Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (24 page)

“Gotta be Gotham General,” he said, keying his radio.

A cop named Grogan responded. Gordon asked him if Dent had been evacuated, and Grogan replied that he thought so, but wasn’t sure.

Everyone in the area was staring at what had been Gotham General just two minutes earlier and was now a huge heap of twisted steel and shattered masonry from which dust and smoke still rose. No one paid any particular attention to the school bus that left the space that had been a parking zone for the emergency room and, bumping over stuff that littered the pavement, turned onto the nearest street.

By six, every television and radio venue in the city had preempted regular programming and was covering the Gotham General situation. But the reporters had no new information, so they continually repeated video of the hospital collapsing taken by a passerby with a phone camera, interviewed each other, interviewed eyewitnesses, who all said the same thing: it had been blown up.

But the journalists soldiered on, and people continued to wonder and worry and talk. Some thought that this latest hassle, coming so soon after the Narrows drama the other year, was the universe telling them that
anywhere
would be better than Gotham City, maybe including the Black Hole of Calcutta. One small but noisy group thought that the Joker was part of a government plot designed to distract the citizenry from their loss of independence—a couple of radio-talk-show hosts rode that theory to exhaustion. The
Gotham Times
began to print a lot of angry letters, mostly expressing chagrin at the cops’ inability to do their job, which was to serve and protect—especially protect. Most people, though, did what Gothamites almost always do: complain, hope that the evil, whatever it was, stayed clear of
their
neighborhood, and took out the garbage and grumbled to their mates and . . . lived their lives. But there were a lot of small changes in their routines. More parents drove their kids to school and soccer practice and the skating rink, and forbade them to hang out at the malls. Business was sharply down at downtown restaurants and theaters. Gasoline sales were also suffering because people weren’t going anywhere they didn’t absolutely have to be. The only thing that was improving were the ratings for the nightly newscasts. The good citizens of Gotham City were watching a lot of news.

They were watching in Lou’s Bar, a drinking establishment on the fringe of the blue-collar neighborhood where Detective Michael Wuertz lived alone in a three-room flat. Lou’s was not a classy joint. It was dingy and stale-smelling, with bad lighting and worse plumbing, where a despairing and lonely man could go to extinguish large chunks of time. After dinner was usually the big time of day for Lou’s, when it became a haven for guys who couldn’t stand the thought of either another evening of TV or another argument with their wives. Now, at six fifteen, only Wuertz and the bartender were in Lou’s, and only the bartender was watching the news broadcast on a television set on metal brackets above the back bar.

“Sweet Jesus, d’you see this, Mike?” he asked Wuertz. “They blew up a hospital. Shouldn’t you be out there, y’know, doing something?”

“It’s my day off,” Wuertz mumbled into his drink.

The bartender locked the cash register and came around the bar. “I gotta take a leak. Keep an eye on things, will ya?”

Wuertz shrugged an answer. The bartender went through a door. Almost immediately, the door reopened.

“What?” Wuertz grumbled. “You need me to shake it for y—”

Someone jammed a gun barrel into Wuertz’s cheek. He looked sideways, without turning his head, and recognized the gunman standing in deep shadow, with only the right side of his face visible.

“Hello,” Harvey Dent said. “I see you still come to the same old place.”

“Dent! I thought you was . . . dead.”

Dent leaned into the light, displaying the mutilated left side of his face. “Half.”

Dent picked up Wuertz’s drink, took a sip, asked, “Who picked up Rachel, Wuertz?”

“It must’ve been Maroni’s men.”

Dent slammed the glass onto the bar. “You, of all people, are gonna protect the other traitor in Gordon’s unit?”

“I don’t know who it is. He’d never tell
me.”

Neither man spoke for a full minute. Finally, Wuertz said, “I swear to God I didn’t know what they were gonna do to you.”

Dent took his lucky coin from his pocked. “Funny, I don’t know what’s gonna happen to you, either.”

Dent flipped the coin, caught it, looked at the damaged side, then pulled the trigger.

Jim Gordon had a bad night. He crawled into bed a bit after one, lay still, rolled over, got up and had a glass of milk, retired again and watched the windowpane lighten. It was 5:00
A.M.
Good time to go to work as any. He scribbled a note to Barbara, propped it against the toaster, and drove through semideserted streets to the grotesque heap that had been a hospital.

There were already dozens of men and women busy at the disaster site, most of them wearing hard hats. He saw one of the cops, Grogan, talking to a paramedic. He asked Grogan for a situation report, and Grogan said there
was
no situation report.

“You must know how many were inside,” Gordon protested. “You’ve got patient lists, roll calls . . .”

Grogan interrupted him. “Sir. Sir. Take a look at what we’re dealing with. Cops, National Guard, sanitation men, firemen . . . As near as we can figure, we’ve got fifty missing. But that building was
clear.
I checked it myself, and so did six other cops.” He waved toward a departing bus. “These vehicles are heading off to other hospitals. My guess is, we missed one.”

“Yeah? What’s your guess about where Harvey Dent is?”

Grogan said nothing.

“Keep looking,” Gordon said. “And keep it to yourself.”

L
ucius Fox expected to find Bruce Wayne in the research and development facility, in a subsubbasement of the Wayne Enterprises building. Instead, he found an array of thousands of tiny monitors. As he approached, seemingly random patterns appeared on them, patterns that swirled and dissolved and gradually re-formed themselves into a map.

