Batman 4 - Batman & Robin (9 page)

He let that thought sink in for a moment. Then he held the phone up to his mouth, so whoever was on the other end couldn’t miss his next remark. “The bidding begins at a mere ten million. Dollars, of course.”

For good measure, Woodrue punched another stud on his remote and increased the Venom flow. Impossibly, the prisoner grew even larger.

His arm and leg shackles snapped. Sitting up and swinging his legs around, the monstrous Bane lurched for the Venom pump, smashing equipment and computer consoles as he went.

One piece of equipment actually exploded, raining sparks down around Pamela. Closing her eyes, she shielded herself with her arms and waited a few moments. Then she looked up again.

To her utter dismay, Woodrue was hovering over her, his eyes more maniacal than ever. In the background, she could see the scientist’s guards rushing to subdue Bane.

“Welcome to my parlor,” said the scientist.

“I . . .” She tried to come up with an explanation, but it stuck in her throat. “You don’t understand, I . . .”

“It’s all right,” Woodrue told her. “Really. All for the best.”

Helping Pamela up, he escorted her back toward her lab. Still reeling from what she’d seen, she went willingly.

“You see,” he told her en route, “our original sponsor had no stomach for military applications. He cut the funding for our work. In fact—”

“Our
work?” she murmured. “I had nothing to do with that . . . that
creature
I saw in there.”

Woodrue smiled. “But without your research, your Venom, I could never have come this far, my dear.” His smile widened. “Join me, won’t you, Pamela? The two of us entwined, side by side . . .”

He let his voice trail off suggestively.

By then, they had arrived at Pamela’s tent—the one where she created the Venom. Woodrue opened the tent flap for her.

“Join you?” Pamela repeated, still numb from what she’d seen. She sat down on the nearest stool. “But I’ve spent my life trying to protect plants from extinction . . . and now you corrupt my research into some maniacal scheme for world domination.”

She felt herself getting angry. She drew strength from it.

“When I get through with you,” she told him, “you won’t be able to get a job teaching high-school chemistry. You hear me, you grade-A psycho?”

Woodrue chewed the inside of his mouth. “Well,” he said with eerie calm, “I can respect your opinion.”

Then he shoved Pamela viciously backward into the interconnected tables. Plants and poisonous vermin came raining down on top of her as they spilled from their cages.

“Sadly,” shrieked Woodrue, his eyes popping wildly, “I’m not very good at rejection!”

He began pulling down shelves full of cages and bubbling beakers. Their contents came crashing down on Pamela, burying her, burying all her specimens as well.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to die!” he screamed at her.

He pulled down more equipment. More. Pamela felt herself crushed by the weight of it. She tried to struggle against that weight, but it was no use. She was overcome.

As blackness gathered before her eyes, she could see Woodrue grinning, taking pleasure in her death. She imagined him turning, heading back into the prison, where the bidding was about to start.

And she hated the idea.
Hated
it.

But not for long.

B
ruce Wayne stood by the main computer console in the Batcave and tapped in a command. Then he retreated a few steps to join his legal ward, Dick Grayson—who was wrapped in a heavy blanket, a steaming mug of hot cocoa in his hand.

“Gotham University Labs,” said Bruce, eyeing the monitor. “Security video. Two years ago.”

A moment later, an image sprang to life—that of a dazzling, high-tech laboratory. A beautiful young woman was lying on a gurney in the foreground as a lab-coated scientist worked on an elevated platform in the background, manipulating a bank of controls.

Below him, a vat of chemicals steamed and roiled. Bruce recognized the stuff as cryonic solution—a variation on which had made Dick a frozen statue in his guise as Robin.

Abruptly, the scientist looked up. It was Freeze—not as they had just seen him, but as a handsome, confident man at the top of his career. His eyes were warm and friendly, portals to a soul that seemed much the same.

“Dr. Victor Fries,” said Bruce. “Two-time Olympian.” He realized how that sounded and modified it. “Two-time Olympic
decathlete.
Nobel Prize winner in molecular biology. After his wife, Nora, contracted a rare disease called McGregor’s Syndrome, he hoped to freeze her in cryogenic sleep until he could discover a cure.” Bruce frowned. “Watch closely. This is where everything goes north.”

On the monitor screen, alarms began to sound. A panel exploded. And Fries, caught in the blast, was thrown into the vat of cryogenic solution.

“That liquid is fifty below,” Bruce pointed out.

Bobbing to the surface, Fries screamed through the mists of the cryonic solution. His skin was frozen now, a bluish color. His hair was brittle where it still existed at all.

Dick winced in sympathy. “He’s freezing alive. That’s gotta hurt.”

Fries was still bobbing. Still screaming in pain and terror.

“Somehow,” Bruce said, “he survived. But the cryo-solution mutated his body. Made him something other than human.”

The image on the monitor changed. It became a revolving schematic of Fries’s unique physiology.

“What happened to his wife?” asked Dick.

Bruce remembered the woman he had seen that night on the athletic field. He remembered how beautiful she was.

He shrugged. “Presumed dead. No one knows.”

The schematic turned into an image of Mr. Freeze. Then it outfitted him with his high-tech silver suit, layer by layer. When the computer was done, compartments in both of Freeze’s sleeves were highlighted with flashing diamond shapes.

“He needs extreme cold to survive,” Bruce went on. “His cryo-suit uses diamond-enhanced lasers to keep him at zero degrees.”

