Drayling nodded, adding his support. “And I intend to be seeing you all more often, in person.”
Thanks to several major new defense contracts, the price of Wayne Enterprises stock had soared, improving the profitability of his company. Again and again, Wayne Enterprises successfully outbid LuthorCorp for new government contracts, and Bruce knew the real reason. Without his spies copying the best Wayne Enterprises work, Luthor no longer had the edge he’d once taken for granted.
In the last two months, given full creative freedom, Bruce’s research teams had developed amazing designs, innovative weapons, and vehicles that were not just refinements of tried-and-true existing technology but genuinely new approaches. Every breakthrough, every report, every prototype was channeled directly through him.
Naturally, he made a point of keeping the most daring advances for his “personal testing.”
INSIDE THE CAVE, BRUCE DIDN’T MIND GETTING HIS HANDS dirty. Engine grease covered his knuckles, darkened his fingernails. He slid beneath the black automobile, inspecting the axles, the transmission. Its lines were predatory, its paint coat polished to such a high gleam that it looked like a clear midnight sky.
Straightening, Alfred raised his welding helmet and extinguished the blowtorch. “I neglected to install the minibar and magazine rack, sir, but you’ll find everything else quite in order.”
Lying on his back, Bruce rolled out from beneath the chassis, wiping his hands on a rag. He hauled himself to his feet. “And the entire body is bulletproof?”
“Doubly armored, sir. Would you like me to take a few potshots in order to demonstrate?”
“We’ll test it soon enough, Alfred. And the windshield glass?”
“Triple-sandwiched transparent polymer, along with a strong, virtually invisible wire grid to help maintain integrity. This is the best vehicle that money can buy—as you well know.”
Bruce raised the hood and inspected the high-powered engine, which made the largest American V8 look like a windup toy by comparison. A rocket nozzle above the rear exhaust ports could provide emergency thrust.
He had made most of the modifications himself, diverting R&D developments from Wayne Enterprises before they could be released to government contractors. Naturally, such extraordinary breakthroughs had to be demonstrated in the field, and he looked forward to doing the testing himself.
Though the car’s design was functional, it also displayed a flair for the dramatic—swooping fins, armored tires, gadgets to respond to any conceivable situation…something James Bond would have envied. Anyone who glanced at the vehicle would immediately know that it belonged to the mysterious Batman.
However, Bruce still found it maddening that he could not reproduce Superman’s powers. Their encounters at the Luthor mansion and in the Area 51 hangar had only heightened his interest. He knew how challenging it had been to penetrate the incredible security at Groom Lake, but Superman had gotten in without even breaking a sweat. And later the other man had flown high enough and fast enough to stop all three Soviet missiles, hurling them away from Earth. That was no parlor trick, and it could not be explained by the technology Luthor had stolen to design his bulky battlesuits.
Even so, this new rocket-powered car was quite impressive.
Opening the door of the vehicle, Bruce slid into the biodynamically designed seat. Alfred, with his perennial dry wit, had taped a note to the front control panel: BATMOBILE.
“Stand clear, Alfred. I’m going to fire her up. Are the tires secure on the rollers?”
“Indeed they are, sir. I wouldn’t want your first test drive to terminate prematurely against the cave wall.”
Alfred primly inserted earplugs and stood against the rock wall, waiting as Bruce started the ignition process—atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed. The engine purred, hummed, then roared to full power. And he hadn’t even engaged the rocket booster yet.
The vehicle shuddered, tires screaming on the rollers like fractious thoroughbreds in the starting gate. The dashboard gauges inched toward red fields as he increased power. Bruce ran diagnostics that continually monitored the vehicle’s systems. Thus far he was very pleased. Batmobile indeed!
When he finished his tests, Bruce climbed reluctantly out of the black vehicle. A smile showed beneath Alfred’s pencil-thin mustache as he removed his earplugs. “It seems adequate, Master Bruce. The Wayne Enterprises scientists have produced another miracle.”
