The trip passed uneventfully. It was mid-afternoon, Central Time, when the big Boeing 747 put down at Staked Plains Airport serving Ogdensville and Amarillo. A telex sent earlier had alerted Finley Lopez, an investment consultant on energy and defense matters, with his main office in Houston. He was one of the foremost investment consultants in the Southwest, and someone Bruce often worked with in his Morrison persona. Lopez had taken a local flight to Ogdensville and was at the airport to meet him.
“How good to see you, Mr. Morrison!” Finley Lopez was a large man, suave and easy-mannered, his complexion a light olive. He had a narrow black moustache and bright brown eyes with dark pouches under them. A small scar above his left eye was the last reminder of a tough childhood growing up in the barrios of Brownsville.
“You’re looking well, Finley. Not letting the señoritas take up all of your time, are you?”
Lopez grinned. His reputation as a lady’s man was known from Bayou City, Louisiana, clear west to Albuquerque. “Not quite all, Mr. Morrison. Business comes first. But I could show you one fine old time if you’d let me.”
“Good of you to offer,” Bruce said, “but I’m afraid I’m here this time on business.”
“So let’s get it done, then we can paint the town red. Or maybe you’d like a real old-style Texas barbecue at my ranch. My wife Esmeralda has a special way with beef ribs.”
“I remember Esmeralda’s cooking well,” Bruce said. “Please give her my love. But I’m just here for the day. I return to Gotham City tonight.”
“Well, tarnation,” Lopez said with mock annoyance. “Can’t get you to have any fun at all. What can I do for you, Mr. Morrison?”
“I’m interested in the ARDC corporation.”
Lopez nodded. “Good solid output with a first-class reputation. Red Murphy’s the chief ramrod on that spread, Mr. Morrison. You’d like him. He looks a little like Spencer Tracy, only not so pretty.”
“I’d like to meet him. Today.”
“Let’s find a telephone,” Lopez said.
Lopez found a phone in the airport and called. He left the booth shaking his head.
“I don’t know what’s getting into Murphy,” he said. “Must be getting old.”
“What’s the matter?” Bruce asked.
“I spoke to his personal secretary. She said that Murphy isn’t seeing anyone at the moment.”
“For how long?”
“She couldn’t say. Just that he was very occupied with important matters.” Lopez scratched his chin, thinking. “Let me make another call.”
Ten minutes later he had further news.
“I called Ben Braxton. I don’t think you ever met him, Mr. Morrison. He’s chief editor of the main newspaper here, The Ogdensville Bugle. I’ve done him a few favors in my time and he was glad to fill me in on Murphy. It’s all public knowledge anyhow, but it saves us from having to dig it out of the newspaper’s morgue. It seems that Murphy has been acting oddly for the past several weeks. He has a suite in the factory complex, you know, and he moved in there recently, him and his wife. Her name’s Lavinia. She’s a fine woman, Mr. Morrison.”
“So they’re both living in the ARDC factory complex?”
“That’s right. And they haven’t come out. They talk to family members by telephone from time to time. But they haven’t been seeing anyone. Not even their son, Dennis, who was in town recently on his way to South America. He’s a fire-fighting specialist and spends most of his time on the road. But Murphy wouldn’t even see him. It’s very curious.”
“Curious indeed,” Bruce said. “Well, Finley, let’s have some lunch. I’ll just have time to catch the evening flight back to Gotham City.”
“You’re going to come and go just like that? Come on, Mr. Morrison! Why don’t you tell me what this is all about.”
“It isn’t about anything,” Bruce said. “I’ve gotten some information about ARDC and I was considering making a large investment in the company. I thought I’d talk to Murphy, see what I think of him, before tying up capital. But if it can’t be done at this time, it’ll keep. You got any place good to eat around here?”
“Indeed we do!” Lopez said. “I hope you like barbecue, Mr. Morrison, because one of the finest restaurants in the state is just a few miles outside of town.”
