pointing his forkful of pancakes at him, “the military sent you through butler school?”

“Oh, yes, forgot to mention that part, young sir. I was formally discharged so that I could enroll at the British Butler Institute as a civilian, train to be a butler, and then conduct clandestine operations for the government. I had to infiltrate the home of a Russian ambassador named Vladimir Yakubovich and spy on him for three years.”

Dick’s mouth was agape. He remembered that he had pancakes in his mouth, and chewed slowly, thoughtfully. “You were a spy?”

“No. Well, yes, briefly. I made friends with Vladimir, and as far as I know he never knew I supplied the information that ultimately got him killed.”

This just got better and better, and Dick couldn’t believe any of it. He whispered, “You…killed him?”

“No, sir. I would never think of it. Vladimir was a friend and a gentleman. Gentlemen don’t kill one another.”

Dick shook his head. “But then…who…?”

“Politics, young sir,” he said flatly. “It will get in the way of progress every time.”

He snorted. “Yeah, tell me about it,” he said, taking another forkful of pancakes.

“Something troubling you, young sir?” said Alfred. Dick only shrugged, but the butler wasn’t having that. “Out with it, young man, or it’ll only eat you up from the inside.”

There was a moment when he would keep his heart’s desire to himself, but the teenage rebellion past in an instant and he decided he needed to say something to someone. “Tony Zucco,” he said, looking over at Alfred. The butler didn’t say anything back. He seemed to know that there was more, and was waiting to hear it. And Dick, damn his vulnerability, gave him what he wanted. “It’s like…nobody’s doing anything about it. He…he killed them over a year ago and he’s still…he’s still…” Dick’s eyes started to water, and he stopped thinking about it immediately, because he didn’t want to cry anymore. Babies cry. I’m past that.

“I understand, young master.”

Dick sighed. “How could you understand?” he said, hearing the snarling in his own voice, and hating himself for the lack of emotional control. That was something else babies did, and he knew it. “You’re…you never had anything like that happen to you.”

“Oh, you don’t think so?” Alfred said, stepping around the bed. “You might be surprised what I’ve seen. You might just be shocked to know how many friends I’ve buried, and how many of their deaths I was there to see.”

“But not your…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word parents, because the tears threatened to spill.

“No. No, nothing like what you and Master Bruce experienced,” he conceded. “But my own experiences have left me no less changed. Now, we can choose to let those things embitter us, make us cold and callous to the world. Or, we can select a different option.”

Dick looked up at him. “What option?”

“To rise above it all, young sir. Let it give us power. Let it be the fuel that burns inside you. Let it give you a clear goal, something that directly counteracts the bad thing that happened. It can be difficult to do, but once you jump in and swim, I think you’ll find the water pleasant.” Alfred smiled, then shrugged. “I mean, look at me. After Vladimir was killed, I really couldn’t see myself playing by their rules anymore. So, I went about life my own way. I got out of the military, enrolled at the British Butler Institute again, took on more classes, mastered a variety of fields, and decided I would actually dedicate my life to the service of life, and never again for killing on someone else’s agenda.”

For a moment, they just looked at one another. The butler seemed both a thousand years old and yet as young as Dick himself. His words crossed a gulf that no one, not Bruce, not his tutor Molly, and, admittedly, not even his own parents had ever been to cross with words alone. He’s a wise man, Dick thought, thinking about a story his father had once told him about how in ancient times the oldest people in a village were sought after for their advice, having survived untold summers and the harshest of winters.

Dick looked down at his pancakes, and nodded. “These pancakes are solid, Al. Thanks.” Without realizing it, Dick had just shut himself out again. Or, rather, shut the butler and the rest of the world out. It was a natural reaction, that deflection of good intent. Even the best words left him in brooding moods, and that, if he was being honest, was the source of his insomnia.

Alfred stood up, and clapped him on the shoulder. “You are always welcome, young master. Just leave the dishes when you’re finished if you wish. I’ll come by and collect them later. It’s nearly eight o’clock, and Molly will be here very soon. You’ve got a long day ahead.”

“Yeah, I know. Bruce’s martial arts instructors are comin’ by right after Molly leaves. I’m gonna get some time in with them.”

Alfred smiled, but this time it seemed like a smile that covered up worry. “Very good, sir,” he said. “I’ll see you later, no doubt.” The butler stepped out, and Dick was left wondering what the old man had been hiding. The freakin’ dude was a spy, he thought. Then, on the heels of that, What other secrets does he keep?

Dick flipped on his computer, and checked the recent YouTube videos in his queue. There was one made of a montage of news videos from last year, when the Batman had been racing through Gotham City in broad daylight on some beefed up motorcycle. “Now there’s somebody who’s gettin’ it done,” he muttered. “He’s not worried about all the politics. All the bullshit.”

