CHAPTER 5

After almost thirty minutes of talking, Batman had recorded enough to convict Enrique Gutierrez with a confession. He would give it all to Gordon, if he could get to him before he left their rendezvous point. Otherwise, he’d drop the fat man off near one of the local precincts tonight, along with the recording. He’d do it all anonymously, as usual, using a voice scrambler to give the fat man’s location. With the severity of the crime, he was willing to bet the new DA would make the confession admissible, somehow.

Once he was back at his bike, which he’d parked in another abandoned garage on the far side of the Bowery, Batman replayed the confession back to himself. Enrique Gutierrez was unconscious again, handcuffed and tied to the back of his motorcycle (Alfred called it the “Batcycle”).

“…some guy paid us to do the job for ’im,” Enrique could be heard saying on the playback. “Us, an’ some o’ Nate’s people. We worked together on this. But this mystery dude, he wired us the m-money, gave us the names an’ instructions…he had the targets all picked out. W-w-we just had to hold the wife hostage until…until the…” He trailed off there.

“Until what, Enrique?” Batman had asked.

The fat man swallowed yet again. “Until the husband…the husband strapped the bomb to himself, an’ walked into the place…an’ blew himself up.” Here, Enrique had looked up at the Batman imploringly. “But ya gotta believe me, man…I was only there to help with the f-family…an’ then one o’ the Falcone guys who came with us, he takes the wife into the other room…an’ I guess he strangled her, homes. I figured I knew what was about t-to h-happen, so I got the hell outta there…we all did, and fast! B-but then, one o’ my guys said he went back to check on the little girl…an’ said the place was a bloody mess. Somebody had come in after w-w-we left…an’ finished off the little girl. They were strangled, an’ heads were smashed. I swear, homes, me an’ people would never do somethin’ stone cold like that! I’ve popped a few pendejos in my life, man, I ain’t gonna lie…but whoever took out that little girl is stone cold!”

Presently, the Batcycle hummed to life, quietly, barely noticeable, like the engine of a Prius. He pulled slowly out of the garage, keeping the lights off and driving by using the NV setting on his HUD screen.

Enrique had gone on to explain the vest made of Semtex, which had been waiting for them all at the sailboat where they had been ordered to bring the family. He described where the husband, Patrick, had been taken after being abducted, along with his family. Enrique said the boat belonged to neither the Tralley family nor the Juarezes. The job had come to them through channels in Nate’s and John’s operation. A mystery man who paid them for odd jobs had provided the package waiting in the boat, and in that package had been the Semtex vest, with the hexagonal booster charges prepared and ready to go, as well as the detonator and instructions on how to use it.

Patrick Tralley had been a businessman. At least, that’s what Enrique said. He loved his family enough that, while he had wrestled with the thought, and then cried, and then pleaded with the gunmen to let them go, he had ultimately sacrificed himself, and done precisely what Enrique and his people had asked him to do on behalf of their unknown employer(s). He had stepped into the Muslim Center, uttered some poem that had been prerecorded on an iPod for him alone to listen to (which had also been inside the package), and blew himself up.

The Batman had been taken aback. At first, he wasn’t sure he believed the story, but then why would Enrique confess to such a heinous conspiracy and make up all those gruesome details? He had confessed only out of fear of dying, and the Batman had watched him closely for any signs of deception, seeing none.

The bombing at the Muslim Center on the Eastside had been all over the news all day long, and here he’d come across at least an explanation of what had happened, even if he didn’t know why. It seemed Enrique didn’t know why, either. He’d been paid for a job, one that went a little awry, and he’d wanted extra compensation for it.

This was a major break in the case, and Gordon needed to know about it immediately.

The Batcycle trundled quietly through what could loosely be called a “neighborhood” of tents that had sprouted in areas leading out of the Bowery, and a smattering of torches that the squatters used to illuminate the campfires of the now-useless train yards of Old Parker Station, fires around which they told their stories and shared what they had gathered from the streets in their buggies and carts. He drove through Edmond Street and crossed over Full Street, some portions of which were littered with couches and loveseats shared by an ever-rotating group of the utterly hopeless.

Traffic this time of night was light, so just about any back alleys and side streets he wanted to take he could, but he would still have to be wary of patrol cars. But, by arrangement, his and Gordon’s usual meeting spot was on this end of town, a few blocks outside of the Bowery, at another isolated ruin where nobody traversed anymore.

* * *

WHEREAS THE BOWERY was a no man’s land, these high-rises of Monroe Gardens were scheduled to come down in a year, and would then be rebuilt with money donated to the city by Wayne Enterprises. Originally built sixty years ago, they were a way to get rid of all the bums by erecting high-rises all throughout the old ghettoes. There had been lots of poverty and extreme housing shortages back then, back when his dad had tried to do something about it…and then one of those impoverished, desperate souls, who felt pushed into a life of crime, killed the one man in Gotham City who might have rescued him from a doomed life of constant poverty. Killed him, and his wife, while their son looked on, helpless…

That hadn’t been too far away from here…in Park Row, aka “Crime Alley”. Where it all started for me.

He parked the Batcycle always in a different area, so as not to get people used to seeing it if they happened to come upon it—he couldn’t let people know about his patrols, he couldn’t make himself predictable The bat left it behind the remains of what had been a maintenance shed of Monroe Gardens and then flung a tarp over it, a tarp he kept in the storage compartment on the back end. Still sore from his ordeal earlier that night, Batman ground his teeth as he pulled Enrique Gutierrez off of the bike and laid him on the ground. Then, he went looking for Gordon.

He found the commissioner near the usual place, in the abandoned underground parking lot, standing beside an old truck that someone had left behind long ago, the wheels and tires stolen, the whole rusted bucket sitting on top of cinderblocks, the windows shattered and the steering wheel gone. Graffiti on the side said DON’T MESS WITH THE MOB!, the slogan of the Molehill Mob. Another slab of graffiti on a wall nearby read, THANK GOD FOR MULCOYISY “NATE” STEWART-PAULSON!, while another said DOWN WITH THE BAT! in red, dripping paint.

Gordon didn’t spot him until he was close. The bat had done a wide circle around him, using his scanners to search for any prying eyes, just in case Gordon had finally gotten sloppy and been followed. But Gordon hadn’t been sloppy, and they were all alone. His IR vision setting picked up only a small heat signature, that of some animal the size of a cat huddled at the far end of the parking lot.

“Jim,” he said.

Gordon didn’t jump. He was used to this. It was their routine, had been for a while. His old friend turned slowly, hands in his coat pockets. The bat had emerged from around the old truck, and the commissioner nodded. “How’s the hunting?”

“Pretty good. You?”

“Not bad. But it’s costing me my marriage as we speak.” He smirked. “I’m supposed to be home right now, but I’ve broken that promise already. I was just getting ready to leave when—” Gordon winced, and pointed at his shoulder. “Have you been shot?”

“It’s nothing. I had a run-in tonight,” he said, stepping closer. “That’s actually why I came. I wasn’t expecting to make it out tonight, but something came up that I think needs your attention.”

“That’s funny,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “Because I think I’ve got something here that might need yours.” Gordon pulled something out of his pocket, and handed it over to the bat, who accepted the piece of paper, unfolded it, and started reading it. “What you’ve got there are a couple of riddles that came our way just within the last twenty-four hours. One of them came from a family that was slain out on the docks, and the other was spoken to the janitor who escaped the Muslim Center today just before the bomb went off.”

