Daughterof_Evil
12-28-2001, 12:29 AM
I can't believe it. Christmas is over, a new year is almost upon us, and I'm up to thirty-one on this story. Time has really gone fast. I'm glad I could spend a little of it with you guys.
This episode includes some very graphic violence, grim themes and disturbing conversation. Christmas and Chanukah might be over, but hey, thank goodness for Kwanzaa and New Year!
***
It turned out that in reality, Hiramiaku’s hair was that brilliant red naturally.
They moved through the clubbing crowds silently, edging along the admittance lines and the clusters of random partiers who danced to drunken music played in heir own minds. The night was warm with the smell of hot neon and sweat. They hopped onto the sidewalk again and went by a doorway full of Spaniard expatriates, Mexican-imported nortec spewing out onto the street. The hot chatter of Spanish and a brief taste of marijuana smoke blown from a nearby East European absorbed X’s senses.
Her father had been a Japanese assassin, dead before she was even born. Her mother, an Indian assassin, had killed him shortly after becoming pregnant. Hiramiaku’s maternal line had been with one particular assassin society for generations, their children picked and chosen by the forebearer of genetic engineering, selective breeding. The strongest with the smartest, the most beautiful with the most agile, and so on.
As Hiramiaku recounted this to her in Japanese, she pulled her along a building front spray painted with a mural of some technicolor South American rainforest. Saru was close behind, at her back.
And so all that selective breeding, aided in the last few years by the most advanced genetic technology, produced a race of soldiers with skills other assassins worked most of their lives in Zen and Baghua Zhang to get. After all that time, there were bound to be a few deformities, and one of those happened to be Hiramiaku’s unearthly red hair, extremely rare for a woman of Indian-Japanese descent.
However, Hiramiaku's father had been an outsider. She was not of pure blood, and not respected fully by either of the societies she belonged to by birthright.
This portion of the night scene seemed to be dominated by electronica clubs, their patronage pouring out into the streets in the form of leather-clad women and men in dark, tight denim. Hiramiaku was wearing a pair of red leather pants, black boots, a black halter top scribed with the Romanji word HANTA in red letters, and tall black fingerless gloves. As they continued on, X noticed that imprinted deep in the brown flesh of Hiramiaku’s bare back was a pair of elaborate black angel’s wings.
X was so overwhelmed by the sensations of the street she didn’t even realize they had snuck into a club through the kitchen until the cool turquoise walls and the shouts of French cooks roused her from her waking dream.
“ What are we doing!?” X cried.
“ Wait for it,” Saru advised.
X suddenly stopped in her tracks. “ I-I don’t think-”
Saru whirled around in front of her while Hiramiaku delved into the club. “ Do not worry!” he cried. “ You rook ruvry!”
She looked down at herself. She was dressed in huge black boots, a black leather miniskirt, and a black top with mid-length sleeves that tied up the very low-cut front. She tugged at the hem of the skirt. It was very short and showed the large muscles in her pale thighs, which apparently weren’t valued in girls lately. She had never worn something so revealing before, and it made her feel strange, like all her physical power was gone.
“ I-I,” She could smell the contents of the club, the alcohol, the moving humans, the slightly tart scent of burning strobe lights.
Saru laced a lean arm about her shoulders and pulled her out into the club. “ Farro me,” he advised.
The crush of people was immediate. The music was remixed techno, pouring from the speakers in cooling waves, backed by static mechanical blips and surges. Everything was dark, and only the occasional flashes of brilliant light against bare skin served as guide.
It took X a moment to find Hiramiaku in the chaos. She was in the middle of it, dancing, eyes closed, as if possessed. And alone. Within the crowd, she was singular, separated from the amoebous form of the other dancers.
Suddenly, X was jerked into a circlet of motion, and Saru was across from her, dancing. It was as if she were transfixed, replicating the movements of those around her, sifting through the mesh of dark and light. Saru still had her hand in his own, and he was laughing at the ceiling, pale face reflecting the blues and pinks of the strobe. For the first time, X realized what the rush of living was.
Someone grabbed her arm and wrenched her away from Saru, pulling her deeper into the circuit. The exhilaration was gone in a moment, replaced with very real fear, the taste bubbling in her mouth. There was only the flash of her adrenaline.
Her fingers were knuckle-deep in his throat, sunk far into the ring of cartilage surrounding his trachea. She could feel his pulse in the warm fountain of red running down her hand and trailing off her elbow. His eyes were wide with fear, mouth open in a cry he could not seem to complete. The dancers went on around them, a solid mass twisting and coagulating back together.
