He had descended from the roof and was halfway to the ground. He paused, and conjured up a mental picture of the asylum schematic he had memorized before leaving the cave. There was a hydrotherapy room in a sub-basement that seemed to be unused. That might or might not be where Crane and company would take Rachel if they meant to do her harm, but it was as good a place as any to start his search. He dropped to the ground and crouched.
This has to be the right window . . .
Crane had positioned gunmen on either side of the door and the window. They waited, but not for long.
Someone groaned. The sound came from above, in the rafters.
“Shoot!” Crane commanded.
The other gunman fired upward blindly. A blackness quickly descended on him and he was quiet.
There was the sound of a muffled blow from across the room and Crane knew that the third man had been taken down. Then another muffled blow and Crane knew he was alone.
Except for the woman. Maybe Rachel could be his ace in the hole. Where was she? Still on the table, probably. Give her another whiff of the gas as insurance, then—
Someone grabbed him, spun him around, and ripped off his mask. Crane’s arm was pinned between his body and Batman—it had to be Batman—his fist against his own chin. He felt a compressed air gun being triggered and realized, a half second before a puff of smoke blew into his face, what was about to happen.
“How about a dose of your own medicine,” Batman said. He released Crane and the doctor fell to the ground. Batman hauled him up by his collar and asked, “What have you been doing here? Who are you working for?”
As Crane tried to answer, his breath came in sharp, staccato gasps. Finally, he managed to say, “Rā’s . . . Rā’s . . . Rā’s al Ghūl.”
Batman pulled Crane closer. “Rā’s al Ghūl is dead, Crane. I’ll ask you one more time . . . Who are you working for?”
But Crane did not, and apparently could not, reply. For almost a minute, he simply stared, and continued to gasp. Then his breath became normal and he said pleasantly, “Dr. Crane isn’t here right now, but if you’d like to make an appointment . . .”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Batman gave himself a quick mental inventory to determine if the puff of gas from Crane’s sleeve had affected him. Nothing seemed to be wrong; Fox’s antidote was proving to be an effective vaccine. He guessed that Crane would not provide any useful information for the foreseeable future. He wondered about what the doctor had said.
Rā’s al Ghūl? What an odd lie to tell. And how did Crane even know about Rā’s?
Batman released Crane and let him sink to the floor. He took a step toward Rachel, who was lying unconscious on a table.
From his belt, he removed a tiny light and used it to examine the room. There was a large hole in the floor and several empty sacks around it. He shone his flashlight into it and saw the curved top of a large pipe. A water main . . . has to be. Other empty sacks, hundreds of them, were tossed into the corners.
Which adds up to what?
A loud something came from outside the window and Batman realized that he was hearing someone speak, distorted by a bullhorn and the echoing against the old building. The sound came again and he was able to discern the words:
“BATMAN. PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND SURRENDER. YOU ARE SURROUNDED.”
The speaker did not identify himself as a policeman. He did not have to. Batman picked Rachel up and carried her out of the room.
Outside, the flashing lights of a dozen police cruisers threw grotesque, reddish shadows on the walls of the asylum. Behind the open doors of each car stood a uniformed cop, some aiming sidearms, others with shotguns.
Flass stood next to a man in a captain’s uniform, who was holding a bullhorn.
“What are your waiting for?” Flass demanded.
“Backup,” the captain said.
“Backup?”
“Listen, Flass, the Batman’s in there. SWAT’s on the way. But if you want to go in now . . . Hey, I’ll be right behind you.”
“Well, if SWAT’s on the way . . .”
Jim Gordon parked his car at the perimeter of the police cordon, grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment, and hurried to Flass.
“I heard about it on the radio,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Got a call, said it was from inside the nuthouse,” Flass replied. “Some guy said Batman was loose inside there.”
Gordon pushed past Flass and was going through the front entrance of the asylum as a large van screeched to a halt and a half-dozen SWAT officers, carrying rifles with flashlights attached and wearing flak jackets and helmets, spilled onto the sidewalk.
Once inside, Gordon felt his way along the walls. He had seen the arrival of the SWAT team and wanted no part of it. Those guys had their orders: apprehend, subdue, use force if necessary. Gordon’s mission was different: find out what the hell was happening and leave the bullets inside the gun.
He heard shouts and heavy footfalls behind him: the SWAT guys, probably spreading out, keeping in contact with lapel radios. Did he have a chance to find the Batman before they did? Well, he’d soon find out.
In the brief bursts of red light from the police cruisers that were coming through the window, he saw an elevator. He pressed the button on the wall next to it. Nothing. No surprise. The radio call he’d intercepted reported that the asylum was without electricity. Okay, he’d do it the hard way. He switched on his flashlight and began to ascend a staircase next to the elevator, slowly—
—and he was grabbed around the waist and pulled off of his feet, rocketing upward. He stopped and was placed on a landing, a gloved hand covering his mouth.
Below, the SWAT guys, rifles and lights aimed ahead of them, shouted and began to climb the steps.
“Okay, we go higher,” someone said in Gordon’s ear, a low, rasping voice that he recognized immediately.