Batman looked up at him.

Gordon made a face. “What? What is it?”

“Would this family be the Tralleys?”

“Christ, how do you know that? How do you know everything?”

“I brought you something. Someone. He’s got an interesting story to tell. Says he and some of Mulcoyisy Stewart-Paulson’s men were paid to hold a family hostage long enough for the father to detonate himself at the Muslim Center earlier today.”

“What?”

So Batman divulged all the details, and the commissioner listened in rapt attention, asking no questions and with his mouth agape, bewildered.

“You’re kidding me?”

“No. I have Gutierrez nearby, and his confession recorded if you need it.”

Gordon leaned back a bit, stroking his mustache thoughtfully. “That seals it, then. Jesus, this means not only are they connected, but that Nate Stewart-Paulson was behind it. Behind an act of terrorism,” Gordon said. “But why? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Unless he’s carrying out new orders from Carmine Falcone.”

“Falcone’s locked up in Arkham, and I don’t believe the rumors that he’s still running things from inside. Besides, even if he were, why in the hell would he attack a Muslim Center? Why threaten a man’s family, force him to detonate himself like that and then kill his family anyway?”

“Have you picked up any rumors about the Muslim Center? Maybe it’s a front for something else? People in the streets are saying Falcone’s getting upset with the Juarezes and others moving in on his turf while he’s gone, so maybe he hit the Center because he thought it was storing the goods of his competitors. We have been looking for where the Juarez and Shukur cartels have been hiding their cocaine within the city, so maybe that was it?”

Gordon shook his head. “We’ve not heard anything like that, and I’ve not heard of anything illicit being found in the rubble.” He sighed. “What I have heard is that Patrick Tralley’s entire life savings was somehow wiped out, transferred from his account at the Third Bank of Gotham just an hour ago. Someone managed to shut off power for thirteen minutes on that whole block. Power went out, the bank’s alarms were going off and the manager was on his way in to turn them off when he got a call from Hard Target Security—that’s the computer security company they use—that the bank’s systems got a pretty big hit from an outside source. Computer viruses and worms that probably came in through old e-mails activated when the bank’s systems rebooted. The computers are programmed to reboot automatically in case all the computers and security systems suddenly go offline, naturally. The hackers found a design flaw, as hackers will do, and I guess knew that the systems would be at their weakest when they’re all rebooting like that. The worm that did the most damage could’ve taken as much money as it wanted, but it only took money from Patrick Tralley’s life savings.”

Batman said, “This is no coincidence, Jim. The Tralleys are the connection between all of these, and all of these incidents happened in the same day.”

“I know,” Gordon said, and produced another piece of paper from his pocket, this one completely covered in the same two characters, repeating over and over again. “The hackers left this, I guess, as their final flip of the bird and a ‘Screw you’ to the bank’s staff and the security admins. Greg Copeland down at Precinct Twelve’s Cyber Crimes Division is investigating, and I had him e-mail me the whole printout. Here, take a look. Looks like just a bunch o’ LOLs repeating over and over again.”

OLOOLOOLOOLOOOOOOLLOOOOLOLLOLLOLLOLOOLOOOOOOLLOLLLOOLLOOLOLOLLLOLLOOLLOOLOLOLLLOOLOOOLOOOOOOLLOLLLOOLLOOLOLOLLOOLLLOLLOOOOLOLLLOLOOOOOOLLOLOOLOLLLOLLOOLLOOLOLOOLOLLOOOOLOOOOOOLLOOOLOOLLLOLOLOLLLOLOOOOLOOOOOOLOOLOOLOOLOOOOOOLLOLOOOOLOLLOLLOLOOLOOOOOOLLOOOLOOLLOLLLLOLLLOLOOOLLOLOOOOOLOOOOOOLLOOOLLOLLOLOOOOLLOOOOLOLLLOOLOOLLOOLLLOLLOOLOLOLLOLOOOOLOOOOOOLLOOOOLOLLOLLLOOLLOOLOOOOLOOOOOOLLOLLLOOLLOOLOLOLLLOLOLOLLLOLOOOLLLOOLOOLLOOOOLOLLOLLOO…

On and on and on it went like that.

“The creep’s just laughing at us. This computer generation, they just yuck it all up from afar. Sit in their cushy chairs in their parent’s basement and hack into people’s business, ruin their lives—and in this case kill them—and then write LOL and LULZ all over every damn thing. Why don’t they just piss on the graves of the whole Tralley family? That’s about all they haven’t done.”

Batman watched his old friend closely. It was obvious that he was stressed. Confident in the beginning of Gordon’s appointment as police commissioner, he now wondered if the job wasn’t too much for him. They hadn’t really had any time to talk about it, they had both been so busy adjusting to the new methods and new ways of their partnership, which didn’t allow for as much cooperation and closeness as they’d had in the past, so therefore Batman wasn’t really sure how everything was going on Gordon’s end. For his own part, Batman had been pounding heads or running terror campaigns on the criminals of the night, like the pimp Clarence Mulligan earlier, but what had Gordon been going all alone? He said his marriage was suffering. How badly?

Batman looked down at the piece of paper Gordon had handed him. “Have your people worked these others out yet?”

“The answer to the first one is math,” he said. “The second and third riddles, I dunno. You think they’re hints to something? Like the Zodiac killer, or something?”

“I think they at least mean something to the perpetrator, or perpetrators,” he said.

“So, whattaya think, my friend?”

“If they had a chance to break into any accounts they wanted, and yet they only chose Tralley’s to wipe out, then…it feels to me like someone is trying to draw our attention to it.”

“Like how I found the first riddle—it was written on the back of a picture, just one of a few left in a sailboat where there were no other adornments or furnishings. It just took a bit of sifting to get to the riddle.”

“And I think that’s all we need here is some sifting. The LOLs are indicative of that, leaving those kinds of messages stir the public emotionally, but the LOLs might also be indicating something else.”

“Like what?” Gordon asked.

“Well, the first thing that jumps out at me are the circles and the straight lines. It looks a lot like binary.”

“Binary?”

“What if I changed all the O’s into zeros, and the L’s into ones?” He had a small flip-top computer pad in his left glove. He activated it, and said, “Do you have something to write with?” Gordon groped around in his pockets and finally withdrew a pen. “This’ll take a few minutes.” He flipped down his heads-up display screen, and typed it all out in silence, substituting 0 for O and 1 for L. Whatever he typed was displayed in a screen that Gordon could not see. Batman laid the piece of paper on the front of the old truck, glancing between it and the screen on his HUD. He had to go slow to make sure he didn’t miss a single character. Whenever he finished with a line, he used the pen to mark where he had left off. After about ten minutes worth of work, he finally had a full screen of numbers floating in front of him.

