Her smile was slightly wry. “Thank you, but…could you just show me the way out?”
Bruce considered for a moment how she possibly could have gotten in. The number of alarm and surveillance systems in place, not just on the perimeter but within the grounds, including seismic sensors, should have made it impossible for anyone to pass around the estate unnoticed. Indeed, while Bruce had engineered the system himself, he had more recently come to feel he was a prisoner in a cage of his own design. The once comforting thought of being able to track anyone on the grounds had eroded over time, until Bruce felt he was constantly being watched by Alfred.
Things had been slowly changing between them in recent years. Alfred’s elevation in title and position within the company had been necessary but strained the tightrope balance of their relationship. Bruce had begun to feel vaguely unsettled in Alfred’s presence, like the hair standing up at the nape of one’s neck for no discernable reason. Alfred was deferential and efficient as always, but now there was something irritating about the uncanny perfection of his former butler’s service to him that made Bruce want some space in his life where Alfred could not reach—something the security of the Manor, the grounds, and even the caverns under it could not afford him.
But Bruce’s jacket had something in its lining that would facilitate the solution: a low-yield bypass transmitter sewn in just for such occasions. If he wanted to wander the grounds without Alfred knowing where he was, he had to be a ghost to his own surveillance systems. As long as this woman stayed within five feet of him, he should be able to get her off the grounds without tripping any of the multiple alarms.
And maybe then he could discover how she managed to get into here in the first place.
“If I may escort you,” Bruce said, extending his crooked arm.
She smiled as she slipped her elegant, long hand through his arm. “My knight in shining armor.”
Hardly shining, lady.
“So you’re a gamekeeper?” she said as they strolled out of the walled garden and further down the slope. She arched her right eyebrow even further. “Do they still have those, Mr. Grayson?”
With his left hand in his pocket, he fingered the invitation card.
The card mystery…now the woman mystery. I wanted to come to the garden to…why did I come to the garden? Why didn’t I stay in the cave where it was safe and dark? Why did I have to come into the light?
“They do,” he replied. “Here they do. And you still haven’t told me your name.”
“Richter,” she said turning her head away slightly as she spoke. “Amanda Richter.”
Means nothing. New to me. File it for reference later.
“Well, Ms. Richter, I’ll see you to the servants’ gatehouse,” Bruce said. “It’s at the bottom of the hill, and we can call for a cab from the guard’s room there.”
“Won’t the guard mind us intruding on him there?” she asked.
“No guard,” Bruce smiled. They had already passed over more than a hundred different automated alarm and intruder-response systems. “Still, I wouldn’t advise you coming back for another try over the fence.”
“Is that how I got in?” Amanda asked. “Climbed over the fence in my designer jacket and tailored suit?”
“Well, if you did,” Bruce nodded, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see it. Here is the gatehouse.”
They were at the base of the enormous slope of the back lawn. The twelve-foot-tall stone fence emerged from the woods to their left and extended across the back of the property and into the woods on the far side of the lawn. The line was broken only by the gatehouse and the wide iron gate next to it, thwarting the road that wound up the edge of the woods toward the manor, which was nearly two miles distant at the top of the rise to the north.
If Amanda heard the door unlock at their approach, she didn’t show it.
Bruce showed her through the gatehouse and out the other side. He placed the call for the cab and then stepped out to where she was standing next to the road.
“They say they’ll be here in about ten minutes,” Bruce said. “Must be a gathering of the upper-crust somewhere in Bristol tonight if the cabs are that close.”
Amanda nodded, then turned her gray eyes on him. “I really must see Bruce, Mr. Grayson.”
“Call me Gerry,” Bruce corrected.
“Gerry, then. Isn’t there any way that I—”
“Well, you can ask,” Bruce said.
Remember to flash your charming smile. It’s been such a long time.
Bruce leaned against the gatehouse, folded his arms, and nodded toward the intercom mounted next to the gate.
Amanda gave him a “thanks for nothing” smile and stepped up to the intercom. She jabbed the button with a long, elegant finger.
“Yes?”
Alfred sounds upset. He’s probably wondering why he didn’t get any proximity alarms at her approach.
“I am here to see Bruce Wayne,” Amanda said.
Bruce raised his eyebrows and nodded approvingly.
“Mr. Wayne is not taking callers,” Alfred’s tinlike voice replied from the box.
“I have a message for him—a very important message,” Amanda said.
“I shall be delighted to take the message, madam,” Alfred responded. “Whom may I say the message is from?”
“It is from me. Amanda Richter.”
The metal box went silent for a moment.
That’s not like Alfred. Reporters and writers trying to make their mark approach him every day, and usually a lot more creatively than this.
“Could you give that name again?” Alfred said at last.
“Yes. I’m Amanda Richter.”
Silence again? Did I hear stress in Alfred’s voice?
“Miss Richter, please stay where you are,” Alfred said. “I’ll be down directly.”
Bruce continued to smile, but there was definitely something wrong. Alfred had strict orders never to greet anyone on the property nor allow them in unless they had been cleared by him personally. There were no exceptions.