He slumped. She slowly and deliberately pulled her fingers from his throat, relishing the loamy feel of living flesh and the spurt of blood as his jugular vein erupted. There was an audible ripping sound from his massive neck, and he was dead, toppled onto the floor. It had been so fast and silent no one else had even noticed.
X looked down at her left hand, painted up to the wrist in sticky, slightly translucent red. She raised a finger to her lips and licked the gore from it in a single swipe of her tongue.
A hand grappled her from behind, and she turned on heel, two clean fingers hooked to gouge out the eyes. Saru blinked at her and shrugged.
“ We didn’t need him anyway,” Hiramiaku said behind him, slinging one arm casually over Saru’s shoulder. Clenched in one of her fists was a canvas bag. A brilliant flash of pinkish light bounded off her cheekbones as she grinned, teeth white and sharp. Her face was splattered with blood.
Saru reached into the open front of his black mesh t-shirt and pulled out a thin, graceful, silver handgun, its side decorated with a floral filigree design. He raised it to the ceiling and fired once. The shot was silent.
Saru tugged on the jump line to make sure it was secure, then gestured to Hiramiaku, who clamped the handle of the bag between her teeth and clambered up immediately. She had disappeared in a second, hopping from the line to one of the massive chandeliers hanging from the ceiling by steel cables. Saru then took hold of the gun, fastened a lanky arm around X’s waist, and hit the recall button.
The withdraw was slower than normal with X’s added weight, but the second their feet left the floor the writhing mass of dancers below discovered the dead body of the hired thug. A scream went up, punctuating through the pulsating blur of the music. The crowd shifted backwards in a sphere around the corpse and its splattered bed of scarlet as Saru handed X off to Hiramiaku on the chandelier. The crystal and gilt steel structure trembled under her, and X heard the cables above moan. Across the room, a group of other dancers tripped over two more bodies near the bar.
Hiramiaku started up one of the three cables that affixed their chandelier as Saru scanned the crowd with his eyes, a matte black pistol primed at his side. His brow was low, face serious. She’d never seen him like that. He glanced up, once, to make sure Hiramiaku was safe, and she knew he was doing it out of instinct.
It was at that time, when Hiramiaku had just popped open the hatch of the blacked-out skylight, that the middle of the three cables snapped. The chandelier lurched, then dropped a few inches. Saru and X traded expressionless faces and began to simultaneously shimmy up the remaining two, one to each.
Three feet short of the ceiling, X felt the housing above her come undone, the bolts giving way under her weight. Saru was by then pulling himself up through the skylight, onto the roof. The cable’s steel hook broke from the ceiling and X, in a terrifying and exhilarating moment of free-fall, swooped towards the floor as the huge Victorian chandelier swung completely vertical.
The girl lost her grip on the cable six feet above the floor, hitting the stained concrete on her side with a thud and a pop. Above her, she could hear the cry, “ I didn’t do it!” It sounded like Hiramiaku.
People around her shouted, the music abruptly stopped, the strobes went out. Everything was black, and the wails rose like a collective wall enveloping her. The silhouettes around her were dusted in a strange phosphorescent green, and X suddenly, and somewhat inappropriately, remembered that she could probably see in the dark.
She scrambled to her feet and reached upwards, hands groping for the cable. The partiers pressed in around her, knocking into her, their smells filling her nose and their heat attempting to burn her to a cinder. She covered her head with her arms. Gasping, she suddenly looked down…
…to find she had jumped twenty feet into the air, the muscles of her thighs tensed and body bent slightly over at the waist to watch the heads of the patrons below. Her feet met the lopsided chandelier, and she was off again, spinning to miss the last steel cable as it separated from the ceiling. She heard the chandelier crash to the floor in a harmony of shattering crystal and horrific screams. The lights flashed on just as she found the roof and the hand pulling her onto it.
The police crowded the doorway, ushering patrons out into the street in clumps of weeping and exclaiming French. A woman sat at the bar, calmly finishing her martini. She was soft-skinned, with glowing honey-blond hair and long, shapely legs, wearing a tight black midriff shirt and a red leather skirt. She checked her watch, then looked up at the gaping square of Parisian sky in the ceiling. Getting up from the bar, Annaka ignored her tab and focused on trying to hide the bloody stain soaking through the shoulder of her shirt, a rivulet of red running down her bare stomach.
