There are four other people here, one engineer, one researcher and two secretaries, but they're all too scared to make a move – they just dart wild-eyed glances back and forth between Terry and the Kobra. Terry can't think of any good options right now, so he decides to try negotiation, which doesn't usually work but is always worth a try. At the very least, it may buy him some time. "The cops are going to be here any minute," he points out. "If you let her go and cooperate with them, they'll go easier on you."
As he expected, the tactic doesn't work. "No!" the Kobra growls, backing up a few steps, dragging his hapless hostage along with him. "I'm leaving, and I'm taking this one with me for insurance. Stay back!"
Then the woman slumps, going limp in his grip. Her head falls forward. Terry thinks she's fainted, but suddenly the Kobra screams and drops his knife. She hasn't fainted at all – she was just pretending to so that she could sink her teeth into her captor's knife hand. After the knife has fallen on the floor, she viciously stomps on the arch of the Kobra's foot with the heel of her shoe, then jabs her elbow into his solar plexus. He lets go of her and reels backwards, gasping for breath.
Terry knows an opportunity when he sees one. He's on the Kobra in a second, gets him pinned to the floor, and pulls they guy's arms behind his back so he can secure them with a pair of handcuffs from his belt. The employees who were frozen in terror are now cheering and applauding. A couple of security guards arrive, thank him profusely and take the Kobra off his hands. Terry opens the Kobra's satchel, takes out the disk with the files he took from the mainframe computer, and hands it over to one of the guards. "Here. He was trying to swipe some of your research files." The guard nods and takes the disk.
Before he leaves, Terry turns to the Kobra's former hostage. "Are you all right?" he asks her as the security guards take the sullen but unresisting Kobra away.
She grins at him. "Yes, thank you. Those self-defense classes really paid off." Terry can't help but smile - just a little - at the way she says it.
Just then the lights start flickering, and then go out completely. Looks like whatever damage the Kobras did to the power system has not been completely fixed. Terry's night vision systems, responding to the drop in the ambient light level, switch on just as the other people present utter exclamations of shock and, in one case, a frustrated curse.
This may be an annoyance for the people around him, but for Terry it's a perfect opportunity to make a discreet exit – one of the practices that Batman is famous for. He switches on his camo and slips out, just before the backup generators start working and the lights come back to life.
~***~
A few minutes after dinner is over, Max goes to her computer to check her messages. She's got an e-mail from her cousin in Chicago and a message from one of the listserv groups she's on. After reading both of them, she checks to see if there's anything new in her Batman news file.
This news file is her particular manifestation of a habit that she picked up from her mother's father. Grandpa had been a cop back in the days when Bruce Wayne was still Batman, and had collected newspaper articles about him the way some people collect trading cards. He'd kept them in a set of three-ring binders, carefully organized by date and laminated to loose-leaf pages for durability. In those binders he had every Batman article that the New York Times, the Daily Planet and the Gotham Chronicle had ever printed, from the beginning of the vigilante's career right up to the last editorial concerning his mysterious, and presumably permanent, disappearance. Max's grandpa had passed his fascination on to her, and when he died he'd left her his collection, which she keeps in a box on the floor of her closet.
When Batman returned after a twenty-year absence, she started collecting articles the way her grandfather used to do. Except that she didn't use the same methods – instead, she wrote a search program that would find Batman articles from certain sources (such as the electronic newspapers her family subscribed to, as well as a few other sites) and put them in a file. Where her grandpa had had a collection of binders, she had a single disk, but she organized it by the same principle. After a couple of months she had gone a step further by coding a program that would help her discover Batman's secret identity. It had worked, albeit not exactly the way she'd expected it to.
Although she now knows more about Batman than any reporter, she still collects articles on him. There are a couple of new pieces in her file. One of them is particularly interesting, because it fills in the details of a situation that Terry only hinted at yesterday.
