Way back, when I hoped to finish this story around Christmas 2012, this chapter positively resisted being written: it insisted on being cumbersome, slow, and confusing. I am afraid I have not managed to rewrite it from scratch, but I dare hope that its current shape is a tolerable improvement.
I have been a terrible disappointment to the wonderful readers who left comments, likes, and follows here; I can only try to make it up to those who might still stumble upon it as I have some time on my hands and, despite having resigned myself several times to leaving this tale incomplete, I still feel duty-bound and somewhat tempted to finish it. This has not been a good year for me; it started with a major three-month depressive bout in early February and took its heaviest toll so far with the heartbreak of my father's death three weeks ago, just over a week before my 41st birthday (yes, I am *that* old). Speaking of which, I do indeed feel too old to play around in the wonderful world of fanfiction; I spent a great 4-5 years in it in various fandoms, but it is time to call it a day. Still, I *will* stick it out with this one. I may not end my fanfic writing on an exhilarating high à la Chinese Boxes, but I owe it to the readers, and even to the characters, to finish what I started and bring my take on their story to a close.
Meanwhile, a lot of things have happened in the not-so-wonderful world of espionage since last autumn when I put the plot together. For one thing, I cannot ignore the Edward Snowden story; I do not intend to write a topical commentary or follow the facts verbatim, but parts of it kind of fit in with the plot I made up. The guy himself won't feature, but I can't help sticking in an oblique reference.
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They set the table for dinner in an excited hurry, but by the time they sat down, the upbeat mood evaporated, and preoccupation crept in and settled over them like a chilly fog. Bruce has become reticent, Theo has become businesslike, and Selina sits and listens and wonders whether, on cold reflection, they should be going on this trip.
Theo says it for her. "The way things stand, you're better off staying here."
"We don't know much about the way things stand," Bruce mutters.
"You don't know shit about the way things stand," Theo corrects him."But the whole thing stinks. They must have a few hundred people capable of doing whatever it is they need done. Why you?"
"I suppose they want deniable assets for this one," Bruce ventures.
"All their black ops people are deniable assets by definition. I suspect that they don't just want deniable assets, they want disposable ones." Theo is staring at Bruce as he says it, but if his words are meant as a deterrent, they don't seem to be working.
Sensing that he is losing the argument, Theo looks to Selina for help. "Has he always had a death wish?" he asks rhetorically. Strictly speaking, he has known her husband for much longer than she has, though they had not had any face time until about a year and a half ago.
She nods emphatically, but the gesture likewise seems lost on Bruce.
Theo goes for a more direct approach. "I take it there's a reason why you can't just tell them to fuck off."
"A few," Bruce admits. He sounds uncomfortable.
The silence that follows lasts no more than ten seconds, but the sudden quiet in the room and two pairs of eyes fixed on his face make it impossible for Bruce to stick to the cryptic answer.
"They know how best to blackmail us both," he explains darkly. "And there's no doubt they'll use it."
"If you mean that they can charge you with faking your death, it is technically illegal, but you can always prove that you were pronounced clinically dead and then spent weeks in a coma," Theo offers. "And changing names is not illegal. I suppose they could try to corner you with attempted US tax evasion if they brought in the IRS."
Bruce perks up at this line of reasoning; to Selina, it sounds as if he is relieved to be talking about this, the more technical issue, and not other dangers lurking beneath. "The argument would never fly. I can prove that I derived no benefits from being declared dead. I'm sure they've checked and seen that my death was a minor windfall to the IRS thanks to the estate tax on whatever I left to Alfred in my will that wasn't in his name already. I could probably even ask for a refund. I've been a Swiss tax resident since I ended up here, and I pay every cent that's due. They could try to give me crap over my beneficial ownership of Wayne shares, but the dividends are taxed anyway."
