He tried to move forward once more.

  “I think perhaps our fight is now,” Bane said mildly, and then sent a quick left jab to Batman’s head, following with a body punch to the middle. The jab missed, but the body blow connected, the punch sinking deep into Batman’s gut Batman pitched forward suddenly, doubling from the blow, his hands out brushing Bane’s waist.

  Bane stepped back and waited.

  Batman righted himself, catching his breath.

  “You win,” he said. “Happy?”

  Bane shook his head, laughing again. “I broke more than your back. I broke your spirit, too.” He moved out of the doorway, gesturing to the outside. “Please, our business here has ended.”

  Batman moved through the doorway silently, then stopped.

  “Remember what I said,” he told Bane. “Finish the job and then leave.”

  “I shall take it under advisement,” Bane said.

  Without another word, Batman moved into the night.

  * * * * *

  From atop the wreckage of the Gotham First National Bank, Batman kept watch on the Hall of Records, the detonator he had palmed from Bane in his hand.

  He considered for a long while, looking at the silver box in his hand.

  What if I’m wrong, he thought. What if…

  No. You have to make him feel it’s safe to proceed. You have to bring him and his money here. And he’ll only do that if he believes the way is clear. If he believes all the records of the past have been destroyed.

  Nonetheless, he had to make certain, and he switched on the commlink in his cowl, saying, “Oracle?”

  Her voice answered in his ear almost instantly. “Batman? “What’s your status?”

  “Hall of Records, just confirming the situation. It’s checked out.’,

  “Robin and Batgirl just got back from the West Side, they’re awaiting further orders. They say the Xhosa have retreated.”

  “Tell them to stand by. Oracle?”

  “Yes, Boss?”

  “The files. They’re secure?”

  There was a pause, and he assumed the question had taken her by surprise. “Still have them on my system. Sent duplicates to the WayneTech Crays in London and Hong Kong, hidden in the system, so there are copies off-site, as well. You want me to do anything with them?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why are you asking?”

  Doubt, he thought. But he didn’t say it, because he knew he never could say it, that they could never hear the word from his lips. Batgirl and Robin and Oracle and even Nightwing.

  “Good work,” Batman said. “Out.”

  He closed the connection. Then he pressed the stud on the silver box in his hand.

  Almost instantly, flames began dancing in the lower windows of the building, spreading fast. Whatever accelerant Bane-had chosen, he had chosen it well. In under a minute the fire had spread to the first floor, and its glow was beginning to illuminate Civic Plaza.

  Batman waited until the whole building was burning before dropping the detonator and walking away.

  He could feel the heat on his back.

  He imagined, for a moment, that it was what hell felt like.

  ORACLE

  PERSONAL

  Entry #552—NML Day 294

  1410 Zulu

  Dear Dad—

  It’s quiet again, and I’ve finally found some peace in which to write.

  Autumn is ending. Maybe it’s that, the new chill in the air, the bite of the coming cold off the Gotham River and the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe that’s what is keeping us silent.

  or maybe in the wake of Bane’s one-man war against Two-Face, the whole of No Man’s Land is nervous again.

  There was a lot of blood spilled at City Hall. A lot of Two-Face’s men died, and in the course of three days, the No Mans Land’s mightiest warlord fell from his perch, crashing into near anonymity. My Eyes haven’t seen hide nor hair of Dent since the Hall of Records went up in smoke, and neither Nightwing nor Robin has mentioned seeing him, either. Batman himself has remained silent on the subject. All he would confirm was that Bane escaped the blaze. He added nothing more.

  Pettit and his Strong Men took losses, too, trying to corral the fleeing members of Two-Face’s crew. It led to more fighting, and people fell on both sides. My agent Charlie saw some of it, said that Huntress was in the thick of it with Pettit’s boys. From what he says about it, my interpretation is that she wasn’t very happy to be there, but that may just be Nightwing’s influence rubbing off on me more than anything else.