010010010010000001100001011011010010000001101110011001010111011001100101 011100100010000001101110011001010110011101100001011101000110100101110110 011001010010110000100000011000100111010101110100001000000100100100100000 011000010110110100100000011000100110111101110100011010000010000001100011 011010000110000101110010011001110110010101100100001000000110000101101110 011001000010000001101110011001010111010101110100011100100110000101101100 001011100010000000100000010101000110100001101111011011010111001101101111 011011100010000001100110011011110111010101101110011001000010000001101111 011011100110010100100000011011110110011000100000011011010111100100100000 011010110110100101101110001000000110011001101001011100100111001101110100 001011000010000001110100011010000110010101101110001000000110001101100001 011011010110010100100000010000010110111001100100011001010111001001110011 011011110110111000100000011101110110100101110100011010000010000001100001 011011100110111101110100011010000110010101110010001011100010000000100000 010101000110100001101001011100110010000001110011011010000110111101110101 011011000110010000100000011000100110010100100000011101100110010101110010 011110010010000001100101011011000110010101101101011001010110111001110100 011000010111001001111001001011000010000001100010011101010111010000100000 010010011001001001101100011011000010000001100001011100110110101100100000 011110010110111101110101001000000110000101101110011110010111011101100001 011110010010111000100000001000000101011101101000011000010111010000100000 011010010111001100100000011011010111100100100000011011100110000101101101 0110010100111111

“All right. I have it all. Now, just let me get find a decoder online.” Like a cell phone, Batman’s systems could connect to the Internet from just about anywhere. The Internet had numerous binary translators he could use. He picked one, and it took all of a second to decode the message. He then wrote it out so that Gordon could see it, too, even though he had already solved it.

I am never negative, but I am both charged and neutral. Thomson found one of my kin first, then came Anderson with another. This should be very elementary, but I’ll ask you anyway. What is my name?

“Jesus,” Gordon said. “Another riddle.” He shook his head, and blinked a few times, like he was trying in vain to work something out. “Any ideas?” he said.

“Lepton,” Batman said.

Gordon glanced up at him. “Huh? Who’s Lepton?”

“Lepton’s not a person, it’s an elementary particle,” Batman said. “It says here ‘This should be elementary.’ Leptons have two classes: charged, like an electron, and neutral. A physicist named J.J. Thomson first discovered the electron, and an American physicist named Carl Anderson discovered the muon, or the lepton’s other ‘kin.’ ”

“Oh,” Gordon said, looking dubiously down at his notepad, and perhaps a little deflated that he lacked the knowledge to figure that one out himself. “Well, that just leaves the one other poem, then. I checked the Internet, but I couldn’t find the answer to that one anywhere, either. Any thoughts on that one?”

Batman looked down and read it. It looked like a Xeroxed copy of the original.

I am uttered first, before all others like me,

These others are my twins, yet not exactly like me,

In this poem, there are fifty-two like me,

In myself, there are, in fact, three of me,

What am I, exactly?

“That one might take some time. Handwriting analysis might be useful here, though.”

Gordon waited while Batman went over the riddles again and again. He finally said, “They’re calling this one the Riddler.”

The bat looked up. “Who is?”

“The press. That’s what they’re calling our unsub.” That was police vernacular, meaning “unknown subject,” a person whose identity was a complete mystery to law enforcement. “There’s a guy I know on the forensics team, Adam Paxton. You know him?” Batman nodded. He tried to keep up with everyone on the GCPD, old and new. “He’s…well, he’s a talker. A good guy, damn good at his job, he just likes to spread gossip. He was there when I got the phone call about Patrick Tralley’s involvement in the Muslim Center attack, and he talked to a journalist friend of his that works for the Gotham Informer, and now they’re trying to rush this story into tomorrow’s paper. I’m trying to hold them back for a while, since the investigations are all still pending and I don’t want idiots calling in all their phony baloney ‘tips’ that just screw with us because they hate the police, but so far all we’ve been able to make sure of is that they don’t put these riddles in the paper, at least not unless they were to prove too difficult to solve and we might then require public assistance. We need to be ready for something like this, have a task force set aside to handle all the weirdos who’ll try and claim they’ve solved it or that they know who he is. Right now, we don’t have that kind of manpower.” He put his hands on his hips and sighed. “But in any case, they first named this guy ‘The Riddling Killer,’ but then the Informer’s editor called, trying to get a quote from me or anybody at the precinct. They shortened it, probably to save ink, and now it’s just the Riddler.”

Batman didn’t like that. “That’s counterproductive and intrusive to your investigation. You’ll have people coming out of the woodwork claiming to know him, to be him.” It was in their culture now. Once, the press would dub some wanted criminal “The Boston Strangler”, “The Barefoot Bandit”, or the “The Green River Killer”. Now, it was different. Ever since he had created his own standard as Batman, the standard had passed on to this new breed of vermin. Some had borrowed his “style,” some of them to great efficacy, and the press exaggerated every new moron who cropped up to try to claim a space. In the years after he and Gordon had made so much headway in cleaning up this city, Batman feared this was putting it on a backslide, like how so many undisciplined thugs had moved into positions of power after the Falcones had fallen. Those same upjumped thugs were making calls on operations they had little experience with, and, without having learned the requisite finesse of smooth criminal conduct, they substituted violence in its place. This press leakage now lent street cred to these sorts, and it was just one more sobering moment in a recent series of sobering moments for the bat.

The Batman and the commissioner both understood how it worked. The press would propagate the story, exaggerate aspects, and when things started escalating they would report on the escalation, the weirdness of it all, and ask important questions like, How did Gotham get to be in the state it’s in? They’d ask those questions and then conveniently remove themselves from the equation. News organizations like the Informer now made the news, quite literally, by glamorizing sorts like the Joker.

“I’ve tried to stop the Informer from going ahead with stories before, but they’ve never really listened.”

“You’re the police commissioner now. You ought to be able to put a cap on all information that could damage a major investigation.”

“Yeah, well, not if they have the support of Gotham City’s mayor.”

The Dark Knight cocked his head to one side. “Walden’s okay with this?”

“S’far as I know,” Gordon said.

“Why?”

“I dunno.” He shrugged, looking like a man who wanted to drop the subject.

Gordon was trying to remain professional, to not say anything inappropriate about his superior. But that wasn’t good enough for the bat. “What’s wrong? Why the disconnect between you and the mayor?” A moment passed between them, and Gordon glanced down at his shoes. “Jim?” The name and the tone he used carried the weight of the years of their partnership, of their friendship.

Gordon licked his lips, and ran a thumb over his mustache. “He’s not…let me put it this way. He’s not the man I would’ve elected for Gotham during this time, okay? He’s…he’s not communicative, not towards me, anyway, not towards law enforcement in general. He attends balls, holds press conferences—he loves those, in case you hadn’t noticed—and he basically hands orders down to me and then ignores any qualms I or my people might have about it. He expects the guys in the precinct to swallow a bunch of hard pills that he gives me to give to them. He expects them to swallow the pills because the pills come from my hand, not his.” Batman said nothing, and Gordon shifted his weight nervously. There was obviously more he wanted to say, but he wouldn’t say it, not right then.

The Batman decided to change the subject back to the most important task at hand. “I’ll look into this,” he said, holding up the piece of paper with the riddles written across them. “See what I can find. In the meantime, let’s change L-O-C in the future.” LOC was police talk for location, and Batman had learned to speak in that vernacular while doing business with Gordon and Dent. “I’ve picked out a spot on the lower Westside. Across the street from Grant Park is a place called Glen’s Bakery.”

Gordon nodded. “I know the place. Really good bagels.”

“Behind the bakery is an abandoned duplex, repossessed by the bank. If you use the signal again, I’ll assume we’re meeting in the alleys there. But I’ll also visit that spot every other night, so if any other problems related to this case pop up, such as more riddles or messages, and you just don’t have the time to meet face-to-face to talk, just leave them here. I’ll find them.”

