CHAPTER 10

Evening hours found Bruce Wayne looking into the blue eyes of a beautiful young woman. Her name was Theresa Marianne Fuller, she was twenty-seven years old, stood about 5’7” tall, with brown hair below her shoulders and a pale complexion. She had a birthmark on the left side of her neck about the size of a penny and shaped like an S. And, according to the story from Jim Gordon, Fuller was recently engaged to a thirty-year-old factory worker named Daniel Vaughn, and was supposed to marry him earlier that day.

The young, beautiful bride-to-be had gone out for Chinese food, something her family and friends said was her very favorite thing to eat, and she hadn’t come back. She had taken the next two weeks off from her work to go on the perfect honeymoon to Aruba, a 33-kilometer-long island in the southern Caribbean Sea. Bruce had been there himself once before, but only for two days—ever since he began his work as the Batman, he had never been able to tear himself away from his work in the cave for too long. But that was because he had no other life besides what he had created for himself, and no real plans for any other life besides this one.

Here, in this picture, was a woman who had had the potential to enjoy a genuine family life, to have children and grandchildren and to live the American dream. Here she was, in a picture Gordon had included in the packet he’d left for the Batman behind Glen’s Bakery.

In the Batcave, there was a CIAS, or communications intercept array system, that might rival portions of ECHELON—that was the famous surveillance and eavesdropping network that the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K. used—and he even had a “dictionary” search setting that allowed him to pick up on key words and phrases uttered in communications sent via radio, satellite, microwave, cellular or fiber-optic transmissions, just like ECHELON. ECHELON was headquartered in Menwith Hill, England, and allowed the NSA to tap into the heart of the British Telecomm network. Using similar technologies created to help the U.S. and the U.K. in their search for terrorists, Bruce had localized his own personal ECHELON to Gotham’s police radio transmissions, and that was enough to keep the CIAS’s computers busy around the clock, sorting through key words he had set in the systems dictionary to search for, among them “Falcone”, “Joker”, “Stewart-Paulson”, “Nate”, “Dreaded Sun”, “Juarez”, and, most recently, “riddles”. All the transmissions that contained those key words or phrases were recorded and prioritized according to the level of importance he had given them.

It was thanks to the CIAS that Bruce had heard about the riddles left at the future Mrs. Vaughn’s home while on his way back from the Bowery, and had started making his way to Glen’s Bakery. Gordon already had a lot on his plate, but Bruce had counted on him to come through, and the commissioner had, and in spades. And, once Bruce read the message that described the e-mails that had been sent to Gordon’s wife’s account from a cloaked Internet service provider, he understood that the commissioner now had a personal stake in all of this.

While Gordon was doubtless out there putting out his own fires, Bruce sat in his cave, sipping at a cup of coffee and finishing up the last of Gordon’s summary. Some of the misspellings indicated that parts of Gordon’s message had been hurriedly prepared, probably using his speech recognition/spoken text app on his cell phone, which he knew the commissioner loved now because it saved him so much time typing out a text.

But the evidence itself, the riddles, they weren’t misspelled at all. The e-mails that had gone to Barbara Gordon were printed there exactly as they had appeared in her mailbox. Gordon had provided pictures of the crime scene, as well. Nothing in the apartment appeared disturbed, and a small note written on one of the pictures confirmed that. No signs of forced entry or struggle, it read in Gordon’s handwriting. On the wall, above the living room couch, written in moderate, exact strokes in what appeared to be blood (whose?), were letters that dripped down the wall, skewing the words a bit. But the message was clear:

I am a number higher than 1

My first is the nineteenth

My last is the fourteenth

But I am only one

I can be divided into five

And I divide a week

But I am not a divisor of ten

And I'm not more than a dozen

My second and fourth is identical

Twice of me is a minor

Thrice of me is legal

What number am I?

Bruce heard footsteps coming up the dais behind him. “More coffee, Master Bruce?”

“Just set it on the table,” he said. Bruce flipped through the rest of the file one more time. He’d read quickly but carefully, and now he went back over every line again speed reading, scanning for all the major details he’d noted in his mind on the first read-through. He’d read each of the riddles once apiece, not expecting the answers to be obvious so not wasting any more time than was necessary on them. He absorbed the specifics of the victim and the circumstances of her home. He read, looking for any other physical clues that might lead the way, such as eyewitness accounts or anonymous tips that could help lead the way. So far, there was none of that.

“It surprises me that he knew the commissioner’s wife’s e-mail address,” Alfred said.

