Chapter Seven: Throwing Out the Rulebook

Batgirl's boots thumped onto the steel plating which had just slid sideways to seal a gap in the floor after the couch dropped through it. She had been behind the drapes, studying the window, when she heard Sergius start to speak and then stop in shock. She had reacted, coming out of the drapes as fast as possible . . . but her wild leap across the room was still too late to catch up with him after she saw his head dropping below floor level.

She wanted to scream. But that would be pointless. It wouldn't bring Sergius back up here, and it certainly wouldn't make her feel any less guilty about what might be happening to him when she wasn't around to protect him.

Besides, The Spook would probably enjoy hearing her scream. Why give him the thrill?

Not that he intended to leave her alone anyway. "Well, well, well, my little noctule," The Spook's voice said from two sides at once in a new stereo effect. "Lost your new friend? My oh my, who will figure things out for you from now on?"

(Had he just called her a knock jewel? That didn't make any sense. Not that it mattered.)

Batgirl felt no need to answer The Spook's questions, and doubted he'd tell her anything really useful if she asked him some, so she said nothing.

In some of the movies she had been watching in recent months (in an attempt to expand her grasp of English and of social behavior among people who spoke it), this was the point where the angry hero would probably say, "Give him back if you know what's good for you!" or perhaps "You'll never get away with this, you psycho!"

Then the villain would laugh a sneering laugh . . . and, of course, go right ahead with whatever nasty thing he felt like doing next, because the hero was just wasting time by bluffing from a position of weakness, instead of being in a position to force the villain to do anything.

Batgirl figured they could just skip that talk-talk-talk part. She was no negotiator—and as long as she couldn't see The Spook as he spoke, she couldn't tell when he was lying anyway. (Did he know that somehow? Or was he just hiding from her on general principle?)

The Spook had evidently figured out she wasn't interested in arguing with him. He must've turned up the volume to make sure he got her attention; his voice was booming now as he tried again: "There's a fresh clue hidden in that room, of course, and you'll probably find it on your own, but I doubt you'll be able to interpret it. Shall we renegotiate the terms a trifle? To keep the game moving along at a brisk pace, I could sell you a passcode in exchange for certain promises. Or perhaps you think you can just twiddle your thumbs until one of the many poor fools you've rendered insensible is able to wake up and exercise his own wits on your behalf?"

Batgirl hadn't even thought of that second possibility—but if The Spook seriously thought she was going to promise him anything nicer than delivering a quick, efficient beating as soon as she found him, he was an idiot. Somehow she doubted that.

Besides, did the passcodes to other doors much matter at this point? Sergius had started to say something about The Spook not really caring about the game they had seemed to be playing, and she didn't think it was coincidence that The Spook had suddenly chosen that moment to take Sergius away from her before he could finish his thoughts. Whatever it was the villain really wanted from a captive Batgirl, he was going to find ways to keep pushing her in the "right" direction for him to get it, whether she could solve his silly puzzles or not.

(Which she probably couldn't, being illiterate, as she had seen Sergius figure out very quickly. He had been tactful enough not to say so, though; so whether or not The Spook knew about that handicap was still unclear. It had been fun, though, teasing Sergius for a minute by answering some of the personal questions he thought he carefully wasn't asking. Knowing that The Spook would be annoyed when he didn't understand what she was talking about had made it funnier.)

Which brought her back to the main point—protecting the nice friendly civilian. Until now, Batgirl had figured one unknown room was as good as another for exploration purposes, so she hadn't been in a hurry to get anywhere in particular. Now the priority was to get down into the basement. If she'd had a chainsaw, or even an ax, she might have tried cutting her way right through the floor—on the theory that it wasn't likely that every square foot had steel plating beneath the surface.

But she didn't have those things. On the other hand: If there was a basement, then somewhere in this house there was a staircase, or at least a ladder, leading down. It was behind a locked door, presumably, but if she could figure out where it was, she'd find a way to get in there, from one direction or another.

Batgirl wished she knew more about architecture.

She thought this house was old. If it had been built a long time ago for "normal use," and if The Spook had only bought it recently, then he hadn't paid someone to build the entire thing like a prison, with walls it would take forever to tunnel through if you didn't have the right equipment. Was it possible that he'd put metal doors and fancy electronic locks in every doorframe, and metal bars (full of electricity) over all the windows, while leaving most of the interior walls the way they were to begin with? Probably full of insulation and wiring and stuff, instead of being solid blocks of wood or concrete or whatever?

First things first. If I were a basement staircase, where would I be hiding?