  Doesn’t matter, she’s still with them, and the Strong Men, as of now, are still the safest cordon in the city next to you down in TriCorner.

  I’ve had this feeling, though. Dad … like things are on the verge of changing, that we might he nearing the end of the tunnel. It’s not that I can see the light yet—I can’t—more that I just know the light is there, a little farther ahead, attainable.

  Problem is that, until I see that light, I’m still in the dark.

  This is what I know now, and it’s mostly gleaned through my own analysis, conversations with Nightwing, Robin, and (kinda) Batgirl, then supplemented by reports from the Eyes.

  First off, almost all of the minor players have been removed from the board, either through their own actions or, in the last two months, by direct movement against them by either Pettit’s Strong Men or our guys. Nightwing, Robin, and Batgirl have pretty much been working their way through the city, sector by sector, treating symptoms as they encounter them.

  Of the name players, only Penguin seems to have any power base left, and he’s been remarkably quiet. His sector has remained firmly under his control since Two-Face’s double-cross so long ago. Apparently, he has no interest in increasing his holdings. This makes perfect sense to me, actually. Penguin’s never been much for the kind of power games the No Man’s land encourages. He’d much rather—you’ll forgive me for this—line his own nest.

  Two-Face, in the wake of Bane, has a handful of men left to command, far too few to actually hold the land he’d claimed. He’s lost all of his northern chunk, which has already been reclaimed by Batman and the rest of our little squad. Further, he can no longer hold onto all of his southern sector, as I’m sure you’ve discovered. By all reports, he’s pretty much retreated to the area around Civic Plaza, and doesn’t venture out. Rough estimates are that he has between ten and twenty armed men, and that all those civilians who had been living in his territory have long since fled.

  So the wild card, as always, is Joker.

  Maybe that’s why the city seems so silent.

  We all know he’s out there, we hear the reports, second- or third-hand, rumors of madness along the West Side, stories of bonfires and baseball games and stranger things still. Rumors abound—Joker has started a cult a la Black Mask; Joker is breeding rats with which to infect the city with bubonic plague: Joker has become a cannibal; Joker is married; Joker is organizing a militia and planning on attacking fill-in-the-blank. No confirmations on anything at all and no idea how many people he may have gathered to his side. Vanessa reported a rumor that he’s traveling with a woman who wears a costume of her own, but there’s been no visual confirmation of that.

  All rumors, and that only makes it worse.

  Nightwing’s spent much of the last week searching for him, with Robin and Batgirl helping. They’ve found some locations where it’s possible Joker had stayed, at least for a while … mostly evidenced by the discovery of several corpses. The problem, as I’m sure you know, is that Gotham is a big place to begin with; the No Man’s Land has just made it all the easier to hide inside, and as a result, he could be almost anywhere and we would never find him.

  Unless he wanted us to.

  That seems to be what Batman is counting on.

  He was here a couple nights ago, and Nightwing brought up the situation, saying. “Joker. What are we doing about him?”

  “Nothing.” Batman said. “Ignore him for now.”

  We all gave him stares, even Batgirl. She didn’t know who Joker was yet, but I’m sure she’d noted the tension each time the name had been mentioned around her, and she certainly knew something was up.

  “Ignore Joker?” Robin asked.

  “He’ll come looking for me. Right now there are other priorities.”

  “But—” Nightwing said.

  “No. If you encounter him notify me and continue monitoring the situation. Gather what intel you can, numbers, capabilities, so on. But otherwise do not engage him unless the life of an innocent is at risk. Leave him alone. He’ll come to me.

  And that was the end of that discussion.

  * * * * *

  As for the plan … well I wish I could be certain I understood it, but here again Batman has been tight-lipped. The destruction of the Hall of Records was not the blow it seemed to be at the time. I know that much. The reason I know that much is because way back when Mr. Wayne went to Washington and we could all read the writing on the wall, he contacted me and said that I had to make duplicates of all the titles and deeds—yeah, that’s right, all of them—for Gotham and the surrounding area. Preferably scans, he said, but duplicates however possible.