“Well, that’s the kind of thing that falls under standard OSINT,” he said, referring to open-source intelligence. “Any person with thirty minutes on their hands could probably figure that out. Gordon’s wife is a busy woman. I know that she volunteers at numerous charities, especially the Martha Wayne Foundation—she really loves art—so her e-mail could be written on anything from a card handed out at one of those functions to a simple Facebook page. Not hard at all.”

Alfred looked down at the picture of Theresa Fuller, a picture taken just a year ago at her college graduation. Bruce looked up from the file in his hand, and watched him. Alfred’s blue eyes softened a bit, and he winced. “What creature would take a woman on the night before her wedding? Who would go out of their way to select her? Her, of all people. So vibrant…why not pick an old man like me, near the end of his life, if you had to pick someone?”

“The police found no evidence of forced entry into the home,” Bruce said, sighing and looking up at the pictures of Fuller’s apartment on the center screen of his command post. He zoomed in on various features, and compiled the more than fifty photographs to create an actual three-dimensional rendering of the apartment using software from Wayne Enterprises, meant to allow a person to take a multitude of photos taken on a vacation and arrange them in a way so that the viewer could simulate stepping into the environment. It was almost as though Bruce was there, walking around the room, glancing at the mirror on the far wall, and looking out the window in her apartment that overlooked Laurel Avenue. This is where she lived her life, he thought. This is where she walked around and tossed that pile of laundry in that rocking chair right there, probably expecting to come back later to finish sorting it. This is probably where she pulled her wedding dress on and off, looking at herself in that mirror over there multiple times, making sure everything was just perfect. And everything had been perfect.

Until he entered her life, Bruce thought.

He spun the image, so that he was facing the front door, which the police and investigators hadn’t thought to close, and so he got a look outside her apartment and into the hallway. Bruce looked carefully for any clue the investigators might have missed, but nothing jumped out at him, and without being there he couldn’t root around, lift cushions, or interact with the environment in any way as he had at crime scenes just like this one a year ago. What little love affair he’d had with the public and certain police officers was now almost completely evaporated, so gone were the days when he could show up at a crime scene and trust in his friendship with James Gordon to allow him the liberty to root around.

“What about these riddles, sir?”

Bruce looked down at them in his lap, then looked back up at the screens so that he could rotate the images—many images cropped up on the other sixteen screens all around him, all of them helping to immerse him in the environment. He zoomed in on the first riddle, the one that had been carefully painted in blood on the wall.

“Just getting to those,” Bruce said. He quickly checked the Internet for answers to the first riddle, but this particular riddle was nowhere to be found. “Looks like we’re doing this the hard way.” Maybe five minutes passed while he clucked his tongue, thinking. Then, eureka. “Oh, I get it. Seven.”

“Sir?”

“Seven is higher than one, its first letter is S, the nineteenth letter of the alphabet, and its last is N, the fourteenth letter, but it’s only a single-digit number. It can be divided into five—five letters, S-E-V-E-N. It divides a week. Its second and fourth letters are identical—the letter E.”

“Ah, and twice of seven is fourteen, which is a minor. Thrice of seven is twenty-one, the legal age for drinking.”

“Right.” The rest were all e-mails sent to Barbara Gordon, and so he went in order.

I am an odd number, but take a way one letter and I become even. What number am I?

“Seven again. Take away the S at the beginning and it spells ‘even’.” He was getting quicker at this. Thinking in this way presented his mind with a challenge, and Bruce had always the sort who got into trouble whenever he wasn’t challenged, even as a boy. That was probably a good thing, though. As one famous U.S. Ranger had said to Bruce, speaking of his best soldiers, “These kind of guys basically failed at vacation and relaxation.” Bruce could relate to that. He had to admit that these riddles, while disgusting in the nature of their delivery, were invigorating to follow nevertheless.

A farmer combines two compost heaps with three other compost heaps. How many does he have now?

“One,” Bruce answered.

“Clever, sir,” Alfred said. “My natural inclination was to add them together to make five.”

What number gets larger when it’s turned upside down?

“Six.”

When do 2 and 2 make more than 4?

Bruce thought about that one for a second. “When they make twenty-two,” he said. “I remember hearing this one as a kid. He’s practically giving us the answers on some of these, since they can be easily answered with a search on the Web. Same with these two,” he said, pointing to the ones before it. Then, Bruce flipped the sheet of paper to reveal the printouts of the other e-mails.

If your sock drawer has 6 black socks, 4 brown socks, 8 white socks, and 2 tan socks, how many socks would you have to pull out in the dark to be sure you had a matching pair?