***
“ So, I find this briefcase, and I’m wondering where it came from,” Agent Carter looked up from the lambskin case laid out flat on the desk. Gordon’s eyes shifted to the two shadows standing in the darkened corner. Agent Carter picked the case up, revealing a symbol neatly scribed into the yielding hide…a bat.
“ Poof, it’s just at the door of my hotel room, like that,” Agent Carter’s voice was easily a Brooklyn accent, persuaded into a further dialect by years working for the federal government. He was in his late thirties, early forties, with dark eyes that instinctively fell upon the corners of every room he occupied. Block eyes blinked coldly back at him. The boy was leaning against the window frame casually, just a spectator in the conversation, just like Agent Arroway stood near the door, stiff as a post.
Commissioner Gordon took a sip of coffee. “ This isn’t my jurisdiction,”
“ This is your city, Jim!” Carter cried, “ Tell the Bat to back the hell off.”
“ I don’t give him orders,” Gordon said. “ He does this on his own.”
“ With your aid, Gordon,” Agent Arroway suddenly said. “ All due respect, Commissioner, but we can’t have non-governmental agents trifling with this. About a dozen and a half countries are looking to have Mullen fried for the things he’s done, and if anything warps the process, we’re in deep.”
Gordon nodded. Agent Arroway noticed how tense the Robin boy looked. He kept shifting his feet, checking the watch built into his glove, glancing out the window. Like he was waiting for something. His master, the Bat, was completely still. They hadn’t even noticed he was in the room till Gordon had gestured at him.
“ Did you check what was in the briefcase?” Gordon asked from the inside of his coffee mug. He said it in a knowing, somewhat arrogant way.
“ I looked at it,” Carter admitted.
“ Find anything interesting?”
Carter jutted out his jaw. “ Some old Interpol scraps about Nevig Lockhardt, pictures from that airport bombing in La Havre.”
“ Anything else?”
Carter opened up the case, picking out a paper-clipped sheaf of yellow paper. “ Printouts of a correspondence with a person called Coquin.”
“ A person inside Intergang,”
The agent narrowed his eyes. “ If you can believe it. The Bureau already got this information and reduced it to a hoax,”
“ You read it, then?” Arroway asked. She was dressed in a gunmetal-grey skirt suit, braided hair brought up in a half-ponytail.
Gordon nodded. “ This Coquin knows things about the inside of Intergang that agencies like MI-6 and Interpol were just beginning to understand. The information given to the FBI directly by Coquin was a ruse to distract the government’s attention from the real information being funneled to an independent secret agent.”
“ They’ve also somehow managed to procure parts of British intelligence censored by MI-6’s ‘D’ notices; things that were never released to the public,” Arroway added.
“ So this double-agent, if that’s what you can call them…who are they?” Carter asked rhetorically, standing back and crossing his arms. He looked at Batman. “ Do you happen to know? And how did you get this information?”
The Bat stepped forward, producing from the inside of his cloak an uncreased photo in black and white taken from what appeared to be an airport security camera. It showed a simple image of a long-haired man in a dark trenchcoat and sunglasses in the middle of a wide stride into a group of foreign tourists.
He laid it on the desk, under the circlet of white light. “ This man,”
Arroway looked at it, then frowned at Batman. “ Forgive me if I don’t study the wanted posters, but just who is he?”
“ A defect from several underground intelligence agencies, who I believe is presently in Gotham. A quadruple agent, if you will. He has hundreds of aliases, but his birth-name was Brugnon La Touga.”
“ What stake does he have in this?” she asked.
“ At first, very little. He was working Intergang from the inside out, using his younger sister Cerise’s connections with Nevig Lockhardt to study them and learn their secrets."
“ And then?”
Batman looked unaffected. “ According to DGSE, his younger sister was raped and killed.”
Arroway didn’t wince. “ Execution?”
“ Unlikely. Coquin said it was just a way of burning bridges, getting rid of a witness. If you’d read the file, you’d have known that.”
“ But why the rape?”
“ Again, Coquin states it wasn’t rape. Cerise La Touga was having an affair with a member of Intergang. His superiors probably convinced him to kill her at last moment’s notice.”
Arroway’s eyes shifted to the boy at the window. He looked strangely detached, arms folded over his thin chest. He hadn’t made a noise the entire time.
“ Do you think she could have been on the verge of sending her brother valuable information?”