Bruce drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. In spite of the car’s armor, engine power, built-in weaponry, and evasive devices, Superman trumped all of it. “Yes, miracles, Alfred…but they’re not yet miraculous enough.”
CHAPTER 39
LUTHORCORP
INSIDE HIS CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS IN METROPOLIS, Lex Luthor’s office was a well-defended island in a sea of covertly armed receptionists whose primary job was to prevent him from being interrupted: At any moment, Luthor’s great mind might be on the verge of an important breakthrough.
He sat in intense silence, studying the plans for the production model of his advanced armored battlesuit. Enhanced shoulder and neck protection, impenetrable casing over vulnerable areas, a jetpack for short flights, magnetic boots, built-in projectile weapons, protective gauntlets. The wearer of such a suit would become the world’s most powerful soldier…perhaps even powerful enough to defeat Superman.
Luthor had always been annoyed by the grandstanding hero. That blue suit and red cape—where had he gotten such an outlandish costume? And since he had helped the cowled burglar to escape from his mansion, Superman was clearly more than an attention-seeking gadfly. Granted, after the incomprehensible failure of Luthor’s energy-beam defense system, he admitted that a superpowerful alien freak might have his uses. Even so, Superman would have been much more tolerable if he’d been controlled by LuthorCorp.
Fortunately, because his death-beam system had been a carefully kept secret on his island, nobody was aware that the energy rays had failed at the most crucial moment. Luthor’s disgrace, his shame, his error was entirely a private matter. But that didn’t make it any less maddening.
After the debacle, he had received a cryptic telegram from behind the Iron Curtain—a message from General Ceridov informing him that the military traitors Endovik and Dubrov had not, in fact, been executed but, better still, had been sent to the Ariguska gulag. Ceridov seemed to believe that the stunt with Superman was one of Luthor’s ploys.
Good; let him keep his delusions, Luthor thought.
The KGB general had kept his fingerprints off the entire incident, as had Luthor. Even so, Luthor was more than annoyed by Superman’s continued intervention. Yes, he had saved the world, which almost—almost—balanced out the fact that he had made a fool out of Lex Luthor. Nobody made a fool out of Lex Luthor.
As a result, he had decided to investigate the mystery of Superman with even greater vigor. How could the brute be stopped if he happened to get out of control? Luthor didn’t like any aspect of his plans to be out of control. Superman had to be taken out of the picture, or at least thoroughly leashed.
An hour earlier, he had received a formal letter from the secretary of defense, regretfully turning down Luthor’s appeal to submit new bids for several contracts that had been awarded to Wayne Enterprises. Just yesterday, a major bid for helicopters had been awarded to Northrop Aircraft. Queen Industries had just won out on the contract for the new Arrow short-range missile. LuthorCorp’s medical division had lost a lucrative contract for a radiation treatment to be used in the case of heavy fallout exposures; Tyler Pharmaceuticals had come up with an equivalent—and cheaper—system.
Wayne Enterprises was, however, his only true competitor. Luthor now realized he’d made a mistake—a mistake!—in underestimating Bruce Wayne, believing him to be an insipid hedonistic playboy, all money and no brains. Since Luthor’s insiders at Wayne Enterprises had been so useful for so long, he hadn’t worried about the handsome goof-off. Now, astonishingly, Wayne actually seem
ed to know what he was doing, and his paid-off board members had been rendered impotent. Obviously Wayne knew, or at least suspected, their treachery. And none of them had bothered to inform him! Idiots.
When the intercom on his desk buzzed, he stabbed at it irritably. “What?”
“A man to see you, Mr. Luthor. He insists you’ll want to talk with him, though he’s not on the calendar.”
“Who is it? Senator McCarthy will be here soon.”
“His last name is Buchheim. He claims you knew him from Wayne Enterprises.”
Luthor stiffened. “Send him in—and don’t let anyone else see him. Is Bertram here?”
“I’ll call for him, Mr. Luthor.”
Larry Buchheim walked in, looking sheepish, red-eyed, broken. Luthor had always considered the man weak. Anyone who left incriminating evidence lying around was a sloppy fool, beneath contempt—except when he could be put to good use. Unfortunately, this man’s usefulness had ended the moment that Bruce Wayne had transferred him out of active management.