Usually Selina is very laid back about table manners, herself treating most solid dishes as finger food in informal company; however, she has a problem with Bruce waving around a fork to emphasise the points he is making when there is a dripping mozzarella pearl stuck on it – within inches of her silk dress. The instant his hand stays still, she grabs his wrist and holds it long enough to bite off the cheese, while Theo, out of the danger zone, gives his verdict on the argument.
"Which means that a good tax attorney can shut them up. So where's the real catch?"
You're puzzled because Bruce has been too good at downplaying the depth of his hang-ups, she thinks, sipping the Amarone. He even fooled her for a few months, until she watched him wriggle his way out of a two-day business trip to Gotham last November. She hadn't called his bluff, but she knew his excuse back then to have been nothing more than a clever contrivance, whatever the real reason for his reluctance to go back. Having had a single person for a confidant for most of his life has not helped; and even Alfred has been telling her that Bruce always tried to keep his troubles to himself. He goes to great lengths to avoid admitting to feeling pain, physical or otherwise. She has made good progress on getting him to acknowledge pain of the physical kind, which luckily has not bothered him much since last August's cartilage replacement operation, but the mental kind definitely needs work.
"The catch has little to do with my life or finances as Wayne," Bruce confesses, looking glum. "If we don't play along now, they'll find a way to make public what else I did when I lived in Gotham. They must have figured it out and know that I don't want it advertised, or else I'd have stepped forward when the film came out, hogging the spotlight or brandishing a lawsuit demanding royalties."
Theo shakes his head. "Call me an idiot, but I'm still stumped as to why you refuse to admit that it was you. The greatest hero that city has known in decades; it's not as if anyone could hold it against you. You don't even live there anymore so you're at much less risk of attracting publicity. If you're worried about paparazzi stalking your home, raise the fence three more feet and get a couple of guard dogs."
Privately, Selina has wondered about the same thing, even if she has always accepted his denial as a given. Her own desire to safeguard her anonymity was a natural consequence of her Gotham lifestyle; but after the near-destruction of the city, no one, not even the CIA, would dare hold Bruce accountable for his unorthodox modus operandi, and any attempt to tarnish a legend with accusations of petty misdeeds would be seen as crass and irrelevant.
"They'll throw me to the media who'll do their damned best to make a puppet out of me. It'll be a mockery of any good I did back then. I'll be spending days turning down requests to pose in the Batsuit, to sign up for product endorsements, and to do the rounds at the late night comedy circuit and in shitty reality shows."
"A month's inconvenience followed by lifelong peace of mind still sounds like a bargain," Theo counters.
"If it comes to that, I'd rather do it on my own terms," Bruce replies, morose but resolute.
There's more to it, she thinks; he has been telling the truth, but she knows him well enough by now to read the signs - and he has not been telling the whole truth. Theo is not far behind with the same conclusion, albeit for a less intuitive and more specific motive.
"You said they have facts to blackmail you both with," he prompts Bruce, and Selina's eyes fly wide at the crestfallen look on her husband's face.
"If they manage to prove that Céline is in fact Selina Kyle, she has an unfinished prison sentence to serve and I can guarantee that they've got an extradition order ready and will threaten to enforce it if we don't cooperate."
Shit; this was damn shortsighted of her. She spent too long thinking about his reasons for avoiding Gotham - and overlooked the blatantly obvious. Worse still, it painfully reminds her of how and following what she'd got herself arrested and sentenced.
Luckily, Theo, unaware of her tormented sentiments, sticks to logical reasoning. "There's no trace of her previous identity online. I checked the databases last year, remember."
Selina takes it as her cue to weigh in: getting into practical risk assessment issues is a good distraction, not to mention a useful measure. "If someone got a recent picture of me and showed it to Gilly, the dickhead Senator I kidnapped, he'd give them a positive ID in two seconds. I know he's still alive. I saw him on TV a couple of months ago talking bullshit about new lobbying regulations."
"Even if he IDs you, they need a match in the criminal records to show that you really had a conviction. If no records and no evidence remain, they'll have a hard time proving it. It'll be a case of he said, she said."