“ No.”
The frankness of his answer startled her. “ Why?”
Carter interrupted them. “ What would Coquin have to tell this La Touga guy that he already hadn’t learned from his sister?”
Batman looked at him. “ Intergang members all have a secret signature feature. They have their fingerprints burned off with lasers upon earning acceptance. This Coquin apparently witnessed the rite of passage and went through it themself.”
Carter, arms still folded, bore down on him with his eyes. “ How can I know to trust you?”
Nothing from the other side. He folded up the photo and replaced it within his cloak. “ You can’t. The information is yours to take or leave.”
Carter paused, then shut the case and took it off the desk. Batman turned completely around. The boy stood up straight.
“ I’ll see you tomorrow, Gordon,” Carter said with a half-wave. Arroway nodded to him, and led the way out the door.
Outside, the sky was beginning to pink very slightly at the edges. The streets were deserted, except for a gutter-sweeper making its rounds of the block and the trucks of papers being delivered at the news stands. There was no wind, and the tart smell of the sewer was delivered up from the manholes in plumes of white smoke. Taxis were lining up at the perpendicular street, delivering uptown workers back home for the evening.
“ Do you think what he said is worth a sh*t?” Arroway asked her partner.
He grunted. “ Barely. He could be working for them. That’s the hell of it,” He raised a hand and hailed a cab. “ You can’t even trust your garden-variety super hero anymore.”
Some twenty-odd stories above, Batman and his small partner tested the wind up on the ledge. Robin, crouching at the edge, detached a grappling hook from his belt.
“ Why didn’t you tell them everything?” he asked, in a small and slightly disappointed voice.
Batman didn’t say anything at first, but fired a line off in the direction of home.
“ I can’t let them know the entirety of the situation,” he said finally. “ Doing so would put a lot of people in jeopardy.”
“ But, it’s not like they’re innocent.”
Batman looked at him. The boy rose his brow.
“ Some of them are innocent?” he questioned.
“ A small percentage.” He took off. Robin followed, and they continued the conversation on the next roof. “ People who are caught in the processes, for whom it’s difficult to escape their circumstances.”
“ Like, people in debt to Intergang?”
“ I mean slaves, Robin,” He looked off towards the thin black line that held up the edge of the horizon. “ But yes, they are in debt. In a very sick way, they are in debt.”
This episode includes some very graphic violence, grim themes and disturbing conversation. Christmas and Chanukah might be over, but hey, thank goodness for Kwanzaa and New Year!
***
It turned out that in reality, Hiramiaku’s hair was that brilliant red naturally.
They moved through the clubbing crowds silently, edging along the admittance lines and the clusters of random partiers who danced to drunken music played in heir own minds. The night was warm with the smell of hot neon and sweat. They hopped onto the sidewalk again and went by a doorway full of Spaniard expatriates, Mexican-imported nortec spewing out onto the street. The hot chatter of Spanish and a brief taste of marijuana smoke blown from a nearby East European absorbed X’s senses.
Her father had been a Japanese assassin, dead before she was even born. Her mother, an Indian assassin, had killed him shortly after becoming pregnant. Hiramiaku’s maternal line had been with one particular assassin society for generations, their children picked and chosen by the forebearer of genetic engineering, selective breeding. The strongest with the smartest, the most beautiful with the most agile, and so on.
As Hiramiaku recounted this to her in Japanese, she pulled her along a building front spray painted with a mural of some technicolor South American rainforest. Saru was close behind, at her back.
And so all that selective breeding, aided in the last few years by the most advanced genetic technology, produced a race of soldiers with skills other assassins worked most of their lives in Zen and Baghua Zhang to get. After all that time, there were bound to be a few deformities, and one of those happened to be Hiramiaku’s unearthly red hair, extremely rare for a woman of Indian-Japanese descent.
However, Hiramiaku's father had been an outsider. She was not of pure blood, and not respected fully by either of the societies she belonged to by birthright.
This portion of the night scene seemed to be dominated by electronica clubs, their patronage pouring out into the streets in the form of leather-clad women and men in dark, tight denim. Hiramiaku was wearing a pair of red leather pants, black boots, a black halter top scribed with the Romanji word HANTA in red letters, and tall black fingerless gloves. As they continued on, X noticed that imprinted deep in the brown flesh of Hiramiaku’s bare back was a pair of elaborate black angel’s wings.