Buchheim approached his desk, hat in hand, squeezing the brim nervously; his suit was rumpled. Luthor had heard that the man’s wife had left him—a fact that should have given the idiot more time to concentrate on the job at hand, become a useful member of society.
Buchheim stood in front of the single chair across from the desk, careful not to take a seat without being invited. “I have information for you, Mr. Luthor. Good information.”
“That’ll be a refreshing change. Your last offerings proved useless.”
“It wasn’t my fault. We were ordered to do it, all of us. Wayne knows about our connections with you. He uncovered the dirt you have on each of us.”
Since Luthor had already suspected this, he was unimpressed by Buchheim’s news. “How did he do that?”
“He must have hired the world’s greatest detective. He had photos, documents, records of my bank account. He knows everything, Mr. Luthor.”
“Poor you.” His thoughts raced ahead to determine how he could remove all evidence from his end.
“Some of the others are bound to be coming to you as well, but I wanted to get here first. He’s going to dismiss us all—I know it. I need a job at LuthorCorp. You owe it to me, after what I did for you all those years.”
“I owe you?” Luthor actually barked a laugh, unable to believe this man’s gall. “I seem to recall that you were paid—well paid, in fact, for technology that proved faulty!”
“That was Wayne’s doing, too, sir. Once he discovered our connection to LuthorCorp, he ordered us to continue providing components and blueprints to you, but I’ve since learned that he altered them somehow, modified the designs in subtle ways. The pieces we supplied, Mr. Luthor, weren’t supposed to work. He sabotaged them, just to spite you.”
Buchheim reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He leaned forward to place a small sketch on Luthor’s desk. The drawing showed the diodes and transistors that had been cleverly, but improperly, connected in the control circuits that Luthor had co-opted for his energy-beam system. Without a careful and meticulous inspection, no one would ever have noticed the flaw.
The last piece fell into place in Luthor’s mind. The components he had so carefully obtained from Wayne Enterprises and installed in his flawless energy-beam system were duds, designed to fail? He had used technology stolen from Wayne Enterprises so he could put the system online faster, test it sooner, pit it against the Soviet missiles. There had been no fault in his design—no error. Luthor’s only real mistake had been in trusting the competence of others.
“Buchheim, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“That’s why I came here. I know what Wayne Enterprises is working on now, and I can help you develop it before they do. New technology!”
“New technology…I’m a fan of new technology, Mr. Buchheim. Give me something new over something old any day. That’s one major difference between myself and Bruce Wayne: He surrounds himself with relics from fallen empires, museum-quality garbage. I, on the other hand, see how things can be improved, and I figure out how to profit from that.” Luthor opened a desk drawer and reached inside. “However, sometimes the old ways are reliable and effective. You just can’t improve on certain ideas.”
He withdrew a Luger P08 pistol, for which he had paid a great deal. The gun had supposedly been carried by Dr. Mengele himself, and Luthor’s labs had authenticated one partial fingerprint.
“This type of pistol has been in service for decades. The Germans began using it at the turn of the century.” He pointed it directly at Buchheim’s chest and fired without another word. The bullet ripped through the man’s sternum, knocking him backward into the chair. He slumped like a scarecrow in the seat.
The gunshot was loud, but the office was soundproofed. This was by no means the first time Luthor had needed to keep his activities here absolutely private. The former Wayne Enterprises employee twitched and bled, then lay still. Luthor waved away the bitter smell of cordite about him. He hit the intercom again, much more relaxed now. “Is Bertram here yet?”
“Yes, sir, he’s just arrived.”
“Send him in.”
When the burly bodyguard stepped through the door, he regarded the body in the seat without comment.
“Clean up the mess before Senator McCarthy arrives for our luncheon. And bring in a new chair. That one is stained.”
Bertram grabbed the dead man’s arms and dragged him away. Already on to other business of the day, Luthor took a sheet of paper from his desk blotter and put aside the battlesuit plans. With neat, precise handwriting, he jotted down the names of the other eight directors who had been under his thumb.