He watched the video for a minute, watched how the bat zoomed around a patrol car that got in his way, unconcerned about the repercussions from the law if he got caught. He’s just doing what’s right, and nobody’s gonna stop him.

Dick finished his pancakes, and decided to get some jump rope time in before Molly showed up.

* * *

IN THE CAVE, Bruce sat bundled in an electric blanket. He pored over the photographs from the crime scene. On the monitor directly to his left, he had a folder opened up for this latest case where he’d put all the photos. He labeled it simply “COLD KILLER” and placed it just above the folder labeled “SEWER KILLER,” which he’d made a year ago for a series of murders where the bodies had been found mutilated in the sewers under the Old Bowery. That case had only a few eyewitnesses to a large, deformed man seen skulking around one of the culverts, and the case had since gone cold.

This Cold Killer case didn’t even have that much. There were no eyewitnesses, no survivors, and no evidence pointing towards the killer’s identity other than a few scattered boot prints. Bruce had electrostatically lifted the prints on-scene, and now spent hours scouring the Internet looking for a match for the boot print, the closest he’d found so far was for a thermal suit. Makes sense, he thought, listening to the sound of footsteps approaching from behind. A person would want to stay warm to do all that work.

“Your breakfast, sir,” said Alfred, rounding the large array of computer monitors that encircled the dais. He placed a silver tray of pancakes on the workbench, and said, “Please do eat it before it gets cold this time, or before one of the bats drops its droppings into it again.”

Bruce smirked. “If I do, it’s my own damn fault. Don’t sweat it so much, old man.”

“It’s hard not to sweat things when one lives in a home with two very troubled young men, one of them quite a bit more confused than the other.”

He turned his chair around. “You mean Dick?”

“Who else would I mean, sir?”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Alfred gave him a look that said, Do I really need to answer this?

Bruce sighed. “I’ll train with him when Andy and the other instructors get here later today,” he said. “I’ll make that time, I promise.”

“That’s a start, sir.”

Bruce smiled. “All right, then. We’ll go somewhere afterwards. Maybe, I dunno, the park or the zoo or something. Or maybe something social. There’s always a good social party going on in Gotham.”

“In case you hadn’t notice, sir, Master Grayson’s not the social type.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Hm. Maybe go see a Knights game, then. I’ve still got those season tickets the city sent me for holding the fundraisers. They’re sky box seats. He won’t have to look at anybody or talk to anybody. Good enough?”

“Sounds perfect, sir.” Alfred walked over to the array of computer monitors. He tapped a few of the interactive screens. Alfred knew how the computers and the filing system worked almost as well as Bruce did, and in some ways better. The butler kept more than just Wayne Manor orderly. “Is this what you were talking about?” he said, tapping a screen that zoomed in on one of the victims. It was Lois Walker, her mouth gaping in an eternal scream.

“Yeah, this is them,” Bruce said, pushing himself away from the console and rubbing his eyes.

Alfred looked at him. “You haven’t slept,” he said in a reproachful tone that hadn’t changed since Bruce was five.

“What else is new?” Bruce said, tossing the electric blanket off of him and standing up. He walked over to one of the computer monitors at the far end to see if the piezoelectric oscillators and radio saturation emitters were still working—he and Alfred were constantly checking to see if their little Batcave was being monitored, especially since the level of government surveillance in Gotham City had gone up, and so far it seemed Batman’s secret had been kept completely secret, despite the fact that Edward Nashton knew exactly who he was.

“You’ve been home for several hours,” Alfred said, walking over to him. “The sun’s come up. Time for Batman to get some rest, yes?”

“Could you rest with that bouncing around in your head?” he said, pointing to the center screen. On it, he had the enlarged image of the frozen baby girl.

“Perhaps not, sir. But I do try to rest with what horrific images I do have bouncing around inside my head. Rest settles the mind. Sharpens it. We’ve had this discussion numerous times before, and it always ends with me being right, so you may as well stop fighting, sir.”

Bruce scoffed, and patted his old friend on the shoulder before turning and walking over to the workbench. There, he’d disassembled one of his GTEM guns and was lubricating the parts. He was also thinking of replacing the motor. “You’re right, of course,” Bruce said. “I need to get some rest. Maybe more rest than you’d think. I’m thinking again of quitting, Alfred.”

The butler sighed, and stepped down off the dais. “We’ve had this discussion before, too.”

“Things are different now.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a son now. Or a brother. However you wanna look at it.”

At the bottom of the stairs, Alfred paused, turned, and said, “That’s certainly the most mature reason you’ve ever given for retiring, sir. And it’s a good one. A very good one. So I won’t argue with you this time. I’ll let you sit on that one for a while and think about it. In the meantime, your breakfast is getting cold.” The butler turned and left.

