Batman (11 page)

“Yes.” Batman surveyed the control panel. The Riddler would have left some sign of how he wanted them to proceed.

“Did Croc want his tooth back?”

“No, he didn’t seem to care about it,” Batman said.

“Figures. He’s got plenty.”

“That’s more or less what he said.” He paused, then added, “Tell me exactly what you see.”

Robin started describing the cistern and what he had seen so far. Batman looked more closely at some of the gauges on the area of the console that had been painted bright green. Finally he saw what he needed. Each of the gauges measured flow, in cubic feet per second—ft3/s—through the huge array of pipes that ran through and around the Flood Control Facility. But on some of them, the “f” of “ft” was replaced by a question mark—six of them, to be precise. Only one was vertical—the others pointed at different angles.

“You said there were six pipes coming into the cistern?” he asked.

“Oh, good—you were listening.”

“Do you remember in what order they started flowing?”

There was a pause.

“Yeah.”

That was half of the answer. The other half was which gauges corresponded with which pipes. Batman doubted the Riddler would be so lenient as to permit him to shut them down in any order.

The six angles of the question marks each had to correspond to an orientation, Batman thought. But was it a directional orientation, or were they keyed to the location of the door?

“Robin,” he said. “Can you point north from where you are?”

“Seriously?”

That answered the question. As far as their opponent knew, Robin wouldn’t possess an instinctive sense of direction. So the question marks had to have been keyed to the location of the door.

“Never mind,” he said. “I need you to do exactly as I say. Face the door and use it as your twelve o’clock. Then tell me in order which pipes started flowing.”

Batman heard Robin shifting himself around. From the sounds he was making, it was taking more effort than he would have expected. Robin had to get out of there before he had no reserves left to call upon.

“Okay,”
Robin said.
“Here’s the order as I remember it. They went ten o’clock, two o’clock, six o’clock, then four o’clock, eight o’clock, midnight.”

“Are you sure?” Batman heard the slap of water, and then the unmistakable swirling sound of the mic going underwater.

“Doesn’t matter,”
Robin said, his voice distorted.
“The water’s almost to my nose.”

Batman dialed the first five pipes down. Nothing happened. This was it. If they had figured the puzzle wrong…

“Hold on,” he said. “Here comes number six.”

Robin didn’t answer.

“Here comes number six.”

Robin heard a muffled
clunk
coming through the water. He was holding his breath and his feet were completely numb. A moment after the sound died away, he felt the currents begin to move more aggressively, and heard the renewed rush of water below him in the drain opening.

He stubbornly held onto the broken catwalk strut, and felt the meniscus of the water’s surface creep down the sides of his head. Nearly a minute after he had pulled in his last breath, the water level had dropped enough that he could take another. He did so with a gulp.

Batman was talking in his earpiece but it took Robin a moment to get his breath enough to respond.

“I’m here,” he said.

“But not by much,”
Batman said, an angry sound to his voice.
“The Riddler managed the timing of these traps very carefully.”

“I could stand a little more care,” Robin answered. “Or maybe a little less. I’m not sure which is better.” He braced his feet as the water dropped, and he sucked in breath after breath, his muscles starting to tremble and his head going foggy again. He’d never been this cold, at least not since the last time he’d tangled with Victor Fries.

The water level dropped below his feet and Robin heard a series of clicks from just above him. He looked up and a bright green question mark lit up over the door… which lay wide open.

“The Riddler’s opened a way out,” he said. His teeth started chattering and he realized that before that moment he’d been too cold for it to happen. Batman must have heard it over the comm link.

“You need to get warm,”
he said.
“And dry, if you can. Before you go any further.”

“Let me get back to you,” Robin said.

He swung up into the doorway and stripped off his cloak. Then he opened his tunic, letting the warmer air get at his skin. He squeezed as much water as possible out of his costume and his boots. What he really wanted was to lie down and sleep, and his fingers were still so cold he could barely work the clasp holding the cloak on. But Robin knew he wasn’t out of the woods yet. There were still six more doors.

If each of them led to a trap like this…

He put the thought out of his mind. Without a doubt the Riddler meant to kill him, at least ultimately, but he wanted it to happen on
his
schedule, and no other. He would take much greater satisfaction in eliminating a strong adversary, instead of a half-dead hypothermia case.