"I've made sure there were no surviving electronic records online, but I never bothered to go after hard copies or physical evidence bearing my prints that they still might have. I figured that erasing the online stuff and getting a new ID was good enough. There may also be offline backups that I couldn't get to if they were never plugged in and updated after the Bane occupation. I just assumed they were all destroyed when it happened, or lost in the confusion afterwards." Hoped it was the case, more like it, and refused to acknowledge the limitations of her Holy Grail piece of software. Recklessly negligent at the very least. "We don't know when exactly they tagged me. Chances are that they've been through the remaining archives already and found something to make sure they have a match. I know it was stupid of me." She should have known better than relying exclusively on a software gimmick, however effective.
Theo tactfully says nothing, but she can tell that he is deliberately not shaking his head. After all, both she and Bruce had given him ironclad assurances, which he had confirmed as far as he could, but neither she nor Bruce had ever explained what exactly their "magic eraser" had amounted to and what its potential pitfalls were. "It's probably too late now, but we could try to check how many of the offline records survived. By way of damage control," he offers.
At least that is easy to do. Sort of. "We're meeting Jim Gordon in Gotham tomorrow night. We're gonna ask him to go through the surviving part of the old GCPD archives and destroy any copies of my records he may find. I know I should have done it earlier."
Bruce decides to stake a claim for his share of the debacle. "I should have done it. You only met him a couple of times, and Jim and I go a long way back. But we didn't talk until two weeks ago. He knew I was alive but had no idea where I was."
Theo does shake his head this time. "You're friends with the Gotham Police Commissioner and you didn't ask him to double-check."
Selina relents, seeing her husband's misery. "Bottom line is, we can no longer walk away from this mess. All we can do now is deal with it."
"Fair enough," Theo concedes. "And you can't start dealing with the mess until you meet with them and find out how much they know and what they want. They still haven't mentioned what it's about, have they?"
Bruce shakes his head. "Nothing. Morell says his aide will explain it face-to-face in Gotham. The only thing he did say was that they want us to help them retrieve a misplaced asset."
"Translation: steal something," Theo supplies.
"Steal back, more likely," Selina suggests.
"Seeing the kind of press they've been getting lately," Bruce muses, "there's a long list of what they may want stolen back, all of it covered in sleaze. I won't be surprised if it's a sex tape featuring one of their top bosses that they don't want discovered by their own staff."
"Can't rule it out," Theo agrees. "Or worse, they'll want you to capture this Sutcliffe guy or some other whistleblower."
"We're not doing that," she and Bruce remonstrate in unison.
"Fair enough, but it'll be trouble either way. Any clues about the location?"
Bruce scowls. "Nope. We have to wait until Wednesday." The day after tomorrow. "I know they'll swear us to secrecy, but I'll leave you a note in draft if it turns out we need something and don't have time to come back here. Then we can talk, no open references, in case the stuff we've put together isn't enough or isn't right." Earlier that afternoon in the office, they spent the better part of an hour assembling emergency toolkits of sorts, of surveillance, counter-surveillance, and lock-picking gadgets they might end up needing. They resolved against bringing those along until they had decided whether to pick up the task, and figured that if they went for it, they would ask their CIA counterparts either to get them travel clearance to carry the gadgetry or help send it as a diplomatic mail package if necessary to make sure that they they would be given a green light at security checks. The note in draft was a standard covert messaging technique allegedly used by terrorists and, apparently, by General Petraeus in his amorous dealings: with a shared password to a dedicated e-mail account, they could leave each other messages in the draft folder, thwarting attempts to monitor e-mail traffic.
"OK, we wait until your meeting," Theo concludes. "Anything else I can help with in the meantime?"
"Could you ask Max to pick us up at Gotham International? I'd rather not pay the cab fare." More importantly, Selina suspects, Bruce wants to find out any fresh Wayne Enterprises gossip from Theo's nephew, the recent Wayne recruit, before their dinner with Lucius, so that he can impress his CEO with the intel.
