Batman (6 page)

Damn
, he thought.
“Don’t get boxed in!”

The comm in his cowl chimed, but Batman ignored it. Before the thugs could draw a bead on him, he threw down a smoke pellet, swept his cape out to the right, and dodged to his left. The triple burst of gunfire shredded the edge of the cape—and also shredded the gunman Batman had missed with his Batarang. He felt a pang of guilt, but there was nothing he could have done. People in their line of business assumed the risk of collateral damage.

The smoke swirled up, obscuring the view from the corner where the three remaining gunmen continued to fire wildly. Knowing that out-of-control shooting tended to go high, rather than low, Batman dropped into a crouch and lunged through the cloud. He hit one of them low and heard the snap of a bone breaking in the man’s leg. Before his target even started to scream, Batman was already spinning to drive his right elbow into the midsection of the goon to his left, doubling him over. Continuing the spin, he caught the barrel jacket of the last thug’s gun, ripped it from his hands, and smashed him across the head with the stock.

Fifteen seconds. Three unconscious, one dead, one vomiting on the floor, one down with a broken leg. A haze hung in the air from both the pellet and the gunfire. Near the hole in the collapsed wall, a draft drew the smoke away. He took note of this—it meant the tunnel definitely connected to the larger complex of passages below Gotham City.

In addition to the man-made tunnels, there was a natural cave system that had never been fully charted, and which ultimately connected to the Batcave. He had sealed the cave’s entrance to it, to the best of his ability, but there could be miles of other passages and chambers used by anyone who happened to discover them.

As the smoke cleared, the thug with the broken leg continued to scream. Batman took three long steps to reach him and delivered a sharp jab to the chin.

The screaming stopped.

Then he studied the room. The walls, built from reinforced concrete as a security precaution, were relatively intact except for the immediate area where the explosion had taken place. One wall was blank, another supported the door and locking mechanisms, and the third was lined with safe-deposit boxes. That was where the thug crouched on his hands and knees, still stunned by the gut punch he had received.

Batman squatted next to him.

“Who sent you here?”

“We was just covering,” the thug moaned. “Guarding. Nobody said you’d be here.”

“Guarding for who?”

“Don’t make me talk to you,” the man pleaded. “You
know
what they’ll do if they think I’ve ratted on them.”

“All you have to say is yes or no. The Riddler?”

The thug shook his head.

“Uh-uh. Wasn’t him. I never met him.”

Batman leaned in close, despite the smell of vomit. “You know I don’t kill people, but I’m not above using a little… persuasion.” He paused to let that sink in. “Tell me again. Did the Riddler send you here?”

“No!” the thug barked, and he grimaced in pain. “I told you, I never met him.”

He was telling the truth. There was a certain kind of desperation visible in low-level street thugs who knew they were in over their heads. They might lie to the police, but they were terrified of Batman. That’s exactly how he wanted it.

“Then who was it?”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “A guy, we met once and he gave us instructions. We were doing what he told us to do. You weren’t supposed to be here, like I said.”

“That’s because I show up when you don’t expect me,” Batman said, and he delivered enough of a blow to keep the thug sleeping for a while.

Tapping the controls on his gauntlet, he checked his comm. He was expecting a notification from Oracle soon. She had agreed to tell him when the timer from the USB drive reached zero again. But it was too soon—an hour hadn’t yet elapsed. Close, but not quite. The call he’d received during the fight couldn’t have been her.

Glancing at the cryptographic sequencer which logged all communications along his personal frequency, Batman saw that the call had come from Robin.
Good.
One call meant Robin was touching base. Multiple calls would have indicated some urgency.

So he returned his attention to the vault. The Riddler wanted him to see something here. The thugs really weren’t a part of the gambit, though—they had been talking freely when he arrived. If it had been intended as an ambush, they had done a comically poor job of it. It didn’t fit. Thus far, Nigma seemed to be putting far more care into his planning.

