Batman by Alex Irvine Read Free Book Online Page A

who?”
    “Don’t make me talk to you,” the man pleaded. “You
know
what they’ll do if they think I’ve ratted on them.”
    “All you have to say is yes or no. The Riddler?”
    The thug shook his head.
    “Uh-uh. Wasn’t him. I never met him.”
    Batman leaned in close, despite the smell of vomit. “You know I don’t kill people, but I’m not above using a little… persuasion.” He paused to let that sink in. “Tell me again. Did the Riddler send you here?”
    “No!” the thug barked, and he grimaced in pain. “I told you, I never met him.”
    He was telling the truth. There was a certain kind of desperation visible in low-level street thugs who knew they were in over their heads. They might lie to the police, but they were terrified of Batman. That’s exactly how he wanted it.
    “Then who was it?”
    “I don’t know,” the man said. “A guy, we met once and he gave us instructions. We were doing what he told us to do. You weren’t supposed to be here, like I said.”
    “That’s because I show up when you don’t expect me,” Batman said, and he delivered enough of a blow to keep the thug sleeping for a while.
    Tapping the controls on his gauntlet, he checked his comm. He was expecting a notification from Oracle soon. She had agreed to tell him when the timer from the USB drive reached zero again. But it was too soon—an hour hadn’t yet elapsed. Close, but not quite. The call he’d received during the fight couldn’t have been her.
    Glancing at the cryptographic sequencer which logged all communications along his personal frequency, Batman saw that the call had come from Robin.
Good.
One call meant Robin was touching base. Multiple calls would have indicated some urgency.
    So he returned his attention to the vault. The Riddler wanted him to see something here. The thugs really weren’t a part of the gambit, though—they had been talking freely when he arrived. If it had been intended as an ambush, they had done a comically poor job of it. It didn’t fit. Thus far, Nigma seemed to be putting far more care into his planning.
    No, the goon squad was there for another purpose. Perhaps they were intended to guard something, as they seemed to think, but Batman had the sense that they had been left there as sacrificial pawns, or to make sure he stayed long enough to take a good look around. Perhaps he was being overly suspicious, but there was no such thing as too much suspicion. Not when the Riddler was up to his deadly tricks.
    One of those tricks was to isolate himself from henchmen like these. He must have used an intermediary to hire and deploy them. Finding out who that intermediary was would be a job for Oracle. Batman would put her on that trail when he got back to the Batcave.
    As if on cue, Oracle pinged him with a text message.
    * * *
    Timer has reached zero. Resetting. Now it reads fifty-nine minutes and fifty-eight… fifty-seven… you get the idea.
    Batman tapped his control to stop the message from repeating. If the Riddler had simply wanted him to go through into the tunnel, he wouldn’t have put the gunmen in the way. That much was clear. So the tunnel was of secondary importance, if that. Something else in the vault was the next clue. It wasn’t on the blank walls, and there was nothing out of the ordinary in the open door.
    That left the safe-deposit boxes. He turned to face that wall again, and saw something that hadn’t been immediately evident. The boxes were all in place except one, as if the vault had never been looted. Given the condition of the rest of the bank, though, that didn’t fit. And the thugs had been doing
something
to make that racket.
    “Don’t get boxed in.”
    Good advice
, Batman thought. He couldn’t make the mistake of assuming he knew what a riddle meant. He had to work his way through each element, step by step.
    His comm chimed. Robin was calling him again. This time Batman answered, hitting the gauntlet control.
    “There you are,”
Robin