Batman spoke from the shadows. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Beautiful,” Fox said. “Unethical.
Dangerous.
You’ve turned every phone in the city into a microphone.”

“And a high-frequency generator-receiver.”

“Like the phone I gave you in Hong Kong. You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in he city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is
wrong
!”

“I’ve got to find this man, Lucius.”

“But at what cost?”

“The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.”

“No one should have that kind of power.”

“That’s why I gave it to you.”

“Spying on 30 million people wasn’t in my job description.”

“Let me show you something I recorded from a newscast.” Batman turned on a full-size monitor.

The Joker appeared on the screen. “What does it take to make you people want to join in? You failed to kill the lawyer. I’ve got to get you off the bench and into the game. So, here it is . . . Come nightfall, the city is mine, and anyone left here plays by my rules. If you don’t want to be in the game, get out now. But the bridge-and-tunnel crowd are in for a surprise.”

Batman switched off the monitor, and said to Fox, “Trust me.” He plugged a USB dongle into the console. “This is the audio sample. If he talks within range of any phone in the city, you’ll be able to triangulate his position. When you’ve finished, type in your name to turn it off.”

“This is a terrible weight you’ve put on me. I didn’t ask for it, I don’t want it. I’ll help you this one time . . . but as long as this machine is at Wayne Enterprises, I won’t be.”

Then began the great exodus. At first hundreds of thousands, and at the end, millions of men, women, and children streamed past the city limits—on foot, by car and motorcycle and bicycle, and a few by boat. Many did not reach their destinations, whatever they were; there were overheated engines and blown tires and, mostly, empty fuel tanks because few anticipated being stranded in traffic jams for hours. There were heart attacks and panic attacks and asthma attacks. There were fistfights and a few gunfights among motorists driven past fury by frustration. Some acts of kindness occurred, but those grew rarer as the day wore on.

State police did what they could. It wasn’t much.

The sky over everyone’s head buzzed with small aircraft, mostly television helicopters. Like their studio-bound colleagues, the airborne reporters didn’t have much to report on but, like their studio-bound colleagues, this did not prevent them from talking into microphones. The information they conveyed could be easily summarized: It sure is a mess.

Of course, not everyone fled the city. Most Gothamites stayed put and braced themselves for some inconvenience, some belt-tightening, maybe a little pain.
What the hell, it’s Gotham . . . what can you expect? Lousy town . . .

Lucius Fox considered his options. He could just pull a Pontius Pilate, wash his hands of the whole thing, good-bye Mr. Wayne, and good luck. But he wouldn’t. He had never once, in his sixty years, broken a promise, and he’d promised Wayne he’d stay on until the present crisis was past. Okay, maybe promise-keeping was really nothing more than a habit, but it had helped give him the parts of himself that he liked. He would, though what Wayne had done with the technology Lucius had given him was, in Lucius’s opinion, pure evil. He had no doubt that Bruce Wayne was a good man, but he was starting to doubt Bruce’s nocturnal alter ego, and the lengths he seemed willing to go to. The lines that had been crossed . . . Maybe this was one of those three-faces-of-Eve deals, different personalities inhabiting the same body. And maybe Lucius wasn’t serving the
good
personality anymore.

How the hell to know? Batman was trying to put the skids under a rotten bastard, no doubt about that, maybe save some lives, but he was abusing everything Lucius held sacred to do it.

He made his decision. He’d keep his promise, but he wouldn’t just walk away. He would destroy every trace of the technology, beginning with the hardware already operating. Then he’d get rid of the computer files and finish up by burning every scrap of paper in the lab. If Bruce Wayne betrayed him, tried to use the technology again, or, worse, give it to someone else, someone governmental maybe, he’d have a hard time, he’s have to start—well, maybe not from scratch, because once you knew that something had already been done you had a big head start on doing it yourself. But Lucius’s sabotage would slow Bruce down, a lot.

Lucius hated this, hated every damn bit of it. Because next to keeping promises, being grateful when gratitude was due was his primary virtue, and he had plenty to thank Bruce Wayne for.

You take the hand you’re dealt, you play it, you don’t whine.

Gordon was doing his best. This wasn’t the kind of thing he had any experience with, nor any training, but that didn’t stop him from trying. At the moment, he was in City Hall, in the mayor’s office, reporting to his honor.

“My officers are going over every inch of the tunnels and bridges,” Gordon was saying, “but with the Joker’s threat . . .”

“Land routes east?” the mayor asked.

“Backed up for hours. Which leaves the ferries with thirty thousand waiting to board. Plus, corrections are at capacity, so I want to use the ferry to take some prisoners off the island.”

“The men you and Dent put away? Those aren’t people I’m worried about.”

“You
should
be. They’re the people you least want to be stuck with in an emergency. Whatever the Joker’s planning, it’s a good bet that Harvey’s prisoners might be involved. I want ’em out of here.”

Gordon prevailed. An hour later, officers in riot gear escorted citizens off one of the ferries and felons on. Nobody was happy.

Sal Maroni climbed into the rear of the limo and settled his bulk into the leather seat. He was in a hurry. Wanted to meet the old lady before dark.

“Hey driver,” he said, louder than was necessary. “Don’t stop for lights, cops, nothing.”