Bruce opened up his ratchet set and started working on the GTEM gun. He checked his body armor, and figured it was still working good enough to leave Lucius alone for the time being—for almost a decade, he’d been pestering his company’s CEO for one piece of high-tech equipment after another. It’s about time I let him rest, too, Bruce thought. It’s time I let all of us rest. Myself. Lucius. Alfred. Hell, maybe even Gordon will fare better without the complications I’ll bring once the city transitions back into a territory under regular city council control.

Corruption would never vanish completely, but it had been dealt a crushing blow in these last few years.

While reassembling the GTEM gun, Bruce noticed his hands were trembling. The batsuit had a special layer of insulation to keep him warm, but here in the cave it was cold and he was exposed. Winds found their way through the twisting tunnels all around, sometimes creating low whines, like a woman calling from someplace far, far off. The bats were very quiet this time of year, hibernating and barely moving around at all.

Maybe not retire, Bruce thought. Just hibernate for a while. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d gone on hiatus, but even those had been short and he could never keep himself from lounging in the cave and listening to radio chatter, conducting long-term investigations that he’d put to the side while chasing down other big game, and just generally getting antsy to be back out there in the action.

The Batman project had taken up so much of his life, could he really just hibernate now? Could he just retire?

The phone in his pocket suddenly buzzed. He answered it immediately, knowing who it would be. Gordon’s text was short and simple: We’ve got something.

Bruce texted him back: Autopsy on the infant?

Gordon replied: No, but we know who she is. Janna Lefort. The daughter of Karl Lefort, one of the other victims in the ice room. The other victims have been identified. Here they are – Dr. Taylor Griffon; Nathaniel Hammond; Dr. Kyle Saberton; Professor Bart Freyburg; Reginald Toppem; Matthew Northwood; and Dr. Michael Pettit.

Something struck Bruce immediately. He texted back: Looks like an awful lot of people from academia there.

Gordon replied: All victims are from different parts of the country, most of them from here in Gotham. All victims went missing within the last two months.

Bruce sent back: Relationship?

Gordon was quick with his reply, which meant he was using the new speech-to-text app on his phone, which he had claimed to Batman his wife was pushing on him and that he’d never use: We back-checked it. Most of these people never knew each other, at least that we can tell. Nothing criminal in ANY of their backgrounds. Most interesting thing is that, at one time or another, they all served on the ICSU.

Bruce winced at that. The International Council for Science?

Gordon added: The Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry branch, to be exact.

There were a few moments while he stood there in silence. A single bat flapped its wings overhead, but never materialized out of the darkness to be seen. As elusive as the answer Bruce was now chasing down, which was to this question: Who the hell would kill a bunch of scientists, chemists, and professors who had no history of criminality? And why kill the infant?

His phone buzzed again. He looked at it. It was Gordon, saying: You were right, this was no ordinary mob hit. I’ll talk to you later. Have the family here with me. One last thing, though. The autopsy of Lois Walker and Kyle Saberton are already showing signs of being crushed PRIOR to being frozen. Bone marrow leaking out from serious fractures shows that. The crushed pieces are wide enough for a hand, with bruising like you saw with Walker’s ligature marks. Our perp is strong.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Bruce reread the message, then put his phone away and looked over at the pictures on the monitors. He looked at the eternally screaming face of Lois Walker, and thought, What did you see? What was it that made someone do this to you?

He stared at the frozen woman, who had no answers.

* * *

RACING UP THE stone steps of City Hall, Gordon nearly tripped at the top. It was like the wind was chasing him, nipping at him, biting at his ears.

Coat flapping, he moved through the front door. Nodded to Helena Kingsley, the prosecuting attorney, now famous for being present in the courtroom at the Joker trial when Roy Higgens had pulled out a pistol and shot the man she had meant to send to the lethal injection chair. “Helena, how’ve you been?” he said as she hustled past.

“Been warmer, Jim,” she said briefly, and made her way down the steps quickly.

Security at the front door was heavy as always. It was mostly new GCPD recruits. However, one plainclothes FBI agent from Breaking Point and two National Guardsmen stood as stoic sentries, watching both the screeners they had been training over the last year and Gordon as he emptied his pockets and moved through the same screener as everybody else. “Boys, girls, good morning,” he said to them.

“Morning, Commissioner,” said Rosalie, the chief of security at City Hall for a couple of years now and who’d probably seen more changes come through and faster than anybody else to hold the position.

“How’s the baby?”

“At home with Daddy.”

“I’ll bet they’re happy and warm.”

“I’m sure they are,” she laughed. Rosalie was wearing thick gloves, like most of the security teams who had to stay near the door all day.

Gordon took the stairs rather than the elevator, because his doctor had told him to get more exercise and fit it in anywhere he could. Halfway up, he nodded to two more relatively new acquaintances. “Patrick,” he said to the HS liaison. “Diana,” he said to the National Guardswoman who’d been assigned to update the systems throughout City Hall and all of city council.

