CHAPTER 19

Existing as he did in the ether, Lionel Curran naturally got the heads up from his pals online first. One of them had seen their group’s name on GCN’s website, and had immediately started spreading the story amongst his peers. To most of them it was exciting, the kind of validation that any hacker group was looking for, that kind of recognition that only came with the largest of capers.

But Lionel wasn’t too excited when he heard about it. In fact, he was downright suspicious of the whole thing. They hadn’t attacked Wayne Enterprises in a good while, since their focus had been on other projects. Now, all of a sudden, WE was declaring that not only would they be more defensive, but that they were indestructible. So what gives? His answer came when another story ran a day later concerning the FBI’s increased presence in Gotham City. In that article, Special Agent Sarah Essen was quoted as saying, “You can pretty much rest assured that hack attacks are not an issue for the city of Gotham from this day forward. They’re a thing of the past.”

Ah, so, it was the season of hacker hate. This kind of thing came around every year or so, when all at once a number of politicians and groups would hold hands in a sad show of uniformity and bash hackers and all other people involved in the art of hacktivism. This, of course, incited a few dozen conversations in their private chat rooms. They were in the middle of it right now. Lionel finished downloading an upgrade to his wares and then got up to speed.

NessyLives: what r W3 gonna do about this? We can’t just let em talk smack like that!!!!!!

BibBoBoTheGreat: I say we hit em wit everything we got, NOOCH!

TrevorsToupe: This is BS, man. I say we go in swingin

NessyLives: Fibber, what u think?

Hacker groups didn’t generally have a designated leader, per se, but the senior guys were always looked to for their experience and wisdom. As the most senior man in Parasyte, Lionel “Fibber Øptïc” Curran had directed some of the bigger operations that their group had undertaken.

Lionel had been hacking a long time. He learned to program when he was eight, and his first real taste of hacking had been when he was wandering around inside an operating system that he shouldn’t have been in when he discovered that if he could map the user space onto the system space so that they both started out at zero again, he could ultimately gain the same power as the equivalent account to root. And viola, he was in. Back in those days, it had been invigorating. These days, though, it was both his casual entertainment and his livelihood. Lionel had reached Elite hacker status; his and Parasyte’s exploits were starting to get around, and had attracted a number of clientele of late, including his latest client, E. Nygma.

There’s a hacker handle if I ever heard one, he thought. Perhaps some of their work for Nygma had actually kicked up some dust. Maybe that was why Wayne Enterprises was being so declarative about their past rivalry with Parasyte and their intent to end it all. We haven’t done anything to WE in a while. Maybe Nygma took some of the code I gave him and used it on the company, though.

The code he had worked out with Nygma was pretty sophisticated stuff. In fact, a lot of the work had been done by Nygma himself, who apparently knew his way around SQL, HTML, Perl, PHP, and UNIX-command knowledge. He also knew all the tricks, like changing ISPs, how to find the best hacker sites to visit, finding the books to read to gain greater knowledge, how to join a community, and all the usual necessities of any hacker. Nygma was one smart cookie, who was only using Parasyte to polish off a few things of his own design before paying them to upload the worms and viruses himself, like the one Lionel had dumped into Gotham Light & Power just an hour ago.

If the alarms inside Lionel Curran’s head sounded loud, they quickly diminished when he saw the fervor of his pals in chat. TrevorsToupe was out for blood, as usual, and NessyLives was always one to follow the crowd.

Lionel typed out his answer to them:

Fibber Øptïc: Let’s do it.

He smiled. It felt good getting back in the saddle again and going against the Man. And there was no bigger man or game in town than Bruce Wayne. Besides the Batman, anyway. Lionel had been working out a way to track the bat, assuming he received regular radio signals from anyone helping him, and had plans to hack and listen to what that the fool said, as well.