In the ambient glow from the SWAT lights, Gordon saw Batman aim some kind of gun at the rafters. Batman again circled Gordon’s waist with his arm and triggered the gun. There was a faint hiss and again Gordon was shooting upward. Just as quickly, they jolted to a stop.
Somehow, Gordon had managed to hold on to his flashlight during his ascent. He swept its beam around him and saw that he was in some sort of attic. Batman grasped Gordon’s wrist and gently pushed it down; Gordon’s beam shone on Rachel Dawes, who was curled on the floor, her eyes wide, her lips moving soundlessly.
“What happened to her?” Gordon whispered.
“Crane poisoned her with a psychotropic hallucinogen,” Batman said. “A panic-inducing toxin.”
“Let me get her down to the medics.”
“They can’t help her, but I can. I need to get her the antidote before the damage becomes permanent.”
“How long does she have?”
“Not long. Get her downstairs and meet me in the alley on the Narrows side.”
“How will you get out?”
Batman lifted his heel and pressed it. “I just called for backup.”
Batman glided toward a window, hesitated, then turned back to Gordon. “Some things you ought to know in case something happens to me. Crane was at the Narrows. He was up to something before I got here.
“Do you know what’s he planning?”
“No.”
“Was he working for Falcone?”
“No. Someone else. Maybe someone far worse.”
Gordon heard an odd sound coming from beyond the asylum’s walls: a screech melded with what sounded like wings flapping. “What’s that?”
“Backup,” Batman said.
The clouds had dissipated and a full moon shone in the sky. That’s how Flass first saw them—wiggly shapes crossing the moon. There were only a few at first. Flass and some of the cops noticed them but then ignored them. What were a few bats? You’d expect them in a creepy place like this. But now there were more than a few, a lot more—hundreds, no thousands . . . Maybe even more? They flowed
in an unending stream from the north, so many they almost concealed the moon. They flew straight for the building and found entrances and flew inside.
“It’s his doing,” Flass said to the uniformed captain. “Can’t be a coincidence, not bats. What kind of thing is he?”
Inside the asylum, a black mass, flapping and screeching, flooded into the stairwell, past the SWAT team who ducked and covered their faces with their forearms, and soared upward.
Batman stood in the midst of the swarm. The image of himself at the bottom of a well flitted across his mind for only a second, but the memory had long ago lost its power to frighten him. He had originally doubted that this would really work, this summoning of the bats that lived beneath Wayne Manor. He had planned to test it later, but there was no need for that now. He was surrounded by proof that, yes, the device in his heel performed as expected.
But most of the bats were past the SWAT team and Batman needed them occupied for a minute or two more. He pulled the device loose from his boot and dropped it down the stairwell. Immediately, the bats veered and plummeted downward, following the device, and the SWAT guys scattered. Batman jumped into the middle of the stairwell, almost invisible amid the black swarm, and opened his cloak into its wing configuration. He landed hard, swayed to get his balance, and as he ran toward the inmates’ quarters, refolded the cloak.
He was now standing in a corridor with barred doors on either side. He took a mini mine from his belt and threw it at the nearest door lock. A second later there was an explosion and the door fell smoking to the floor. Batman climbed over the door and entered the cell.
He nodded to the two men who, wide-eyed, were cowering in a corner and said, “Excuse me.”
He threw a second mine at the barred window and told the inmates that they’d better cover their faces. There was another explosion and the bars clattered onto the ground outside.
Batman took three running steps, leaped, and dove through the window.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Gordon was sitting in the alley behind the asylum, cradling Rachel’s head, when Batman emerged from the darkness.
“How is she?” Batman asked.
Before Gordon could answer, a police helicopter flew past the asylum and shone a blindingly bright searchlight on them.
Batman lifted Rachel. “I’ve got to get her out of here.”
“Take my car,” Gordon said.
“I brought mine,” Batman replied and, still carrying Rachel, loped into the shadows at the end of the alley.
“Yours?” said Gordon.
A few seconds later, a pair of headlights lit the area and Gordon heard the low thrum of a powerful engine. The headlights moved and something black and vaguely automotive lurched forward. It picked up speed and passed Gordon, heading for the street. A police cruiser appeared and stopped, blocking the exit to the alley, and Gordon cringed, waiting for disaster because whatever Batman was driving did not slow—no, it moved even faster. An ugly, life-taking collision seemed inevitable.
Two cops scrambled from the car and ran.
Batman’s vehicle smashed into the cop car, its huge front wheels crushing the hood and bouncing on toward the street.
One of the cops spoke into a lapel radio. “He’s in a vehicle.”
The receiver squawked. “Make and color?”
“It’s a black . . . tank.”
“Tank?”
Batman turned onto the street, north, away from the asylum and the army of officers, and accelerated onto the bridge, swerving past a delivery van and a sedan, steel missing steel by inches.
Rachel awakened and, for a minute, shook her head slowly as she strained against her seat belt, arms straight before her, hands braced against the dash.
“You’ve been poisoned,” Batman told her. “Stay calm.”
He touched a stud on the steeling wheel and a screen between him and Rachel brightened. It was crisscrossed with lines, some dotted, some solid.
