The Dark Knight Rises (5 page)

With a move worthy of an Olympic gymnast, she vaulted onto the bureau, taking the pearls with her. A high window provided a ready egress. “Good night, Mr. Wayne,” she said teasingly, before flipping backward out the window. Bruce heard her touch down lightly in the gardens outside.

Gathering himself, he chuckled, amused by the woman’s nerve. Ignoring the usual aches and twinges, he rocked forward on his good leg and rose smoothly to his feet. But his brow furrowed as he took a closer look at the violated safe.

Was that
powder
on the door?

Fun’s fun
, she thought,
but let’s not overstay our welcome.

The party was starting to break up. Having made her escape from the building, she wasted no time heading for the line of town cars waiting in the driveway. Along the way, she deftly peeled off her servile white apron, cuffs, and collar, discarding those previously handy bits of camouflage in various leafy mounds of shrubbery.

By the time she reached the drive, what the valets saw was a breathtaking young woman wearing a little black dress and pearls. One of the young men rushed
forward to assist her.

She quickly scanned the row of limos and found just the one she was looking for. She pointed it out to the valet, who obligingly opened the door for her. Thanking him, she slid into the car beside Congressman Gilly, who looked both startled and delighted by her unexpected entrance. Exactly as she had planned from the moment they had met.

“Can I have a ride?” she purred.

He leered at her like she was just another tasty morsel for his consumption. Deep in his cups, he slurred his response.

“You read my mind.”

The car pulled away from the house and toward the front gate.

Alfred found Bruce kneeling before the hidden safe, his cane lying on the floor a few feet away. The butler wondered what his troubled employer was looking for.

“Miss Tate was asking to see you again,” he said.

Bruce did not look up from the safe.

“She’s very persistent.”

“And quite lovely,” Alfred observed. “In case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.”

Alfred sighed. It was precisely the response he had anticipated.
I’m sorry, Miss Tate
, he thought.
I tried.

His obligation to Miranda Tate discharged, albeit
to no avail, he turned his attention to his employer’s current preoccupation.

“What are you doing?”

“Examining print dust,” Bruce said tersely. “We’ve been robbed.”

Alfred was startled by the news. Wayne Manor’s security was state-of-the-art, and then some. They had never been burgled before.

“And this is your idea of raising the alarm?” he asked. Wayne just shrugged.

“She took the pearls,” he answered. “Tracking device and all.”

Alfred recalled the precautions Bruce had taken to protect his late mother’s pearls. Poor Mrs. Wayne had been wearing those pearls the night she and her husband had lost their lives. It would be tragic if they were not recovered.

Then he realized…

“She?”

“One of the maids.” Bruce gave Alfred a wry look. “Perhaps you should stop letting them into this side of the house.”

“Perhaps you should learn to make your own bed, then.” He bent to look over Bruce’s shoulder. “Why are you dusting for prints?”

“I’m not,” Bruce said. “She was.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The rooftop of police headquarters had become Commissioner Gordon’s personal refuge, away from the nonstop phone calls, emails, faxes, meetings, and bureaucracy that came with the job. He liked to think he did his best detective work here, where he could actually concentrate without being interrupted—at least some of the time.

On clear nights like this one, the roof offered a good view of midtown, the bridges, and the adjoining islands. The city appeared quiet, but Gordon knew that looks could be deceptive. Who knew what was going on behind closed doors and in the murky back alleys? Let the politicians brag that Gotham had been cleaned up for good. Gordon had been a cop too long to take anything for granted. Crime never slept, so he couldn’t afford to, either.

Especially now that he didn’t have a certain Dark Knight backing him up.

He yawned. It was late, but he was in no hurry to return to his depressingly empty apartment. Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered keeping it—he practically lived at Police HQ anyway, or so Barbara had always complained. Smacking a thick stack of files against a nearby air duct to shake off the dust, he settled back against the railing to read. A shattered searchlight, rusted over and corroded, sat neglected a few yards away. Gordon had personally smashed it with a sledgehammer almost eight years ago. But he had never had the heart to remove it.

Maybe someday. . .

“Sir?” A young uniformed officer joined him on the rooftop. He approached Gordon tentatively. “I didn’t want to bother you up here, but they’re looking for you.”

Gordon glanced up from the reports.

“What’s the problem, son?”

“Congressman Gilly’s wife has been calling. He hasn’t made it home from the Wayne Foundation event.”

Gordon remembered Gilly pawing that poor maid. Maybe he had found a more cooperative plaything.

“That’s a job for the police?” he asked.

“Sir,” the rookie said, “I’ve been a cop for a year, and I’ve only logged half a dozen arrests. When you and Dent cleaned up the streets, you cleaned them up
good.” He shrugged. “Pretty soon we’ll be chasing overdue library books.”

Gordon smiled. He appreciated the young officer’s candor.

“But here you are, sir.” He indicated the large stack of files Gordon held in his hands. “Like we’re still at war.”

“Old habits,” Gordon said.

“Or instinct?”

Gordon heard something in the younger man’s voice. He gave the rookie a closer look. He was a husky young man with short, neatly cropped dark brown hair. He seemed shockingly young and fresh-faced, but Gordon recognized a hungry look in the youth’s eyes and the set of his jaw—an eagerness and curiosity Gordon remembered from his own early days as a beat cop in Chicago.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Blake, sir.”

Gordon put down the files.

“You have something you want to ask me, Officer Blake?”

Blake hesitated, then spit it out.

“It’s that night,” he said eagerly.
“This
night, eight years ago. The night Dent died.”

“What about it?”

“The last confirmed sighting of the Batman,” Blake said. He shook his head as if something didn’t add up. “He murders those people, takes out two SWAT
teams, breaks Dent’s neck, and then just vanishes?”