Alfred leaned forward, reading that one to himself. “That’s a more difficult one,” said the old man.

“But no less easy to find on the Internet,” he said, pointing to the answer he’d found on a riddling website. “And there’s the answer. Five.” He jotted the answers down. So far, he had 7,7,1,6,2,2, and 5. “All right, next?”

Mom and Dad have four daughters, and each daughter has one brother. How many people are in the family?

Bruce shook his head. “Seven again. Still too juvenile, and still too easy to discover the answer. The one inside Theresa Fuller’s apartment was more difficult. I’m starting to get a little worried here.”

“Why, sir?”

“Because I think we’re answering these wrong. They’re too simple.” He sighed, shaking his head. “It’s easy to get lost in these kinds of puzzles, assuming that just because the answer seems obvious you’re doing okay, and then you get too confident and make a mistake. And that’s not good because we’ve got a missing woman, which mean we could be running out of time here and we can’t afford to make mistakes.” He scribbled the answer down anyway. “Let’s keep going for now. Let’s see…”

What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?

“This one’s a bit obscure. It’s not like the others. Let me look it up on the—”

“It’s forty-two, sir.”

Bruce looked up at him, fingers hovering over the keyboard. “You sure? How do you know that?”

“Haven’t you ever read a Douglas Adams satire?” his butler asked. Bruce looked at him blankly. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency? The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul?” Bruce just stared at him. “A suggestion, sir, if I may. You really should read more than just books about blood spatter patterns and vehicle mechanics.” Alfred shrugged. “Take that advice how you like.”

Bruce smirked. “Okay,” he sighed, turning back to the computer. “Assuming you know what you’re talking about, let’s see…that gives us…seven-seven-one-six-two-two-five-seven-four-two.”

He typed it all out, and looked up at the numbers: 7716225742.

He rolled his chair around to the computer, and brought up the Internet, punching in the numbers to run a search. “Okay, what does that give us? Let’s see…if we put the numbers directly in the order that the e-mails came in, and if we assume it’s something like an address, then…” He entered it into the computer. “The last five digits give us a zip code to Valencia, California.”

“Perhaps, sir, all the numbers before two-five-seven-four-two could be street numbers and apartment numbers? Possibly something significant to Valencia?”

“I’m thinking coordinates. But global coordinates could place any two of the numbers together, so let’s keep them all as they were given for now, keeping twenty-two and forty-two as solid numbers and all the others as single digits…nope, doesn’t work out to anything. All right, let’s just try some combinations of longitude and latitude in here, see if anything jumps out, anything near Gotham.” Over the next thirty minutes, Bruce tried putting the coordinates in by various means—having the first numbers as 77°16’22” N, and then 5°7’42” W, and then switching the latitude from North to South and the longitude from West to East—but nothing came anywhere close to Gotham. Which doesn’t mean they’ve not taken her someplace else, he thought. Assuming we’re even on the right track at all and he is trying to lure us someplace, that is.

After each failed combination, Alfred scratched off a possibility. At one point, Alfred looked up and said, “Do you have your calculator nearby, sir?”

“Yeah, it’s right here, why?”

“Would you hand it to me? Just had a thought.” Bruce did, and watched as Alfred punched in the numbers 7716225742, and then turned the calculator upside down. He sighed. “That doesn’t spell anything to me. You, sir?”

“Try reflecting it in a mirror.” But for all the Batcave’s accoutrements, it had no mirror. But it did have a printer and a scanner. Bruce put the calculator’s face onto the scanner, scanned it, and put the image up on the main computer monitor in front of him before reversing it in an advanced Photoshop-like program due out from WayneTech next year. Nothing. “Not a bad thought, though, old man,” he said to his old friend as he leaned in to retry the zip code for Valencia, and then searched for coordinates using the remaining numbers after the zip code’s numbers were taken out of the equation. Still not much of anything—up popped a pub of no great significance in the party area of Valencia, but it was close to a movie star who lived out there. It seemed that a few movie stars and wealthy people liked Valencia. Was that of great import?

Bruce tried not to think too desperately, but it was hard. A woman’s life was at stake and there was a good chance he had put her there just by existing, just by continuing to go out as the Batman. After all, this “Riddler” had directly challenged him. These riddles might not have concerned him nearly as much if it hadn’t been for that first taunt—they would have just been one more item in a series of things that required his attention. But there was a connection here to other investigations he was working through. It appeared that the Calabrias and the Juarez cartel knew the Riddler, had done some work for him by helping him kidnap and contain the Tralley family. So, what other secrets did these criminals share?

