Batman (3 page)

The envelope had a pull tab. Batman pulled it, and the end of the envelope tore open without incident. He gave it a shake and the USB drive clattered onto the tabletop. It was plain black, with a translucent plastic cap over the end that would plug into a computer. The stores of Gotham City sold these by the thousands.

“Could someone have sent this, not knowing the Joker was gone?” Gordon said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Batman nodded. “I agree. It’s more likely that before he died, he arranged to have it sent,” he added. “Whoever sent it, though, they wanted us to see what’s on the USB drive. What better way to make sure it would get to us than to address it to that madman.”

“So it’s a game—we’re being played.” Gordon looked down at the drive. “I’ll bring in some of our computer people, if you think it’s safe. Have them take a look.”

“I’ll take it myself,” Batman said. “If there are fail-safes, I’ll get past them, and, if there’s any sort of virus on this drive, I’ll take the risk.” He picked up the tiny object. “There’s always the possibility that the drive can only be read once. If that’s the case, my system will capture whatever’s there before it can disappear.”

He could see that Gordon was conflicted—as the commissioner of police, he was used to being in charge. Yet he knew this was the best way to proceed—Batman’s equipment was state-of-the-art, as compared to the police systems, which had been cutting edge sometime in the last century.

“Okay,” he said after a pause, “but you share everything with me. That has to be the deal.”

“Understood,” Batman said. He dropped the USB drive into a pocket on his Utility Belt. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I know anything.”

“You know the way out,” Gordon said.

“I know a number of ways out, as a matter of fact,” he replied wryly. “But no, you don’t need to escort me. I’m sure you have better things to do.” With that, he turned to leave.

“Do I ever.” Gordon sighed. “But don’t leave me hanging, Batman. I saw the Joker burn, watched it with my own eyes as they flushed the remains. This, though… it’s got me edgy. Let me know what you find out.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Batman said from the doorway. Then he was gone.

It was time to touch base with Oracle.

Posted by JKB

Wednesday, 9:46 a.m.

On the way back to the cave, Batman contacted Oracle and recounted what had occurred at GCPD headquarters. Robin and Alfred were waiting when he arrived, but he didn’t say a word as he headed straight to the computer console. Without even sitting, he opened a connection to Oracle.

Batman hadn’t told Gordon he was going to bring in outside resources. For one thing, Gordon didn’t need to know everything about how Batman operated. More to the point, the commissioner did not know that Oracle was his daughter. It was an awkward situation, but Barbara had made it clear that she wanted it that way, and Batman was forced to honor her request.

If the life they had chosen had taught him anything, it was that barriers between public and private identities were best kept impermeable. More often than not, selective information embargoes were key to good working relationships.

He just hoped this one wouldn’t come back to bite them on the ass.

“I’m knocking on your door,”
Oracle said.
“You going to let me in?”

Batman keyed in a long alphanumeric string that generated permissions for Oracle to remotely access one of the Batcave’s servers. That server was kept isolated from all of the other networked equipment, and reserved for work on digital files most likely to be infected with malware or other computer contaminants that might be dangerous to the cave’s control systems and archives.

“I appreciate you knocking,” Batman said. “It’s nice that you’re too polite just to let yourself in.”

“For you,”
she said.
“Now let’s see what we’re looking at.”

Batman inserted the USB drive into the terminal and watched as a directory spawned. The drive’s firmware folder was labeled HAHAHA. Next was DELETED. The third and final folder was called TICKTOCK.

“Let me take a look before anyone opens those folders,”
Oracle said. In the cave, they waited. It didn’t take her long.
“The firmware is normal, boilerplate stuff. Any college kid could write it. DELETED has eight files in it, no extensions. I won’t know what they are until you open them. Do you want to, or do you want me to take a look?”

“Go ahead,” Batman said.

She did, arranging the windows in a double row on the display over the Batcave’s main computer terminal.

“They’re all corrupt,”
she said.
“No known file type, no clues in the file names. TICKTOCK is an app.”

Batman scanned them himself, and at first glance he didn’t see anything. Clicking on HAHAHA, he got nothing—the folder wouldn’t even open.

“Let’s look at TICKTOCK, then,” he said.

Oracle did something remotely without opening the folder.

“It’s completely self-contained,”
she said.
“You can run it if you want. As far as I can tell, it can’t hurt anything. There’s no way to be sure, though.”

He clicked on the app, and a timer display appeared in the upper right corner of the display. It read 00:02:00, then 00:01:59.

“Countdown,” Robin said. “But to what?”

“Batman, you might want to get out of there,”
Oracle said,
“at least for the duration of the countdown.”

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “If there was a direct threat, one of the scans would have detected something, but we came up blank. No, given the effort they put into it, whoever sent this wants us to see what’s on the drive. And if there was data being stolen, we’d be aware of it before two minutes was up.”

“One minute and thirty seconds,” Alfred said. “Sir.”

“This is a countdown to something,” Batman continued. “Worst-case scenario, the drive might be erasing itself.”

“I’m not seeing any code that could do that,”
Oracle said.
“I still think you should be careful.”

“Robin, Alfred, go if you think it’s best.” Batman looked at both of them. Neither moved. “Don’t put yourselves at risk, just because you’re too loyal.”

“I don’t believe there’s such a thing as ‘too’ loyal,” Alfred said.