The offices were all hustle and bustle. This had become a central hub for a great deal of Breaking Point’s activities, filled with its communications and liaison officers. A sea of cubicles and kiosks greeted any new arrival; fax, personal computers, and inkjet printers, were dishing out the latest criminal activity coming from various news services around the world. Many nuggets of information were being sent via secure fax to countless embassies across the planet.

At least two people shared a cubicle, each unit a small team that worked closely to sift through photos of known terrorists, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and fraud artists to create profiles and lists of places they may currently be within Gotham. Gordon navigated his way past the people who were making phone calls, setting up videoconferences, and hooking up with law enforcement representatives in other states and countries for complex skip-tracing, many while leaning back and speaking into their Bluetooths and monitoring various video feeds, eating potato chips, and guzzling coffee and sodas. These people were the ones who made it happen. They were the blood of Gotham’s new efforts to disband this recent string of homegrown terrorists and powerful organized crime families, once and for all.

Breaking Point had become a rather large operation, gathering intel on people who lived in troubled neighborhoods and changing up the police patrols based around the information they obtained, monitoring and setting up more video cameras across the city—there were now more cameras in Gotham than in all of New York City.

Originally, Gordon hadn’t been fully on board with this, Sarah and General Kinnear had both convinced him otherwise. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Wasn’t that the motto he’d lived by when he’d first risked everything to help the bat? And hadn’t Edward Nashton just about killed everyone in Gotham City and surrounding areas by causing a catastrophic malfunction at the Anglo Nuclear Generating Station?

Desperate times, Gordon thought, stepping inside his office and tossing his trench coat onto the back of his chair. Yeah, we’ve had those. But they’ve come and gone. It was true. Project Breaking Point had done its job, and now, it was almost time to hand the reins back to the city’s officials. Gordon still couldn’t believe it was going to happen. After all, when had the U.S. government truly ever relinquished control over a territory so quickly after having dominated it for so long?

Someone knocked at his door. It was his assistant Connie, sweeping in without waiting to be invited. “You still have to sign these DDS request forms, Commissioner,” she said, handing him a thick folder. “And you still haven’t reviewed them.”

“I know,” he said, accepting them. “I’ve been busy.” It was an understatement. He hadn’t just been busy, he’d been swamped. Since Kinnear and the President both wanted to withdraw most of the National Guard by spring, they were in a race to get everything in order so that the city’s officials would understand the new systems that had been set in place.

Gordon was a pivotal part of the reorganization, being the liaison between the new mayor and the Gotham City Police Department. He’d overseen the training of his new undercover officers by instructors from the CIA, and facilitated them at every turn to help the undercovers understand how delicate an operation it was to spy on U.S. citizens, which technically the CIA couldn’t do, and that was why they were using cops to do it. Just as they’d circumvented that law after 9/11 by using New York City cops to infiltrate Muslim centers and mosques, they were doing it now in Gotham City.

No one knew the job better than Gordon, he could set humbleness aside long enough to admit that to himself, which was the reason he’d turned down the offer of running for Gotham City mayor a year ago when Kinnear asked him to do so, despite the fact that he was virtually a shoe-in.

“Wait a minute,” Gordon said presently, scribbling his signature across five different lines on the DDS request forms, handing them right back to Connie before she could walk out. “Here.”

“But you didn’t even read them,” she said.

“I know, Connie. I don’t have time. It’d take me a week to go through everything line by line. But if I delay these things any further, we’re likely to end up with an underequipped and ill-trained police force again, and then we’d be right back in the same boat we were a year ago.”

Connie paused in the doorway. She looked back at him, concerned. “You okay, Commissioner?”

His cell phone buzzed at his side. He checked it. It was a text from Barbara, making sure that he was going to be available for lunch later. Gordon said, “I’m just tired, Connie. Been running around like a chicken with my head cut off, you know.” He offered her a smile, and she took it and walked out.

Gordon spoke into his phone, and the speech-to-text sent the message to Barb: We’re on. Love you.

Gordon sighed. He looked at the stacks of other reports, many of them were in intelligence-speak, a jargon which he’d had to learn to read quickly over the last year. A lot of their intelligence was now coming not from informants—the gangs and the crime families had closed up shop when it came to new recruits now, so afraid were they of the bat and the Breaking Point infiltrators. The information they were getting was mostly coming from vans roving around Gotham City, and arranged in a manner much like to CIA documents. These vans were painted to look like ordinary work vehicles, like plumbing companies and ordinary painters, but the advanced surveillance systems inside allowed them to monitor events happening behind closed doors, some of them even equipped with X-ray and thermal-imaging to view parties inside.