Hmmm.

Right under the big staircase that goes up?

She did a quick mental review. If you were just inside the front door, looking at the staircase, you saw a little hall running beside it on the left, with doors leading to rooms on the far left of the house, and another little hall running beside it on the right, with a line of doors on the right, and then there was a bend in the hall before you entered the kitchen. But she hadn't seen any doors in the walls on either side of the base of the staircase. That meant there was a lot of space underneath those rising steps, completely unaccounted for.

Perhaps there used to be a door in there somewhere and then The Spook had it sealed up after he had fixed the basement the way he wanted it? One way to find out! She'd just have to bash her way in somehow.

Lacking an ax, even a crowbar would have been nice. But she didn't have one of those either. She did have a piano bench, though—it was still standing where she had left it after breaking a window by the front door. She could break off a couple of legs, if necessary—hard wood, good enough for leverage after you made a hole in a wall.

Or there might be a better way. She decided to make another sweep through the kitchen. She hadn't bothered looking in drawers and cupboards the first time through, so there was no telling what useful items might be tucked away in there. She knew the people she'd stunned in there shouldn't be awake yet—her blows were too precise for the effects to be shrugged off so quickly—but she still stayed alert as she headed back the way she and Sergius had come a few minutes ago. The Spook might have some way to stimulate faster recoveries, and there was no telling who else he had lurking in other rooms in this house, in case she and Sergius had used passcodes differently.

If Oracle were running this show, she would have had control of every door so she could let people in and out any time she felt like it, clues or no clues. Batgirl wasn't willing to bet The Spook hadn't thought of that too. If he decided she wasn't giving him enough entertainment, he might turn loose everybody he had left.

That would work out okay. Right now she was definitely in the mood to hit somebody, and if she couldn't make it The Spook just yet, a few dozen proxies would be better than nothing.


The Spook did not have cameras everywhere in the house—too much trouble to hide them all—but he did have earsin each room. So he knew Batgirl was rummaging around in the kitchen now.

He nodded to himself. The slugfests on the ground floor had all been very well and good as a warm-up, but obviously Batgirl was trying to rebel against the "rules of the game" now. Specifically, by seeking a way to descend to find Sergius! He had expected nothing less at this stage. Batman wouldn't have just walked away from the "innocent hostage" either, which meant The Spook's lair on the top floor of the house would remain tranquil for awhile longer.

He'd prepared contingency plans in case the early stages had gone differently, with Batgirl and Sergius heading up the stairs instead of sweeping the ground floor first, but it was probably just as well that he wouldn't be needing them now. When this Batgirl saw a target, she moved like a hyperactive mongoose. The client had forbidden the use of hypnotism on her, which meant that The Spook had no desire to let her catch sight of him again. Decoys and holograms, perhaps, but no need to give her another shot at his own tender flesh. (Despite the ibuprofen now in his blood, he still had a headache where she had bounced a batarang off him hours ago, although he wasn't about to let her know that.)

It irritated him that he still didn't know very much about this Batgirl. She almost never spoke, which he tended to put down to self-consciousness about an imperfect grasp of English. But it limited his ability to figure out what really made her tick. Accordingly, he had calculated that he must allow plenty of "bonding time" for her to start feeling particularly protective towards Sergius, just in case knowing that hack for a bare minute before he vanished wouldn't trigger the necessary emotional reactions in the young heroine, or not as intensely as tonight's client required as part of the services for which The Spook was being very well paid.

Still a few emotional reactions to go before the finale, though. But The Spook saw no reason to think they wouldn't cross the finish line on schedule!


Author's Note:I knew all along that I was going to show The Spook's thoughts sooner or later, but I'd been debating with myself as to just when the first glimpse of them would come. I finally decided it was only fair to explicitly let my readers know there's an unseen "client" lurking about, before Batgirl actually comes face-to-face with that person. You may want to amuse yourselves by trying to guess the identity of the client.

Beyond what little you could glean from feeble clues in this chapter (and I don't expect them to help much), I'll just add a couple of pointers:

The client is a character who previously appeared as a villain, operating in Gotham City at the time, in one or more comic book stories published in the 20th Century.

The client is also pretty darn obscure by modern standards, so if you're wondering about any of the famous villains of Gotham—the sort of people who have repeatedly appeared in episodes of one TV series or another within the past two decades, for instance—then forget it! No Joker, no Scarecrow, no Mister Freeze, no Mad Hatter; not even any of the comic book characters who have used the name "Clayface" somewhere along the line.