One thing at a time, Lionel told himself, his hands already moving across the keyboard. The only thing to determine was how they were going to do this. Maybe start with another DoS attack, or perhaps a time-shift attack…

* * *

THE CHIME ALERTED the administrator that there was new activity around their honeypot. Agent Carl Bellafiore had been playing a video game on his cell phone, and now looked up at once. He ran the logs to see who had come and gone through the system. Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox had given permission for the FBI to play with their systems, and had given unprecedented access without need of a search warrant.

Agent Bellafiore watched the honeypot for a few seconds, and when he saw the outside source try to access it he used his phone to call Essen.

“Hello?” she said, answering groggily.

“Ma’am, we have activity.”

A short pause, then, “I’m on my way.”

* * *

OVER THE NEXT two days, the FBI monitored the activity of the hackers. The honeypots were designed by the best minds in the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Division, and they worked together with Greg Copeland at Precinct 12 to follow the bread crumb trail the hackers left behind.

The natural firewalls of Wayne Enterprises had been left in place, since they didn’t want Parasyte becoming too cautious right from the start and, of course, the intruders had broken through the firewalls before so there was every reason to believe they could get through again, even with the new upgrades.

Commissioner Gordon was present for a lot of the counterhacking. It was a subtle art, requiring Essen’s people to create a few programs on the fly to deal with Parasyte’s methods. It was a game of improvisation and then waiting, then more improvisation and more waiting, with Parasyte avoiding some of the honeypots altogether, since honeypots were nothing new to hackers and were used in many different systems throughout the world. The deception was multi-layered, though, with Essen’s team working around the clock to make some honeypots appear more obvious than others, to lull Parasyte into a false sense of complacency in certain areas of the system.

“I’ve got one!” said one agent. This man’s name was Ted Fiske, and Gordon had met him during Sarah’s first pep talk to the troops back at City Hall. He spoke into his headset to coordinate with the system programmers at Wayne Enterprises. “This hacker is going for one of our honeypots. We’re getting a trace program ready to run.”

At one point, when Gordon had had time to swing by one of the stations that Sarah had allowed him knowledge of, he had asked, “How’s it going?”

“Not bad. We’re getting help from Langley now.”

“The CIA?”

Sarah paced around the room, looking at the various computer monitors. “Washington’s serious about closing up these terrorist-harboring organizations,” she said without looking up at him. “After I told them what your friend told us last night, they’re extremely interested in Cobblepot and what he knows now. I got the warrants no sweat. DARPA’s Total Information Awareness Project will check in on his computer and Internet activities, give us an idea of his online operations.”

This is getting intense, Gordon thought. He had a lot on his mind. He’d woken up another day without a wife in his bed, and without the pitter-patter of small feet running and playing throughout the house. He’d missed a call from Barbara earlier, and she’d left a message saying that they were all okay and having a good time at her mother’s. She asked him to come join them if he found the time. Gordon wasn’t sure if that was her way of trying to arrange some time together so that they could make up, or if it was a ploy to get him to come and see what life could be like outside the city.

That night, something strange happened. As Gordon was leaving the FBI station, the lights on the entire block went out, and then came back on. Then, they went out again, and came back on. They did this several times before he got into his car and drove to an empty home.

* * *

“POWER OUTAGES CONTINUED last night throughout Gotham,” the anchorman was saying. “A dozen blocks experienced a strange pattern of street lamps and lit signs turning on and off in rapid succession, including the R.H. Kane Building. There was one other instance this morning of the exact same sort of power outage, which officials are calling ‘hiccups,’ all throughout the business district of—”

Bruce looked at the scroll that had been delivered the night of the Policeman’s Ball. He compared it to the letter that had been planted in his pocket. The one from his pocket was handwritten, whereas the scroll had been typed out. This left him with two different kinds of clues to follow, one was handwriting analysis, and the other was tracking the printer that had been used to print out the riddle on the scroll.