X was so overwhelmed by the sensations of the street she didn’t even realize they had snuck into a club through the kitchen until the cool turquoise walls and the shouts of French cooks roused her from her waking dream.
“ What are we doing!?” X cried.
“ Wait for it,” Saru advised.
X suddenly stopped in her tracks. “ I-I don’t think-”
Saru whirled around in front of her while Hiramiaku delved into the club. “ Do not worry!” he cried. “ You rook ruvry!”
She looked down at herself. She was dressed in huge black boots, a black leather miniskirt, and a black top with mid-length sleeves that tied up the very low-cut front. She tugged at the hem of the skirt. It was very short and showed the large muscles in her pale thighs, which apparently weren’t valued in girls lately. She had never worn something so revealing before, and it made her feel strange, like all her physical power was gone.
“ I-I,” She could smell the contents of the club, the alcohol, the moving humans, the slightly tart scent of burning strobe lights.
Saru laced a lean arm about her shoulders and pulled her out into the club. “ Farro me,” he advised.
The crush of people was immediate. The music was remixed techno, pouring from the speakers in cooling waves, backed by static mechanical blips and surges. Everything was dark, and only the occasional flashes of brilliant light against bare skin served as guide.
It took X a moment to find Hiramiaku in the chaos. She was in the middle of it, dancing, eyes closed, as if possessed. And alone. Within the crowd, she was singular, separated from the amoebous form of the other dancers.
Suddenly, X was jerked into a circlet of motion, and Saru was across from her, dancing. It was as if she were transfixed, replicating the movements of those around her, sifting through the mesh of dark and light. Saru still had her hand in his own, and he was laughing at the ceiling, pale face reflecting the blues and pinks of the strobe. For the first time, X realized what the rush of living was.
Someone grabbed her arm and wrenched her away from Saru, pulling her deeper into the circuit. The exhilaration was gone in a moment, replaced with very real fear, the taste bubbling in her mouth. There was only the flash of her adrenaline.
Her fingers were knuckle-deep in his throat, sunk far into the ring of cartilage surrounding his trachea. She could feel his pulse in the warm fountain of red running down her hand and trailing off her elbow. His eyes were wide with fear, mouth open in a cry he could not seem to complete. The dancers went on around them, a solid mass twisting and coagulating back together.
He slumped. She slowly and deliberately pulled her fingers from his throat, relishing the loamy feel of living flesh and the spurt of blood as his jugular vein erupted. There was an audible ripping sound from his massive neck, and he was dead, toppled onto the floor. It had been so fast and silent no one else had even noticed.
X looked down at her left hand, painted up to the wrist in sticky, slightly translucent red. She raised a finger to her lips and licked the gore from it in a single swipe of her tongue.
A hand grappled her from behind, and she turned on heel, two clean fingers hooked to gouge out the eyes. Saru blinked at her and shrugged.
“ We didn’t need him anyway,” Hiramiaku said behind him, slinging one arm casually over Saru’s shoulder. Clenched in one of her fists was a canvas bag. A brilliant flash of pinkish light bounded off her cheekbones as she grinned, teeth white and sharp. Her face was splattered with blood.
Saru reached into the open front of his black mesh t-shirt and pulled out a thin, graceful, silver handgun, its side decorated with a floral filigree design. He raised it to the ceiling and fired once. The shot was silent.
Saru tugged on the jump line to make sure it was secure, then gestured to Hiramiaku, who clamped the handle of the bag between her teeth and clambered up immediately. She had disappeared in a second, hopping from the line to one of the massive chandeliers hanging from the ceiling by steel cables. Saru then took hold of the gun, fastened a lanky arm around X’s waist, and hit the recall button.
The withdraw was slower than normal with X’s added weight, but the second their feet left the floor the writhing mass of dancers below discovered the dead body of the hired thug. A scream went up, punctuating through the pulsating blur of the music. The crowd shifted backwards in a sphere around the corpse and its splattered bed of scarlet as Saru handed X off to Hiramiaku on the chandelier. The crystal and gilt steel structure trembled under her, and X heard the cables above moan. Across the room, a group of other dancers tripped over two more bodies near the bar.
Hiramiaku started up one of the three cables that affixed their chandelier as Saru scanned the crowd with his eyes, a matte black pistol primed at his side. His brow was low, face serious. She’d never seen him like that. He glanced up, once, to make sure Hiramiaku was safe, and she knew he was doing it out of instinct.
