Batman leapt from the ledge, falling feet-first to the pavement below. The wind whipped his cape back and forth, blowing it up above him until he grabbed its threads and spread them wide. The wind picked him up and slowed his descent just in time, allowing him to hit the ground in a crouch and not hurt himself in anyway. The door Alfred had pointed him towards was closed just behind him.
He extracted a Batarang from his utility belt. “Luckily,” Batman said, “I’ve got a key.” Walking over to the door, he erased the building schematics image from his gauntlet to turn its light off.
Batman reached the door and stabbed the handle at a downward angle, wedging it between the knob and the door frame. After some aggressive shaking of the knob, the lock inside shifted, turning over to unlock the door.
Taking a breath, he returned the Batarang to his belt. “I’m going in.”
“Good luck, sir,” Alfred replied.
He pulled the door open and slipped inside, shutting the door quickly to prevent the wind from unsettling the people inside.
Though it turned out, he didn’t need to worry; the alley entrance had led him into a separate room from the lobby. This was a small maintenance room and supply closet of sorts, with a combination of cleaning supplies, mechanical hardware and bank property in designated areas around the room. The door to bridging the small room to the lobby lay closed to his left. Fortunately, they had left the lights off in this small closet.
It put him on edge. If he hadn’t been worried about a trap before, he was now. How could these would-be robbers possibly leave such an obvious security flaw into the bank for him to enter through? A darkened area with access to the utilities of the entire building? It seemed almost too easy.
Anxious, he crouched low and turned on his detective vision again, scanning the room once more to verify that nobody was waiting for him in the closet. After two sweeps of the room, he found no evidence of any prowlers spying on him.
Stunned, Batman activated his radio again, if just to make sure that his tech was still working. “Alfred?” he asked. “Are you there?”
“Of course I’m here, sir,” the butler replied. “Where else would I be on a Saturday night like this?”
“Is there any chatter on the police radio?” Bruce demanded. “Is this bank hit just a diversion of some sort?”
“A diversion?” Alfred asked incredulously. “A diversion from what? The tip said that they would be coming in two weeks.”
“I don’t know,” he whispered curtly. He moved over to the far wall, discovering a couple of power boxes and switches. Most of them were active, not having been interfered with by the intruders in the lobby. “These guys aren’t robbing the bank and they’re waiting for me.”
“Sir?”
“They left this entrance uncovered on purpose.” He placed a small, black current controlling disc on top of the circuit breaker that supplied power to all of the building’s electrical systems. “Confirm hack on your end.”
“Confirmed,” Alfred returned. The disc ahead of him flashed red. “The bank’s power system is yours.”
“Time for a test,” Batman said.
He switched off his detective vision and stalked out of the closet and back into the alley. Nobody waited for him in an ambush beyond the door. Looking up to the roof of the bank, he fired his grapnel gun and flew up over the ledge. He landed in a pace, not breaking stride as he returned to the skylight and looked down inside of the lobby.
The intruders seemed to be behaving exactly as they were a few moments ago. If they had been aware of his entry, they gave no indication.
“In position: flickering the lights,” he informed. He activated his gauntlet’s reader of the disc. Several bars indicating the power output to each of the bank’s systems displayed. He placed a finger on the bar marked for the main lights and quickly shifted it to its “off” setting before resetting it to where it had been before.
The criminals reacted immediately to the flickering lights, all flinching and going on alert. Quickly, they recovered and began moving. The majority of them clustered up around the receptionist desk in the lobby, rapidly shifting their flashlight beams. Two of them made their way over to the vault, putting their backs to the steel and pointing their flashlights directly ahead of them, even with the lights to the bank still brightly shining above them. It seemed that their flashlight patterns were in anticipation of him turning out the lights, hence their sudden and practiced reaction to the slightest of light failures.
One of the two men guarding the vault raised his palm in front of the door and held it there. Batman focused on him, watching to see what he would do next.
He waited, minutes passing by as the raised hand remained still before the steel. Batman could be patient, allowing time to become his weapon when it suited him.
Eventually, following several more minutes of silence, the man lowered his hand back to his side. Then, he gestured to the group surrounding the desk, directing them in a wide circle around the room. The men all broke off into jointed groups, who subsequently broke off into pairs and then returned to the general locations they were designated.
Well-disciplined, Bruce thought. But why no guns?
He could be reasonably certain of two things with this group; the man who had given the signals was probably in charge of these men, and whatever was hidden behind that vault door was part of their trap for him. It would be best if he could neutralize the two men who ran to the vault first so that the rest of them would have to fight past him to get to it.
“Did you get a good look, Alfred?” Batman asked.
“I did, sir.” A playback began on his gauntlet, taken from a camera within the bank that shot a video in black and white. “They entered into a formation within seconds, not even talking to coordinate their movements. One wonders if they are part of a dancing troupe.”
“I’d be more than willing to get them matching jumpsuits,” he responded dryly. “The two that ran to the vault are probably going to do the same when I make my entrance. Can you track them?”
“Certainly.” A few moments later, two black and white images appeared on his gauntlet depicting the faces of the patrollers in question. The images shrunk and retreated into the corner as a live video feed of the bank’s cameras cycled until they found them both. Black dots replaced their locations temporarily before fading back to their moving figures.
“Let’s see,” Bruce grunted. “One of them is spending most of his time near the staircase to the upper floor. The other is guarding the thruway between the lobby and the tellers’ stations.”
“No priors that I can see for either one of them,” Alfred said. “This may be their first time breaking into a bank.”
“That’s what I guessed,” Batman stated. “How about the others? Anyone I can interrogate for answers?”
“Master Bruce, this is rather peculiar,” Alfred announced. “I can find absolutely nothing connecting these two men. One is a stockbroker and the other is a local pharmacy aide. They have no mutual acquaintances that I can find.”
“How about the others?”
“Only a few of them know each other,” Alfred said vaguely. “A few work colleagues are here, but none of none of them have any links to more than one other person in the bank.” He paused. “In fact, none of these people have had any business with Gotham First in the past. I can’t find anything to suggest that these men have been conspiring for a time.”
“This could be a sort of initiation for them,” he mused. “Keep digging; there might be a deeper connection related to the way that they have practiced routines. Some of them might be ex-military or law enforcement.”
“Master Bruce, some of the men here have been reported missing by their families for weeks.” Bruce activated his detective vision and took note of the locations of the two men he would be targeting first. The black dots returned for a quick scan before vanishing again. “Perhaps they were hired by someone looking for random accomplices for a job like this.”
“And the practiced patterns?”
“I don’t know.” He deactivated the special lenses on his cowl once more and returned his gauntlet to the camera feeds. “They may have been spending a long time preparing for something like this. Training to fight me.”
“Should I call for the police now?”
“Not yet. Keep monitoring for activity elsewhere.”
“Yes, sir.” The speaker switched off once again.
Batman set his gauntlet to the systems control, placing his finger on the bar maintaining the lights. He swiped it down to recast darkness upon the bank lobby and back up to return the lights to normal. The men inside reacted as they had before, hastily forming up to prepare for a fight, with the same two men placing themselves before the vault. Following a few minutes of nothing- though not as long as the previous instance of waiting- the same man gestured for everyone to return to normal activities.
“Here we go,” he said to himself, rising to his feet. He threw himself off of the nearest ledge and fell the distance to the ground.