DATE: 11 OCT
TIME: 19:13 LOCAL
CASE NO.: 0000328719-0902
ELAPSED: 00:01:08.880
NUMBER: Untraceable
MESSAGE: "Good evening Doctor Sanman. My name is Doctor Victor Freiss. We do not know each other but you have something very dear to me. I have something very dear to you, as well. I am currently in possession of your wife and children. I assure you that they are quite safe and well cared for. But, I will warn you that their continued safety is incumbent on your cooperation with my demands. My wife, Nora Freiss, is being held at your facility against her will. I want my wife, in her current state, delivered to pier seventy-six at the Southeast Dockland for transport out of the country in forty-eight hours. We will make a simultaneous exchange: my family for yours. Do not involve law enforcement. If in forty-eight hours my demands have not been met, your family will meet a bitter, cold end. Don't fail them."
/END/
9:39 PM
The whole situation went from bad to terrible.
"Hold still, Master Bruce," Alfred demanded as he tugged at the skin surrounding my most recent laceration, "or I will be unable to close the wound properly. You really need to stop nearly getting yourself killed. You're exhausting my medical talents."
I gritted my teeth. It wasn't the pain. It was the frustration. It was the consideration that I was behind the power curve—still. The situation was spiraling out of control. I needed to figure out how to bring this affair to a close. The more time I spent deliberating, however, the more momentum the criminals gained.
In just two weeks, Poison Ivy flooded the Bowery with a new narcotic called Hemlock—or just Lock for short. Its narcotic effects swept through the slums at an epidemic pace equaled only by Crack several decades earlier.
The emergency rooms were overflowing with overdosing patients and a drug war was breaking out all over the Eastside as the Bloodroots clashed with their rivals for supremacy. The police in that jurisdiction seemed to be ignoring the entire thing. Commissioner Gordon was doing what he could from his lofty perch but that wasn't protecting the common citizens from the chaos that the drug was breeding. After all, he was the Commissioner of Police not a beat cop. His jurisdiction was command and control, not micro-law enforcement.
The Bowery wasn't the only place affected. Lock was circulating just as rapidly through the Narrows and had been the cause of several isolated incidents in the more affluent areas of the city.
I had needed concrete data on the drug—not just media speculation and forensic hearsay, so I had stormed into a bath-house in Chinatown, that was known for being a drug den for the Gotham elite, to acquire samples. The operation went routinely—if a nearly seven foot, three-hundred pound bat crashing through the skylight could be called routine—with the exception of some lowlife deciding that it was a great idea to impale me with a decorative spear that had hung from the wall. I guess the individual hadn't anticipated the integrity of my armor. Fortunately, it stopped the majority of the lethality of the weapon. Unfortunately, it only stopped a majority of the lethality. Part of the spear's edge managed to bypass the armor plates and carbon bi-weave and bit—albeit, rather deeply—into the muscle beneath my arm. The wound wasn't bad enough to prevent me from teaching the assailant the consequences of attacking the Batman—he'll think twice next time. The wound was bad enough, however, that I had to put my investigation on hold and return to the cave to have the laceration stitched; blood was pouring from my armpit and pooling in my boot.
That was only the bad part.
"Master Bruce, if you do not stop fidgeting, I am going to stitch your arm to your ribcage."
The terrible part was Victor Freiss. Freiss gave Dr. Sanman forty-eight hours to meet his demand. And, that was ninety-six hours ago. As promised, Freiss delivered the Sanman family frozen when Sanman, advised and supported by a contingent of hostage negotiators from the Major Crimes Unit, didn't produce Freiss' equally frozen wife. Worse yet, Freiss only delivered three of the four Sanmans. He was still in custody of the nine-year old, Madhavi.
I had to find her and figure out how to reverse the cryo-process. Slim chance of the latter happening considering the leading minds in the medical profession had not managed it. And, while I credited myself as being an unparalleled problem-solver, I was hardly an medical expert—I wasn't going to be deterred, though.
Freiss, on the other hand, was the only person to ever have successfully and consistently affected a thaw. My guess was that Freiss had data detailing a successful reversal. That made finding him my number one priority.
The sound of the phone ringing returned me to my body and suddenly I was aware of the pain. Alfred, placed the instrument he was using on the table and crossed the floor to answer it. "Wayne Manor. How may I help you? Oh, very good, Miss Gordon. I will patch you through. Please hold a moment. It's Barbara Gordon, Master Bruce." Alfred returned the receiver to its dock and keyed the video. Oracle's face materialized on a display connected to the computer.
"Batman?" Her face pruned. "Damn. What happened to you?"
"A spear," I said as I inspected Alfred's nearly-finished handiwork. He returned to resume the stitching. "What do you have for me, Oracle?"
"A spear? Were you fighting Spartans?"
My face hardened.