It was at that time, when Hiramiaku had just popped open the hatch of the blacked-out skylight, that the middle of the three cables snapped. The chandelier lurched, then dropped a few inches. Saru and X traded expressionless faces and began to simultaneously shimmy up the remaining two, one to each.
Three feet short of the ceiling, X felt the housing above her come undone, the bolts giving way under her weight. Saru was by then pulling himself up through the skylight, onto the roof. The cable’s steel hook broke from the ceiling and X, in a terrifying and exhilarating moment of free-fall, swooped towards the floor as the huge Victorian chandelier swung completely vertical.
The girl lost her grip on the cable six feet above the floor, hitting the stained concrete on her side with a thud and a pop. Above her, she could hear the cry, “ I didn’t do it!” It sounded like Hiramiaku.
People around her shouted, the music abruptly stopped, the strobes went out. Everything was black, and the wails rose like a collective wall enveloping her. The silhouettes around her were dusted in a strange phosphorescent green, and X suddenly, and somewhat inappropriately, remembered that she could probably see in the dark.
She scrambled to her feet and reached upwards, hands groping for the cable. The partiers pressed in around her, knocking into her, their smells filling her nose and their heat attempting to burn her to a cinder. She covered her head with her arms. Gasping, she suddenly looked down…
…to find she had jumped twenty feet into the air, the muscles of her thighs tensed and body bent slightly over at the waist to watch the heads of the patrons below. Her feet met the lopsided chandelier, and she was off again, spinning to miss the last steel cable as it separated from the ceiling. She heard the chandelier crash to the floor in a harmony of shattering crystal and horrific screams. The lights flashed on just as she found the roof and the hand pulling her onto it.
The police crowded the doorway, ushering patrons out into the street in clumps of weeping and exclaiming French. A woman sat at the bar, calmly finishing her martini. She was soft-skinned, with glowing honey-blond hair and long, shapely legs, wearing a tight black midriff shirt and a red leather skirt. She checked her watch, then looked up at the gaping square of Parisian sky in the ceiling. Getting up from the bar, Annaka ignored her tab and focused on trying to hide the bloody stain soaking through the shoulder of her shirt, a rivulet of red running down her bare stomach.
***
“ So, I find this briefcase, and I’m wondering where it came from,” Agent Carter looked up from the lambskin case laid out flat on the desk. Gordon’s eyes shifted to the two shadows standing in the darkened corner. Agent Carter picked the case up, revealing a symbol neatly scribed into the yielding hide…a bat.
“ Poof, it’s just at the door of my hotel room, like that,” Agent Carter’s voice was easily a Brooklyn accent, persuaded into a further dialect by years working for the federal government. He was in his late thirties, early forties, with dark eyes that instinctively fell upon the corners of every room he occupied. Block eyes blinked coldly back at him. The boy was leaning against the window frame casually, just a spectator in the conversation, just like Agent Arroway stood near the door, stiff as a post.
Commissioner Gordon took a sip of coffee. “ This isn’t my jurisdiction,”
“ This is your city, Jim!” Carter cried, “ Tell the Bat to back the hell off.”
“ I don’t give him orders,” Gordon said. “ He does this on his own.”
“ With your aid, Gordon,” Agent Arroway suddenly said. “ All due respect, Commissioner, but we can’t have non-governmental agents trifling with this. About a dozen and a half countries are looking to have Mullen fried for the things he’s done, and if anything warps the process, we’re in deep.”
Gordon nodded. Agent Arroway noticed how tense the Robin boy looked. He kept shifting his feet, checking the watch built into his glove, glancing out the window. Like he was waiting for something. His master, the Bat, was completely still. They hadn’t even noticed he was in the room till Gordon had gestured at him.
“ Did you check what was in the briefcase?” Gordon asked from the inside of his coffee mug. He said it in a knowing, somewhat arrogant way.
“ I looked at it,” Carter admitted.
“ Find anything interesting?”
Carter jutted out his jaw. “ Some old Interpol scraps about Nevig Lockhardt, pictures from that airport bombing in La Havre.”
“ Anything else?”
Carter opened up the case, picking out a paper-clipped sheaf of yellow paper. “ Printouts of a correspondence with a person called Coquin.”
“ A person inside Intergang,”
The agent narrowed his eyes. “ If you can believe it. The Bureau already got this information and reduced it to a hoax,”
“ You read it, then?” Arroway asked. She was dressed in a gunmetal-grey skirt suit, braided hair brought up in a half-ponytail.