  “Is that all?” I’d asked, sarcastically.

  “Don’t worry about birth and death certificates’” he’d said, as if I’d been serious. “Those are duplicated as a matter of course elsewhere. Just make certain you get every deed, every title.”

  I had thought he was just trying to cover his own interests; after all, Wayne Enterprises itself was built primarily on real estate money, diversifying from there. But he was adamant, all of it

  Took some doing. Took a lot of doing, actually. Took all of the Eyes I had at the time, working twenty-four hours a day, for over a month.

  But in the end, I had computer copies of everything Batman had asked for, digitally encoded, locked away on my system and encrypted like you wouldn’t believe. I’d pretty much forgotten about them until Batman called that night when the Hall of Records went up in smoke. He came to see me the next day to talk about them.

  “I have a project for you,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot of your time and energy, but it has to be done, and done flawlessly. I cannot stress this enough.”

  “Have I ever let you down?” I asked him.

  “Each of the files needs to be imprinted—in effect, forged. You need to turn them from unauthorized electronic duplicates into notarized computer copies.”

  My jaw felt like it actually dropped into my lap. “We’re talking about over one million records.” I said.

  He just looked at me, that steely impassive face beneath the cowl, and I could almost hear him thinking, So? What’s your point?

  “Whose notarization?”

  “The government’s. These need to be their copies.”

  “Doesn’t the Library of Congress or someone already have these copies?”

  “They’ve been destroyed.”

  “By?”

  He shook his head just barely, “Later. Can you do it?”

  “It’ll take time.”

  “How long?”

  “A month, at the very least. I’ll need to write an optical character recognition routine that can identify the text in each scan, and then I’ll have to create an entirely separate program, one with a semi-intelligent logarithm to identify variations in the actual documents. Then I’ll have to code a new routine entirely to replicate the digital fingerprint that the government uses for such documents. I do all that, we’ll be able to modify them as we see fit, but any modification beyond the official notarization in the code for the scans, I’ll have to go in and do that manually.”

  “The last won’t be necessary. We’re not changing the records. We’re preserving them. Keep me informed on your progress.”

  “I’ll need Tim’s help.” I said.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just make it happen. And soon.”

  “Why the rush?”

  He left without answering. I contacted Tim, and he and I set to work. We’d been at it for about a week, serious code-raiding, hacking at its finest, when Batman returned and dropped another piece of the puzzle in our laps.

  “I need a sat-phone link to Lucius fox.” he said.

  Tim swung around from the terminal he’d been working at, giving Batman a curious look, then bouncing it over to me. I didn’t even bother to shrug. Batman wanted a satellite phone call to the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, that was relatively easy to accomplish, and a break from the drudgery of the last week. I pulled up my tracking information, set my telemetry, then punched up the number Batman gave me.

  “Gonna be a minute before the connection comes online,” I said. “Can’t track the satellite to maintain the connection. We have to take the window as it comes.”

  “How much time?”

  “You’ll have seven minutes, tops. Then the signal will start to break up.”

  “That’ll do,” Batman said.

  “That’s a D.C. number, isn’t it?” Tim asked. “Lucius is in D.C.?”

  Batman grunted, taking the handset. “Put him on speaker when he answers,” he told me. “And give me some background. Cote d’Azur.”

  “Beach?” I asked.

  “Hotel swimming pool, and give me Kitty and Lise.”

  I grinned. This was, in fact, much more entertaining than coding. I switched to a third terminal, the one I use for audio/visual, and got some background noise running. Then I loaded up the voice routines for Kitty and Lisa, making certain that the giggling girls sounded appropriate.

  Tim slid his chair over, watching what I was doing, now grinning. “Can I be one?” he whispered.

  “Lise,” I said, and linked his keyboard.