“It looks like you won’t be needing that cab after all,” Bruce said.
“I suppose not, Mr. Grayson,” Amanda said.
“Oh, and I shouldn’t have let you out through the gatehouse,” Bruce added. “If that butler catches me here, there’ll be hell to pay. I could lose my job.”
“I promise not to say a thing,” Amanda nodded.
“Thanks,” Bruce replied. “It’s been a pleasure, Amanda.”
“Thank you, Gerry.”
Bruce turned and stepped back through the gatehouse with studied casualness. He stepped back on to the grounds out the other side, registering the sound of the locks on the doors snapping closed automatically behind him. Amanda was now properly locked outside his domain, though he still did not know how she had managed to get into the grounds in the first place.
Moreover, there was the question of Alfred.
Alfred had been with him from the beginning. Every relationship has its strains. He and Alfred had been through it all together for as long as Bruce could remember. Sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was hard. Of late, the warm relationship between the retainer and his master had cooled somewhat and the silences between them had lengthened. Even so, Bruce believed Alfred Pennyworth had been steadfastly honest in his service.
But now Alfred was reacting contrary to Bruce’s direct orders because of a woman he obviously knew—one who somehow had managed to slip undetected onto the grounds.
“They are all just pieces to the puzzle, Bruce,” Mother said so often. “Just put together the ones that make sense and the rest will follow in time…”
Bruce moved quickly back toward the ravine. He could hear the motor of the Bentley approaching from the Manor, no doubt with Alfred behind the wheel, and wanted to be out of sight before it arrived.
Bruce settled down into the massive chair in front of his research console. The air in the Batcave felt oppressive now compared
with the morning outside, but it was also familiar and somehow comforting after the strange encounter he had on the grounds.
Don’t let yourself get distracted. Hold onto the greater picture and let the pieces fall into place when you see where they fit.
He pulled the card out from the pocket of his jacket and set it down in front of him. Then he pulled on the gloves of the virtual interface. The array of screens awoke in front of him and he started pulling data out of the air with his hands. It shifted in the space in front of him as he examined it. The first was the card itself. He pulled the chemical analysis of the card and the printing which displayed in a cascade to his left.
The laminate coat over the cards was actually a bonded protein complex, permeable and releasing its bond under heat. It was an unusual substance for a card laminate, and understanding its properties would take some additional consideration. He let the sequencer continue chewing on that one while he moved on.
The paper itself was a plastic derivative rather than actual paper. The grain was a fine embossed simulation of the feel of paper down to a very fine surface level, and a comparison of the card he had pulled from the Scarface dummy with the one he took from Alfred showed their texture patterns were identical down to microscopic levels.
That’s an unusual amount of effort for an invitation. Fine detail…
He pulled the high-resolution optical scans of the cards to examine the printing side by side, looking for variations in the ink.
There were none. No bleeding, print smudges, or blur variations one might expect in a mass-production press run. The printing was identical right down to the highest magnification of the—The highest magnification…
He pushed the scan in as far as the magnification would go.
The ink was not contiguous. It was a half-tone imaging at the most miniscule microprinting scale he had ever encountered. Each of the letters was made up of a series of spaced dots. Not only were there distinct dots, but the dots appeared to be the same size in each case, although their positions and the spaces between the dots varied.
No…they don’t vary at all. They are an entirely uniform spacing of black dots and white spaces. It’s a digital stream. It’s data!
He pushed the chemical analysis aside and pulled down a graphic parser module, coupling it to the cryptography node. The parser would scan the micro image into a data stream, and then the cryptographic software would process it searching for recognizable patterns. The graphic parsing would be almost instantaneous, but the cryptographic node could take days to chew through the data before coming up with possible recognizable patterns. Bruce set up the parameters, started the program run, stripped off the gloves, and spun around in his chair.
He had barely started to stand when the consol began chiming.
I must have made a mistake in the comparison loop sequence.
He sat back down and turned to the consol, pulling the gloves back on in annoyance. The display was flashing “Run complete.” He reached for the image, tapped it, and waited for the garbage data to display so he could push it into the trash.
“What the hell?” Bruce muttered, staring at the display. It was a congruous PDF file.
“It can’t be that simple.” His eyes narrowing, Bruce reached forward and tapped on the file to open it.
It sprang open.
Gotham City Police Department
Case Number: VR/01/04/05/1689
Investigating Officer: Detective J. Gordon
Vice & Racketeering Division
June 28, 1974
Two days after my parents died. Two days after I died with them.
Bruce leaned forward, reading the fuzzy type on the digital page floating in front of him.
