A/N I am so glad last week is over with! Conferences mostly went well, so not bad for a first try, I hope!
Thank you to my bat-beta, IcyWaters, whose breadth of knowledge is invaluable.
This chapter is dedicated to my ex-roommate and her very bad day with the daycare hamsters.
Disclaimer Can you believe it? The IDEA isn't even my own. That's just own pathetic I am.
(Disclaimer courtesy of The New and Improved Hermione Granger by chemqueen)
Acknowledgment I haven't done one of these in a while, but at this point I really need to acknowledge Dorothy Dunnett, all time master of the chess metaphor and permanent sculptor of my imaginative habits. (She wrote the series this week's quote is taken from.)
Chapter 41
"It seems to me," said Roxelana Sultán, "that this nation has become embroiled in a private feud between two masters: a feud which has been played like a game: falsehood within falsehood and guile within guile. I propose that what has begun as a game, entangling as puppets who knows how many innocent as well as the guilty, should end in like fashion."
- Pawn in Frankincense
When Gordon pushed through the front door of the school, he was met by two men dressed in black with white painted faces and silver wigs. They unceremoniously slammed him against the wall and frisked him for weapons before tying his hands in front of him and blindfolding him with a colorful silk scarf.
"I thought I was here for ransom demands," he protested, and a second scarf was tied across his mouth, effectively gagging him.
One of clowns grabbed his arm and led him, stumbling through a door and down a flight of stairs, to a place that was full of metallic groans and reeked of must. They passed through another door (he knew because he tripped over the sill) and into an area that was freezing and echoing. A minute in a straight line, then he was shoved to the ground and forced to struggle awkwardly forward on his knees with one guard pushing and one pulling him through what was apparently a very low aperture. They were outside now; he could feel the wind biting at his cheekbones and hear the purring engine of a motor vehicle. Metal clanged behind him as he was hauled to his feet. A car door opened and he was thrust onto upholstery that smelled of cigarettes and French fry grease.
They drove for what felt like hours, but what Gordon estimated was actually ten to fifteen minutes. Then he was hauled back out of the car and propelled across an uneven surface to an indoor environment that was only fractionally warmer than outside. As the door shut behind them, an explosion reverberated through the walls, and the guard who had his hand on Gordon's shoulder tightened his grip convulsively.
"We've brought the cop," one of his escorts said.
"I'll let him know you're here," another man responded. There was the click of a phone being lifted, and the same voice said, "Lieutenant Gordon is here." The phone was hung back up and the caller said, "I'll take him down. You two wait here. It won't be long."
A light hand was laid on his arm and the cold muzzle of gun was placed against his neck. "This way, please, Lieutenant."
He was led, more efficiently this time, across the room and down a flight of stairs - a very long flight of stairs. They crossed seven or eight small landings, but Gordon lost track of the exact number when he stumbled and fell onto one of them. His guide hauled him smoothly back to his feet, giving not the slightest opportunity for struggle or escape.
They at last reached the bottom. A sharp turn, the sound of a door latch clicking open, and a wave of warm air that carried scents of leather and liquor washed over him.
"Atuan, do help the Lieutenant sit down," a new voice from inside the room said. "And take off his blindfold.
Gordon allowed himself to be led forward, and he obediently sat when a chair was pushed against his knees. The scarf was pulled off his eyes, and he squinted in pain. A bright light was shining directly into his face, and even after his eyes adjusted, he never caught a clear glimpse of the shadowed man behind the desk.
"Lieutenant Gordon, I must apologize for the rough and ready treatment, but I required a personal interview with you, and I wasn't certain how else to persuade you to come." The voice was quiet, cultured, and evenly pitched. Gordon failed to feel comforted.
"You're welcome to drop by the station anytime," he snapped.
"Not to cast any disparagement upon the police department, but we both know there are certain drawbacks to having private conversations there."
Gordon flexed his fingers, wishing that the rope, which bound his wrists, were just a bit looser. "So are you going to tell me what we have to do to get you to take your psychos off those kids?"
"Ah, that, I am afraid is out of my hands. The…gentlemen…you refer to are actually under the direction of a colleague of mine. I wished to speak to you about a different matter."