“Dead drops, huh?”

“It’s safest right now, especially for you.”

“All right,” Gordon said, checking his watch. “Look, thanks for the help on this. I appreciate it. I know it’s been a while since the busts from Internal Affairs and all the work you and I did, and I know we made progress with that, but I still don’t feel comfortable trusting too many people with the details of this thing. So, ya know…just thanks.”

The bat almost gave half a smirk, and reached out a hand. “What are friends for, Jim?”

The commissioner smiled, and shook his hand. “Anything I can do for you in return?” Then, he must’ve felt it, because his face changed. When they finished shaking hands, Gordon had a small disk in his hand. He examined it.

“Have a car scoop up Enrique Gutierrez, say it was on an anonymous tip. You can interrogate him some more, but I don’t think he knows much else. Then check the audio and images on that disk,” Batman said. “I’ve run them all through my database, but I haven’t found anything. Send whatever you can up to Interpol, and have them run the faces through their facial-recognition systems. These guys are new in Gotham, maybe international. There’s fingerprints I ran off of a gun, see what that that gives us. Also, run the tags on the cars you see in the pictures through DMV. Probably fake, but we might get lucky.”

“Will do. Anything else?”

“The trial’s coming up soon.” He didn’t need to tell Gordon which trial. The Joker, now labeled John Doe, had finally finished having his paperwork bounce through the legal system, and was potentially facing final justice despite his plea of insanity—or “super sanity” as it was being called. It was a bizarre new slant on the insanity plea that one or two key doctors at Arkham Asylum had cooked up, and the clown’s lawyers had seized upon it. “What do you think of this ‘super-sanity’ defense?” Batman asked.

“I dunno. Sounds far-fetched.”

The bat nodded. “Stay sharp.”

“You think something might happen?”

“It’s the Joker.” Nothing else need to be said.

Gordon nodded. “Fair enough. Any other advice?”

The bat took a few steps backward, the shadows reclaiming him as their own. “Just try not to work too hard, Jim. And make sure you make time for your wife and kids. What’s life without family?” he said, knowing the answer to his own riddle.

Within a few seconds, he was gone, and soon enough the commissioner would clear the area, as well. They had this down to a science, this tradecraft of theirs, avoiding detection during their various meetings. He hoped Gordon was still doing his “dry cleaning runs” (Gordon used that old CIA tradecraft slang for an SDR, or surveillance detection run) to make sure he was not being followed away from their meeting. Batman was adamant about keeping Jim Gordon from getting into trouble.

Without Jim Gordon, Gotham City wouldn’t survive, he was certain of that. And, quite possibly, neither would the Batman.

* * *

IT WASN’T NECESSARY to drive all the way back to the cave on his motorcycle. In fact, it wasn’t practical at all. The Batman had made arrangements for himself at six key locations throughout the city, each one in a different sector, where he could suit up and launch his nightly operations from.

Tonight, he had used an old junkyard bought by Wayne Enterprises five years ago, one Bruce Wayne meant to turn around, but it had never really seen more than a few basic structural repairs. As far as Bruce Wayne’s business partners and colleagues were concerned, this was just one of many forgotten projects that he’d been overly exuberant about, having let his incredible wealth once more exceed his grasp, ultimately doing nothing with it.

Well, the Batman had certainly found use for it.

Pulling into one of three entrances, he drove the Batcycle to the rear of the place, where tall piles of smashed cars stood on all sides like sentries, and where he would leave the motorcycle for the night. He used one of the nearby canisters of fuel to fill it up, and then went into what had once been the reception area of Ned Attleby, who once owned Ned Attleby’s Junkyard and Parts Store. The Batman stepped through, his boots clomping on the torn and warped linoleum. In the back, where a little break room once was, the Batman upended a small oven, and took out what he had stashed there: a leather suitcase, and a black duffel bag filled with clothes.

First to come off was the helmet, then the cape and cowl. His hair was damp with sweat and rain, and was sticking out in all directions. Then came the utility belt, which he hung over the back of an old foldout chair. Next to come off were the cut- and puncture-resistant gloves—he had to be a little bit careful in unplugging the wires that allowed communication between his wrist-linked computer and the HUD system. Next came the double layers of body armor; the layer containing the STL system first, and then the layer of Dyneema. Then came the boots and greaves. The underlying MTS body-glove (moisture transfer system) was the last thing to be removed.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Finally, Bruce Wayne stood there naked. He had peeled away the layers, and he was once more out of the shadows, and back into the light. He went over to an area where he kept bottled water along with a toolbox full of just about any medical equipment he could ever want or need. He touched at the spot on his shoulder, saw how it was deeply reddened and maybe just a bit swollen. He applied ointment and took an ibuprofen pill, and figured he’d be okay.

This time.

Bruce thought back on the night’s endeavors. He thought about the pimp, Enrique Gutierrez, and Nate Stewart-Paulson’s would-be assassins—the sniper, the big bald man, the one who had taken a shot at him—and he wondered how much longer he could do this. Doubt wasn’t something he allowed to creep into his mind too often, even Alfred had backed off from reminding him of the many dangers that he faced on a daily basis, including becoming too exposed and having his secret revealed. Then where would he hide? Where would Alfred hide?

Bruce had safeguarded against this, a possible inevitability, by distancing himself from everyone around him. If the worst happened, it would all be on him, and Alfred, God bless him, had been willing to accept the risks. If Bruce Wayne died alone and unloved, who cared? His goal wasn’t to be loved, it was to eradicate the vermin in Gotham, or to at least inspire good, daring people to their own capacities, to show them that they could stand up against the likes of the Falcones and the Stewart-Paulsons and the Jokers of the world.

He pulled himself out of the reverie, and opened the black duffel bag to dress himself in the casual wear he’d set aside for himself. Once dressed, he packed up all of the batgear (another of Alfred’s coined terms) and shouldered it. He arranged the oven and everything in the break room back into place, and then walked outside, to the other end of the junkyard where his fire-red Dodge Stealth awaited him.

Bruce looked up at the sky, took a deep breath of the fresh air. Morning was almost here.

* * *

WHEN HE GOT home, he didn’t fall asleep immediately, although he certainly wanted to. Alfred was asleep, though, but that wouldn’t last long. He’d be up at the crack of dawn, floating around the mansion and getting to work on various tasks.

Bruce went into the rebuilt study, lifted the statue of Theodore Roosevelt at the center of the bookcase, and pressed the button that slid the bookcase sideways. He stepped into what he had had the builders construct as a panic room for him, directly over the largest entrance of the caves that ran underneath Wayne Manor. He’d told them to leave the hole open, and while they advised him against it, they had ultimately allowed the millionaire to do what he wanted with his money, and left the hole exposed. Bruce had later put a spiral staircase in place for Alfred and a pulley system to lower large items down. Next he’d put in an old fireman’s pole going from the panic room all the way down into the upper chamber of the cave. It was easier than getting an elevator in here himself, and hiring someone to do it would only allow them closer looks into what he was doing in the cave.

When his feet landed in the cave, Bruce stood there for a moment just listening to the quiet flapping of wings all throughout the darkness. All around him, a colony of bats slept, though one wouldn’t know it because they were well away from the halogen lights that lit the main path down the steel steps he’d put in place piece by piece, way back when he’d launched this whole project. If not for Alfred, general maintenance on them wouldn’t get done as often.