To get his blood moving and generate heat, he did a quick set of calisthenics and exercises with the bō. His mind started to clear, and it hit home again just how close he’d been to dying. The Riddler had definitely started playing for higher stakes. The USB drive had been an invitation to a lethal game, and now they would have to play it through as best they could.

When he had warmed up a little, he put his cloak on again and looked back out into the holding tank. The drain at the bottom was closed. That, together with the question mark over the door told Robin that the only way out was back up the passage.

Jogging as best he could, he returned to the junction room at the bottom of the stairs leading down from door number one. He could return the way he had come, or follow the second passage leading out of the junction room at a right angle.

Given his manic attention to detail, the Riddler wasn’t likely to abide by any deviation from the game. To do so would likely invite instant retaliation, and Robin would likely be dead in an instant. So he climbed the stairs back toward the door, pausing on the steel landing to look around and see if anything had changed since the last time he’d passed through. Nothing seemed different. The same bits of debris were in the same corners, and there were no visible signs that anyone else had passed this way.

Before attempting to open it, he looked the door up and down as best he could in the incandescent light. It, too, seemed the same as it had before, although he hadn’t taken a close look at this side of it in his earlier transit. He chided himself for that bit of amateurism.

Then he rattled the latch and found that it was locked from the other side. It was too heavy to blow with explosive gel, and there were no visible hinges that could be broken.

I guess it’s the other direction after all
, he mused as he descended again. Moving cautiously down the hall that would cut across the corner closest to the furnace, he found that it hooked around to another short stairwell, this one also leading to a door. He climbed the stairs and when he touched the latch, he heard a staccato clang of machinery from somewhere else in the complex.

The knob turned easily. He opened the door and stepped into the room. As it closed behind him, he saw that it was door number two.

Aha
, he thought.
Out through odd numbers, in through even?
But there were seven doors. That suggested the Riddler had built in an actual exit… or that whatever lay behind door number seven was intended to be inescapably fatal.

The latter seemed infinitely more likely.

He found himself standing on a white square. Door number three faced a white square. The three costumed chessmen were in different places on the board, still wearing their same numbers. He had already used N4, and the knight was standing on the black square one space out in front of number three.

The other options were B3 and R2.

With N4 standing where he was, there was no viable sequence of rook moves that would put Robin in front of his goal. That left the bishop, so Robin stepped out into the room, keeping his feet on white squares in a left diagonal until he was past R2. Then he zigzagged to the right, cutting across the board until he was next to N4. As before, none of the chessmen reacted to his presence. Robin took the third bishop move, stepping one square diagonally to his left and facing door number three.

Before he went through it, he considered blowing up the Riddler’s plan by attacking the chessmen and trying to force a different door. Would it work? Robin didn’t think he would have trouble with the chessmen—he could take two of them down before the third knew the attack was happening. But he had a feeling none of the other doors would open without heavy explosives, which he didn’t have.

And again, Nigma wouldn’t take well to the rules being broken. Especially since they were
his
rules. So while it irritated him, Robin knew the best way forward was to follow the Riddler’s format until a better alternative presented itself.

Standing at arm’s length from number three, he contacted Batman again.

“I’m back on the chessboard. I leave through odd-numbered doors and come back through even-numbered ones. Number one led down to the cistern. When I came back, number two was the only way back into the room. Now the chessmen are in a different pattern, and I’m looking at number three.”

“If you exit through odd-numbered doors, that means there are four stages,”
Batman said.
“But you’re only looking at three chessmen, correct?”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that too. The fourth time through is likely to be different.”

“Without a doubt. Keep that in mind when you come through next time. The Riddler might tip his hand.”

“Roger that,” Robin said, and he was secretly pleased to know that Batman expected him to succeed. “Opening door number three.”

“Keep moving. The clock is ticking,”
Batman answered.
“Literally. Every time that timer reaches zero, there’s another murder. Soon enough we’ll start to see a pattern in those, but the faster you can get through that labyrinth, the more lives we’ll save.”

“Who’s been killed so far?”

“A software engineer, a building contractor, and an electronics designer. There’s no known relationship between the three of them, or at least not one Gordon has uncovered. But I’m beginning to see a pattern that makes a nasty sort of sense. What’s more, it’s likely that Deadshot is behind all three murders.”

“Great, one of our favorite people,” Robin replied. “So I can look forward to seeing him at some point. It’s all I need to make this a perfect day.”