The restaurant, Las Angelitas de Tejas, was a beautifully restored building in Spanish colonial style. They ate on the broad terrace, overlooking the formal gardens that the restaurant maintained at great expense. Bruce ate enough of the fiery and savory barbecue to satisfy his host. Bruce’s own taste was more for diets high in fiber and nuts, with plenty of salad and vegetables on the side. But he didn’t want to insult Lopez’s native cuisine.
Lopez drove him back to the airport and saw him aboard the four P.M. flight to Gotham City with a stopover in Kansas City.
When the plane reached Kansas City, Bruce got off and booked a private plane to take him back to Ogdensville. He arrived just after dark. His luggage was still there, in the locker where he had left it.
The ARDC complex occupied several hundred square acres of flat desert close to Ogdensville. It was surrounded by a double barrier of electrified fence. Armed guards patroled the perimeter at all hours.
At night, the place looked uncanny with its guard towers spaced every hundred yards, the entire line of fence brilliantly illuminated by searchlights. It looked like a concentration camp in the American desert.
Bruce Wayne, who had been Charlie Morrison, now became Batman. And Batman was not too impressed.
In his line of work, fighting some of the most ingenious and well-financed criminals the world had ever known, he had on many occasions had to get into places of strong security; places whose owners had gone to considerable expense and ingenuity to make Batmanproof.
ARDC would not be easy, but it was a long way from impossible.
Batman’s first attempt was on the north side of the complex. Here, several of the floodlights had gone out; a sign of carelessness that might in itself mean something. Carrying a heavy suitcase of equipment with him, Batman observed the guards’ routine for a while. Blending perfectly into the night, and with the gift of total immobility when he so desired, Batman watched for almost two hours.
He concluded that it would be difficult to get through the wire without someone noticing. The guards’ paths meshed too well to allow even the ten minutes or so he would need to neutralize the electricity and get through the wire.
He turned his attention to burrowing beneath. Taking a small but powerful mass detector from his suitcase, he took an underground profile of the surrounding land to a depth of a hundred feet.
As he had feared, the ARDC security people had invested in an advanced sensing alarm system, which would detect movements in the earth to a depth of fifty feet. He would have to give up any thought of going under the wire. He would need earthmoving equipment if he wanted to get below the level of the detectors.
He decided that this break-in might not be as easy as he had expected.
He stood in the darkness and thought for a while, a tall, awe-inspiring figure dressed in black from head to toe. Even the little peaked ears of his costume seemed to be standing stiff in concentration.
At last he made up his mind. It was risky, but he had undergone worse.
Billy-Joe Namon and Steve Kingston were on the northeastern quadrant that night. Even in their dark blue guards’ uniforms they looked like what they were—out-of-work cowboys filling in the time between rodeos with any work they could find. Guarding the place for Old Man Murphy was not bad work. Murphy was a fair man and he paid a decent wage. The only trouble with the job was, it was boring. So highly evolved were the protective systems that surrounded the factory that no one ever tried to get in. Night after night it was the same: the soft hiss of the desert wind, the occasional howl of a coyote, and nothing else. Ever.
Except for tonight.
Tonight was different. It began with a loud hissing sound that s
eemed to come from the desert.
“You ever heard anything like that?” Billy-Joe asked.
“Might be a gut-shot bear,” Steve said.
“I doubt it. Not this far south.”
They listened. The sound increased in intensity. Then a light appeared in the sky in front of them. It pulsed, a bright electric violet, unlike anything either man had ever seen before.
“You know,” Billy-Joe said, “I don’t like this one little bit.”
“What’s it up to now?” Steve asked.
The violet light had begun to move, traveling in easy swoops back and forth across the sky, coming closer and closer to the perimeter fence.
“You think we should shoot it down?” Steve asked. He had already cleared his sidearm.
“Don’t go gettin’ nervous,” Billy-Joe said. “Ain’t even nothin’ to shoot at yet. Let it get a little closer.”