Going down the steps, he stepped over the large cables that stemmed from the latest countersurveillance systems he’d installed, those that wrapped around the stalactites and stalagmites throughout the cave. Bruce had integrated piezoelectric oscillators into the walls; those were used by clandestine agencies to render any laser-acoustic surveillance from outside useless.

The steps bottomed out fifty feet down before opening into a great, wide expanse, most of which he kept absolutely dark. Water dripped from the stalactites, and this time of year with the rains there came the soft trickling of the underground river a quarter of a mile down the western corridor.

If ever Bruce needed to flee down in here, or if he was ever cornered in his own house, he knew the ways out better than anyone, and wasn’t going to give them any means to stalk him in his own turf. He’d mapped out most of the cave in his head, and only Alfred had it memorized as much—or, it was quite possible that the butler had it memorized more.

As he walked up to the main dais where his largest workstation was, a camp of bats fluttered. A couple of them swooped down around him, as if to say hello, and then darted for the sanctuary of the dark. The workstation itself was beneath a large plastic canopy, which protected all of the equipment from bat droppings. Most of the bats remained at the far end of the immense cave, keeping away from all the lights and the human activity.

As Bruce came near his rolling chair, he noticed one of the bats lying on the floor of the dais, unmoving. Another one dead. This wasn’t uncommon in here, of course. Usually, if Alfred spotted any of them near the workstations, he just cleaned them up himself, but Bruce wasn’t averse to taking care of the small bodies. He lifted this one up gently, walked a few steps into the darkness, and placed it within a large bin along with a few others. Every so often, Alfred took the whole bin out of the cave and buried the bats in the woods behind Wayne Manor.

Bruce went over to one of the workbenches and took one of the other GTEM guns and tossed it into a gear bag to take with him later, then he returned to the dais, and tapped the button that took each of the computers out of sleep mode. Seventeen separate monitors lit up; the largest and main screen in the dead center, and eight others on the right and left side of it. All of them were hooked up to different computers that were created for very specific needs—face-recognition and fingerprinting on one, criminal profiles on another, et cetera—and yet all of them were networked together with a special Cray computer, each one complete with several petaflops of processing power, able to perform quadrillions of operations per second. With 150 gigabytes of online capacity in a mass-storage system, advanced linked nodes, audio- and facial-recognition software, dedicated microcomputer modules with a circuit of processors and databases programmed with multiple code-breaking and counter-cryptography subroutines, and multithreaded architecture computers, all feeding, processing, calculating, and cross-referencing across a wide spectrum of data, it was as good as any system the CIA currently had.

Wayne Enterprises, of course, had built such computers as part of an experimental project with the CIA. The Agency occasionally went to WE for upgrades, but only after Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox had thoroughly tested with the equipment themselves.

“Okay,” he sighed, leaning back in his seat and placing his keyboard in his lap. Bruce started typing, and what he typed showed up on the main screen. On one screen, he pulled up CNN’s website and read through the headlines of the day while he cued up some light, symphonic music. After about thirty minutes of bringing himself up to speed about the world’s events, and making notes to come back to follow up on others, he looked over at GCN, both the website and the TV station itself, in order to see what was being reported so far on the Muslim Center attack.

Gotham City News had run with the story all night, and once they ran out of new things to report, they went to the analysis phase of the story, as all stations were doing. A couple of eyewitnesses who’d been far enough away from the blast kept recounting their stories over and over again, and many people were raging in the comments section of each story—Bruce normally didn’t like reading comments sections, but sometimes it was helpful to see what the general public was saying—and found that most people were blaming racists and “counter-terrorists” with exacting revenge on the Muslim community.

They have no idea what they’re talking about, Bruce thought, pulling the pieces of paper that Gordon had given him out of his pocket. He watched a few more minutes of the news, and then muted everything but Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

He first tried searching for the riddle online, but just like Gordon had said, this poem was nowhere to be found on the Internet, not even a single line like it, which meant that it was completely original. Their unsub had created this challenge himself, which meant solving it fell completely on the shoulders of anyone reading it; no cheating.

Riddles were of two types, Bruce knew: enigmas and conundrums. Enigmas were those puzzles with answers expressed either in metaphorical or allegorical language and required ingenuity for their solution, whereas conundrums relied on puns either in their questions or in their answers.

Bruce took out a notepad and wrote the poem out by hand, just to see if that did anything, and also typed it out onto his computer screen, examining them both.

I am uttered first, before all others like me,

These others are my twins, yet not exactly like me,

In this poem, there are fifty-two like me,

In myself, there are, in fact, three of me,

What am I, exactly?

He sat there a moment, marshalling his thoughts and wondering where this might lead, fearing the answer. He wrote out the numbers “3” and “52”, since he found those the most curious clues in the riddle. His goal was to somehow find three of something within the answer itself, and yet fifty-two of the same thing contained within the poem.

He started at the beginning. I am uttered first. He thought about any such riddle that placed the answer itself within the riddle to throw the thinker off, so he wondered if the answer was “I”. With his pencil tip he counted the I’s in the poem, but there were only eleven of them, and the poem specified fifty-two.

Fifty-two like me, he thought.

The single most important thing to know when trying to solve a riddle was to realize the whole thing was designed to trick you, to deceive—keeping that in mind, it was vital to look for any language that could have multiple meanings, and all the while one had to guard against one’s own assumptions. Riddles almost always had multiple lines, so it was best to break them down into manageable pieces, and then search carefully for tricky subject matter. Every clue was designed by the riddler to mislead. A common trick was to give ordinary objects and actions alternative meanings, as in the riddle, “What goes up, but never comes down?” It’s natural to at first imagine something being flung up into the sky, but one had to think of other things that go up in order to solve it, not just objects that can be thrown. Ergo, an obscure thought such as “your age” can be the answer.

In myself, there are three of me. That was actually the line that intrigued Bruce the most. That suggested that the answer defined what it was made of. Letters? he wondered. No, there were more than three letters in “letters”, and far more than fifty-two letters in the whole poem. Vowels? he wondered. He counted them up. No, that didn’t fit, either.

Consonants? No, there were more than three consonants in the word “consonants”, so that wouldn’t work, either. The letter N caught his attention, though, since there were three of those in “consonants.” He counted the total N’s in the entire poem. But that didn’t work, either, there were nowhere near fifty-two of them, and it didn’t make sense with the first line, I am uttered first, before all others like me.

He sat there cogitating for the better part of an hour, chasing down other possibilities and inspirations, always coming to a dead end. He sighed.

Not consonants, not vowels. So what, then? Commas? No. Question marks? Nope. Punctuation marks? Wrong again. How about total words? Uh-uh. In none of the cases did either of these add up to either three or fifty-two. He tapped his pencil at the side of his notepad. C’mon, Bruce, think outside the box here. He closed his eyes, took a deep, steadying breath, and let it out slowly. I am uttered first, before all others like me. He then went through a mental exercise, which took him through what it actually felt like to utter something, to speak. He thought about the very first action of opening the mouth, activating the vocal cords, and then pronouncing the first syllable. When I utter the first syllable, what do I do in that action? he asked himself. He started to give that some thought, and then went back a step.

Wait a minute. He took the pencil back through the poem, and started counting. Then, he counted the number of syllables in the word “syllable,” and smiled down at the notepad. What am I, exactly? It was there, and, like any riddle, solving it was its own little reward.

