Wayne of Gotham (6 page)

Don't let yourself get distracted. Hold onto the greater picture and let the pieces fall into place when you see where they fit.

He pulled the card out from the pocket of his jacket and set it down in front of him. Then he pulled on the gloves of the virtual interface. The array of screens awoke in front of him and he started pulling data out of the air with his hands. It shifted in the space in front of him as he examined it. The first was the card itself. He pulled the chemical analysis of the card and the printing which displayed in a cascade to his left.

The laminate coat over the cards was actually a bonded protein complex, permeable and releasing its bond under heat. It was an unusual substance for a card laminate, and understanding its properties would take some additional consideration. He let the sequencer continue chewing on that one while he moved on.

The paper itself was a plastic derivative rather than actual paper. The grain was a fine embossed simulation of the feel of paper down to a very fine surface level, and a comparison of the card he had pulled from the Scarface dummy with the one he took from Alfred showed their texture patterns were identical down to microscopic levels.

That's an unusual amount of effort for an invitation. Fine detail …

He pulled the high-resolution optical scans of the cards to examine the printing side by side, looking for variations in the ink.

There were none. No bleeding, print smudges, or blur variations one might expect in a mass-production press run. The printing was identical right down to the highest magnification of the—

The highest magnification …

He pushed the scan in as far as the magnification would go.

The ink was not contiguous. It was a half-tone imaging at the most miniscule microprinting scale he had ever encountered. Each of the letters was made up of a series of spaced dots. Not only were there distinct dots, but the dots appeared to be the same size in each case, although their positions and the spaces between the dots varied.

No … they don't vary at all. They are an entirely uniform spacing of black dots and white spaces. It's a digital stream. It's data!

He pushed the chemical analysis aside and pulled down a graphic parser module, coupling it to the cryptography node. The parser would scan the micro image into a data stream, and then the cryptographic software would process it searching for recognizable patterns. The graphic parsing would be almost instantaneous, but the cryptographic node could take days to chew through the data before coming up with possible recognizable patterns. Bruce set up the parameters, started the program run, stripped off the gloves, and spun around in his chair.

He had barely started to stand when the consol began chiming.

I must have made a mistake in the comparison loop sequence.

He sat back down and turned to the consol, pulling the gloves back on in annoyance. The display was flashing “Run complete.” He reached for the image, tapped it, and waited for the garbage data to display so he could push it into the trash.

“What the hell?” Bruce muttered, staring at the display. It was a congruous PDF file.

“It can't be that simple.” His eyes narrowing, Bruce reached forward and tapped on the file to open it.

It sprang open.

Gotham City Police Department

Case Number: VR/01/04/05/1689

Investigating Officer: Detective J. Gordon

Vice & Racketeering Division

June 28, 1974

Two days after my parents died. Two days after I died with them.

Bruce leaned forward, reading the fuzzy type on the digital page floating in front of him.

Telephone tip received from one Marion Richter / 1429 Pearl Street / Upper West Side re: Wayne killing. Partner Detective T. Holloway and I conducted the interview in Richter's apartment at 10:36 a.m. Richter asserted the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne had been contract killing motivated by Thomas Wayne's alleged business with her father, Dr. Ernst Richter (deceased). She further claimed Thomas Wayne had ties to the Moxon mob and had been conspiring with them over several decades. She presented six of her father's bound journals in evidence, as well as a number of contracts and papers that appear to have been signed by both Wayne and her father. She also included a number of bank deposits and account statements indicating when payments to her father and, after his death, to her and her young sister, Amanda, had been made by Thomas Wayne through the intermediary of the Wayne House managers, Jarvis Pennyworth and subsequently his son, Alfred Pennyworth. These items were catalogued by Holloway and accepted.

Bruce sat back in his chair, his frown deepening.

No wonder, then, that Alfred came down to the gatehouse to see to Amanda Richter personally. But I've never heard of these Richters before, and certainly not in conjunction with my parents' deaths. Why didn't Alfred tell me about this
?

He read on.

Miss Richter further stated that, according to her father's journals, Thomas Wayne also kept extensive journals of his own that could corroborate her testimony. We concluded the interview with Marion Richter at 11:46 a.m.

We then proceeded to Wayne Manor in Bristol with the intention of interviewing Alfred Pennyworth regarding the payments made to the Richters and the alleged journals. Mr. Pennyworth consented to the interview, which we conducted in the library at Wayne Manor. Alfred acknowledges knowing the Richters and conveying financial assistance to the Richters at the behest of his employer, Thomas Wayne. He denied the existence of journals by Thomas Wayne in any form, electronic or otherwise. (Search warrant filed / pending.) He further denies any association between the Moxon mob and the …

The typewriter text ended at the bottom of the page.

Bruce stretched his hand out, tapping the document to flip to the next page.

Nothing happened.

He looked at the lower right corner of the displayed page. It read “1 / 14,” meaning that he had read page one of fourteen pages. He quickly checked the file size. The single page was all the data that existed in the microprint on the card.

Bruce cross-referenced the case file number against the Police Evidence Archives database.

The file referred to in the document was missing from the archives.

Bruce pressed his hands together, his forefingers tented in front of his pursed lips. He reached forward, stabbing at the intercom switch on the console.

“Alfred.”

“Yes, Master Wayne.”

“You mentioned something about breakfast earlier … and I feel like we should talk.”