“Global positioning display,” Batman said, glancing at it. “Tells me what’s ahead.”
Rachel’s breath was shallow and harsh.
As Batman was turning onto a freeway ramp, two police cruisers appeared in his rearview mirror, sirens howling, red lights blinking. Batman touched another stud and a strip of tensile plastic studded with metal spikes dropped from the rear of his vehicle. The first cruiser’s tires hit the spikes and exploded. Sparks shooting from its bare wheel rims, it spun and skidded sideways into the second cruiser. The hoods of both cars popped open and steam began rising from their engines.
Batman’s fingers danced on a row of buttons beneath the screen and the images blinked and changed.
Rachel’s breathing continued to be erratic.
“Breathe slowly,” Batman said. “Close your eyes.”
“That’s worse,” Rachel gasped.
Batman looked down at the screen, twisted the steering wheel, and left the freeway. He moved into an industrial area, deserted at this late hour.
Three cruisers were blocking the intersection ahead of him.
Batman slewed into a turn and into the entrance of a multilevel parking garage. His vehicle smashed through the ticket machine and wooden barrier and roared up a ramp.
“What are you doing?” Rachel whispered.
“Shortcut.”
Batman’s vehicle erupted onto the top level, the roof of the garage. A helicopter, hovering directly overhead, surrounded it with a circle of light.
Batman braked, and smoke rising from its tires, the vehicle skidded to a stop.
Gordon had been following the progress of the chase on the police radio, He knew where Batman had gone and went there too, hoping the man in the mask was not trapped, that he could somehow escape. But when he parked his car across from the garage, he could see that: it was hopeless. The place was ringed with cops, cruisers blocking every entrance and exit, a chopper hovering overhead, a spotlight on its underbelly glaring down at Batman’s vehicle, and armed officers moving into place. There was nothing Batman could do and nothing Gordon could do for him.
“We’ve got the bastard now,” Flass said to the uniformed captain as they trotted toward the garage. He holstered his service automatic and commandeered a shotgun from a uniformed officer. He was remembering being hauled up the side of a building and being so scared he could hardly answer questions. Being dumped into garbage and all that made him feel like a puke and the only way he could stop feeling like a puke was to watch the bastard die at his feet. And that was going to happen. Real soon. Because he couldn’t go on feeling like a puke.
Rachel was leaning against the passenger-side window, staring at the blurred images around her. “Brace yourself,” said Batman. “This might be a little rough.”
Batman had a momentary doubt. What he was about to try might work. Maybe should work. But would it? Would even this wild fantasy of a muscle car, this Batmobile, be able to do what he required of it? Doubts are pointless and unproductive—I learned that at the monastery. And he floored the accelerator. And the . . . Batmobile—for that’s what it was—sped toward the edge of the roof.
“So the bastard’s taking the coward’s way out,” Flass said to the captain. “Gonna off himself.”
Gordon was hoping he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t drive off the roof and fall six floors and into a crash that he surely would not survive. But that’s what he seemed to be doing.
Rachel did not know much because she could not discern the real from the phantasmagoric and she knew that she could not. But she was about to die. Of that she was certain.
Batman pulled a lever next to the gearshift. The Batmobile shifted into its formal driving position. The car lifted off the roof and started a rampless jump.
So far, so good.
The vehicle soared thirty feet to the neighboring roof. It landed with a jolt. But the tires held and Batman sped toward the next roof.
Flass stared, the shotgun forgotten in his hands.
Gordon thought: Maybe?
Rachel wondered if she were already dead.
The Batmobile did its leap-and-soar maneuver twice more and finally landed on a steeply pitched, chateau-style roof. Its tires bit into red tiles, crumbling some and sending others flying down into the street, where a few of them pelted the tops of police cruisers that were tracking the Batmobile.
Batman glanced at the global positioning screen—okay!—and up through the window at the chopper, which was still in pursuit.
“This last bit might be the roughest,” he told Rachel. “But we’ll be fine if the roof holds.”
It almost did not. The tiles were raining inward and falling, baring cracking timbers, when the Batmobile shot off a gable and dropped onto an elevated freeway twenty-five feet below. Batman’s navigational gear told him that the nearest on ramp was almost two miles to the south. By the time a police cruiser could get to it and then get to where Batman was now, the Batmobile would be only a memory. But there was still the chopper. The chopper was a problem. As long as he stayed on the freeway, the chopper could follow him.
“Hold on,” Batman said. “Just hold on.”
Warning signs seemed to race past them: the freeway was still under construction and the pavement ended in less than a mile. There were no lights; the electrical lines had not been extended this far yet. Batman accelerated. The Batmobile smashed through wooden barriers and down into a clearing below, then veered under the elevated road. Batman killed the exterior lights and the windshield immediately tinted night-vision green. He tapped a control near the screen, which converted it into a television receiver tuned to an infrared camera at the rear of the vehicle, and reverted the engines to stealth mode. They made no sound as the Batmobile sped silently away from Gotham City. The chopper hovered and descended, its searchlight probing the area under the road. It moved forward, in the opposite direction from the Batmobile.
The Batmobile lurched forward and flew off the edge of a lookout, over a river gorge, straight at a waterfall.
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