No, the goon squad was there for another purpose. Perhaps they were intended to guard something, as they seemed to think, but Batman had the sense that they had been left there as sacrificial pawns, or to make sure he stayed long enough to take a good look around. Perhaps he was being overly suspicious, but there was no such thing as too much suspicion. Not when the Riddler was up to his deadly tricks.

One of those tricks was to isolate himself from henchmen like these. He must have used an intermediary to hire and deploy them. Finding out who that intermediary was would be a job for Oracle. Batman would put her on that trail when he got back to the Batcave.

As if on cue, Oracle pinged him with a text message.

* * *

Timer has reached zero. Resetting. Now it reads fifty-nine minutes and fifty-eight… fifty-seven… you get the idea.

Batman tapped his control to stop the message from repeating. If the Riddler had simply wanted him to go through into the tunnel, he wouldn’t have put the gunmen in the way. That much was clear. So the tunnel was of secondary importance, if that. Something else in the vault was the next clue. It wasn’t on the blank walls, and there was nothing out of the ordinary in the open door.

That left the safe-deposit boxes. He turned to face that wall again, and saw something that hadn’t been immediately evident. The boxes were all in place except one, as if the vault had never been looted. Given the condition of the rest of the bank, though, that didn’t fit. And the thugs had been doing
something
to make that racket.

“Don’t get boxed in.”

Good advice
, Batman thought. He couldn’t make the mistake of assuming he knew what a riddle meant. He had to work his way through each element, step by step.

His comm chimed. Robin was calling him again. This time Batman answered, hitting the gauntlet control.

“There you are,”
Robin said.
“Hope I didn’t rush you.”

“Is there something you want to report, or are we bantering?”

“Well, I cut through the subway tunnels into the pump house on the river by the Flood Control Facility. Then I was going to drop down into the outflow pipes and come up inside the steel mill, so whoever might still be in Arkham City wouldn’t get in my way. But guess what I found?”

“I’m not going to guess.”

“Remember the Riddler’s challenge rooms?”

“They’re pretty memorable, yes.”

“Well, we’ve got a new one. I’m in it.”

Batman frowned. Still, Robin didn’t sound alarmed.

“Why aren’t you
out
of it?” he asked sharply. It rankled him that he’d sent Tim into an unknown situation like that, but the clock was ticking in the truest sense. Each time it hit zero, another victim would pay with his life.

“That’s why I’m calling you,”
Robin replied.
“There’s a door here that requires a code. It’s four digits. I can stand here and punch in all ten thousand possible combinations, but…”

This was a fairly mundane puzzle for the Riddler to pose, Batman thought. Like the anagram of MARAVILLA. There had to be more to it. While he considered this, he scanned the wall of safe-deposit boxes. They were all back in their proper numerical order—4777, 4778…

Ah
, he thought. “That’s it.”

The sounds he had thought were the gunmen ransacking the vault were actually the opposite. They had been putting the safe-deposit boxes
back
in place, leaving only the single gap to draw his attention. And that single gap would have once held a box with a particular four-digit number. Anything in that gap would not, to borrow the Riddler’s phrase, be boxed in, because it wasn’t contained in a box.

“What did you say?”
Robin asked.

“I didn’t mean to say anything,” Batman responded, “but I think I might have an answer for you. Hang on—let me confirm.”

“I’ll wait,”
Robin said.
“No rush.”

Batman stepped into the center of the room so he could see straight into the empty slot. A single triangular object lay inside. Batman came closer, wary of the possibility of a booby trap. The inside walls of the slot were bare, and didn’t appear to have been tampered with. He took another step closer and saw that the object lying in the box was a tooth, or something carved to resemble a tooth.

Of course.

“Something to sink your teeth into.”

Looking closer, Batman examined the tooth without touching it, and inspected the shelf around it to see if he could discern any kind of mechanism that might be disturbed if he touched it. There was nothing. He shone a flashlight in to be sure. No wire, nothing gleamed in the light.

“When I said ‘no rush,’ I was kidding,”
Robin said over the comm.
“It’s getting creepy in here.”

