Catwoman bolted from the room, not caring what the night nurse saw or thought.
Mist was creeping around the convent walls when Catwoman reached the ground outside the grated windows. It changed to rain while she looked for a lair in which to spend the night. (There were no night trains going through Riverwyck. The community was a bedroom for Gotham, and the trains ran accordingly.) The costume could keep Catwoman dry in any weather, but it was better at keeping her cool when it was hot than keeping her warm when it was cold, damp, and miserable. She retrieved her backpack and started wandering among the outbuildings. When she found an unlocked toolshed, she slipped inside and made herself a bed in a pile of musty tarpaulins.
Chapter Seven
Not long after Selina closed her eyes, and not all that far away either, Bruce Wayne hunkered down in an ergonomically correct computer-user's chair that resembled the illegitimate offspring of a fold-down church kneeler and a bar stool. He squirmed constantly and unconsciously. After thirty-six hours staring at the monitor, crunching data, and surviving on black coffee and snacks Alfred managed to shove under his nose, his body had used up all its comfortable positions. A lesser man might have quit, taken a shower, gotten some sleep, and started again when the sun was shining and his mind was fresh.
Batman was not a lesser man.
Ranks and files of phosphorescent green marched up and off the screen. Bruce Wayne's hands were poised above the keyboard, ready to stop the flow. His eyes were unblinking. His pupils were wide and steady, absorbing the information rather than reading it. Wayne was dressed for comfort and endurance in dark, loose-fitting slacks and a cotton knit shirt. The Batman costume was in its locker at the back of the large, subterranean room they called the Batcave. In the dim light, his clothing blurred with the furniture and the gray stone walls.
Standing at the top of a flight of metal stairs, Alfred saw Bruce's hands, trembling with caffeine overload, and the flickering green light reflecting off his motionless face. The war paint of a technological primitive.
"I've brought a snack, sir."
No reaction. Alfred descended the steep stairway. he was no longer a young man, but his step was steady. Nothing on the silver tray shook or clattered to give his presence away. He set it on the top of a file cabinet, beside a similar tray bearing the unappetizing remains of an untouched dinner.
"Sir." Alfred found the tone midway between command and request that distinguished butlers from all other human subspecies. "Sir," he repeated, "this really has gone on long enough."
"I'm close, Alfred. I can feel it."
"You were 'close' this morning when I brought breakfast. By now 'close' is behind you."
Bruce Wayne surrendered his concentration with a groan. His hands fell on the keyboard; the marching figures halted. "I'm nailing jelly to a tree," he admitted, using hacket's jargon.
At times like this he was, essentially, a computer hacker. A technology wizard shining lights through the back doors of every major data bank in the world. Over the course of several long days, he'd extracted enough raw information to keep a hundred data-gnomes busy for a lifetime. Thirty-six hours ago he'd thrown it all into the cybernetic equivalent of a centrifuge. Since then he'd been spinning the data down through a bewildering series of customized algorithms. He was fully aware that his eyes were glazed and his mind was numb. It was at times like this---when his brain was reduced to its most primitive processes---that his mind was best attuned to subtle variations in pure pattern or rhythm. He was waiting for the neurons in his visual cortex to erupt and alert the rest of him to a deviation in the data flow.
"I've sorted it on every variable. Hit every correlation. Nothing stands out. He's there---I know he is. These are his deals. I recognize them. I come so close, and then he's gone into a web of corporations and money transfers. He's tickled the Wayne Foundation more than once to clean up his profits. Never the same way twice, never overt. He does things in pieces that look harmless enough---"
Wayne's fingers clattered across the keyboard, bringing up a frozen section of prior data. After he tapped the screen with an optical stylus, a second window opened---the reincorporation papers of what appeared to be some sort of food-processing facility.
"Here's a little juice factory in Florida that was shut down after the mid-eighties freezes wiped out the orange groves. Suddenly it's got a contract to process second-rate apricots from California. Fifty honest people get jobs rendering bruised fruit into generic fruit syrup and by-products. What do you think happens next?"
Alfred pursed his lips. With a thirty-room mansion to care for, he almost always had better things to do than play guessing games. But the terms "second-rate" and "by-products" pointed him in a particular direction. "Someone puts the byproducts into animal feed and people get sick?"
"The Connection's too crafty for that. In his deals---especially his American deals---everybody seems to come out ahead." He tapped the screen again. Now it showed a series of invoices. "Our reincorporated syrup-maker is concerned about the environment. It adds an extra step to its end-processing to concentrate toxins, extract them, seal them in fifty-gallon barrels which they ship to a brand-new company up in North Carolina, where skilled jobs are even more precious and people will welcome a hazardous-materials recycler with open arms."
Another tap, another screen---a list of chemicals by common name, scientific name, and formula. One of the formulas was blinking. Alfred saw a (CN) notation in the middle of it.
"That's cyanide, isn't it?" he asked soberly.
"Five barrels a month, extracted from apricot sludge in Florida. You can't recycle it, but you can sell it---and so they do. Here's a standing order for all our apricot residue. It's supposed to go to a chemical conglomerate in the unified Germany. I could find where the barrels get hoisted into a ship's hold, but, by the records, they never come off. Three or four tramp freighters show up regularly in Shreveport, Louisiana, to take on cargo. It seems safe to assume that they are empty when they arrive in Shreveport, but there's no sign that they've ever been off-loaded anywhere in the past two years."
"There must be an error somewhere, a gap in the paperwork---"
"More likely a quick coat of marine paint somewhere on the high seas. Ship A vanishes, but Ship B sails into port right on schedule."
"A very large gap in the paperwork," Alfred agreed.
"Ships arrive in ports like San'a in South Yemen where America doesn't have a consulate, and no one asks questions about where a few extra barrels are going, or where they've been."
"Where do they go from there?"
Bruce Wayne tapped the glass a final time. The display shrank into a single green dot, then the screen was blank. "Iran, Iraq, Syria---any place that might want to secretly develop a few chemical weapons to drop on their neighbors. The Connection's broken the laws of no single country. A couple hundred families here in the United States have food on their tables because of this, of him---and somewhere somebody's making chemical weapons."
Moments passed. The computer kept time, then activated a background program that began filling the screen with random blobs of primary colors. The effect momentarily mesmerized both men.
"And those other Arabs," Alfred began gently, "those Bess-arabs you were looking for---were you able to find them, at least?"