Telephone tip received from one Marion Richter / 1429 Pearl Street / Upper West Side re: Wayne killing. Partner Detective T. Holloway and I conducted the interview in Richter’s apartment at 10:36 a.m. Richter asserted the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne had been contract killing motivated by Thomas Wayne’s alleged business with her father, Dr. Ernst Richter (deceased). She further claimed Thomas Wayne had ties to the Moxon mob and had been conspiring with them over several decades. She presented six of her father’s bound journals in evidence, as well as a number of contracts and papers that appear to have been signed by both Wayne and her father. She also included a number of bank deposits and account statements indicating when payments to her father and, after his death, to her and her young sister, Amanda, had been made by Thomas Wayne through the intermediary of the Wayne House managers, Jarvis Pennyworth and subsequently his son, Alfred Pennyworth. These items were catalogued by Holloway and accepted.
Bruce sat back in his chair, his frown deepening.
No wonder, then, that Alfred came down to the gatehouse to see to Amanda Richter personally. But I’ve never heard of these Richters before, and certainly not in conjunction with my parents’ deaths. Why didn’t Alfred tell me about this?
He read on.
Miss Richter further stated that, according to her father’s journals, Thomas Wayne also kept extensive journals of his own that could corroborate her testimony. We concluded the interview with Marion Richter at 11:46 a.m.
We then proceeded to Wayne Manor in Bristol with the intention of interviewing Alfred Pennyworth regarding the payments made to the Richters and the alleged journals. Mr. Pennyworth consented to the interview, which we conducted in the library at Wayne Manor. Alfred acknowledges knowing the Richters and conveying financial assistance to the Richters at the behest of his employer, Thomas Wayne. He denied the existence of journals by Thomas Wayne in any form, electronic or otherwise. (Search warrant filed / pending.) He further denies any association between the Moxon mob and the…
The typewriter text ended at the bottom of the page.
Bruce stretched his hand out, tapping the document to flip to the next page.
Nothing happened.
He looked at the lower right corner of the displayed page. It read “1 / 14,” meaning that he had read page one of fourteen pages. He quickly checked the file size. The single page was all the data that existed in the microprint on the card.
Bruce cross-referenced the case file number against the Police Evidence Archives database.
The file referred to in the document was missing from the archives.
Bruce pressed his hands together, his forefingers tented in front of his pursed lips. He reached forward, stabbing at the intercom switch on the console.
“Alfred.”
“Yes, Master Wayne.”
“You mentioned something about breakfast earlier…and I feel like we should talk.”
“Of course, sir,” Alfred’s voice was smooth as cream.
“I’ll be right up then.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Alfred responded at once. “I apologize that your meal will be ready a few minutes later than I had anticipated. I fear I am required to run to the market for some fresh cilantro. It shall be another hour, sir.”
Cilantro? In an hour?
“Oh, that’s quite all right, Alfred,” Bruce said in practiced, even tones. “I’m more of a brunch man myself. By the way, was there someone at the back gate just now?”
There’s a pause in his response. He never pauses…never hesitates.
“No, sir,” Alfred replied brightly. “Not that I am aware of.”
“I just thought I heard the proximity alarm is all.”
“No, sir,” Alfred replied. “Perhaps a malfunction. I shall look into it at once.”
“Of course,” Bruce replied. “Let me know when breakfast is served.”
Bruce released the intercom button, a dark shadow covering his face as he again sat back in his chair to consider.
The evidence file is missing. Thirteen pages of Gordon’s report are missing. Alfred is lying to me about Amanda Richter. My parents’ lives are missing and now the why behind their deaths is missing, too.
Reluctantly, Bruce reached forward, spun the display down to a file
he had long ago closed.
BC001–0001
Wayne, Thomas & Martha
CHAPTER FOUR
GOOD-LOOKING CORPSE
* * *
G.C.P.D. Headquarters / Gotham / 9:07 p.m. / Present Day
James Gordon stood on the roof of police headquarters facing the high-load circuit breaker box. The lock was dangling from the open panel door. It had long since stopped swinging. The night was chilly, his breath forming clouds in front of him as he stood in the clear autumn night.
How the hell did it come to this?
Gotham City police commissioner James Gordon knew the answer better than anyone else. He had grown up with his brother Roger in Chicago, the two of them playing “cops and robbers” up and down the block of their brownstone-lined Lincoln Park neighborhood. It had not mattered much to the boys then who played the “cop” and who played the “robber,” and they often tossed a coin to see which one would be which.
It was not until much later in his life that Gordon—a newly minted police lieutenant moving his wife and son to a new job in Gotham—discovered just how arbitrary that coin toss was in the G.C.P.D. His first partner on the job was Arthur Flass—a cop as dirty as they came. Gordon dutifully reported his partner’s extortion racket to then-commissioner Gillian Loeb. He soon had his naïveté beaten out of him by a number of his brother officers wielding baseball bats; it seemed that Loeb was skimming a cut of his own off the top of every corrupt cop in town. The beating only managed to forge the young lieutenant into tougher steel. Gordon became known as an “untouchable” cop, but with Loeb running the police and his hand firmly in control of the Internal Affairs Division, it was obvious that the career of James Gordon had died in the baseball bat beating even if his body had not.
Then Gordon’s fortunes all changed at the hands of a different kind of bat.
Wayne of Gotham Page 4