The same minds who thought up ECHELON had also come up with the system that embedded every piece of paper that ran through a laser jet printer with a microscopic code that could only be seen under blue lights and magnifiers. Those numbers identified the exact printer that the paper had come from. Bruce had the equipment to check the code, but would have to give the information to Special Agent Essen and/or Commissioner Gordon to have them run it through their systems. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about working with the U.S. government, but he figured it was worth a try for the moment. It could be beneficial if he gained access to a greater wealth of resources, though he doubted a long-term relationship would be feasible. Too many egos, and too many complications. I’ll use them as long as I can, and they’ll use me. Simple.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Next came the analysis of the paper itself. The Batcomputer had no problems scanning the paper for components.

76.57% cellulose

14.3% cotton

5.21% resin

3.92% miscellaneous

Perfectly normal. No strange foreign elements that would make it more traceable.

Next was the handwriting analysis. Lettering that slanted to the right tended to suggest an open person who liked to socialize, while left-leaning letters were suggestive of a person that preferred to work alone. When someone’s didn’t slant at all, like the Riddler’s, it was indicative of a logical and practical human being. When it came to letter size, many graphologists held that large meant a person was outgoing—it was common for celebrities to have large letters in their signatures—whereas small showed an introspective and shy personality. Again, the Riddler’s was average, which was another indicator of a highly logical mind.

The exact opposite of the Joker, he thought, looking up at the television just as Alfred was coming down the steps. The Joker moved as he pleased, and sometimes some of those schemes came together, or didn’t. With the Riddler, everything’s mapped out and structured. There’s a plan at work. Bruce believed that the evidence, as incredible as it was, was on the TV at that very moment.

“Sir, I was wondering if you’d seen the news.”

“Yes,” Bruce said. “I’ve seen it. It’s him. It’s Morse code.” He had been watching video footage that others had caught of the phenomenon throughout the night. The obviousness of it had leapt out at him at once. The Riddler had already managed to hack into Gotham Light & Power once, possibly helped along by Parasyte, and Bruce believed he was using it to send another kind of message.

“Morse code, sir?” Alfred said.

“He’s talking to us. To me. He’s flicking the lights on and off across the city, using Morse code to send the message loud and clear. I’ve been looking for a few good camera feeds to get the whole message,” he said, pulling up some of the video feed he had hacked into on various streets throughout Gotham. People had caught the weird power outages on cell phone cameras, but not the whole thing.

After nearly an hour of searching for the perfect video feed of the outages, Bruce finally found the angle he was looking for; the power switching on and off at the R.H. Kane Building. He set the two letters to the side for the moment and examined the video, rewinding again and again to make sure he had it right. “All right, it starts off with a single dot, and four dashes, so that gives us the number one…then the number nine…” He watched the footage closely, and wrote the sequence of dots and dashes out on one of the computer monitors:

.---- ----. -.... .---- / .... .- -.. / .. - --..-- / -... ..- - / .. - / .-- --- -. - / .... .- .--. .--. . -. / .- --. .- .. -. / ..- -. - .. .-.. / - .... .. ... / -.. .- - .

“This is a weird one,” Bruce said. “It says, ‘1961 had it, but it won’t happen again until this date.’”

“Any idea on the meaning, sir?”

“Yeah…six thousand and nine.” He went to another monitor, opening the file where he kept a listing of all the riddles he’d been given and their answers. Bruce had started to wonder if an overall pattern would eventually emerge down the road. He typed, 6009. “That’s the next time we’ll have a year that reads the same when inverted—when it’s flipped and rotated. That hasn’t happened since 1961.”

“More numbers, then.”

“Yeah, but there’s more.” The code kept on coming, and over the next thirty minutes Bruce checked and rechecked the video to make sure he was getting the message right. He found another camera angle for Bells Ferry and Emerson Street, making sure there wasn’t a difference in the messages conveyed by the power outages there. They were all the same. In the end, Bruce had two more riddles written up on the screen:

The optimist sees the glass half full.

The pessimist sees the glass half empty.

The chemist sees it that way.