When Bertram finished the cleaning chores, Luthor handed him the paper. “These men are liabilities. Take care of them. I want it done quickly.”
“Yes, sir. Quickly.”
Luthor raised a finger. “Quietly, if possible. But if not…well, quickly will be good enough.”
HE POURED SCOTCHES FOR BOTH HIMSELF AND JOSEPH McCarthy while they waited for lunch to be served. The senator from Wisconsin, firebrand of the House Un-American Activities Commission, settled himself comfortably in a brand-new chair across from the desk.
The meek and silent kitchen staff delivered a tray for each man: thick rare steaks, baked potatoes, and an iceberg lettuce salad smothered with thousand island dressing. As he cut into his own fillet, Luthor enjoyed the smooth glide of the steak knife’s serrated edge through the tender flesh. The bloody juices oozed out with an appetizing aroma. “Good American heartland beef, Senator.”
The senator also attacked the meal. His round eyes were intense, his face set in a perpetual scowl that made him appear as though he ate only mustard and pickles. After the recent missile launch, McCarthy had gone on the warpath against the evil Communists with renewed fervor. In years past, the senator had been a great ally in helping to promote the Cold War tensions that led to the arms buildup. “Let’s talk business while we dine, Mr. Luthor. I’m due back on Capitol Hill later today for more HUAC hearings.”
“We’re both busy men, Senator. We can both accomplish a great deal.”
McCarthy crunched into his salad, wiping a smear of dressing from the corner of his mouth. “And there’s still much to do. It wasn’t so long ago, Mr. Luthor, that you yourself made me see the danger posed by the Communist menace. I only hope we’ve responded in time and with enough vehemence.” He launched into his typical diatribe against the Commies, as if he were sitting in front of a TV camera instead of in a private meeting.
Luthor grew bored with the man’s limited scope of thinking and brought him up short with a single comment. “Senator, there’s something even worse than Communists.”
McCarthy blinked at the astonishing comment, a bite of steak poised in front of his mouth.
Now that he had his guest’s undivided attention, Luthor laid the groundwork for the next step in his plan. After being terrified by the n
ear-holocaust, all of America was starry-eyed over that fool Superman, and even McCarthy didn’t see the flaw in their misplaced faith. Not yet. Luthor would lead him down the next path.
The mutual fear that he and General Ceridov had managed to engender between the U.S. and USSR was a resounding and lucrative success, and it had led him to consider larger possibilities. Luthor did not think small and did not like to share—not with Ceridov, not with anyone. Therefore, he had to create a titanic enemy that would dwarf even the Soviet Union.
“Communists may be opposed to all that we fundamentally hold dear, Senator. They enslave their own people. They threaten the American way. They want to deny us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, while we disagree on basic ideals, even Communists are still human. Aliens, on the other hand, are a far more dangerous menace.”
“Aliens!” McCarthy laughed and took another drink of his Scotch. “You can’t be serious, Luthor.”
“Deadly serious. An alien already walks among us wearing a blue suit and bright red cape, pretending to do good deeds and lulling us into a false sense of security.”
“You’re referring to Superman?” McCarthy chuckled again. “But he’s a hero. He saved America.”
“But for what purpose? Who knows where he’s really from or what he wants? He told Lois Lane that he comes from a dead planet called Krypton. Krypton? It sounds made up. Is it beyond Mars? Past Alpha Centauri? In the Andromeda Galaxy?
“He won’t reveal his true name. How long has he lived among us? Does he pay taxes? Is he even an American citizen, or is he here illegally? Can we really take him at face value? Is that how the House Un-American Activities Commission treats the hidden Communists among us? Do you presume they are fine human beings who can’t mean us harm?”
McCarthy’s thick brows drew together. “I’ve never considered that. We don’t actually have an immigration policy for…extraterrestrial visitors. Even so, you can’t deny that Superman’s done great work.”
Enemies & Allies: A Novel Page 18