This wasn’t quite what Gordon had envisioned when he’d first agreed to assist Sarah with Breaking Point, but again, desperate times had called for desperate measures, and there was no arguing that they had been desperate. One thing had led to another, and Kinnear’s suggestions to the POTUS were almost never turned down. Progress? Gordon wondered, not for the first time. Or just more escalation? It was hard to say at this point.

Gordon lifted one of the files and started going over it to update himself. It detailed the operational success of a drug den in the Old Bowery that had been busted up based on information given by the Batman. Gordon recalled receiving this information a few months ago, the last time he’d felt the need to flash the bat signal across the sky and rendezvous with his old partner. That section of the Old Bowery was quickly being converted to Safe Havens.

Midway through reviewing the file and working his way through all of the dense intelligence parlance, he got another knock at his door. He looked up. It was Connie again, peeking her head in. “Sorry to bother you again, sir, but Mayor Sharp just called down. He’s upstairs and wants a quick meet.”

“Did he say what it’s about?”

“No, sir.”

Gordon nodded. “Tell him I’ll be right up.” He stood up, leaving the file open on his desk. He stepped out into the hallway, nearly bumping into Maggie Russell, one of three assistants for General Kinnear. “Oops, sorry Maggie. Hey, before I go up and see your boss, did you ever speak to him on lightening up on the curfews of the five districts we discussed?”

“I tried, Commissioner, but he was very busy.”

“No problem. I’ll remind him when I see him. Thanks.”

“Sure. He’s upstairs with the mayor and Agent Essen right now,” Maggie said.

“The general’s here?” he asked. Maggie nodded, and was gone around a corner before Gordon could ask her what for. Up another flight of stairs, he passed by two Guardsmen who were permanently stationed on the top floor of City Hall. They scanned everybody, including him, just to make sure that nobody got through. After all, former mayor Marcellus Walden had been assassinated on live television. The criminals of Gotham had gotten bold.

Down the hall, he ran into Courtney Mills, another one of Kinnear’s assistants, who gave the commissioner a mock salute on his way to the room with all the scanning and fax machines. Gordon knocked on the door, and from the other side he heard Sharp’s voice. “Come in!”

He opened the door, and stepped through. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Mayor?”

The room was full of people, some of them in military fatigues, a couple in dark suits and dark glasses hanging from their front breast pockets. The general was indeed there, the large man standing near a window with his hands in his pockets, looking out at a military helicopter that was swooping near the tall skyscraper of One Gotham Center off in the distance.

Mayor Sharp was sitting at his desk, of course, and Gordon had rarely seen him anyplace else. The mayor’s tie was loosened and he leaned back in his chair. He was running a hand over his bald head, chewing on the ends of his eyeglasses. In front of him, two laptops were switched on, and his own computer monitor was scrolling through streams of data slowly. Beside Sharp’s desk, Sarah was standing with her arms folded, looking concerned.

“You guys having a pow-wow in here?” Gordon asked.

“Morning, Jim,” Sharp said, ignoring the humor. “Come on in. I’d invite you to take a seat, but they’re all taken.”

“I see that.” The guys in dark suits had taken all the available chairs, which were lower to the floor. That was a holdover from Walden’s reign as mayor, when he’d designed his office so that his desk was slightly raised, and the chairs were all slightly lowered, except for his, so that he could have a more powerful position over others, no doubt.

Sharp stood up and shook his hand. “Thanks for coming up.” He was an old acquaintance of Gordon’s, a man totally devoted to law and order, an efficacious warden of Arkham Asylum with more than twenty years working in politics. Still, with only experience handling inmates and crazy people, Gordon had been surprised when General Kinnear had recommended Sharp to the President as a nominee after Gordon himself backed down.

Sharp was used to controlling a madhouse and a prison. Was that why they thought he was a good choice? Was that the way the administration now viewed Gotham? A place that needs containment?

“No problem. So, what’s up?” Gordon didn’t like the look of this large gathering. It smacked of an ambush. He still hadn’t learned to fully trust the new mayor. It wasn’t Sharp’s fault, Gordon had just been ruined to almost all politicians after Walden. Sharp had made quite a name for himself at both Arkham Asylum and Blackgate Penitentiary, and had shown clear aspirations to be a career politician. And General Kinnear, though he seemed like a real man of his word and so far hadn’t lied or misled Gordon about anything, was still quite the silent one, the type who kept secrets without difficulty or compunction.

The mayor and the general had formed a fast alliance, and things had moved smoothly during these last six months. Very smoothly. And, for an old cop like Gordon, things that ran very smoothly made him nervous. He was either waiting for the other shoe to drop, or for the floor to completely fall out from under his feet. His wife had once warned him about thinking like that too much, but these days she was actually coming around to his way of thinking.

“Well, Jim,” Sharp sighed, taking his seat back. “Some interesting things have come up. Some things that involve recent investigations here in Gotham, and connecting them to a few other investigations abroad.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. It concerns the frozen bodies we found yesterday. They…well, why don’t I let Agents Essen and Conroy fill you in?” The mayor looked at Sarah, who cleared her throat.