“A syllable,” he said aloud to the empty cave. It was, after all, uttered first. Uttered before all of its other twins, which were identical to it in that they were all syllables and yet they were not exactly alike, as the poem said, because many syllables sounded different. There were fifty-two of them in the whole poem, and three syllables in “syllable.”

He used his cursor on his main computer screen to move through each syllable, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

I am uttered first, before all others like me, = 12 syllables

These others are my twins, yet not exactly like me, = 13 syllables

In this poem, there are fifty-two like me = 11 syllables

In myself, there are, in fact, three of me, = 10 syllables

What am I, exactly? = 6 syllables

“Cute,” Bruce said. Now to put everything he knew together, to see if this meant anything. He started again by both writing out the individual riddles and their answers on his notepad and typing onto the computer screen. As a rule for now, he would keep them in the chronological order that they had been given.

* Math

* A syllable

* Lepton

Bruce reclined in his seat, and sighed. “Okay, you like to play games. Are you playing games with these answers? Are they leading us anywhere?” He figured Gordon might not be too off the mark when he compared this fellow with the Zodiac killer of the 1960s and 70s. Certainly he had killed and left a kind of calling card, only he had used other people to do it in every single case, it seemed. Enrique Gutierrez had said he hadn’t known what he was getting into, and the Batman had been inclined to believe him. Patrick Tralley had been chosen—for what reason they didn’t really know yet, maybe because the killer had come across him and simply found him easy to manipulate?—and had been used against his will.

The attack on the power grid of 78th Street might have been done by one hacker, but Bruce knew that hackers, growing ever more powerful and innumerable these days, now favored working in groups so they could lean on each other and swap tips and information, making it harder than ever for the police to nail them down. He probably had help on that one, too, Bruce wagered.

A few bats fluttered behind him. He heard footsteps, as well. But here in his sanctum, he didn’t have to flinch or be on constant guard. It would be Alfred, no doubt. Indeed, his breakfast was brought to him, still warm. The butler stepped up onto the dais and left the tray on the table beside his chair, stepping away wordlessly.

Bruce glanced over his shoulder, saw the old man in retreat back up the steps, headed back to clean up the manor. He almost said something, but decided against it.

The riddles were in front of him, staring back at him from the screens. These could just be harmless riddles, left at the scene of harmful crimes. But that didn’t seem to make sense. This person, or these people, whoever he/she/they were, had gone through a lot of trouble today. Lots of schemes had come together, and he didn’t think they had just left riddles behind to rub it in. Well, not completely to rub it in, but Bruce was certain there was a heavy level of narcissism at work here. He wants—needs—attention. That’s why he did this. Anybody could’ve just written the riddles in graffiti, but who would’ve paid attention then? No one. That’s why he delivered the riddles using unusual delivery methods. He needs an audience.

Bruce considered the answers. Math, a syllable, and lepton. Am I being asked to figure out what they all have in common? He played with that notion for a bit, and then went through various Internet searches and played games with the words. They obviously weren’t palindromes and didn’t spell anything at all when spelled backwards. Adding the letters together produced 19. Was that significant? He pulled up a map of Gotham, and tried to figure out if anything jumped out at him, such as any events taking place on the 19th of this month at apartment number 19 on 19th Street, or something like that.

That was getting a little too obscure. So, don’t overthink it, just try something simple. So, he tried to work with exactly what he had been given to work with—the letters themselves. Forget the words and their meanings, he figured. There were other sorts of riddling concepts, like classic anagram games.

“Well, let’s see what we have here.” He went to an online anagram server—the Internet had several providers of for that sort of service—and he put in the words he’d been given…and it promptly produced exactly 78,949 variations. Bruce scrolled down, and sighed.

A Alphabets Lent Molly

A Meatball Spent Holly

A Playable Tells Month

A Bathmat Lonely Spell

A Blatantly Help Moles

A Ballast Helmet Pylon

A Banally Pellets Moth

A Manta Potbelly Hells

A Lable Staple Monthly

A Ballet Mentally Shop

On and on and on, a sea of permutations and expressions scrolled down. This could take a while. It could especially take a while once Bruce considered that all of these anagrams probably didn’t take into account the possibility of full names. For example, just looking at the possibilities on paper, he figured he could make the name “Helen Molly”, although that left a few odd letters for any sort of name he could configure. So, he ran those letters through a foreign name search program he knew was on one of his computers, one which he’d rarely used, and found the rare Ukranian family name “Tabaplats”. So, was this unsub saying that he was going to target someone named Helen Molly Tabaplats, or Molly Helen Tabaplats?

Bruce doubted it, but checked Gotham’s phone directory anyway. Nothing. He then went broader, and, as far as he could tell, there was no phone number listed by anyone with the name Tabaplats in the entire U.S.

What if I dropped the “a” from “a syllable” and just had the answer as “syllable”, a single-word answer like the other two? When he tried it, it still produced almost as many anagram possibilities. He didn’t think that would work, anyway. After all, in order to remove the letter A from the lepton riddle, this riddler had asked, “What is my name?” That prevented the answer from being “a lepton” and made it just “Lepton.” So then, the first “a” in “a syllable” was most likely important to the answer. But that still put him back at square one.

So what next?

Bruce rubbed his eyes. Sleep might have taken him before now, if he hadn’t also paid to have himself put through sleep deprivation just to test and train himself to deal with it. The piping hot coffee on the tray that Alfred had left helped out a lot, but with his mind racing and now actively engaged, he could probably stay up for another two days working on this.

Probably best if I get some rest, though. Inspiration had a way of coming to those who were well rested. And there was always the chance that more puzzles were forthcoming, and if so, then that meant that these words, if they have any other meaning, wouldn’t reveal that meaning to him until he had them all.

* * *

ALFRED PENNYWORTH WAS in the dining hall speaking with the team of eight lawncare professionals who took two days each month to attack the grass, hedges, and trees all around Wayne Manor. Alfred couldn’t do it all by himself. Once upon a time, he had been able to help out with most of Wayne Manor’s operations to some degree. These days, he had trouble enough keeping up with the interior of the mansion, and all of the accoutrements that his old ward and present employer had come to rely on for his work.

“Please be sure you get the hedges on the far end of the property,” he laughed. “I can’t blame you for missing them the last time, they’re clear on the other side of the gazebo and it can be difficult getting around there because of the work being done on the infinity swimming pool, but you should be able to get there now without stepping in anything important.”

“Yes, sir,” said the team’s boss man. “Anything else?”

“Yes. If you would please contact your brother Harold for me, and tell him to check the termite bait stations around the mansion here and the two guest houses. I believe it’s time that they were switched out.”

“He’s on vacation this week, but I can do that for you.”

Alfred made a note on his notepad—Master Bruce had given him a digital day planner, but Alfred couldn’t figure out how to use the blasted things. “Much appreciated. I’ll tip you for the service, my friend.”

“Thanks, Mr. Pennyworth.”