“Of course, sir,” Alfred's voice was smooth as cream.

“I'll be right up then.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Alfred responded at once. “I apologize that your meal will be ready a few minutes later than I had anticipated. I fear I am required to run to the market for some fresh cilantro. It shall be another hour, sir.”

Cilantro? In an hour
?

“Oh, that's quite all right, Alfred,” Bruce said in practiced, even tones. “I'm more of a brunch man myself. By the way, was there someone at the back gate just now?”

There's a pause in his response. He never pauses … never hesitates.

“No, sir,” Alfred replied brightly. “Not that I am aware of.”

“I just thought I heard the proximity alarm is all.”

“No, sir,” Alfred replied. “Perhaps a malfunction. I shall look into it at once.”

“Of course,” Bruce replied. “Let me know when breakfast is served.”

Bruce released the intercom button, a dark shadow covering his face as he again sat back in his chair to consider.

The evidence file is missing. Thirteen pages of Gordon's report are missing. Alfred is lying to me about Amanda Richter. My parents' lives are missing and now the why behind their deaths is missing, too.

Reluctantly, Bruce reached forward, spun the display down to a file he had long ago closed.

BC001–0001

Wayne, Thomas & Martha

G.C.P.D. Headquarters / Gotham / 9:07 p.m. / Present Day

James Gordon stood on the roof of police headquarters facing the high-load circuit breaker box. The lock was dangling from the open panel door. It had long since stopped swinging. The night was chilly, his breath forming clouds in front of him as he stood in the clear autumn night.

How the hell did it come to this
?

Gotham City police commissioner James Gordon knew the answer better than anyone else. He had grown up with his brother Roger in Chicago, the two of them playing “cops and robbers” up and down the block of their brownstone-lined Lincoln Park neighborhood. It had not mattered much to the boys then who played the “cop” and who played the “robber,” and they often tossed a coin to see which one would be which.

It was not until much later in his life that Gordon—a newly minted police lieutenant moving his wife and son to a new job in Gotham—discovered just how arbitrary that coin toss was in the G.C.P.D. His first partner on the job was Arthur Flass—a cop as dirty as they came. Gordon dutifully reported his partner's extortion racket to then-commissioner Gillian Loeb. He soon had his naïveté beaten out of him by a number of his brother officers wielding baseball bats; it seemed that Loeb was skimming a cut of his own off the top of every corrupt cop in town. The beating only managed to forge the young lieutenant into tougher steel. Gordon became known as an “untouchable” cop, but with Loeb running the police and his hand firmly in control of the Internal Affairs Division, it was obvious that the career of James Gordon had died in the baseball bat beating even if his body had not.

Then Gordon's fortunes all changed at the hands of a different kind of bat.

Batman had been hailed as a valiant citizen by Commissioner Loeb when he first arrived. Loeb believed this Batman could be bought and controlled just like nearly everyone else, and his antics were a nice distraction from the commissioner's more shadow-prone deals. Loeb had not counted on this “nut-job in a cape” actually prying into his own racket. So when “the Bat” opened up the commissioner's can of worms, Loeb responded by branding him a criminal, vigilante, anarchist, and terrorist. Batman became Gotham's most-wanted criminal.

And who better to bring down such a menace to law and order than the squeaky-clean, untouchable Detective Lieutenant James Gordon?

It had been like trying to hose down a fire with gasoline.

It was the beginning of a volatile friendship.

They were different men with different approaches to the problem, but they both agreed on what the problem was. Gordon could never condone Batman acting outside the process of law. Batman was often frustrated by Gordon's insistence on a process that so often thwarted justice. But together they managed to turn the tables on both Flass and, eventually, Loeb, bringing both of them down.

Batman, it seemed, was the salvation of Gordon's career, so long as Gordon could justify to himself allowing the Batman to exist. It required him to compromise his principles in order to achieve them, a dichotomy that made him question and sometimes hate himself every day. He had come to view the Batman as his friend and yet he hated him—hated him for the compromise he represented in his life and for the things Gordon was forced to ask this outlaw to do when justice could not be served by the very institutions he had vowed to honor and protect.

The Batman had made him a success at the cost of a piece of his soul.

Gordon's fortunes rose in the police department, though at a high personal cost. The beating he had taken had also been the beginning of the end for his relationship with his wife, the strain of being a principled police detective eventually showing as cracks in his marriage. His brother Roger and his wife Thelma both died in a horrific automobile accident, leaving their daughter Barbara without a home. The Gordons adopted the thirteen-year-old girl partly out of duty and partly out of a hope that it might help them save their marriage. When Gordon's wife finally left him, Gordon had doted on the girl, raising her into a fine young woman with a bright future.

Then the Batman swept onto the porch of her apartment and shot her in cold blood … she died alone, bleeding out in that hallway …

Gordon stared at the breaker arm that would power up the Bat-Signal on the roof of police headquarters.

“It's been fifteen minutes, Gordon,” came the raspy voice from above him. “Can't you decide?”

The police commissioner jumped at the sound, his hand instinctively going for his service weapon. Some delicate inhibition in the back of his mind snapped. He knew he should stop, but he was already past that, the weapon drawn from its holster, rising up toward the silhouette that blocked out the stars with its hated, too-familiar shape.

I'm going to do it this time
, Gordon thought with detachment.
I'm really going to do it …