"Okay—tough crowd. So I…uh," she said looking away from the camera and at a display to her right, "I got quite a bit, actually. I'll just talk while you two do your thing."
I nodded approvingly.
"Victor Diakon Freiss, age sixty-four, was born an only child in Kaliningrad, East Prussia on January 13th, 1946 to a prominent Soviet family of noble Prussian descent. His childhood is relatively uneventful up until his mother disappeared when he was twelve. The disappearance remains unsolved to this day."
I didn't have time to get involved in Freiss' personal life nor the psychology of his childhood. "Let's not solve the mystery of his mother's disappearance right now."
"Okay. Moving on. He graduated at the top of his high school class at age fifteen and was then sent by his family to attend the Lomonosov Moscow State University to pursue a predetermined profession as a physician—"
Alfred interjected, "Great use of alliteration, Miss Gordon. English professionals abound would be delighted by your agility with the language."
We ignored him.
"—where he studied cellular biology and bioengineering and graduated Magna Cum Laude. He then studied at the University of Istanbul for six years in the fields of cryobiology and cryogenics. From there he moved on to study at Oxford where he stayed for twelve years and continued to study in the field of cryogenics, but also began dabbling into the field of cryonics. There he met his wife, Nora; also age sixty four. They were married in November of 1976 and lived happily from what I can tell."
"Clearly."
"If I may," Alfred interrupted again as he washed my blood from his hands, "what, pray tell, is the difference between cryogenics and cryonics?"
I stretched my arm above my head, checking the integrity of the stitches. "In layman's terms, cryogenics is the study of and exercise of very low temperatures."
"And, cryonics," Oracle took the hand-off, "is the study of the effects of very low temperatures on living organisms."
"Understand?" I asked.
"Cool."
I looked at Alfred from the corner of my eye. Something told me he already knew the difference between the two disciplines and he was just looking for a reason to be facetious.
Oracle continued, "As his time drew to a close at Oxford, he was offered a position at the François Rabelais Research Medical Facility here in Gotham where he made tremendous breakthroughs in both fields and catapulted the field of cryonics into mainstream science."
"I'm moved."
Alfred laughed at my sarcasm.
"Here's where we get to the meat of it: He was investigated on two separate occasions regarding the ethics of his research and his testing of live subjects. Both cases were dismissed, the investigations were shelved, and he was placed on administrative leave for undisclosed reasons. External to the investigations, he was arrested for domestic assault and battery against his wife but never went to court because Nora refused to press charges.
"About three years—and probably several beatings—later, Nora was diagnosed with a rare blood-deteriorating condition for which doctors—fourteen to be exact—were unable to halt her prognosis."
I slid off the table, walked over to my armory, and began reorganizing the contents of my utility-belt. "And, in his powerlessness, he froze her."
"Yeah. Some of her coworkers had become concerned when she hadn't returned to work over a period of several weeks. Considering Freiss' history of abuse, they reported her uncharacteristically long absence to the police. A warrant was promptly issued and the policed investigated their house. Authorities found a cryonics laboratory in Freiss' basement composed of stolen industrial equipment and live testing subjects; rats mostly, some cats, and few dogs. More importantly, in a shower-sized, metal tank, they discovered Nora's body in suspended animation. He was promptly arrested and deported back to Russia. His wife's body, on the other hand, is maintained here in Gotham at the—surprise surprise—François Rabelais Research Medical Facility where the cryonics division was tasked to find a way to reverse the process. Which they still haven't managed to do, mind you."
"Can you blame him? We all will go to great lengths to preserve love," Alfred said as he sterilized our makeshift operating table. "After all, who wants to watch their loved-ones die? I suppose he had to do what no one else could until he could find a cure."
"Are you serious?" I growled.
"As a stab wound," he retorted.
"What he did was insane."
"No more insane, I suppose, than masquerading like a bat and scaring the dickens out of an entire city."
"Not even the same thing." My voice took on that distinct Batman tone, "Freiss isn't some tragic character out of a fairy tale. He froze his wife, Alfred. Against her will. And, there's no survivable thawing process. She probably begged and pleaded with him to stop. He signed her death certificate. He might as well have shot her in alleyway in cold-blood."
The cave fell silent; only the faint beatings of bat wings and of dripping water were audible. Shadows danced on the cave walls reenacting my parents' murder in macabre fanfare. My memory supplanted the silence with the sounds of gunshots and my mother's screams. The resurrected pain caused a drumming in my ears.
"Bruce."
I didn't answer Oracle despite hearing her. She called my name once more but I was still lost in the nightmare. I'm not exactly sure how long I was gone but finally she said, "Earth calling Batman. Come-in, Batman."
I looked up.
"You okay?"
"I'm going after Poison Ivy. Alfred, help me with my armor please."
"Know yourself, Master Wayne, and see your enemy reflected," Alfred said.
My brow furrowed. "My armor please. Help me."