"Well?" demanded Gordon when the moment grew too long for his strained nerves.
"I am going to offer you a job."
"Thanks, I've already got one."
"This won't interfere with your regular police duties. In fact, it has everything to do with improving your job performance. You must realize that those you investigate and arrest are only a fraction of this city's criminals – the mere scum off of a deep pool of impurity."
Gordon scowled into the glare. "So?"
"If you will work with me, I can help you do more than scratch the surface. I can give you people you never even dreamed of touching."
"If you're looking for a tame cop to sit in your pocket, you're bribing up the wrong tree." Gordon was vaguely aware of having mixed his metaphors, but he really didn't care.
"Believe me, Lieutenant Gordon, the people I give you will all be guilty. I do not think you will regret accepting my offer."
"Do I have a choice?" he asked bitterly.
"Yes," the voice said unexpectedly. "People who are forced to cooperate often give an unsatisfactory performance. In the morning you will be released to return to your job and your family. I am not going to threaten your excellent wife or your delightful daughter, although it would be obviously quite easy for me to do so. You don't have to give me an answer tonight. Think it over for a few days, and I'll be in touch."
"No thanks," Gordon replied.
"I'm not going to accept that," the voice stated calmly, "because you obviously haven't thought it over. You can choose to go on as you are – I already said I would allow it. But consider it: if you survive, what do you have to look forward to? A lifetime of throwing yourself against the odds alone? Of one failure after another? How much longer will your wife put up with it, do you think?"
"Leave my family out of this," Gordon rasped.
"I'm simply pointing out the facts. My dear lieutenant, is what I'm offering really so different from your current arrangement with the Batman? With, of course, the exception that I can offer you a promotion, resources, and a promise of safe conduct for yourself and your family. I'm giving you a chance to actually make a difference."
Gordon remained silent.
"Atuan, you may take him now. Please make our guest as comfortable as the situation will allow."
The blindfold descended over Gordon's eyes again, and he was pulled back to his feet and led from the room. As far as he could tell, they seemed to be retracing their previous path, and they were soon climbing the long flights of stairs. They passed what Gordon judged was their entrance level, and had gone several landings above it, when a loud roar shook the building. Gordon fell full length onto the stairs as chunks of the ceiling cascaded around and onto him.
As the last of the debris stopped falling, he cautiously sat up and pulled off his blindfold. He was in a narrow stairwell lit by a single dim and flickering bulb. Below him sprawled the body of his captor, a muscular Middle Eastern man. A section of corroded pipe had apparently caught him directly on the head because he was bleeding profusely from one temple.
Shifting carefully across the rubble, Gordon hopefully poked around the body for the gun, but it was nowhere to be found. Inside the unconscious guard's jacket, he found two heavy wooden sticks, connected at the ends by a short chain. It looked like something out of a Jackie Chan movie, but it was better than nothing.
As he maneuvered himself to his feet, the light flickered and went out, leaving the stairs in pitch blackness. Gordon hesitated, trying to remember what he had seen in the last moment of light. The stairs going up had looked to be in better shape than the ones going back down. He began to climb.
- - - - - -
Dick stood very still on his end of the board. He wasn't at all afraid of heights, but he was worried about Miss Somerville. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut and she was gasping and hunched forward, as if she were sick. He'd never seen anyone look so afraid.
"Don't be scared, Miss Somerville," Dick pleaded. "Rachel Jr. won't hurt you." Unconsciously, he began to step toward her, the board shuddering under his weight. The guard drew back the bolt on his rifle, the click clear in the cold air.
Miss Somerville's eyes flew open, and she stared at him, almost as if she didn't see him. But the next moment she gasped, "Richard, don't move."
Dick looked at the guard's gun, which pointed straight at Miss Somerville's heart. "Ok," he said in a small voice.
Miss Somerville slowly bent her knees until she was squatting, then tilted forward so that she landed solidly on her kneecaps, sending a tremor through the wood. She settled back onto her heels and stayed that way, panting heavily as though she had been running very hard for a very long time. "Chess," she said suddenly, around her painful breathing. "Let's play chess."
Dick, trying to watch both the guard and Miss Somerville, didn't think that he had heard right. "What?"
"Chess," she gritted, sounding angry. "I'll…be white."