Officially, the masked vigilante known as Batman had been blamed for the murders of five people, including two cops and a prominent mob boss. Only Batman and Gordon knew who was truly responsible for those killings. Or how Harvey Dent had really fallen to his death.

“I’m not hearing a question, son.”

Blake shifted uneasily, but stuck to his guns.

“Don’t you want to know who he was?”

“I know
exactly
who he was.” Gordon walked over to the broken searchlight. He ran his finger over its rusty frame. Once upon a time, the lens had been capable of projecting an ominous bat-winged silhouette onto the night sky. It had been a signal that let the good people of Gotham City know that someone was watching out for them—and that kept the bad people spooked. “He was Batman.”

Blake looked disappointed by Gordon’s answer, but was smart enough not to argue with his boss. Gordon couldn’t blame him for wanting answers. The mystery of the Batman had gone unsolved for close to a decade now. Blake had probably grown up hearing the legend—and its ugly conclusion.

Time to change the subject,
Gordon thought. He walked past Blake and toward the stairs. “Let’s go see about the congressman’s wife.”

* * *

Sunlight crept through the thick curtains over the bedroom windows. Alfred entered, bearing breakfast on a tray, and was surprised to find the bed unoccupied. In fact, it appeared as if it had not been slept in at all.

“Master Bruce?”

No answer. Puzzled, he explored the east wing, but found no sign of his elusive employer. It dawned on him that there was one other place Bruce might be, although it had been many months—at the very least—since Bruce had ventured down there. Alfred frowned, and wondered if this was a good sign or not.

Wooden bookcases lined the walls of the study. An antique globe rested atop a polished mahogany table, not far from a grand piano that resembled the one Bruce’s mother had often played before her tragic demise. Alfred glanced at one particular bookcase before walking over to the piano.

He tapped out a specific, rather difficult sequence of three notes on the black-and-white keys. In response, a door-sized segment of the bookcase swung outward, exposing a hidden elevator. Concealed hinges, long unused, squeaked slightly. He made a mental note to oil them later.

Could it be that Bruce had gone…below?

Alfred rode the elevator down, concerned about what he might find at the bottom. He had long hoped for something that might shake Bruce out of his
malaise, and induce him to re-enter the world, but he wasn’t at all certain that the answer to his prayers was to be found down here.

In the Batcave.

The vast caverns had once been used to shelter runaway slaves escaping to the North. Damp limestone walls glistened beneath the subdued interior lighting that Bruce had installed years ago. A shallow, slow-moving river was all that remained of the underground waterway that had carved out the caverns in ages past. Massive wooden arches, high overhead, helped to support the mansion’s foundations.

Scores of North American brown bats roosted amidst the jagged stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Towering calcite columns rose hundreds of feet in height. The bats squeaked and rustled overhead.

Filthy animals,
Alfred thought.

He descended a stone ramp to the concrete floor of the main grotto, where a series of dark slate obelisks loomed directly ahead. A footbridge led across the river to where Bruce was seated at the main computer station, atop a large slate cube. A large, high-definition flatscreen monitor dominated the wall before him. Seven linked Cray supercomputers hummed softly, providing him with enough data storage and computing power to put the NSA to shame. Bruce’s gaze was glued to the screen even as his fingers danced over the keyboard. His cane rested against his seat.

He did not shift his attention as Alfred came up behind him.

“You haven’t been down here for a long time,” the butler observed.

“Just trying to find out more about our jewel thief,” his employer replied. “I ran her prints from the photos she handled.” With that, he pulled up a mug shot. The face in the photo belonged to a scowling armed robbery suspect with a receding hairline, double chins, and a bad case of five o’clock shadow. It bore little resemblance to the larcenous “maid” they had briefly encountered the night before.

“She was wearing someone else’s fingerprints,” Bruce explained, with a hint of grudging admiration in his voice. “She’s good.”

“That she may be,” Alfred conceded. “But we still have a trace on the necklace.”

“Yes, we do, so I cross-referenced the address she went back to, with the police data on recent high-end B-and-Es.”

Breaking and entering
, Alfred translated mentally. It troubled him that Bruce had become so familiar with law-enforcement jargon. That was not a field of study he would have chosen for the sweet young boy Bruce had once been.
Your father was a doctor.

Bruce hit another key and a new photo appeared. This time Alfred recognized the young lady, although she appeared rather less demure than he remembered. What appeared to be a long-distance surveillance
photo captured an alluring face graced with striking brown eyes and sleek brown hair. It was a face worth remembering.

“Selina Kyle,” Bruce said. “No convictions yet, but the databases are full close calls, tips from fences.”

A montage of newspaper headlines flashed across the screen:

THE CAT STRIKES AGAIN

POLICE SUSPECT ‘CAT’ BURGLAR IN JEWELRY HEIST

PENTHOUSE ROBBER LEAVES FEW CLUES BEHIND

ART MUSEUM LATEST VICTIM OF ‘THE CAT’?

Alfred nodded. He recognized some of the headlines from the morning papers. The string of high-profile heists had been notable for their daring and execution. He had thought Wayne Manor was burglar-proof, but this Miss Kyle had proven otherwise.

“She’s good,” Bruce repeated, “but the ground is sinking beneath her feet.”

Our crimes always catch up with us,
Alfred thought. The smell of a burning letter wafted across his memory, reminding him that he had a few guilty secrets of his own. “We should send the police before
she fences the pearls.”

“She won’t,” Bruce said. “She likes them too much. And they weren’t what she was after.”

Alfred didn’t understand.

“What
was
she after?” he inquired.