“Thank you, lads. You did a good job. I’m glad I called you fellows all those months ago. The last group of guys just couldn’t get their heads wrapped around this place.” And understandably so, he thought. Wayne Manor was, after all, a 4,791,000-square-foot area, more than 109 acres, and sprawled all across it was a tennis court, racquetball court, weightlifting gym, gazebo, ballroom, a vita course that ran through the woods, a clubhouse (which hardly saw any use except Master Bruce’s private training with self-defense instructors from the Executive Protection Specialists, Inc.), a duck pond with an adjoining picnic area, a garage filled with (at present) thirty-two different kinds of automobiles and motorcycles, and a newly rebuilt indoor and outdoor swimming pool.

Alfred glanced up to see Master Bruce emerging from the study, and he nodded towards Alfred and gave him a brief smile. “I’ll leave you lads to it,” he said to the group, and turned to intercept his young master. “Master Bruce, you still haven’t slept yet. That’s not healthy. You’re still relatively young, so you can get away with it for now, but that lack of sleep adds up, sir. When you get on my age, you’ll wish you’d caught up on some of it sooner.”

“I had a lot of busy work in the night, Alfred,” he said, his voice still a whisper, reminiscent of the tone he took on whenever he donned the mantle of his other self. It sounded like he had a sore throat. Alfred made a mental note to give him something for that. “And I’m still not caught up on all of it.” Master Bruce kept it all in vagaries, as he usually did in the daytime when there were so many workers coming and going, even though most of them stayed outside the mansion and regarded the weirdo billionaire as possessing a strange mélange of partygoer attitude and hermit tendencies.

“Every working man has to sleep sometime, sir,” he said, joining the younger man for a stroll through the house and up the stairs. Every step they took, Alfred noticed something else about the house that needed work done to it. Even now, as they walked and chatted, he noticed a slight cant to the banister, making a mental note to have it fixed within the week, and he also glanced up at the chandelier overhead, realizing he hadn’t dusted it in nearly a month.

“Is that your secret to staying so youthful?” Master Bruce asked.

“An old friend of mine told me that the secret to immortality was to stay busy and yet know when it was time to recharge.”

“Oh, yeah? Who told you that?”

“Your father.”

Master Bruce glanced at him as they reached the top of the stairs. “Two decades later, and he’s still teaching me.”

“How do you think I felt? I was twenty years his senior and he was constantly giving me advice.” Alfred chuckled. “Always one for platitudes and anecdotes, your father. Well, at least around me and your mother anyway. Other than to us, he was a very private man, of course.” He glanced at the young man that he still considered his own young ward. “I don’t think the apple fell far from the tree there.”

Of course, Thomas Wayne had offered Alfred advice that he rarely shared with anyone, including a bit that he followed to this day. Once, he recalled, during the time when Master Thomas had been working on transitioning his life from that of a surgeon to one of a man fixing the family industries that he’d inherited, which happened to be near the brink of ruin, Alfred had said to him, “It’s got to be a strain on you, sir, dropping your life as a surgeon to become something else. I mean, if you don’t mind my saying so, you look awfully tired most of the time. You’re having to learn a great deal about your family and how they ran things, and how to fix their mistakes. That’s a lot to take on.” Master Thomas and looked at him and said, “Alfred, what I’m learning is that these people on the boards of my family’s businesses don’t need any help in their drive—they are very driven to succeed—but what they need is guidance. I may not be up to speed on their corporate language yet, but in the meantime I feel I can guide them to make better decisions. Moral decisions. A lot of corruption in the upper echelons nearly brought the whole thing down around my family’s ears. If it’s to be me to inherit it, I need to do the best that I can do.”

Then, Thomas Wayne had said something else. “Men—and women, too—we can all be obsessive about something. It’s not for us to change each other’s obsessions. But what we can offer is guidance.”

That had been near the beginning of his tenure with the Wayne family, and to this day he had never forgotten that piece of advice, in particularly with this, the last the son of the Wayne bloodline. People like Master Bruce didn’t lack for drive. They were incredibly driven, and they would not be dissuaded from pursuing what they were after. What they needed was guidance along the path, a constant reminder of what their original goals were so that they didn’t stray so far off they become lost to themselves and their ideals.

“Sir, I’m to tell you that you’ve been invited to join the mayor and his family on the opening night of Haley’s Circus,” Alfred said, changing the subject. “It arrives in town this week. You are to be the guest of both him and Anthony Zucco.”

“Tony Zucco?” Bruce said. “The mayor’s still chummy with him?” He didn’t like that one bit, and Alfred knew why. Zucco had been suspected of running several illegal gambling rackets and loan shark operations throughout Gotham a few years back. He’d beat all the charges, but only barely, and then he’d gone low-key and stayed there, although, as Batman, Master Bruce had heard rumors about Zucco’s involvement with other known, disreputable sorts, but had yet to find anything conclusive. The fact that Mayor Walden would even be seen in the same room with Zucco did not bode well. “Tell them that I must respectfully decline.”

“Yes sir, but I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the Policeman’s Ball happening later this week,” Alfred went on. “I’ve received answers to all the invitations, and it appears almost everyone will be able to attend, including the police commissioner and the mayor, and many of them have expressed hopes that you will be attending because, well, you’ve donated a great deal to the city recently, and the ball is being in the manor’s celebration hall, so it would be nice to have a host who appears from time to time corporeally.”

Master Bruce managed a beleaguered smiled. “As long as no photographers or journalists are here from the Informer,” he said. He stepped inside the master bedroom, removed his shirt, and tossed it onto the back of the chair at the armoire. And Alfred winced when he saw the swollen place on his left shoulder. “They’re only stirring things up, and showing no signs of letting up, either. They’re loving this. All of this. It’s selling their papers like hotcakes.” By this he obviously meant the state of things in the city. Alfred knew this was a touchy subject, because Master Bruce felt responsible. And, since Alfred couldn’t disagree with him, he kept silent on the matter.

“I’ll see to it that no one from the Informer, or any other news rag, appears at the ball, sir. Do you wish to use the same security company we did the last time?”

Master Bruce walked over to the large bay windows, and used the remote control to close the large black curtains. The sun was coming up, and it looked like he was about ready for some sleep. Finally, Alfred thought.

“Sure. Whatever you think is best, Alfred. I trust you.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his shoes, then propped his elbows on his knees and rubbed his face in his hands.

“Is something else bothering you, sir?” he asked in that tone he had rehearsed a million times before, the one that sounded more helpful than intrusive.

“My mind’s still working on something, that’s all. Can you bring me up a glass of water and set it on the table there? I need to pass out for a while.”

“Of course, sir. And about time, too.”

“Alfred?”

“Yes, sir?”

Master Bruce looked over his shoulder at him. “Are you still up for…this?” he asked. “I know we don’t ever have much time to talk about things like this, especially here recently, but I just gotta know. All that you do, all that we do…it’s a lot.” He gave Alfred a most serious look. “Say the word, and we’re done.”

Alfred took a moment to consider that, then said, “I am ever your man, sir.” That was all he would say. The choice was his. Alfred had made his own, to follow him on whatever course he felt was best, to be his confidant, and to guide him at every moment the younger man looked like he needed it.

Master Bruce said nothing, only nodded.

Alfred went to retrieve the glass of water from the kitchen, making a mental note to mop the floors later in the day after he finished retrieving Master Bruce’s suits from the laundry mat. By the time he returned to the master bedroom, his young ward was passed out. However, as Alfred crept in to place the glass of water on the table as he’d asked, and then set some medicine beside in case he had a cold; his voice had sounded rough. He spotted Master Bruce’s right eye slowly slide open. Just in case he’s waking up in somebody’s custody, he thought, and moved quietly back to the door as though he hadn’t seen the trick. If he keeps on like this, he’ll never be able to sleep normally, not in his whole life.