He sighed, and leaned back in his chair. There were no answers to these riddles online. A chemist…a chemist…

Then, it came to him. “Full,” he said. “A chemist sees a glass as being full—half of it is in water, the other half in the vapor state.” He looked at the next one.

When is a ship that carries baggage like a brother?

“Hm.” That one was a little tricky, and it was easy to confuse the phrase “carries baggage” with carrying emotional problems. It was solved along a different line of reasoning than the riddle above had been. “When it’s a freighter,” Bruce said. Alfred looked at him dubiously. “Frater is the Latin word for brother. This is a slight but important divergence for him. He’s playing with other tricks now. Instead of answers in English, for instance, they can now be in other languages.” He sighed. “The answer of the last one also cannot be solved with a single- or two-word answer—the answer has to be ‘When it’s a freighter,’ so is that significant?”

Alfred still had his duster in his hand, and laid it down on the workbench in front of the monitors. “If I may add my two cents in, sir, it appears to me that there’s also no obvious way of knowing which ‘freighter’ he means, the English word or the Latin, so that would give us a slew of possible anagrams.”

“Exactly, it’s another divergence for him. That’s why I don’t think the answer’s going to be in an anagram this time.”

“Oh? What, then?”

Bruce wrote the answers on the center screen, adding them to the growing number of riddles and solutions: 6009, full, and frater/freighter. Bruce stood up, and looked around at the other monitors, some of them showing security footage of various streets, others revealing the anagram searches that he had running (just in case), and one that was showing the continuous checking-in on police channels for key words pertaining to the various cases Bruce was working on.

And then there were the monitors that showed the pictures of Old Parker Station, and the contraption that Theresa Fuller had been put in. There were photos of Amanda Riddle, copies of her autopsy report that he got from Gordon, juxtaposed with photos of Oswald Cobblepot walking out of the Iceberg Lounge.

There was a lot to work on right then. To add to what other leads were developed, he’d gotten a call from Lucius an hour ago; as it turned out, Essen and her people had detected heavy infiltration of WE’s systems, and were working with Lucius and WE’s security programmers to track the source of these hackers. He would be anxious to see if they end up catching any of them, and if any of them would turn out to be Parasyte members with knowledge of Nygma.

Bruce considered the enormity of the task here. Things had been bad enough searching the streets for Nate and trying to figure out how Carmine Falcone was getting his information out to his people in the street, now the Riddler had entered the scene issuing an open challenge to Bruce/Batman and revealing that he knew the secret of the two. Gordon’s right. It is all coming part.

As if to remind him of the here and now, a sizable portion of the bats in the cave all around him screeched, and many of them started fluttering about, one or two of them zipping through his workstation.

He brought himself out of the reverie and looked back at the riddles. Bruce told himself to stay focused, and not to lose hope. Alfred had a point in saying that Batman had the criminals of Gotham terrified, and he wasn’t prepared to give up that edge, not just yet. “All right,” he said. He finished pacing and slumped back into his chair. “Okay, so, so far we’ve done a lot of critical thinking in putting his other clues together. But what if…what if that’s not what’s required here?”

“How do you mean?” Alfred asked.

“Lateral thinking,” Bruce said. “Maybe solving this message is ultimately done through more indirect and creative approaches. Lateral thinking uses reasoning that isn’t immediately obvious to most other people. It involves notions that might not ever be obtainable by anyone that uses only traditional step-by-step logic, because the answers are a bit more obscure.”

The butler nodded. “Well then, that would complicate things. If that’s the case, then I’m afraid that’ll require a bit more thinking on my part, sir.”

“The frater riddle is the first one that involves any answer other than English. It’s in Latin. What else is in…?” Then, a notion came to him from a completely different direction. “Hold on, what’s at 6009 Full Street?” Bruce was mostly talking to himself as he pulled up a map of Gotham City, and then punched in an address in the city’s directory. Within two seconds, he had his answer. “Parnes Industries,” he said. The online map was asking if he wanted directions, but instead Bruce pulled up images from Google Earth. There, from street level, he saw the giant smokestacks, and written across the biggest on, in Latin, was the company slogan for Parnes Industries: Optima Expectans (“Expecting the Best”).