They watched as the brilliant violet light advanced toward them. Billy-Joe had picked up his submachine gun. He clicked off the safeties as the violet light came directly overhead.
Then it burst into dazzling light like the simultaneous bursting of a million flashbulbs. At the same time it gave off a deafening noise like a howitzer going off about five feet from them.
Both men fell down, stunned and blinded. They got to their feet quickly, rubbing their eyes and trying to regain sight.
There was a field telephone ringing nearby. It was from the southern quadrant guardpost, several miles away on the other side of the perimeter fence. The guards there had picked up the noise and flash and wanted to know what was going on.
Billy-Joe pulled himself together enough to make a report.
“Cal,” he said to the southern quadrant guard, “I hate to tell you this because you’re going to call me a liar, but I think we just saw a UFO close up.”
“My aunt May saw one of those last year,” Cal said. “They are the dangdest things, aren’t they?”
“Cal, I’m telling you, that’s what we saw near as we can tell.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Cal said. “But I guess we’d better go on full alert just in case you boys been hittin’ the bottle or chewing on devil weed.”
Four Jeeps full of armed men roared out of the motor pool. They raced around the inner perimeter, helping out the Jeeps’ headlights with handheld searchlights. They came across plenty of tumbleweed but nothing else.
Nothing they were able to spot, that is.
Darkness and silence again. No sounds but the moaning desert wind and the occasional call of a coyote.
No movement on the fenced-in land of the inner perimeter except for the wind, rippling the grass that the ARDC Corporation maintained at so high a cost.
Grass rippling in the dark.
Something flowing across the dark grass.
Something dark, shapeless, large, moving in a zigzag fashion, coming closer and closer to the main buildings.
In the high watchtower, Steve was watching the grass. There was something a little funny about it tonight. But that was the wind, blowing it back and forth in sudden flaws, taking unexpected turns and reversals, until you could almost swear there was someone or something moving through it.
But that was crazy.
Nothing could get through the fence.
“What you looking at?” Billy-Joe remarked beside him.
“Just watching the grass,” Steve said.
“Old buddy,” Billy-Joe said, “we’re paid to look outside the perimeter, not inside. We already know there’s nothing inside.”
“Nothing except us chickens,” Steve said, grinning.
Us chickens. And a very large bat.
Promptly at midnight, the Captain of the ARDC guards, Blaise Connell, a former Texas Ranger, reported to Red Murphy in his suite.
“Everything OK, Mr. Murphy.”
“Thank you, Blaise. What was that bright flash a couple of hours ago?”
Although Murphy’s suite was deep within the ARDC complex, and had no window to the outer world, Red Murphy had picked up the flash on one of the banks of tv monitors that were the eyes of the perimeter surveillance system.
“Couple of the boys think it was flying saucers,” Connell said. “But that’s crazy. I really don’t know what it was, sir.”
“Does the perimeter fence show any signs of breaching?”
Connell shook his head. “Integrity intact.”
“I guess we won’t worry too much about it,” Murphy said. “Good night, Blaise.”
When his guard captain had departed, Red Murphy went to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. He’d been going to the bottle a little too much recently. He knew that, but he was under heavy stress. The worst of it was having to keep it all to himself. At least he could share it with his bottle, even if that was not such a great idea.
The apartment was furnished plainly in a typical Western motif. Piebald cowhides covered the chairs. The couches and tables were simple but well made. There were two original Remington oil paintings on the wall, the only touch of ostentation in the room. Aside from them, everything was plain and serviceable, even though the suite was larger than usual. Red Murphy was a man who didn’t like to feel hemmed in. The Remingtons, with their sense of wide spaces and western subjects, helped him forget the reinforced concrete on all sides.