Obviously, Miss Somerville had gone crazy. "We don't have a board," Dick pointed out timidly.
"In your head," she snapped. "The board is always…" She sucked in a sharp breath, and her shoulder hunched up sharply. "…in your head. King's pawn…to King's fourth."
"I don't understand," he pleaded.
"Picture the board in your head!" she shouted, suddenly looking less scared.
Of course he could do that. He could see the black and white squares, with their two armies lined up on the edges. Mentally, he pushed the white pawn in front of the queen forward two spaces. Black had to answer now. "King's pawn to king's fourth?" he echoed doubtfully.
"Good," she grunted. "King's knight to…" She trailed off in a small moan and doubled over until her head nearly touched the wood in front of her knees.
"Where's your knight, Miss Somerville?" Dick encouraged.
"King's knight to…king's bishop's third."
He made the mental adjustment. "Queen's knight to queen's bishop's third."
"King's bishop," she said, her voice uneven, "to queen's bishop's fourth."
"King's knight to king's rook's third."
"Queen's rook's pawn to queen's rook's third."
The longer they played, the steadier Miss Somerville's voice grew, although Dick was pretty sure he was winning. He had just taken one of her rooks when there was a muffled roar and the building shuddered, shaking the board. Dick fell forward onto his knees and grasped the wood desperately. Their guard looked nervously over his shoulder, but nothing else happened.
"Are you all right?" Miss Somerville asked, sounding shaky again.
"I'm ok. I think it's your turn."
Five moves later, Richard was watching the guard look at his watch, when the door directly behind him slowly opened and a man emerged.
"Queen to king's knight's fifth," the social worker said.
"Um…king's bishop," he began, distracted by the new arrival. "King's bishop to…What's in queen's fifth?" The figure was walking silently across the roof toward the guard.
"I…don't remember. Nothing, I think."
"King's bishop to…"
The man had something grasped in his two hands in front of him. Now he lifted it and Richard watched the dark and slender sideways arc end in a vicious crack on the side of the guard's head. He fell without a sound.
The newcomer dropped his weapon and ran forward, and now Dick saw that it was the policeman who had asked him questions after he and Miss Somerville had been kidnapped that other time.
"All right, kid, nice and easy." Lieutenant Gordon reached out his two hands, which were tied together, and grabbed hold of Dick's jacket to pull him to safety.
The moment Dick's feet were on the roof he ran over to Miss Somerville. She was still kneeling stiffly on the board, and now that he was closer he saw that her teeth were clenched tightly, pulling her cheeks into funny bulges. In the front of her shirt there was a lump that wiggled frantically. Dick pulled her shirt hem free of her waistband, and a gerbil, a mouse head, and a mouse body tumbled onto the snowy roof. Dick stared down at the bloody mess in horror. "Rachel Jr., you bad gerbil!"
Miss Somerville wrenched herself around and gagged violently.
Dick snatched up his gerbil, tucked her down the front of his own t-shirt for safe keeping, and discovered Gordon was kneeling in the snow next to them. "Are you two all right?"
"I think so," Dick replied when the social worker seemed unable to answer. "Miss Somerville's just scared."
"Is there anyone else up here?"
"No, just him." Dick pointed at the prostrate guard. "The others went back inside."
"All right. Why don't we see if he's got a knife or something so we can get these ropes off?"
They rummaged through the fallen man's pockets and found not only a handgun and flashlight but also a wicked looking switchblade. Dick carefully sawed through the rope around Gordon's hands, and then the cop did the same for Miss Somerville.
She had regained enough self-possession to speak. "Please tell me you're here with the cavalry."
Gordon shook his head. "Just me. The rest of the force is tied up with a major hostage situation." He quickly explained how he had been lured into the school and abducted, then taken in front of the mysterious man behind the desk.
"Gatsby," she said. "He calls himself Gatsby. He claims to be behind everything that's been going on with Richard."
"But if he's gone to so much trouble to get the boy, why did he try to kill you two?"
"He doesn't want Richard," she muttered, and continued, almost to herself, "he said it's never been about the Graysons."
"Well, whatever he's after, we've got to get out of here. I'm not sure how though. There was an explosion that felt like it brought down half the building."