Robin watched the timer count down. “I think you’re right, Batman.” Tim was careful not to say “Bruce,” and the system altered their voices enough to prevent anyone from recognizing them. Batman thought Barbara might already know his true identity, but if she hadn’t figured it out, though, there was no reason to offer it up.

“It’s your funeral,”
Oracle said.

00:00:59

Batman brought the deleted files back to the top of the stack of windows.

“Oracle,” he said, “if we’ve got less than a minute, let’s make it count. There are files referring to Wonder City here. Anything else you can piece together that goes with that? Something about TYGER… Protocol 10… maybe Hugo Strange, or the Joker himself.”

“The files are pretty badly scrambled,”
Oracle answered.
“There’s a pattern that keeps repeating itself, though. Look what happens if I put them all together.”

On the screen a new window spawned, showing a solid block of gibberish text. Highlighted throughout the block were eight separate occurrences of a nine-letter string of capital letters, one for each document.

IAMLARVAL.

“I am larval?” Robin read. “Who’s larval?”

“There are no other capital letters,”
Oracle said.
“Quick. In the fifteen seconds you still have to live, what do you think that might mean?”

“I think it means we have more than fifteen seconds to live,” Batman said. “Otherwise there’s no point in giving us the puzzle to begin with.”

00:00:09

“Well, I guess we’re about to find out,” Robin said, tension appearing in his voice. “Oracle, you should know—”

“Hush,”
she said.

The counter reached zero.

Nothing happened. Then…

00:59:59

What the hell?

“Well,” Batman said, “whatever the counter represented, at least we know one thing it
didn’t
mean.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard as he and Oracle ran simultaneous diagnostics on the sealed system he’d used to access the information on the drive. Everything there was still intact. The computer had recorded no operations other than what he had instructed, meaning that no code hidden on the drive had executed itself… unless whoever had written the code was a more skillful hacker than Batman had ever encountered.

“Was that a joke?” Robin wondered. “Or did something just go wrong? Why did it just start over, if nothing happened the first time?”

“Perhaps the countdown was a message of another sort,” Alfred interjected. “Perhaps we have yet to gather all the information we require to understand it. Begging your pardon.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, Alfred,” Batman said. “We have to be lacking some sort of critical information, though. Without the proper context, this is just a glorified stopwatch.” He scanned the news feeds, to see if anything major had occurred when the timer hit zero.

Nothing.

Nothing in Gotham City, or anywhere else, for that matter. So he went back to the Wonder City document.

“Oracle, what if this isn’t a corrupted text document? It could be a corrupted binary translation of an image file.”

“Funny you should mention that,”
she said.
“I’ve been running four different decryption and recovery programs designed to reconstruct image files, and look what I found.”
On the display, the window full of nonsense text symbols faded away and was replaced with an image. It was a diagram.

“That’s the steel mill,” Robin said.

“More precisely, it’s the cooling tunnels,” Batman added. “But they don’t look the same as when I was hunting through them for the Joker.”

“But the mill is decades old—this looks new. Is it a blueprint?”
Oracle asked.
“I don’t have any records of construction permits being issued for Wonder City, Arkham City, or the steel mill.”

“Anyone who would construct something like this wouldn’t be going through the regular channels to obtain permits.” Batman looked back at the string that had been repeated in the corrupt text.

IAMLARVAL.

“What could eight repetitions of that mean?” Robin wondered out loud.

“Someone wanted to get a point across, that’s for sure,”
Oracle observed.

“There’s more to it. Those strings were inserted intentionally into the corrupted file.” Batman considered their options. “Robin, hit the streets. Take a look around Arkham City and see what you can find. This is an invitation, and we can’t afford to ignore it.”

Robin started to suit up. “What am I looking for?” he asked.

“Start in the steel mill. Observe and report any unusual activity. That place should be deserted, and there shouldn’t be any TYGER presence at all. Oracle?”

“The whole area is abandoned,”
she confirmed,
“at least officially. But this is Gotham City. It’s a safe bet that some of Hugo Strange’s old facilities are being used, if you know what I mean.”
It never took long for criminals to move into abandoned places. That was true everywhere, but it seemed to happen faster in Gotham City.

“True enough,” Batman said. “Robin, stay in close contact. I don’t like splitting up like this, but we need to get a handle on it, and quickly. As soon as we think we know what this ‘I am larval’ note is about, we’ll update you.”

“Got it,” Robin said. He gave his bō staff a spin, and headed out through a Batcave exit that led to an abandoned subway maintenance station on the river.

“I’ll see what I can find out about the Joker’s remaining henchmen,”
Oracle said.
“We’ve done our best to keep tabs on them, but they fall between the cracks too easily. Could be they’ve been absorbed into another criminal gang.”

“Good idea,” Batman said. Oracle signed off, and he stood looking at the display. The repetitions of IAMLARVAL stood out from the surrounding gibberish. There was an additional meaning there…

“If I may offer a suggestion,” Alfred said after a minute.

“Of course.”

“This has all the earmarks of a puzzle,” Alfred said. “Dare I say… a riddle?”

Batman nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking, too. We have three separate parts so far. The steel mill image, the timer, and IAMLARVAL.”

“It may be four, Master Bruce,” Alfred said. He leaned across to the keyboard and opened a text window. With one finger, he tapped out