Bruce zoomed in on the shipping yards behind. Wayne Enterprises had led the petition to have Parnes Industries submit to EPA suggestions that said it ought to do something about its emissions. He knows Bruce Wayne is Batman, he thought. He knows Wayne Enterprises has a history with Parnes. Is he trying to put me in a position so that when he reveals who I am I’ll look to be sabotaging Parnes Industries? At this point, it was still impossible to know the Riddler’s intent, but that didn’t stop Bruce’s mind from racing at the possibilities.

He zoomed in even further, to get a better look at Miller Harbor just behind Parnes, which harbored numerous vessels at its docks. There, moored alongside numerous other vessels, was the large freighter, which was well known around Gotham City as it passed frequently underneath Aparo Expressway a few times a month. Also on the side of the freighter was the company’s slogan again: Optima Expectans.

“Contact Gordon for me, would you, Alfred?” he said. “Tell him where I’m going, and send him the numbers I wrote down there; they’re the numbers to trace the printer used to make the message the Riddler typed out. Just don’t tell him where I got the numbers from. And use the remote controls to open up the helipad.”

Alfred got in the seat behind the master control station. “You’ll be taking the batcopter then, sir?”

“Bat Hawk. And yes. Wheels up in five. She’s gotta learn to fly sometime.”

* * *

THE HOUSE WAS so quiet, he just couldn’t stay there anymore. The silence was deafening at times, far worse than when Barb became cross with him over being late for dinner and gave him the silent treatment. He’d felt rushed to get home when Barb and the kids were around, and now, without even that motivation, Jim Gordon couldn’t find a single reason to remain in the house.

He couldn’t get Sarah’s words about Marcellus Walden out of his mind. He had stayed up late last night, tossing and turning in bed and considering the condition the country was in if it was allowing not only corrupt cops, but corrupt politicians to just rocket through the system. If everything Sarah and her people believed about Walden was true, and if he really was eyeing the presidency, then Gordon feared for the safety of the entire nation, not just Gotham City.

Gordon’s cell phone sang just as he was getting out of his car. He had gone into the office to talk with Chief Chapman, who also worked late at night because his wife had died three years ago, to ensure that everything that could be done was being done to facilitate the feds in town. Sarah wanted both Gordon and Chapman completely up to speed, and to do that they needed to get to know the men who headed up the different facets of her JTTF and the FBI in general, from district to division. With nothing else to occupy his time or his mind, Gordon figured he ought to find it easy to memorize names up and down this big chain of command. But he was preoccupied by a great deal at the moment.

The incoming message was a text from an unknown party. He knew what that meant, and checked the message: The power outages were a message. Parnes Industries. The big freighter moored there. There may be something there, checking it now. There was a second message, one containing a string of numbers and instructions to locate a printer machine matching the serial number.

He started to send a text back, but just as he did his phone rang. It was coming from Sarah’s cell. He answered, “Go ahead.”

“Jim, we got a few hits,” Sarah said. She sounded very excited, and like she was jogging. “Some of the hackers are in other countries, but two of them are close to Gotham. We’re coordinating with Interpol right now so we can bring all of them down at the same time all over the globe. Looks like twenty-seven hackers in all.”

Gordon started his car. “I just got a call from our mutual friend. He’s heading to Parnes Industries out at Miller Harbor. He thinks there’s something there.”

“Well, I’ve got a few of your uniform guys helping us with the raids, and we’ll need a SWAT team, of course.” It now sounded like she was hopping into her own car. “You can come along with us or help your friend.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it covered. I don’t wanna leave him alone, in case…” He didn’t finish the thought, because it sounded kind of ridiculous. In case he needs help solving riddles.

“Well, he’s used to going at it alone, but I don’t like you going alone,” she said. “Take a black and white with you, at least.”

“Yes, ma’am.”