Batman looked at the box to the left of the gap—8121. To the right was 8123. It made perfect sense, by Riddler logic. The solution to one puzzle also held the beginning of the next. It still might be a trap, but they were still very early in the Riddler’s scheme. His usual modus operandi was to create smaller confusions that built into a grand revelation.

“Try 8122,” he said. “But just to be on the safe side, stay clear of the doorway when you do it.”

“The panel is on the other side of the room,”
Robin said.
“And the Riddler’s just showing off at this point. He’s got something he wants us to see.”

“Agreed,” Batman replied. “But still be careful. Go ahead. Let’s see what happens.”

There was a pause.

“That’s it,”
Robin said.
“The door’s open.”

“What do you see on the other side?”

“Nothing yet. Let me go through and look around.”

“Good. Stay in touch.”

“I will.”
Robin clicked off and Batman took a last look around the vault to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. When he was satisfied, he returned his attention to the tooth.

It was big, about as long as his hand, pointed and slightly curved. Its roots were intact and there was a small amount of tissue still attached. From the looks of it, the tooth had recently been extracted from whatever animal had once used it to eat.

A clue, then. An animal tooth, set in a specific place. There would be no solving this part of the riddle, however, without knowing what animal.

Batman picked up the tooth and held it in the palm of his hand.

There was a click from the empty space that had held box 8122, and a slow hiss. The bottom of the box rose slightly, and there was another click.

A pressure plate.

Batman was three long steps from the vault door. He had covered two of them when the bomb hidden in the wall of safe-deposit boxes went off.

* * *

He lost some time, but not much.

When he came to his senses, he lay crumpled against the base of the stone staircase, singed and smoking. The shrapnel from the metal boxes had shredded part of his cape and nicked him through his suit in several places. The fire raging in the vault was sucking air down the stairs. It had already spread into the reception area. Batman’s ears rang, and the impact of the blast wave had left him feeling like there was something in his lungs he couldn’t quite cough up.

The Riddler’s adapting his style
, he mused.
It may be time to pull out the armored suit.

The interior of the vault looked like the inside of a blast furnace. Fire burned so intensely there that it was swirling out through the door—and up, as if the explosion had knocked down an exterior wall and exposed the vault to open air. There was no way any of the Riddler’s thugs had survived.

Creaking sounds from the ceiling over the reception desk got him moving again. He went up the stairs, limping at a sharp pain in his right heel. Other than that he seemed intact, for the most part, though as he reached the main floor, he noticed his nose was bleeding.

The lobby was filled with smoke, making it impossible to see. He pulled a re-breather from his belt and clamped it over his mouth, taking a deep breath of filtered air. Not trusting the structural integrity of the floor so close to the explosion, he moved to the stairwell and climbed as quickly as he could to the roof of the bank.

When he got out onto the roof again, he could see just how much damage the building had suffered. The explosion had collapsed part of the outside wall of the bank on the far side from the stairwell’s roof access, advancing the work the Joker had begun months before. Flames were spreading in the rubble and licking up the sides of the building.

The bank was old, with quite a bit of woodwork, and filled with old furniture. It would burn itself to ruins, and the fire could easily jump to other neighboring buildings. Batman called Gotham City’s emergency number and reported the fire. Then he crossed the roof to the clock face and zip-lined his way back across Jezebel Square to where he’d first perched to survey the situation.

He paused long enough to scan for survivors. Even the Riddler’s gunmen didn’t deserve to die like that.

In the distance he heard sirens, and saw lights on the freeway. This would be a multiple-alarm blaze. As if to punctuate the thought, another part of the wall collapsed, and Batman stepped back from the fresh upwelling blast of heat.

Strange
, he thought.
Twice I’ve been brought to the Gotham Merchant’s Bank, and twice someone has tried to blow it up.
The Riddler wasn’t usually interested in copying other villains, and in the past he’d chafed at the very suggestion that he was a poor-man’s Joker. Was this just a coincidence?