Perhaps he’s some pro from Italy, like this Calabria guy is, Bruce considered. A pro brought in to take me out? Another hired hitter? It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.

Another thought that Bruce didn’t like to entertain, but was unavoidably true, was that this episode here, with a woman he had never met or even heard of before tonight, had awakened something inside of him he had thought completely forgotten. It was an almost idle fear, but one that could grow out of control if he let it. That fear could was crystallized in a single thought: If Theresa Fuller dies, it’ll be the same as when my parents died. She was put into harm’s way on her wedding day because of something I did.

After spending so much effort on keeping his closest friends and allies safe from retribution from both the law and the underworld for the actions he’d taken, Bruce Wayne could not prevent every maniac in the street from just killing innocent strangers to get to him—the Joker had taught him that lesson.

He hadn’t felt guilt in a long time, and it came back now like an old enemy.

Bruce cleared his mind of those distracting thoughts, and mulled the puzzle over some more. “What about letters of the alphabet?” he said, more to himself than to Alfred, and started typing away. But there was a problem, one of the answers was 42, and the Latin alphabet only went up to 26 letters. Well, we’ll split the four and the two up, then. That meant 7 = G, 1 = A, 6 = F, and so on. That ultimately gave him the letters GGAFVEGDB. He did another anagram search, and was let down again when the letters only formed a word or two, with the rest left as gibberish. What if twenty-two is split up, as well? That would give him GGAFBBEGBD. He entered it into the anagram search. Nothing, just more gibberish.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

He leaned back, sighing with shoulders slumped. “Maybe you should rest on this first, sir.”

“Hard to rest while there’s a woman out there potentially dying because of me, Alfred,” he said, pulling up more photos of the crime scene itself.

“Of course. I understand, sir. But perhaps he’s only fooling with you again, Master Bruce,” Alfred said, pushing himself up out of his chair. “Maybe these numbers only lead to another taunt of some kind, and they’re not directly related to this Riddler or the young lady at all. It might just be another calling card, something to mark himself and his territory, that’s all.”

“I don’t think so, Alfred,” he said, clicking on a zoomed-in image of a monument in the middle of Valencia. “He went through a lot of trouble with Patrick Tralley and his family to time it so that all of it happened within the span of a day. That’s such a tight window. The murders, the bombing, and finally the job with the bank; they all show that he clearly wanted to reveal a pattern, so that for a person who looked carefully, there could be no mistaking it was one and the same person doing all of it.” He thought about it for a second. “He wants attention. He sent a message. He’s smart, and he wants people to know it.”

Alfred yawned and stretched, a few of his joints popping. “Well, I’m afraid I’m not much use to you right now, as sleepy as I am, but I feel the same as you, I suppose. I can’t make myself go to sleep right now when a woman is out there in the hands of a maniac.”

Bruce looked up at him. “You can help by getting us some more coffee, old man.”

“That I can do, sir.” Alfred patted him on the back and stepped down off of the dais.

Bruce looked back up at the map of Valencia. Somewhere behind him, a few bats fluttered in the dark, possibly one chasing after the other over some scrap they had gotten from their nightly foray. Bruce scrolled over the satellite images of Valencia provided by Google Earth, and ran the numbers through his head again and again, waiting for them to jump out at him on the screen.

Then, all at once, Alfred’s words came back to him. Calling card. The thought came unbidden from someplace, and he had no idea why he got hung up on it in that instant. “No,” he said. “No…can’t be that easy.” Then, he spun in his chair. “Alfred!”

He turned around, halfway down the steps. “Yes, sir?”

“Do you have your phone on you?”

“Of course, sir.” He walked back up onto the dais, handing the new cell phone Bruce had gotten him and had forced him to learn how to use. Bruce took it and started dialing. “What, you think that—?”

“We may have been overthinking this, Alfred. He wants to communicate with me, after all. He wants to play.” Alfred watched him dial in bewilderment. Then, all at once, the butler shot his hand out and snatched the phone out of Bruce’s hand, switching it off at once. “What are you doing? Alfred—”

“If it is him on the other end, sir, mightn’t it be better to use a phone not listed to Bruce Wayne or anyone who knows him?”

He hadn’t been thinking straight, so eager was he to get moving on this. Once more, the old man had proved himself as useful and indispensible as any piece of equipment in the whole damn cave. Bruce nodded. “You’re right, but there’s nowhere else here to call from without possibly giving myself away.”