Alfred shut the door gently behind him, leaving his master in total darkness. For a brief moment, he considered his time with Thomas and Martha Wayne. It had been many great years with them, they were by far the best and most benevolent employers he’d ever had, admirably leading their son by example, grooming him at a young age not only in matters of the family business, but also in morals and ethics.

Now, he considered himself as he was now, at the other end of all their work. Almost all of what they had planned together as a family had gone wrong, and Wayne Enterprises had suffered for a time in their absence. Then, the son had risen, he had taken up the mantle and had gone so much further than either his mother or father could have imagined.

As the young man’s legal guardian, Alfred had watched Master Bruce develop as a man, before honing various skills and traveling the world to find his place in it. In the end, he had come back home, back to Gotham City, and back to Alfred. And now, they were more or less partners in a way that Alfred never had been with Master Thomas and Miss Martha.

A chance encounter, a response to an advertisement looking for a butler and part-time assistant, the agency I worked for at the time selected me to send to the Waynes, and now, here I am. Alfred’s own father had given him another piece of advice he had never forgotten: “Life takes you many places, son.” He thought he’d learned that in his travels as a butler to many and more international businessmen and businesswomen, but it wasn’t until just now, in this moment, for whatever reason, he realized the true extent of his father’s words.

Alfred suddenly recalled that the plan he’d had earlier this morning for rearranging some of the equipment in Master Bruce’s locker down in the cave, and went to do that before he forgot again.

* * *

BRUCE NEVER COMPLETELY slept anymore. Instead, he slept like a man deployed in a warzone, always ready, always half listening for sounds of conflict even while he slipped into his dreams. His dreams weren’t the stuff of nightmares—at least, not common nightmares—and while his brain did recall his parents and even reenact their deaths from time to time, that wasn’t common. Instead, he saw shadows, bats, faceless criminals that were still out there, still on the loose. Sometimes, he reached out with a gloved hand, only to have the criminals evaporate into mist or dust when he laid his hands on them.

He could never really get the streets off his mind. Like a writer that never truly left the story finished, Bruce always wanted to get back to the players in his shadowy world. He wanted to know what Gordon had found out by now with the evidence he’d given him. He wanted to work a bit more on what he knew of Falcone, and how he might be getting messages out into the streets and into the hands of his consigliere, Stewart-Paulson, and the mob’s other lieutenants.

He opened his eyes, not fully awake, but mostly. It was nearly pitch-black in the bedroom, but his eyes adjusted well to the darkness and were used to picking out the shapes even without the help of electronic night-vision settings. He recalled his training, learning how a person’s natural night-vision all depended on how much rhodopsin was present in the optic rods, which along with the cones fed the retina its image. Bruce had been taught all about rhodopsin, or what some called “visual purple”, in order to understand its principle, in order to survive.

Principles, he thought, associative thinking taking him down one train of thought to another. He thought about the other principles that had been handed down to him, from those that had come from his mother and father, to those that came from his unassuming silver-haired ally who’d just left the room. He wondered at the conflicts between some of those principles, and wondered if Alfred or Gordon or Lucius struggled with the same problems at night.

Thinking about Lucius reminded him, he really needed to go ahead and approve Lucius’s pay raise by the end of the month now that he was at the top of the company’s charter. It was the least Lucius deserved for all his help. Also, thinking of Lucius brought to mind another problem, that of acquiring the prototype helicopter that had been too expensive a prospect for DARPA, somehow getting it to Wayne Manor secretly, and then to the concealed helipad at the far end of the property. Bruce had seen the military turning down the potential replacement for the Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk a mile away, and had already taken actions to bring it into his possession—he would be needing it now that driving around in the streets wasn’t always an option, what with the Gotham City Police Department still after him.

Bruce had a place all ready to accept the chopper, which had been dubbed the SC-220 Bat Hawk (completely by coincidence and named after the hawk in Asia that was so named because it preyed mainly on bats). The chamber he had ready for it was built when most of Wayne Manor had undergone reconstruction—using the excuse of a potential secondary panic room, with opening bay doors for large numbers of guests in case of nuclear fallout, the large compartment was underneath the tennis court and led down into a chamber that Bruce had worked on for two months on his own to connect it to another upper chamber of the cave, allowing him clandestine access if need ever arose. No one had really pressed him on why he was installing it—he was a billionaire willing to spend gobs of money, and they believed he was just overly paranoid.

Now the only question was, how to get the Bat Hawk to Wayne Manor and into the cave without anyone noticing?

His eyes slowly closed. Sleep was now about to fully take him.

Thinking of the cave returned his thoughts to his lab and primary workstation, and the investigations he was working on down there, including finding out how Mulcoyisy Stewart-Paulson was able to move around the city, conducting Gotham’s criminals like an orchestra and recruiting new talent from the Juarezes—and now, it seemed, the Shukurs, if Enrique Gutierrez could be believed—and yet not actually materializing in any place where witnesses could give a consistent description.

Thinking on this returned him to the riddles, the violence behind two of the crimes and the meticulousness of portions of the schemes. He closed his eyes, thinking…Lepton…

…lepton…math…lepton…a syllable…a lepton syllable?

He opened his eyes, not with a jolt, but with slow, dawning realization. Bruce had seen the words rearranging in front of him, then the letters. They all jumbled together, scattering to the winds. And then, he had seen himself crystal clear in front of his many computer monitors down in the caverns, just typing it out, and after only a few tries, it had come to him.

Hypnagogia, they called it. It was that transitional period between wakefulness and sleep, and it often brought about valuable insights and solutions to a nagging problem, like when the chemist August Kekulé realized that the structure of benzene was a closed ring after he fell asleep in front of a fire and saw molecules forming into snakes, one of them grabbing its own tail in its mouth.

Bruce was certain he had just experienced a hypnagogic moment. He stood up, and walked out of his bedroom, still shirtless but in his pants at least. Once he hit the hallway, he jogged to the steps, and hurried down them. He went into the study to pick up a piece of paper and a pencil, and sat in the chair behind the old desk that his father had sat at many a late night, working out payroll issues or deciding on healthcare plans for the company’s employees.

Bruce wrote the words out on a legal pad:

lepton a syllable math

He then ticked the letters off one by one as he used them to reconfigure the message. Once he was done, he just sat and stared at the legal pad. His brain hadn’t completely awakened yet, and on the trip down he hadn’t quite believed what he was thinking, but now it leapt up at him, almost undeniable.

Is it a coincidence? Bruce thought. Then he considered what the odds were that these letters could be put in the order he’d written, yet weren’t meant to be. The odds were astronomical. No, not a coincidence. He’d been on the right path when he’d considered anagrams, he just hadn’t thought to insert himself. He continued looking down at the message, truly stunned perhaps for the first time in years. The implications of this, obviously, were many.

Hello, Batman, let’s play.

“Master Bruce?” said a voice from someplace. “Were you not sleeping well, sir? Is something wrong?”

Bruce laid the legal pad back down slowly, and leaned back in his chair. Between his weary mind and his befuddlement, he didn’t really register a need to respond to Alfred immediately, nor to look around for him, either. He stared out at the walls and the thousands of books on the shelves all around him, wondering, My God, what have I started?