"I'll call him later tonight. Which flight are you taking?"
Bruce pulls a positively tragic face.
"Come on," Theo chides him, "it can't be that bad. The earliest flight out of Zurich is at ten AM. You can survive getting up at six once in a while, can you?"
"It's not that," Bruce mutters.
Theo raises both eyebrows in response.
"It's Donald fucking Trump," Bruce explains peevishly. "Why the hell he picked the same flight beats me, but because of him, I can't fly first class. I wouldn't even risk business. Knowing Trump, he'll stick his entourage into business rather than put everyone in first, and will keep poking in to give them orders." In the follow-up call from their CIA handlers late last night, the senior aide in charge of the mission insisted that they take the Swissair flight from Zurich to Gotham International the next morning as a condition for vetting their new identity credentials at immigration. The man said that he wanted to make sure the CIA sent an agent on-site to help in case of problems, in addition to clearing their identities past the FBI in advance, but in all likelihood, the real reason was to check that Bruce and Selina were holding up their end of the bargain - knowing the CIA, they'd have someone watching them board in Zurich. And since mid-morning when ever-paranoid Bruce hacked into the Amadeus booking records for their flight and discovered Trump's travel arrangements, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that fucking was the man's official middle name.
Theo looks puzzled. "I know he's an asshole, but flying economy for ten hours because of him sounds like overkill. You don't have to talk to him. Put on a pair of Ray-Bans and if he still recognises you, tell him you have a bad hangover."
"He's a gossip whore. As soon as he lands he'll shout about me on his fucking Twitter account." Bruce takes a shot at a Trump impression; the face is off but the voice is spot-on: "Just saw useless playboy Bruce Wayne sneaking back into Gotham."
"As I said, amore, you could wear a wig and talk like Batman," Selina taunts. It may be unfair, but she is getting a kick out of imagining what he'd look like in a wig.
Bruce refuses to see the funny side of the situation, and takes her comment fully at face value. "I'm not wearing a fucking wig. What colour would I pick, blond? Everyone knows Trump wears a toupee to cover his bald pate, he'll think I'm deliberately trying to get his attention. And you know that talking like Batman will create more problems than it solves."
"You could try a curly wig and speak Italian," she keeps teasing. "Or wear dreadlocks and a Rasta hat and talk about recording your next album."
It finally dawns on him that she may not be entirely serious. "You're kidding, right?"
"It's either that or economy class, tesoro."
"I've already changed my seat to economy. Do you really need to rub it in?" he scoffs. Selina, unimpressed by the prospect of spending nine hours in a cramped economy seat eating unpalatable food, has refused to follow suit, and now he is probably getting jealous, too.
"OK, I'll leave you to it. If you ask me, you're a chronic sucker for punishment."
"I didn't ask for Morell to call me."
"Punishment aside," Theo cuts in, "I'm kind of surprised he didn't call you sooner. With the sort of backgrounds you two have, martial arts, fluent Chinese, experience with security systems, no one could blame them for trying."
"For one thing, they probably didn't know where to find us," Bruce argues. "The CleanSlate software may not be foolproof and I may have been something of a public figure, but for the facial recognition software to tag us, they still needed faces to recognise, and we haven't been photographed much."
"What about that Virginian guy?"
"What Virginian guy?" For a moment, Bruce's face is a concerned blank.
"The ex-Marine you met this past winter, the one in your photos from Zermatt. Max sent me one with the three of you in it, he told me the other guy had made the mistake of suggesting a race with the two of you to the bottom of the Schwarzsee run, and ended up being the last one down the mountain by a quarter mile."
The situation is no laughing matter, but Selina cannot help a snicker. "Oh, I remember. The day you guys went off at dawn and came back after sunset, and then went and got yourselves drunk on a gallon of glühwein and came back signing We Are The Champions."
Even Bruce cracks a half-smile at the memory. "I'd almost - not quite, but almost - say it was worth getting tagged."
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TBC