These days, caller ID and phone-number-tracing services were almost as ubiquitous as phones themselves, and Bruce had done everything he could to ensure that the cave in its entirety was never fully revealed, despite the fact that a few builders who’d worked on Wayne Manor knew that there was some kind of chamber beneath the property (although they could have no idea of the immensity), and part of keeping the cave a secret was cutting it off from the rest of the world as much as possible, but he had to consider escalation. Gotham’s criminals had started upgrading, too, and even contacting Gordon by phone had gotten too dangerous because of how intense the search for the Batman had become.

Alfred’s right, the Riddler might have advanced detection equipment, he realized. After all, he had proven very sophisticated so far. If Bruce had made the call from Alfred’s phone, it wouldn’t have been too hard for the Riddler to figure out whose number it was. “Are the keys in the Porsche?” he asked.

“Of course, sir.” Bruce grabbed his jacket and started to run from the dais. “Master Bruce?” He paused for a moment to look at his old friend. “Be careful, young man.”

* * *

THE PORSCHE WAS moving well over the speed limit, but almost no one moved around here at this time of night. Bruce had gone about three miles down the road from Wayne Manor, to a gas station not too far away on Tennessee Street. He left the car running and jogged through the front door, the bell over the door clacking hard against the glass as he flung it open.

“Sir, uh, I’ve had an emergency. Do you mind if I use your phone?” he asked the station attendant. The pimply-faced teenager behind the counter stuttered, maybe from being called “sir” for the first time in his life, and pointed to a back wall. “Thank you,” Bruce said, and moved to the rear of the store. He lifted the phone, checked the dial tone before dialing, and then dialed 771-622-5742. He listened to the rings. In his hand, Bruce had a pen and notepad, ready to scribble anything down should he actually reach his target at the other end, which he was starting to think was a long shot.

On the other end of the line, it rang six times before a machine picked up, saying, “Hello, this is Matthew, I can’t come to the phone right now. If you would, please leave your name and number at the tone, and I’ll be glad to get back with you as soon as possible. Thank you.”

BEEP!

Bruce sighed, and hung up. Well, it was at least worth a try. He pulled out his cell phone and started to call Alfred, to give him the update and let him know he was okay, and got three steps away from the wall before the phone on the wall started ringing behind him. He stopped, turned, looked at. The phone rang once more, and he walked over to it, lifting it off the receiver. He put the phone to his ear, but didn’t say anything at first. On the other end of the line, there was only static.

Finally, Bruce said, “Hello?”

“Who is this?” said a voice. It was male, flat and businesslike, without a trace of humor.

“Who is this?” Bruce countered.

“You called me.”

Bruce thought for a moment about how best to proceed. “I’m looking for someone,” he ventured.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” he said. “A friend of mine. She gave me this number to call.”

“Odd. What’s her name?” The voice had an accent of some kind, but it was so slight that Bruce couldn’t immediately place it.

Bruce gave it some thought, and figured, Why not? “Theresa Fuller,” he said.

There was a long, long silence. Then, “You’re a friend of hers, you said?”

“Yes. She’s gone missing. I’d like to know where she is. Do you know?”

Another long silence. “I might,” said the voice. “Depends on who I’m talking to.”

Bruce now knew that someone was playing with him. But if he was being led on, then why? What possible end could it serve to be so coy, that is, unless the person on the other end simply enjoyed playing these kinds of games?

So Bruce had a choice to make. Should he play coy as well, or should he go ahead and admit to who he was and why he had called? He licked his lips, and put all of his cards on the table. “I think you know who you’re talking to, just like I know who I’m talking to.”

“Really? Why don’t you tell me?”

“You’re the Riddler.”

There was a sudden snort of laughter, and then breathless chuckling. “The Riddler?” the man said. “Is that what they’re going to insist on calling me? Must I endure the humiliation of having a moniker flung at me like that? Isn’t that just the very quintessence of police work these days? Lots of talk, lots of feeding little items to the press, hoping that these little games somehow ameliorate the situation. Poor darlings, they just can’t help themselves.” The man on the other end of the line sighed. “Problem is, they’re the most ineffectual bunch of fools on the planet right now. I have to admit, though, I’m a bit surprised you haven’t called me before now. I thought the riddles were actually a lot easier this time. But you called before the Gotham City Police Department did, so give yourself a big pat on the back for that, Caped Crusader.” Then, a little humor crept into his voice. “I’d heard that you were clever. But I’m cleverer. I think you’re going to find that out.”