Gordon nodded. “ This Coquin knows things about the inside of Intergang that agencies like MI-6 and Interpol were just beginning to understand. The information given to the FBI directly by Coquin was a ruse to distract the government’s attention from the real information being funneled to an independent secret agent.”
“ They’ve also somehow managed to procure parts of British intelligence censored by MI-6’s ‘D’ notices; things that were never released to the public,” Arroway added.
“ So this double-agent, if that’s what you can call them…who are they?” Carter asked rhetorically, standing back and crossing his arms. He looked at Batman. “ Do you happen to know? And how did you get this information?”
The Bat stepped forward, producing from the inside of his cloak an uncreased photo in black and white taken from what appeared to be an airport security camera. It showed a simple image of a long-haired man in a dark trenchcoat and sunglasses in the middle of a wide stride into a group of foreign tourists.
He laid it on the desk, under the circlet of white light. “ This man,”
Arroway looked at it, then frowned at Batman. “ Forgive me if I don’t study the wanted posters, but just who is he?”
“ A defect from several underground intelligence agencies, who I believe is presently in Gotham. A quadruple agent, if you will. He has hundreds of aliases, but his birth-name was Brugnon La Touga.”
“ What stake does he have in this?” she asked.
“ At first, very little. He was working Intergang from the inside out, using his younger sister Cerise’s connections with Nevig Lockhardt to study them and learn their secrets."
“ And then?”
Batman looked unaffected. “ According to DGSE, his younger sister was raped and killed.”
Arroway didn’t wince. “ Execution?”
“ Unlikely. Coquin said it was just a way of burning bridges, getting rid of a witness. If you’d read the file, you’d have known that.”
“ But why the rape?”
“ Again, Coquin states it wasn’t rape. Cerise La Touga was having an affair with a member of Intergang. His superiors probably convinced him to kill her at last moment’s notice.”
Arroway’s eyes shifted to the boy at the window. He looked strangely detached, arms folded over his thin chest. He hadn’t made a noise the entire time.
“ Do you think she could have been on the verge of sending her brother valuable information?”
“ No.”
The frankness of his answer startled her. “ Why?”
Carter interrupted them. “ What would Coquin have to tell this La Touga guy that he already hadn’t learned from his sister?”
Batman looked at him. “ Intergang members all have a secret signature feature. They have their fingerprints burned off with lasers upon earning acceptance. This Coquin apparently witnessed the rite of passage and went through it themself.”
Carter, arms still folded, bore down on him with his eyes. “ How can I know to trust you?”
Nothing from the other side. He folded up the photo and replaced it within his cloak. “ You can’t. The information is yours to take or leave.”
Carter paused, then shut the case and took it off the desk. Batman turned completely around. The boy stood up straight.
“ I’ll see you tomorrow, Gordon,” Carter said with a half-wave. Arroway nodded to him, and led the way out the door.
Outside, the sky was beginning to pink very slightly at the edges. The streets were deserted, except for a gutter-sweeper making its rounds of the block and the trucks of papers being delivered at the news stands. There was no wind, and the tart smell of the sewer was delivered up from the manholes in plumes of white smoke. Taxis were lining up at the perpendicular street, delivering uptown workers back home for the evening.
“ Do you think what he said is worth a sh*t?” Arroway asked her partner.
He grunted. “ Barely. He could be working for them. That’s the hell of it,” He raised a hand and hailed a cab. “ You can’t even trust your garden-variety super hero anymore.”
Some twenty-odd stories above, Batman and his small partner tested the wind up on the ledge. Robin, crouching at the edge, detached a grappling hook from his belt.
“ Why didn’t you tell them everything?” he asked, in a small and slightly disappointed voice.
Batman didn’t say anything at first, but fired a line off in the direction of home.
“ I can’t let them know the entirety of the situation,” he said finally. “ Doing so would put a lot of people in jeopardy.”
“ But, it’s not like they’re innocent.”
Batman looked at him. The boy rose his brow.
“ Some of them are innocent?” he questioned.
“ A small percentage.” He took off. Robin followed, and they continued the conversation on the next roof. “ People who are caught in the processes, for whom it’s difficult to escape their circumstances.”
“ Like, people in debt to Intergang?”
“ I mean slaves, Robin,” He looked off towards the thin black line that held up the edge of the horizon. “ But yes, they are in debt. In a very sick way, they are in debt.”