Dick held up his hand. “Let me get this straight. A brilliant citizen, disfigured by a horrible accident, reemerges as a psychotic super-villain bent on theft, revenge, and destruction. You see a pattern here?”

Bruce returned Dick’s somber expression. The boy was talking about Two-Face, of course—the district attorney turned master criminal who had shot Dick’s parents to death.

The same paradigm seemed to fit the Riddler as well. And a number of other maniacs whom Batman had fought over the years.

“Maybe it’s something in the water,” Bruce replied.

He glanced thoughtfully at the screen again. “Well, if it’s ice the Iceman wants . . .” He glanced over his shoulder at the costume vault, which stood at the far end of the cave. “Alfred?”

There was no answer. Bruce darted a glance at his ward. Dick shrugged. Bruce was about to see what was keeping his butler when Alfred emerged from the costume vault.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “The costumes needed more dusting than I thought. I lost track of the time. Did you require something?”

Bruce nodded. “The Wayne Diamonds, Alfred.”

Dick jerked his head at the image of Freeze on the monitor. “We gonna trap ourselves a snowman?”

“Absolutely,” said Bruce. He glanced at his ward. “Just as soon as you take ten hours training in the simulator.”

Dick’s mouth opened. Clearly, he’d been caught by surprise.

“Whoa,” he said. “I made a mistake, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Bruce shook his head. “You were reckless,” he insisted gently but firmly. “You could have been killed.”

Dick held out his hands in an appeal for reason. “But I’m fine. See? I’m here, alive. How are we gonna work together, be a team, if you’re never gonna trust me?”

“How indeed?” echoed Alfred.

Bruce was surprised by his butler’s comment. He looked from Alfred to Dick and back again.

Then he smiled a wry smile. “When did
I
become the bad guy?”

Dick smiled back, but not as enthusiastically as he might have hoped. Alfred smiled, too, though more faintly.

Bruce cleared his throat. “Well, we’ve got to sleep sometime.”

“Not me,” Dick declined. “Not yet. I’m still too pumped.”

Bruce nodded, understanding. “Suit yourself. Good night.”

Dick nodded. “Good night.” But his gaze had already strayed back to the monitor and its representation of Freeze.

Bruce headed for the winding stair that led from the Batcave into Wayne Manor. Alfred was right behind him. For a while, they walked in companionable silence. Then, when they were out of earshot of Dick, Bruce turned to his butler and close friend.

“You don’t usually disagree with me,” he noted.

“You were rather stern with him,” Alfred observed.

“He’s overeager,” said Bruce. “He’s impulsive. I can’t trust him not to get himself hurt.”

Alfred pondered the comment. “Perhaps the truth,” he replied, “is that you don’t really trust anyone.”

Bruce frowned. “Don’t tell me you’re on his side.”

His butler smiled benignly at him. “For all your talents, Master Bruce, you are still a novice in the ways of family. Master Dick follows the same star you do, but he arrives there by his own course. You must learn to trust. For that, I daresay, is the essence of family.
Trust.”

They stepped through a doorway into the mansion’s first-floor study, where a portrait of Bruce’s parents hung over the fireplace. Alfred’s quarters were just across the hall.

“I trust
you,”
Bruce pointed out.

Alfred looked at him. He seemed oddly discomfited by his employer’s words. “Thank you, sir. But I shan’t be here forever.”

Bruce returned the look. It wasn’t like Alfred to express such sentiments. Then the butler smiled, dispelling Bruce’s concern.

“Sleep well, sir,” he said.

Bruce nodded. “You too, Alfred.”

The butler repaired to his room for the night. Bruce stood there at the entrance to the study until he saw Alfred’s door close. Then he turned away and looked down the hall . . .

. . . and saw himself come racing around the corner.

Not as an adult, but as a boy of no more than ten. As he watched, the youngster tripped and tumbled to the wooden floor. Immediately, another figure stepped past the corner to pick him up.

It was Alfred. A significantly younger Alfred. Kneeling beside the boy, he brushed off his knees and gave him comfort. He made it seem as if it didn’t hurt at all.

Bruce blinked away the memory. Funny, he thought, that he should remember that just now. Then, undeniably fatigued from his escapades, he made his way down the empty hallway, its echoes loud in his ears as he sought the comfort of his bed.

Alfred closed the door of his bedroom and crossed the carpeted floor to his workstation. But as soon as he sat down, he felt the pain come back.

In waves. In pangs as sharp as kitchen knives. It was even worse than it had been in the costume vault, and that had been so bad he’d barely kept from crying out.

But as before, Alfred gritted his teeth and clenched his fists and endured what he had to endure. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the misery passed. He was drenched with perspiration.

However, Masters Bruce and Dick weren’t the only ones with a modicum of determination in this household. Activating his computer, Alfred watched its screen light up. Then he lifted a compact disc from its holder, slipped it into his disc drive, and began to type.

An advisory came up on the screen in bright green letters. “Override engaged. Copying protected files.”

Alfred lifted a microrecording unit and spoke into it. “Still unable to reach you,” he said. “Have vital information you must see . . .”

One by one, the screen displayed the files he was copying. Batmobile schematics. Batsuit designs. Blueprints of the devices stored in Batman’s Utility Belt.

All of Batman’s secrets, kept since the night he took to the rooftops above Gotham. All of them essential to the continued effectiveness of Gotham’s Dark Knight.

And all of them downloading to the compact disc.