A bell rang at the front of the convenience store. Bruce held the phone close to his ear and turned around to look at the person entering, a young couple paying for gas. “Is that right?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s right. And, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective said so many times before, the game is afoot now, and it’s nice to see that you’re playing. The police don’t seem all too motivated; they’re probably still trying to do things the old-fashioned way, gathering forensic evidence and endless canvassing of neighbors, searching for that one eyewitness that will give them the answer. But some things can’t be solved with forensics, Caped Crusader. Sometimes, there’s no evidence but what the perpetrator chooses to give you. If the perpetrator is intelligent, that is.”

Bruce wasn’t interested in listening to this man pet his own ego. “You sound very confident.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re going to slip up sooner or later, it’s just a matter of time. Everybody does.”

“Including you?”

Bruce didn’t reply to that. He started to inquire about Theresa Fuller, but the Riddler interrupted him.

“I don’t think you’re taking everything I’ve done so far into consideration. Alas, I’m afraid you’re too used to the usual obtuse Neanderthals that you smash the heads of in the alleyways each night,” he said. “Do you have any idea how difficult it was to arrange it so that I had a specific phone number linked to a cloned cell phone, and then dispense the riddles so that they appeared in a specific sequence so that the answer was comprehensible? And what about Patrick Tralley and his family? Don’t tell me you haven’t garnered at least a modicum of respect for my work after all the trouble I had to go through to make sure that come out the way it did.” He sighed theatrically. “I work hard at not getting caught, just as I’m sure you must do.”

“Where is she?” Bruce asked, tired of listening to a maniac pontificate.

“You’ll be looking for a man to riddle, too, I suppose?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell me where she is?” he repeated, his voice developing more edge.

“Who, Mrs. Vaughn? Or, I guess I should say Ms. Fuller, since she technically didn’t make her wedding. Tsk. That’s very sad.”

“Where?” he insisted. He could feel his anger welling up, as such he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. He was used to having his enemies within his sights, not taunting him from unknown locations.

But the Riddler wasn’t finished pontificating, it seemed. “I had a friend once. Well, I wouldn’t call him a friend actually, he was a friend of a friend and was more like a fifteen-year-old faus for us to keep around and mock and generally feel better about ourselves for doing it. You know how young people will do. But I was eighteen back then, so of course those days are gone. Anyways, we called him ‘Pot Ass,’ because he had sensitive bowels—celiac disease, you see—and once he was on the pot he never got his fat ass off. He was also somewhat mentally handicapped, poor soul. We’d talk to him like a cave man. Whenever we had spare food from our lunches to give him, we’d look at him and say, ‘Pot Ass! Yum! Yum-yum-yum! Pot Ass want? Pot Ass want yum-yum?’ And you know what? He actually laughed with us. He thought we were his friends, all the way up until he was nineteen or so. This fellow was that stupid.”

“I’m not interested in your childhood memories,” he said. “Or how you got your kicks bullying mentally handicapped kids. Where’s Theresa Fuller?”

“Just listen, because it all comes to bear, trust me.” Bruce thought, He’s insane. He’s absolutely insane. “You see, years later I went to work for a company that worked on ERBMs, or Extended Range Ballistic Missiles. We tested sixty-eight of these babies every day on land that the government didn’t use for anything else because it was just pocked with sulfur pits. We were out there all alone, all by ourselves, not a soul to bother us while we made large things go boom. I did most of my work on minor details like tantalum capacitors, and—Are you still listening?”

“Yes,” Bruce said, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice.

“Well, good. Because the point is this. I wound up working with some of the brightest, most innovative minds in the world, and then one day, when I was coming back from lunch, I ran into Pot Ass again. You know what the idiot was doing?” The Riddler didn’t wait for an answer. “He was working with specialized titanium plates for vehicles that the aeronautics division was working on, and he was in charge of monitoring gauges with complicated oxygen and nitrogen mixtures, having learned it all at some special trade school for more idiots like him.”

“You said there was a point to all of this?”

“Yes, and here it is. I am a genius. I just am. That’s not gloating, that’s a statement as true as any mathematical certainty. I think you recognize that by now?”

“Sure.”