  The sat-phone connected and began ringing. It was nearly midnight our time, which meant it was midnight in D.C. too. I made certain all my levels were set, the sounds of the fictional pool now coming from my A/V speakers, complete with background murmur and the odd clinking of glasses.

  There was a click, and then Lucius Fox picked up the phone, sounding mildly irritated. “Hello?”

  “Lucius!” Batman said, and there’s no real way to describe the effect of hearing him switch into full Bruce Wayne mode while wearing the cape and cowl. It’s amusing and alarming at the same time.

  His voice changed, of course, went higher and much more bubbly, and his posture altered with it. It was like watching Bruce Wayne dressed up as Batman, and I know that that sounds like precisely what it was, but it’s so much more than that. Bruce doesn’t dress up as Batman. Batman dresses up as Bruce. That’s the only way I can think of pulling it.

  “Bruce?” Fox said from the speaker. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. Melinda said you were in Cabo—”

  “No, no, not for a while now. I’m in France, I think. I think it’s France. Nice is in France, isn’t it? I’m in Nice.” He moved a finger at me, and I took that as a cue. From one of the speakers came Kitty’s accented voice, drippingly French, asking Brucie if he was going to get another bottle of champagne.

  “Nice?” Lucius asked. “Why are you in Nice?”

  “Uh,” Bruce said, vapidly. “Dunno. Seemed nice. Nice seemed nice, that’s it.” From Tim’s speaker, Lise told Brucie to put more lotion on her back.

  “Who is she, Bruce?” Lucius asked, with a sigh.

  “Oh, oh not sure, actually. But she’s real nice too.”

  More giggles from our speakers. Batman motioned to turn it down, and we lowered the voices, then had our electronic girls begin a discussion about the pleasures of swimming in the ocean versus swimming in the hotel pool.

  Batman was saying, “So, look, Lucius, reason I’m calling is I met this fellow, didn’t catch his name, but we were talking, and I told him I was from Gotham. Which I was, you know, or suppose, still am, but since Gotham is now No Man’s Land—”

  “I know where you’re from, Bruce,” Fox said, the hint of exasperation in his voice.

  “Right, right, sorry. But he said, see, this guy, he said that he’d owned land in Gotham and that he’d just sold it. Said that he was surprised anyone was still buying the land, but he said he got rid of it, no problem. Had this offer from some company or something, and he jumped at it, he said, just to get rid of the land, because he said It was now all worthless and—”

  Fox finally managed to break in, saying, “Wait a minute. This guy sold his land after the No Man’s Land began?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean, see, that’s why I thought it was odd, because, right, he can’t do that can he?”

  “No, No, he can’t. All of the Gotham real estate is in limbo right now. Can’t be bought can’t be sold.”

  “We still have our land?”

  “We still have our land. Hmm… Bruce?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “You remember this guys’ name?”

  “Nuh-uh. Just some guy.”

  There was a pause over the line as Fox thought about what Bruce had been saying. Tim had Lise resolve to try the pool, and I kicked up a large splashing noise to convey that she had fallen into the pool.

  “I’ll look into it,” Fox said, “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Maybe. We’re in a delicate position right now, Bruce. I’ve been doing as you asked, and so far we’ve managed to cobble together a fairly strong coalition to lobby Congress. A lot of the larger businesses in the country have rallied around Wayne Enterprises, citing the economic crises created by the loss of Gotham. Right now it’s Marifran-Holby Industries, Zellar Manufacturing, S.T.A.R. Labs. I’ve got another meeting in the morning at the White House to plead our case.”

  Batman didn’t respond.

  “Bruce?”

  “Huh? What?” Batman said. “Oh, sorry, Lucius. There’s this blond girl and she’s kinda … waving at me… at least. I think she’s waving…”

  “You didn’t hear a thing I said.” Lucius sighed, “look, tell Melinda where you’ll be, all right? That way I can contact you?”

  “Sure.”