“Uh, well Jim, there’s no easy way to say this. I…I held something back from you yesterday, but it was only because I wasn’t positive that this was all connected.”

“That what was all connected?” Gordon asked, pushing his glasses up.

Sarah sighed. “What you showed me yesterday, the look of the crime scene, the…the layout of the scene, the bodies and how they were done.” She swallowed. “I thought I’d seen something like it before, but only in photos I’d seen taken from another investigation.” She nodded to a short, dark-skinned, dark-hard gentleman who sat in one of the chairs with the most commanding and erect posture, a career FBI man if there ever was one. “This is one of my oldest colleagues, Agent Raymond Conroy. Ray and I trained together at Quantico, and we’ve kept in touch ever since. He sent me the photos about three years ago, but I didn’t have any helpful feedback. Until now.”

Gordon nodded. “I see,” he said, already feeling like he was the little brother in a family, the last to know whenever something bad was happening. He’d developed a razor-keen sense of when he was being denied something from powerful players. “So, what’s the connection with this case and Agent Conroy’s?”

Sarah looked at the FBI man. “Ray?”

Conroy cleared his throat, and took on an officious air. He stood slowly, with the measured motions of a man who approached everything as a negotiation, and extended his hand to Gordon in the same fashion. “Commissioner, a pleasure.” He stood a full head shorter than Gordon and every other man in the room, but clearly wasn’t the type to let that hold him back. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about you from both Sarah and the general over there. Nice work building the informants, and cultivating the Black Informant.”

Gordon shook his hand, but couldn’t help but look at the agent askance. “Thank you. But, what’s this connection?”

The agent reached out to the mayor’s desk, and lifted a manila envelope from where it lay open, some of the black-and-white photographs inside fanning out. “These were taken at a crime scene three years ago,” he said, handing them over to Gordon. “There’s also some video you need to look at,” he said.

The commissioner took the pictures out, and started flipping through them. Almost immediately, he realized what had unsettled Sarah so much the night before when she’d stepped inside the back room of the sporting goods store. The pictures were of three people, strung up in a meat locker, hanging beside large slabs of what could only be prime beef from freshly-slaughtered cows. They were frozen through and through, the skin splitting, one of their jaws removed, and all the limbs broken off and shattered on the floor. Picture after picture taken of the bodies from different angles showed frozen limbs shattered on the ground, and a third body, this one female, was frozen on the ground and broken in half at the waist.

“Where did this happen?” Gordon asked.

“Atlanta. The three doctors were Patton Emerald, Carrie-Ann Whitworth, and Oliver Pellegrini. All pathologists, all highly respected in their field, and all of them were major policymakers for the Centers for Disease Control.”

“You’re kidding,” Gordon said, looking up at Agent Conroy. “The victims at Alexis Street were all once on the International Council for Science. All these victims here were from the CDC?”

Conroy nodded. “There’s more.” He nodded to the mayor. “Show him the video.”

“Come around my desk here, Commissioner,” said Mayor Sharp. Gordon ambled around to the other side of the desk, and as he did he glanced up at General Kinnear, who he noticed hadn’t taken his gaze off the large bay window (which he’d had bulletproofed for the new mayor), and so far hadn’t even turned to acknowledge that Gordon had entered the room. “They only just showed this to me a few moments ago,” Sharp said. “Prepare yourself, Commissioner.” He reached forward to tap a button on one of the laptops, which obviously was an FBI computer.

Gordon watched as the screen filled with a window that superimposed over the rest of the desktop, and showed a video that was grainy and jumpy, but for the most part he could make it all out. At first, all he saw was a fog of white, kind of like what had lingered just above the floor in parts of the back room at the sporting goods store, like the steam rising off of the water splashed against dry ice. Then, he saw images. The first was a large block of ice, which eventually he realized was another torso strung up by a meat hook, exactly like he’d seen last night, with the arms and legs removed, only the torso and head intact.

Then, whoever had taken this image quickly spun around. Gordon saw a few FBI agents in the video standing over what appeared to be a small human form on the ground. Then, as the cameraman got closer, Gordon was taken aback by the sudden realization that dawned on him. It was a teenage boy, but someone had frozen his torso through and through, no doubt covering it in liquid nitrogen as with the others, and shattered it. The boy’s head and limbs made him appear like a scarecrow that had had its middle torn apart. It looked so unnatural that Gordon realized only a second too late that his mouth was hanging just slightly agape in astonishment. “Is this a cult?” Gordon said. “Maybe some kind of strange ritual? Or, maybe an initiation, like how the Mexican cartels have their new recruits chop informants to pieces?”