“That lacked conviction, but it doesn’t matter. As I was saying, I am a man who values erudition—even that word erudition, I considered using it before I said it, I prefer to use it instead of ‘education’ because it serves the purpose of revealing my extensive vocabulary, of lending a certain verisimilitude that will hopefully make the point that I know what I’m saying and doing. I choose these words deliberately. I enjoy vocabulary. I find knowledge enervating. I enjoy sussing out elegant ways to generate permutations. I am not afraid of using words like sonorous, etiolated, indefatigable, penurious, scurrilous, and obstreperous in spoken conversation rather relegating it to just the written word. I do it because knowledge is power, and what is power if not exercised? I’ve obviously learned how to hack security systems, how to dream up and work out the mechanics of complicated explosive devices. I’m certain that, to you, all I’m saying here simply denotes classical narcissistic personality disorder. That doesn’t matter to me. I’m fully prepared to be called such.”

“You were saying about your old friend Pot Ass?” Bruce said, trying to get him back on topic here. He scribbled down all the most pertinent notes to summarize all that he was hearing, and he thought, He’s a lunatic. A genuine, certifiable lunatic. He’s meandering, going off in all directions.

The Riddler chuckled. “Now you’re calling him that. But that’s the way it should be; you are smart and others are stupid, they are lesser than you. You have the right to look down on them. Someone has to. I’ll have you trained before too long,” he laughed. It was a squeaky, mousy sort of titter. “In any case, you’re right, I got off track again. The point I was making was that Pot Ass is a simpleton, whereas I am not, and yet he and I both ended up working at the same place, at the same time. I don’t know how it happened, I don’t know what journey took him around the world so that he wound up there, performing his tasks like a trained monkey, but he was doing so without understanding the underlying principle of all that he was a part of.

“And I think this is a perfect analogy of where we’ve come to, Caped Crusader,” he said, mentioning the nickname with a growing irony, and just a hint of derision. “Stupid people walking around on autopilot, just a bunch of Pot Asses, never truly searching for the underlying meaning of anything. They just go through the motions. They vote for politicians they really have no clue about, just someone somewhere—probably a parent—told them that their family had always voted one way or another, Democrat or Republican, so they follow suit. You see? A world of Pot Asses.” He added, “And then there’s us.”

“Yes. There’s you and there’s me. Now let’s end this, face-to-face. We can still talk this out. It doesn’t have to be—”

“You think I want a slug match with you?” the Riddler cackled on the other end. “You think I want to come within ten miles of your tazers and your ropes and your grappling hooks and so forth?” More laughter. “You’ve misjudged me, my friend. I expected better from you, which means I misjudged you, as well. But we’re both still learning how this game works, aren’t we?”

“Tell me where she is.”

“But I already did. You just weren’t paying attention. You missed the point of everything I’ve said, and now her blood is on your hands.”

“Where is she?” he hissed into the phone. At the front of the convenience store, the pimply-faced teenager looked up from a comic book he was reading, and looked back at Bruce with his mouth agape, confused.

“I’ve given you everything you need, and the means to rescue them all,” the Riddler said. “I originally thought about handing out all the hints periodically, but that would’ve made it too obvious.”

“You’ve given me nothing but drivel and half-assed riddles?”

“Really? Then you’ve missed the point of all that I’ve said.” He snorted. “I’ve been easy on you to get you to here, but hang tight, Dark Knight, ’cause the riddles get better from here.” He chuckled at his own wit and rhyme, and then hung up. Bruce stared at the dead phone for a beat, then ran from the convenience store, leaving the phone hanging.

* * *

BRUCE GOT INTO his car and looked at his notepad. He’d taken almost all of it in shorthand, which made it easier to review. He looked at his scribbling, and recalled the conversation as it had happened. He went through every word he could remember, and wherever he got lost he referred back to his notes.

Alphabet’s too obvious, he thought. And he said that the riddles were going to get better, and I assume that means more difficult. Unless he was lying to me. Which, of course, was a very real possibility, but if the Riddler was lying then there was nothing Bruce could do about it, so all he could do was try and suss it out and hope the fiend was at least honest in his clues. He tried to think of other possible number-letter assignment systems besides alphabets.

Bruce thought back on everything the kidnapper had said over the phone. He closed his eyes, took deep, steadying breaths, and relaxed his mind. He listened to the Riddler’s voice in his head, heard the tones, heard his easy confidence, listened to the emphasis on his syllables, heard the tittering laughter, tried to hear any moment where he had sounded angry, distressed, or cocky. He went through the entire conversation, replayed the part about the mentally challenged boy, and then his time spent testing missiles near sulfur pits, and then he thought about how confident the Riddler was when he hung up the phone; so sure of himself. His last words were, “I’ve given you everything you need, and the means to rescue them all.” That struck Bruce as strange. Who were “them all”?

“I originally thought about handing out all the hints periodically, but that would’ve made it too obvious.”