The article is a small one, only a few paragraphs, saying that Tanya Wooten, 13, is in critical condition at the Bartholomew M. Swift Memorial Hospital after being wounded by a stray bullet on the night of May 31st around 11:30 PM. Apparently she was in the wrong place at the wrong time – across the street from a pawnshop that a group of Jokerz were trying to rob. Batman had appeared on the scene, they'd started shooting at him, and Tanya had been hit. Terry had brought her to the hospital, where the doctors had identified her and called her parents. The Jokerz involved are, of course, behind bars and awaiting trial. Max is a little frustrated because the article does not say why the girl happened to be out so late at night, nor does it include a quote from her parents, but it does fill in most of the gaps. And it has some information that Terry might be interested in.
Max certainly has to tell Terry about this, but she wonders whether she should wait until tomorrow or try to contact him right now. It's a little past seven-thirty, which means that he's probably on duty already. She decides that this is important enough to warrant calling him as soon as possible. Max can't talk to him through his suit's transmitter, the way Mr. Wayne does – that's off-limits, except in a major emergency – but she can call up the Batmobile. As she opens directories to reach the appropriate program (which is disguised as a humble .DLL file and password-protected just in case), she decides that she shouldn't leave a message if he's not there – she'll just call him back later. This isn't the kind of thing you can leave a message about.
~***~
Terry's already accomplished quite a lot, but of course the old man isn't going to let him off this early in the evening. So now he's just patrolling in the Batmobile, looking for any trouble spots. He hasn't found anything yet, but then again it hasn't been very long since he left VibranTech. Even if this is a quiet night, he'll have to deal with two or three "incidents." On an average night it's usually between four and seven.
Most of the time he enjoys piloting the Batmobile (who wouldn't?), but right now it doesn't occupy enough of his mind to keep him from returning, over and over again, to subjects he really doesn't want to think about. The way his mother's been hinting that she wants him to get a different job. Dana's breaking up with him. And most of all, what happened last night…
The console starts beeping – someone is calling him. He looks at the communications screen, which displays the caller's number. It's Max.
He hits the answer button and the screen switches to display Max, as seen by the little camera lens on top of her computer screen. "Terry?" There is, he notices, a note of anxiety in her voice. "I found something about that girl from last night."
Terry feels his heart lurch in his ribcage. He thinks back to his conversation with Max earlier today, trying to remember how much he had said. All he'd told her was that someone had died – nothing about who or how. But he isn't at all surprised that Max found out more about it on her own. She's very good at that stuff. "Go on," he says, trying to keep his voice calm.
"Her name is Tanya Wooten," Max continues. "I just wanted to tell you, she's still alive at the hospital." Terry feels a prickly wave of hope and disbelief sweep through him. Then the other shoe drops. "But she's still critical. They don't know if she'll make it." That's Max – always honest, even when it hurts. Still, he's glad that she told him.
Now that Max has delivered her message, she looks lost for words. Terry tries to think of something to say, but all he can come up with is "Thanks. If you find anything else…" He trails off.
Max nods. "I'll tell you." Terry hears a faint sound, coming from her side of the link. It's somebody knocking on her bedroom door, and a voice – which he recognizes as her father's – calling something, although he can't make out the words. Max turns her head, looking in the direction of the sound, then turns back to Terry. "I've gotta go. Talk to you later." She taps a key on her computer and the screen goes black again.
Terry takes a deep breath and sighs. He doesn't know whether he should be optimistic and hope that the girl will make it, or be realistic and resign himself to the fact that, in all likelihood, she won't. At least he has the comfort of knowing that he brought her a slim chance. It occurs to him to notice that, although Wayne was certainly watching that whole exchange through the suit's transmitter, he isn't saying anything about it. He hasn't said anything about the girl since last night. Maybe he's waiting for Terry to bring it up, or maybe he's just saying nothing because he doesn't know what to say.
He hasn't been thinking about it for very long when a light on the console comes on, indicating that someone is broadcasting an alert on the police radio frequency. The light is followed by the sound of a voice couched in the crackle of static. "This is unit 532 reporting a robbery in progress on 1657 Fourth Street, upper level. I repeat, a robbery in progress on…"
Terry's already adjusted his course to head for the beleaguered officer. Most of his mind is engaged in the task of getting there as quickly as possible, but some small part of it is glad for the distraction.