By way of answer, Conroy just reached inside his jacket pocket and removed another manila folder, this one much thicker than the other. He handed it over to Gordon wordlessly, who accepted it and started going through first the report, then the pictures, which were a room that looked eerily similar to the icy room at the back of Collier Sporting Goods, and had the same unmistakable M.O. of four hanging, frozen bodies.

While Gordon skimmed the file, Conroy explained what he was looking at. “This case happened seven years ago. That’s a detailed account of a woman named Janice Atlerby, who barely escaped the nightmare. Atlerby was a pathologist and cryogenicist. She used to work for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and at the time of her kidnapping she worked for the World Health Organization, coordinating public health protocols for the United Nations and developing policy in a variety of fields. Dr. Atlerby was abducted from her home in Geneva, went missing for weeks, turned up on a street corner, her body almost totally destroyed by what had been done to her.”

Gordon sifted through the pictures, then looked up at Conroy again. “Were any of these people involved in organized crime?”

Conroy shook his head. “Nope, not a one. In fact, except for one of them not paying his child support for five years and a number of speeding tickets to Atlerby’s name, all of these victims were the pinnacle of good citizenry.”

“You found nothing connecting all these people in the background check?”

“Other than careers spent in science and the public health field? Nothing.” Conroy put his hands in his pockets, and the room remained silent while the commissioner leafed through the report, skimming bits and pieces. “And now we find out that the victims on Alexis Street were all academics, as well, and all of them working for the ICSU at one time or another.”

Gordon flipped through the pictures, and paused when he came to a woman that he assumed was Janice Atlerby, her face sunken and her gaze hollow, like the look of holocaust survivors just released from concentration camps. Another picture showed her body, naked except for a towel over her breasts, and there was severe freeze burn on her back and legs. Her arms were missing completely, and a large bruise was around her neck.

“The man that did this to her made one crucial mistake,” said Agent Conroy. “He froze her arms first. You can read the report. Dr. Atlerby and the other victims were all strung up together. The perp either sprayed them down good with liquid nitrogen over several treatments, while also injecting them with liquid nitrogen to ensure that everything froze down to the marrow of their bones, or else he dunked pieces of them into vats of the chemical. He alternated between the two techniques while she watched.

“They were down there for about six days. But then the perp left one day, presumably to go and get more supplies to keep them alive—he kept them all on blood pressure systems and adrenaline, to keep them awake—that’s when Atlerby snapped her own arms off. See, her arms were frozen, and she was hanging from them by a chain and handcuffs.”

Gordon flipped to another picture, which showed the nubs where arms once were, but his eyes kept going back to hers, to how utterly defeated and finished they appeared. Her survival instincts kicked in, and she gave up her arms to get away. It was remarkable. And horrific. “She crawled out of this place?”

“Yeah. It was a chamber in a sewer where she and the others were taken. A regular dungeon this guy had set up.”

“Who were the other victims?”

“Drs. Jean-François Rideau, Gilles Todeschini, Anatole Carigiet and Bruno Kholund. Policymakers of WHO, just like Atlerby.”

Gordon looked back at the face of the holocaust survivor. “She give a description of the killer?”

Conroy shook his head. “Only vaguely. She never saw his face. She said he wore some sort of suit, kind of bulky, as thick as SWAT team armor, she said, or a firefighter’s outfit with a slightly smaller helmet. She said the perp was pretty tall, maybe six-five, six-six. But she never saw Mr. Freeze’s face. Not once.”

Commissioner Gordon glanced up from the report. “Mr. Freeze?”

Conroy nodded, and smiled humorlessly. “One of the investigators down in Atlanta dubbed him that, made a joke because apparently in Georgia there’s some freezer company called Mr. Freeze’s Refrigerators and Iceboxes. They thought it was funny, and it just stuck at the bureau. You know how these things go.”

Gordon nodded. “So, why am I only hearing about this now? Seems like you guys should’ve called me even if it was the middle of the night. You know I’m fine with that. We should’ve been working this from the moment we knew, I should’ve had my guys at the precinct aware of the similarities in these crime scenes so that we’d have a better context for—”

“Honestly, Commissioner, we weren’t certain that we were even going to tell you until a few moments ago,” said Mayor Sharp.

He looked at each of their faces, dubious. “Why’s that?”

“For the moment,” said Sharp, “this information is on a need-to-know basis.”

“I’m the police commissioner. Why wouldn’t I need to know?”

To that, no one in the room had an answer. Gordon glanced over at General Kinnear, and realized that since he was talking the least, he probably had the most to say on this subject, only he wouldn’t.

Gordon nodded, and looked up at Sarah, then at Mayor Sharp, then at the back of Kinnear’s head, then back at Conroy. “So, we’ve got a killer here that you’ve been tracking for the better part of a decade, from Geneva to Atlanta to Gotham City, but all we have is an M.O. and no physical evidence pointing to his identity.”