He held the shotglass up to the light and squinted at it. He had a tough square face, tanned to the color of saddle leather and seamed by many hours in the fierce sun and driving wind. Murphy was short, and so big in the chest and shoulders that he looked almost misshapen. He had done all the oil field jobs—roustabout, gantry walker, puddler, valve wiper. For years his hobby had been riding around the scrub country west of Ogdensville in his battered old land rover. Folks thought he was a touch loco, spending all those hours just aimlessly riding around the desolate land. They thought he was crazy for sure when he put up every cent of his earnings to take out a drilling lease on the old Double “O” Field. It had gone dry ten years before, and even though new deposits had been suspected in the area, not a drop had been taken out of it.
Red Murphy got up the money to hire an oil rig. He surprised everybody by first bulldozing the shack and corrals that had marked the headquarters building of the Double “O” Enterprise. Then he’d sunk his bits into a point not more than ten feet off the center of what had been the living room.
The ensuing guster was a beauty.
He’d found the basin. Just as his studies of the surrounding countryside, carried out during those so-called idle trips in the land rover, had predicted. The oil was there, in sufficient quantity to let him begin to build a fortune that was soon to be legendary even in this country of big men with big bankrolls.
When the bottom dropped out of the oil business in Texas, he anticipated it by almost six months. He got his money out and bought the ailing ARDC corporation.
ARDC had a list of bad debts as long as a polecat’s shadow on Sadie Hawkins’ Day, as the wits at Bernigan’s Saloon and Pool Hall in Ogdensville used to say. Its machinery was out of date and mostly falling apart, and its senior personnel had given up on the company long ago, keeping their jobs for the paychecks, but looking around for something more interesting to switch into.
Against all these liabilities, the company had only two assets: a potentially lucrative assortment of defense contracts, and a team of the country’s best weapons systems engineers.
Murphy thought he could parlay those into something interesting. He rebuilt the factory, replaced the worn-out machinery, fired the time-servers and gave wage increases and incentive bonuses to the ones he kept. When he hired new men, he hired the best.
Soon, ARDC, under its dynamic new management, was turning out some of the best weapons systems in the world. Their small arms division attracted the attention of the British and French secret services, who were eager to buy some of the products. And the Department of Defense was very interested indeed. As were the police chiefs of America, who saw in ARDC one of
their best hopes in the endless war against crime.
Red Murphy was liked and respected in business groups all over the country. He was welcome in high circles in Washington. He used to attend Washington’s special functions frequently.
But for the past months he had not been seen in his usual haunts. He had begun staying in the factory suite, talking to business associates, friends and relatives by telephone. Only Blaise Connell the security chief saw him. People wondered about it, but eccentricity is part of the Texas tradition. As long as a man doesn’t hurt people or walk around naked, he can act as weird as he pleases. Nobody’s going to pay any attention.
Practically nobody.
Murphy finished his drink and quickly poured another. He held up the shotglass and looked at the room through its amber transparency. The room looked distorted. Murphy laughed and tossed down half the drink.
Then he heard a sound behind him and stiffened.
There was nothing there but the big double closet where he stored his hat collection and his golf clubs.
“Somebody in there?” he said aloud.
There was no reply.
Murphy put down the shot glass. He reached to his back and took out, from beneath his flowing Hawaiian shirt, a chromed .44 Magnum automatic with rosewood handles. He cocked it and walked toward the closet.
“Come on out,” he said. “This is the only time I’ll say it.”
No reply.
He leveled the big gun and pulled the trigger. Slugs blasted apart the light wooden closet door. A pile of hats tumbled out, some of them ragged from being shot through the headbands.
Murphy cursed softly when he saw what he’d done.
He was even angrier when he saw that he’d put a slug through his Ben Hogan Memorial Classic sets of woods.
“Damnation!” he said.
“Don’t worry,” a voice said behind him. “You only punctured the bag.”
The sparse hair on Murphy’s big skull lifted as he heard a voice from where no man could be. A tremor of fear swept over him. He forced himself to turn and wasn’t surprised when the automatic was plucked out of his hand.
The Further Adventures of Batman Page 4