Bruce thought, But handing out what hints? And why would handing them out over time make it easier to solve them?

Something else struck him. Earlier in the conversation, the Riddler had emphasized, “I know what I’m saying and doing.” Bruce considered that. If he knows what he’s saying…then everything he says is deliberate, prepared, not improvised. Is that what he’s saying?

Once more, he went back through the conversation he had just had with the lunatic. “I had a friend once. Well, I wouldn’t call him a friend actually, he was a friend of a friend and was more like a fifteen-year-old faus for us to keep around and mock and generally feel better about ourselves for doing it.” That one word there, “faus,” it was unusual slang, especially for a man who had just professed a deep love for intellectualism and possessing an extensive vocabulary.

“I know what I’m saying and doing,” he’d said. “I choose these words deliberately.”

Bruce wrote these words down.

a fifteen-year-old faus for us to keep around and mock

“Then you’ve missed the point of all that I’ve said…I’ve given you everything you need…”

There were numbers there again, like in the other riddles, so was that significant? He wrote them all down, but didn’t see any immediate patterns—the number sixty-eight had popped up near the end of his rant about “Pot Ass”, and there weren’t sixty-eight letters in the alphabet.

Bruce decided to sound it all out. “A fifteen-year-old faus for us to keep around and mock…a fifteen-year-old faus for us…faus for us…” Then, inspiration struck. “Phosphorus?” he said. I originally thought about handing out all the hints periodically, but that would’ve made it too obvious. “Faus for us…phosphorus…fifteen…” The atomic number of phosphorus was 15.

Hand them all out periodically. The periodic table?

There it was. And all at once, a whole new world of insight opened up to Bruce. It’s not a number-letter assigning system this time, it’s a word game, and a game of symbolism.

He looked down at the notepad, and started scribbling. The Riddler had said, “I was eighteen back then, so those days are gone.” Bruce went over that again. “Eighteen…are gone…argon…” The atomic number of argon was 18.

Now, with the key, it flowed so much easier. We’d look at him and say, “Pot Ass! Yum! Yum-yum-yum! Pot Ass want? Pot Ass want yum-yum?” Bruce scribbled it down. “Potassium,” he said aloud.

I know what I’m saying and doing.

Bruce ran through the rest. “…I went to work for a company that worked on ERBMs, or Extended Range Ballistic Missiles. We tested sixty-eight of these babies every day…”

“Sixty-eight…ERBMs…erbium.” He wrote it down. The story was all a lie. It was just a bunch of nonsense spewed out, giving Bruce a single chance to pick up on it. It was a challenge. If he was swift enough in mind, he could save a life. If not, a young girl would perish.

For the rest of the conversation, it seemed the Riddler had decided to mix it up by being overly blunt, because he had just spoken the words sulfur, tantalum, titanium, oxygen, and nitrogen, in that order.

Bruce took all of the atomic numbers and the letters representing each of the elements, and lined them up in the order he’d received the clues. His eyes went immediately to the periodic symbols.

Phosphorus = P = 15

Argon = Ar = 18

Potassium = K = 19

Erbium = Er = 68

Sulfur = S = 16

Tantalum = Ta = 73

Titanium = Ti = 22

Oxygen = O = 8

Nitrogen = N = 7

His adrenaline surging, Bruce threw the notepad into the passenger seat, cranked up his car, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed up Alfred while he squealed out onto the highway. Alfred answered on the first ring. “Sir?”

“Alfred! Old Parker Station! That’s where she’s at! Use the emergency line and give the information to Gordon!”

“Yes, Master Bruce. Right away, sir,” Alfred said. “And, might I ask, sir, where are you going?”

“To make a pit stop!”

* * *

IT WAS ONLY ten miles to one of his stations. The property was owned by Wayne Enterprises, of course, and it was just three small townhouses that would need renovating before they could ever pass inspection to have human occupants. Cockroaches moved in and around the walls of one townhouse, but they scattered when Bruce entered with a flashlight and made his way through the hallway and into the back bathroom, where he knelt down and pulled up the linoleum, revealing the three floorboard pieces that were slightly lighter in color than the others.

He reached inside to the gear bag and the large case, and, like a trained Minuteman, he was dressed and ready, his clothes left scattered all over the room, since now he didn’t have time to stuff them in the bags properly. A woman’s life was at stake, and it would probably take Gordon a bit of time to really get the information into the right hands once Alfred had successfully delivered it to him.

He went downstairs to the garage, to the Batcycle he kept at this station, and switched it on. The doors opened up for him, and the Batman swept out into the night.