Agent Conroy nodded, smirked a boyish smirk, and shrugged. “We have been working on it, but with absolutely no other evidence our time’s been better spent on other cases. We tried not to let this one go…unsolved.” Gordon realized the agent had almost said cold, and had had the decency to avoid any pun. Conroy point to the other dark-suited men in the room. “This is my own team. We’ve been in contact with Interpol a lot on this case, since the criminal seems to be international, what with Atlerby in Geneva, but so far they’ve not turned up anything, either.”

For a moment, the room went silent. Gordon started to ask another question, but stopped when another voice chimed in. To his great surprise, it was General Kinnear, finally turning away from the window, but fixing his gaze on the floor, not on Gordon. “Commissioner, we called this group together in the mayor’s office so that we could have a closed conversation. We don’t want this getting out.”

Commissioner Gordon nodded. “Okay. But, can I ask why?”

Kinnear nodded, but still did not look up at him. “These killings are incredibly brutal, and they are unusual in that they do not target the usual scum. They target upstanding citizens, educated men and women, all of them relatively wealthy, some of them extremely wealthy, and…” He left it to Gordon’s imagination.

You don’t want Gotham’s upper class worried that they aren’t safe, he thought. Better to keep them thinking that it’s only criminals and the lower class that get targeted. “You can try to keep this information out of public knowledge,” Gordon said, “but the Gotham Informer will know all about what happened on Alexis Street, and you can bet they’ll sensationalize it.”

“That’s all fine,” General Laurence Kinnear said, finally looking up him with those eyes that had seen wars and death beyond measure. This, according to what rumors Gordon had heard. “Just as long as the official story that comes out of City Hall is that it was a mob hit.”

Agent Conroy nodded. “Which, of course, it may very well be.”

“An international hitman?” the commissioner asked. “Targeting scientists and doctors?”

“Maybe.” But Conroy didn’t sound convinced by his own maybe.

They know something, Gordon thought. And for the first time in a year, they’re not sharing it. At least, not with me. “All right,” Gordon assented. “I don’t like it, but I understand the need to control panic. But let’s be honest. These are revenge killings, aren’t they?” Nobody answered him. “C’mon, guys, I was a cop and an investigator for years, I know how to profile. Killings like this show meticulous planning, and the patience a person would have to have to do this, and keep doing it over the years, shows incredible passion to carry out these acts.”

“We suspect revenge is the motive,” Agent Conroy conceded. “But revenge for what is anybody’s guess at this juncture.”

“You will go along with this story when asked, won’t you, Commissioner?” Mayor Sharp asked, fixing him with a level stare. “You’ll tell any and all reporters that this is a Mafia hit of some kind against its enemies, perhaps one side sending a message to the other side? Just leave it at that, and the press will fill in any blanks themselves.”

Seems like you’ve already made up my mind for me. What choice do I have? he thought, but didn’t say. “Sure,” he said. “But I’d like to make a request to allow our Black Informant to know about this, perhaps see everything that you’ve shown me.”

Sharp cocked his head to one side. “Why?”

“Are you serious? The man’s given us more solid information in the last year than all our other street-level informants combined. I think we’d be wasting a precious resource if we kept him in the dark. He’s a detective, too, not just an informant. Allow me to share this information with him, and he’s likely to turn something up.”

The mayor glanced at the general. The big man thought on it for a moment, then shrugged in a way that said it couldn’t hurt. Mayor Sharp said, “All right, I guess you’ve got the clearance. But keep us informed of anything he finds.”

Don’t I always? “Of course, Mr. Mayor.” Gordon looked across at Sarah. It was probably only his imagination, but she was standing so close to the general and the mayor that it truly looked like it was somehow them versus him. Part of Gordon had always felt left out of the loop, at least a little bit, despite the fact that Mayor Sharp seemed to listen to his every complaint and request, from extra training for his officers at the GCPD and the need for more overtime pay, to the personal reservations he’d had about a few of the search warrants throughout the year.

But Gordon had made his decision. He had turned down the offer of mayoral candidacy, and, in the end, felt it was the right call to make. “Is that all?” he asked the assembly.

“Yeah, that’s it,” said Sharp. “You can go.”

Gordon turned to leave. Before he got to the door, though, Agent Conroy said, “I’d actually like to meet the Black Informant. In person, if possible.”

The commissioner opened the door, looked back, smiled, and said, “Sorry, but he’s only on a need-to-meet basis. His rules, not mine.” Before he left, Gordon had the briefest bit of satisfaction. Halfway down the steps, he realized what it was that had made him so happy. For all their power, I’ve still got the bat on my side, he’ll do anything for me, and they know it.

That thought put a little spring in his step while he hustled downstairs. He checked his phone for the time. If he hurried, he could still get some solid work done before meeting Barbara for lunch.