Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (14 page)

The adventure had taught him a lesson. He’d gone into it knowing nothing about what was in the package, who was supposed to deliver it to him, what he should do in the event of a snafu. He had been stupid. The Boy Scouts had it half-right:
Be prepared.
Rā’s al Ghūl supplied the other half:
But don’t count on your preparations.

Just after dark, he got his bag from the public locker where he’d stored it and went to Lau’s office complex. There were two towers. One had less security than the other, a few guards patrolling the grounds and a handful of security cameras, all of which were ridiculously easy to avoid. The more secure tower was where Lau had his offices and computer stations, and that was bathed in light from lamps spotted every few feet along its foundations. Bruce could see motion detectors and a veritable army of guards, weapons on their belts and slung across their backs. All this confirmed what Fox had described. He climbed to the taller tower across from the shorter tower. Fox had visited earlier, the one with all the protection. There, he removed his Batman suit from his bag and put it on. From a distance, it would look like the costumes he wore in Gotham City, but instead of a cape, Batman had what looked like a hard plastic pack on his back. He removed two black boxes from his utility belt, and with a few clicks put them together to form a device that resembled a rifle. Batman lifted it to his shoulder, scoped the shorter tower, and squeezed the trigger four times. Four small sticky bombs shot from the barrel and adhered to windows of the top floor of the smaller tower. Each had visible timers that were counting down the seconds rapidly.

In the lobby below, the phone Fox had left behind began to glow. The top-floor lights dimmed and, suddenly, all the doors hissed open.

A guard looked around, then used his radio to call for help.

Batman launched himself into the empty air between the buildings. His backpack burst open and re-formed itself into wide, stiff glider wings. His descent slowed, and he streaked around the shorter tower, then banked hard to line up with a window in the rear.

He cannonballed into Lau’s office, a hail of shattered glass surrounding him, and with the flick of his wrists, his wings again re-formed themselves, this time into a soft cape he wrapped around himself. He hit the floor, rolled, then stood upright and removed Fox’s second phone from his belt. He took only a second to glance at the screen, on which was a diagram of the building he had just entered, then moved quietly into a corridor. He could hear shouts from below and the wail of approaching sirens.

Lau did not know what was happening, but he
did
know that whatever it was couldn’t be good. He decided that caution was his best response and locked himself in his office. From a desk drawer, he took a fifty-caliber semiautomatic pistol and a flashlight. He switched on the light and swept it around the office. Nothing. Nobody here.

Then the door exploded inward and fell onto the rug, and something struck the flashlight from his hand, extinguishing it.

Lau fired in the direction of the door, then fired again.

Below, a dozen policemen, wearing helmets and holding assault rifles at port arms, swarmed into the building. One of Lau’s guards pointed first to an elevator and then to the fire stairs. Half the cops ran to the elevator, the other half to the stairs.

Lau was on his feet, shooting into the blackness that surrounded him, the muzzle flashes from his weapon lighting the office for less than a second each. He fired his last round and in the brief red blaze saw a black silhouette, a giant bat, swooping toward him.

Batman had been mentally counting the seconds since he had burst into Lau’s sanctum. He hit the man once, feeling a flush of satisfaction as Lau immediately fell. He removed a pack from under his cape, a smaller version of the one that had converted into wings, then the cape itself, and strapped it onto Lau.

Still counting seconds.
Ten, nine, eight . . .

Almost time . . .

five, four, three, two . . .

The four small, round sticky bombs Batman had launched onto the wall exploded simultaneously, rending steel, glass, and cement, opening a jagged gap to the dawn sky over Hong Kong, just as the six cops who had ridden the elevator up followed their flashlight beams and gun barrels into the room. The air was filled with thick dust from the explosions, making it impossible for the cops to see clearly. But they could hear a low rumble, coming closer . . .

Batman jerked a cord attached to the pack he’d fixed to Lau, and a weather balloon exploded out and began inflating, unreeling high-test nylon. The cops flashed their weapons as the weather balloon now swayed gently in the breeze two hundred feet above them.

Suddenly, a massive C-130 cargo plane, flying much too low, swooped over Lau’s complex, its engines a deafening roar. The large V on its nose snagged the line stretching from the balloon, and Lau and Batman were yanked through the hole in the ceiling. The C-130 began to climb, trailing the balloon and, lower, its two human passengers—Lau screaming as he and Batman were slowly being reeled into the cargo hold of the plane.

S
everal hours later, James Gordon was sitting at his desk, leafing through a sheaf of reports inscribed on yellow flimsies. Detective Ramirez rapped on the open door and told Gordon there was something he’d want to see.

Gordon followed Ramirez downstairs through a throng of excited cops to the front steps of police headquarters. There, on the cement, with his hands, legs, arms, and ankles bound with thick tape, lay Lau, his eyes squeezed shut. Pinned to his chest was a sign:

Please deliver to Lieutenant Gordon.

The next two hours were busy. Lau had to be unbound, carefully, in case there was something lethal hidden on him, and examined by a physician, as well as fed, allowed to bathe, and taken to an interrogation room. Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes eventually entered the room, nodded to several detectives who leaned against a wall, and sat across a table from Lau.

Without preamble, Rachel said, “Give us the money, and we’ll deal.”

“The
money
is the only reason I’m alive,” Lau said.