She pulled off her glasses and rubbed fretfully at the bridge of her nose. "The games have begun," she muttered abstractedly. "That's what he said when the explosions started. The games have begun. Games down there, games up here…"
Dick watched her uneasily, trying to understand how their chess game had anything to do with the explosion.
She suddenly stiffened. "Madre de Dios."
"What?" Gordon demanded.
She carefully put her glasses back on, and then she reached over and pulled Dick close, her fingers biting painfully into his upper arm. "It's a game," she said. "This is check. You have to take the king to win. But I never realized…"
"Realized what?" Gordon asked, sounding as confused as Dick felt.
"Who the king is."
- - - - - -
Batman was several feet down the pipe when the promised explosion shook the building. A fine rain of silt drifted around them, but other than that, the structure of the pipe seemed to hold. He continued to slip down the corroded and slightly angled surface for what he was figured was close to two hundred feet. The pipe abruptly ended above a stagnant pool of water.
Working himself around so that he could look out without emerging, he saw that he was in an underground cavern much like the caves beneath Wayne Manor. Apparently, this was where the factory had dumped its waste back in its days of production, and probably also where it had gotten the spring water it bottled.
The cavern was empty and the pool small. He swung himself out and over onto dry rock, and took a moment to answer the signal that had been buzzing quietly in his ear.
"Sir, the coordinates have shifted, a sixteenth of a degree northeast."
"Acknowledged," he muttered, and moved toward a small door set in the rock. It was locked, but a moment of cautious jimmying opened it and let him into a tiny corridor, which in turn led into a dim and dusty room that looked as if it had been the control center for some kind of Mission Impossible operation. Chunks of plaster were littered across the desks, and a haze of dust was still thick in the air – apparently the effect of the Joker's little bombs had not been as benign here as in the tunnel.
He moved swiftly through the mess, navigating to line up with the coordinates on this level, hoping against hope it was the right one. The room was lit only with a couple of flickering incandescent bulbs, but a shaft of brighter light shone from under a door in the wall. As he approached, it swung open and a man came out. Batman shrank back into the shadow, but the other man had quick eyes. They focused, widened, and then something spiked and lethal was whistling through the air.
Months of fighting street criminals with no training and less sense had dulled the edge of his instincts, and he only just managed to duck and let the projectile sail over his head. He lunged forward, taking a desk chair with him to hurl at the assailant and throw off the aim of the gun that was aimed at his heart.
They grappled, briefly but fiercely, before Batman managed to crack his opponent's head against the wall. He dropped the unconscious body and scanned his surroundings, but no one had appeared to investigate the noise. He forced his breathing to slow and cleared his mind of the vestiges of shock. He hadn't tangled with anyone so skilled since...since the night on the train... Stepping forward, he looked into the lighted room.
The man behind the desk looked at him quite calmly. "Do come in, although I must ask that you advance slowly. This complex was built so that it could be destroyed at a moment's notice, and I now have my finger on the detonator switch. While it might be fitting for us to die together, I doubt that you want to take Richard Grayson or your friend Lieutenant Gordon along with us."
"Gatsby," Batman growled, stalking slowly forward, trying to see where the other man had his hands.
"That is one of my names. What else did our grinning friend tell you about me?"
This is Gatsby's show from start to finish. He owns this town. His people are everywhere. "Nothing important." He advanced another step, the echo of a memory worming its way to the surface of his mind. A city so corrupt...
"Stop right there, please."
"Tell me your names." ...that we have infiltrated...
Gatsby smiled faintly. "You know them already."
...every level of its infrastructure. Too late, the pieces clicked into place. "Drug trafficker."
"That is one."
"Master of Gotham."
"Yes."
"Puppet," he hissed with disdain.
"Nothing so crude." Gatsby shook his head. "Better a shadow, acting in accord with the will of the one who casts it."
"He is dead."
"We are his body. We live, and we call you to account for your betrayal. Take off your mask, Bruce Wayne."
To Be Continued
A/N Responses to reviews for the last chapter can be found on my homepage! If you didn't find the promised fluff, it's up as it's own story, Blithering Bats, It's Halloween, Batman!. I promise I will finish it before Halloween.