Rachel leaned forward. “You mean when they hear that you’ve helped us, they’re going to kill you?”

When Lau didn’t reply, Rachel stood and moved toward the door. “Enjoy your stay, Mr. Lau.”

“Wait!” Lau cried, and Rachel stopped, her hand on the doorknob. “I won’t give you the money, but I’ll give you my clients.
All
of them.”

“You were a glorified accountant,” Rachel said. “What could you have on
all
of them that we could charge?”

“I’m good with calculations. I handled all their investments. One big pot.”

Rachel stared at the ceiling for almost a minute, and finally said, “It might work.”

On the other side of the door, Harvey Dent and James Gordon were watching the Lau interrogation on a closed-circuit television.

“You know what Miss Dawes has in mind?” Gordon asked the district attorney.

“RICO,” Dent replied. “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. If their money was pooled, we can charge all of them as one criminal conspiracy.”

“Charge them with what?”

The door opened and Rachel joined them.

Dent smiled at her and continued: “In a RICO case, if we can charge
any
of the conspirators with a felony—”

“We can charge all of them with it,” Rachel said.

“Want to keep going?” Dent asked Rachel.

“Love to.”

“Then he’s all yours.”

Rachel went back into the interrogation room and stood at the table, looking down at Lau and Evans. “Mr. Lau,” she said. “Do you have details of this communal fund? Ledgers, notebooks . . . ?”

Lau raised his face until he was staring into Rachel’s eyes. “Immunity, protection, and a chartered plane back to Hong Kong.”

“Once you’ve testified in open court. So with your clients locked up, what happens to the money?”

“As I said . . . I’m good with calculation.”

Outside the room, Gordon looked up from the television screen. “He can’t go to the county lockup. I’ll keep him here in the holding cells.”

“What is this, Gordon, your fortress?” Dent asked.

“You trust them over at county?”

“I don’t trust them here.”

“Lau stays.”

“It’s your call, Lieutenant. Be right.”

“I am, Counselor.”

S
al Maroni and the Chechen were eating rare steak in a midtown restaurant and watching a newscast on the television above the bar. The district attorney was holding a news conference on the steps of City Hall.

A reporter was speaking. “. . . Chinese government claims that its sovereign rights have been violated.”

Dent’s face replaced the reporter’s on the screen: “I don’t know about Mr. Lau’s travel arrangements . . . but I’m sure glad he’s back.”

“I put word out,” the Chechen said. “We hire the clown. He was right. We have to fix real problem. Batman.” The Chechen chuckled.

The street door swung open, and James Gordon entered, a pair of handcuffs dangling from his right index finger. He sauntered over to where the Chechen and Maroni were eating and nodded to the television. “Our boy looks good on the tube.”

“You sure you want to embarrass me in front of my friend?” Maroni asked.

“Don’t worry. He’s coming, too. So are a lot of your other friends.”

There were no buses left in the police garage that afternoon, and very few patrol cars. The men and women of Gotham’s Finest were busy, arresting people in every one of the city’s dozens of neighborhoods, loading them into vehicles, unloading them at stations and jails, processing them, photographing them, slamming barred doors behind them.

At four o’clock, when the courts would normally be closing for the day, the judicial session in the civic center was just getting started. A dozen newly arrested prisoners were brought before the Honorable Janet Surillo for arraignment.

The judge was reading a list of charges supplied by Harvey Dent: “. . . 849 counts racketeering, 246 counts fraud, 87 counts conspiracy murder . . .”

Judge Surillo turned a page and paused. A playing card was paper-clipped to the indictment sheet, a Joker. The judge pushed it aside with little thought as to how it got into her files, and turned her attention to the group in front of his bench.

“How do the defendants plead?”

Then there was bedlam as an army of defense lawyers all began talking at once.

Across the street, at City Hall, Harvey Dent entered the mayor’s office to find Police Commissioner Loeb, Lieutenant James Gordon, and the mayor himself waiting.

“Dent!” the mayor snapped. “What the hell’s going on over here?”

“I asked Lieutenant Gordon to make some arrests.”

Loeb scanned a report he was holding. “Five hundred and . . .”

“Forty-nine, sir,” Gordon said.

“Five hundred and forty-nine criminals at once!” the mayor shouted. “How did you convince Surillo to hear this farce?”

“She shares my enthusiasm for justice,” Dent said. “After all, she is a
judge
.”

“Even if you blow enough smoke to get convictions out of Surillo,” the mayor said, a bit more calmly, “you’ll set a new record at appeals for the quickest kick in the ass.”

“It won’t matter. The head guys make bail, sure . . . but the middle-level guys, they can’t, and they can’t afford to be off the streets long enough for trial and appeal. They’ll cut deals that include some jail time. Think of all you can do with
eighteen months
of clean streets.”

The major shook his hand in the direction of Loeb and Gordon. “I want a word alone with the district attorney.”

After the door had closed, the mayor said, “The public likes you, Dent. That’s the only reason this might fly. But that means it’s on
you.
They’re
all
coming after you now. Not just the mob . . . politicians, journalists, cops—anyone whose wallet is about to get lighter. Are you up to it? You’d better be.” The mayor stood, turned, looked out a window at the now-quiet evening. “They get anything on you, those crooks will be back out on the streets, followed swiftly by you and me.”