fic: Chinese Boxes 8/11
18. Of shit and fans, part two
They leave the villa at 7:45 on the morning of the third day and are at Tessuti Varese just before eight. The gate guards scowl at them, but since their scrutiny does not reveal anything different from the two days and three checks before this one, they let them through. One of the guards escorts them into the building and stays there while he summons his fellow minder from the yarn warehouse who usually stays at the foot of the stairs; once the man is there, the gatehouse guard goes back, leaving the four of them in the room. As usual, Bruce has used his slow progress up the stairs because of the limp to secretly pull the memory stick out of his suit lining; he has now slipped it to Gianfranco, who goes for his bathroom break a short while later, and they sit and wait.
And wait.
Gianfranco does not come back in three minutes, or four, or five. Instead they hear a sound of hurried footsteps walking past the meeting room in the direction of Wu’s office a few seconds after five minutes have elapsed. They are ready to bully their way past the guard to find out what is going on, but at that moment Zhang walks into the room and goes straight to the table, clearly intending for all of them to stay where they are, and so long as they still see the need to maintain any semblance of civilised, or at least civilian dealings, they are stuck. They may be as dangerous as Gianfranco suggests, but they do not know enough about what is happening outside to decide whether they would be justified in opening hostilities that would make them all into instant targets when they aren’t the ones with guns in this building.
As soon as the curt greetings have been exchanged, Bruce seems to take Zhang’s arrival as his chance to vent some pent-up frustration. “I don’t want the girl here.” The smooth low mechanical voice in her left ear is saying Bruce’s words to her in English. “She is a nuisance with her stupid questions and with the way she thinks her family’s money is all that matters. She may be Varese’s fiancée, but she is nothing more than a bit of fun on the side to me and so long as Varese is not here I can say it openly. Can I just ask you to get her out of here and send her back to Prato?”
She fights to conceal her anger. Not at the way he refers to her - that is perfectly consistent with their roles and her behaviour - but at his intention. It is obvious that they are fucked; if she needed any extra confirmation that he is as sure of it as she is, she saw it a minute ago when he surreptitiously tightened up his knee brace. And he is playing dirty trying to make sure that she gets out of here whether she wants it or not, in a way that does not let her argue.
Zhang, in a perverse fortunate turn, is not so sure. He says something noncommittal about their preference for dealing with all interested stakeholders at once, and seeing how it may not be a lost battle, she decides to speak up and asks them in Italian what is going on. If Bruce can play dirty, so can she; with the enemy’s help, if need be.
Bruce still tries to play dirty and tells her, in a cold impatient tone, that it would help save time and effort and would spare her hours of listening to boring technicalities if she let him and her fiancée finish the negotiations, assuring her that they will do so with her interests in mind. While he is saying that, Zhang and the guard step away from the table to engage in a conversation of their own, and from the snippets the translator catches, it sounds like they are much more in favour of letting, or rather making her wait in another room on the premises, most likely the archive, where the guard would accompany her. It might not be that bad an option, she thinks; disabling the guard will be a matter of seconds and can be conveniently done inside the archive as soon as the situation warrants it, although being far from the meeting room, she may not know the best timing for her reappearance.
Except that as soon as Bruce is satisfied that Zhang and the guard are not paying attention to them, he switches to English and implores her in a quiet, flat voice to get. the hell. out.
And in that instant, she sees a most unlikely emotion in his face.
Fear.
She can argue with him so long as he is acting in cold blood, or in anger; but seeing him like this makes further resistance seem like wilfully torturing him.
“Fine,” she says in Italian, “I’ll go out, but I’ll wait outside this room until I can talk to Gianfranco so we can agree between ourselves.”
Zhang looks like he is about to argue, but in the end decides against it. Standing in the doorway, she sees Bruce getting up from the table to talk to Zhang and the guard, still feigning the limp; he is obviously trying to keep their attention focused on him so she can get away unsupervised. She takes one last look at him and closes the door.
She may have obeyed him in getting out of the room, but she is damned if she is leaving.
***
She can hear Wu’s and Xiao’s voices coming from the reception to her right; it is only a thirty-foot distance away, and she is outside the reception room in five seconds. “He really seems clueless,” Wu says. Before she has time to wonder if they are referring to Gianfranco or Bruce, his next words reveal the truth to her even as they make her blood run cold. “The boys have given him a good working over, and at least now he isn’t going anywhere from my room. But we need to decide about the other two. I don’t know if they are in on this, but it’s likely. We need to keep them all here and make sure they don’t have backup until we figure out how much they know and what to do with them. We’ll have these two men stay here, I’ll leave my office key with them so they can lock up one or both of the others in here as well, if needed. Maybe it’s best to keep them separate for now and then bring them all here later, I’m sure the other two will find Varese’s example... persuasive. Let’s go talk to them and see what we need to do next.” Knowing what she does about Wu and Xiao and the sort of business they run, she has no doubts that the figuring out part will involve reducing the two of them to the same state as Gianfranco is presumably in. At least it sounds like he is alive... so far. But at this rate, it will be a matter of seconds, a minute or two at most, before she and Bruce are facing the guards and, most likely, before their phones are taken away - and apart from the obvious use, those phones are the only way Theo can track them and direct the ROS to their exact position if needed.
Except for...
She practically runs back in the direction of the meeting room, but instead of going in, she leaps down the stairs two at a time on her way to the restrooms, glad that the damned guard is still in the meeting room with Bruce and Zhang. She doesn’t have much time, and only one chance to secure them a possible lifeline.
Mercifully, Theo picks up on the second ring.
“Ciao, sono Chiara.”
“Ciao bella, tutto bene?” Theo sounds anxious, but still goes for the standard opener. It might be easier, at least for her, to speak English rather than Italian, but she does not know when she may be discovered, and she cannot risk Wu finding out that she speaks English, or else he will suspect her of overhearing his conversation with the PKK would-be buyer yesterday. For the same reason, she cannot call Lucius who is nearer to them than Theo is, apart from the fact that having a US-prefix call number in her history will seal their fate as suspected CIA agents.
“Sì, sì. Siamo incasinati ma era da aspettare,” she says, her worried tone belying the reassuring words. Things are screwed up but that was to be expected, indeed.
“Ho parlato con i vicini, stanno per muoversi, adesso andatene,” The neighbours are about to make a move; Theo must mean the Carabinieri Special Ops. And she would be happy for all of them to follow his advice that they get out now, if they only could.
“Senti... ho bisogno di un favore. Ho lasciato la mia collana dal gioielliere per la pulizia e ho dimenticato di ritirarla.” She can hear Xiao calling out to her, an atrociously accented Signorina! from behind the door. “Prendi il mio vecchio cellulare nel ufficio, il codice è scritto dentro. Il gioielliere si trova sotto F, Fornaci o Fornarini, non ricordo, chiamagli e digli che è importante che ti aiuti subito di rintracciare la mia collana, se non la trovate adesso, siamo nei guai,” she rattles off on a single breath. - Listen, I need a favour. I left my necklace at the jeweller’s for cleaning and I forgot to pick it up. Get my old cell phone at your office, the PIN code is written inside. The jeweller is under F in the address book, can’t remember his name, call him and tell him that it’s important that he helps you track down my necklace asap, if it isn’t found right now, we’re in trouble. She purposely uses rintracciare, track, instead of the more usual trovare, find, trusting that Theo will pick up the meaning.
“Questo cellulare è inutile”, this phone is useless, she finishes before Theo can respond, and cuts off the call when the restroom door abruptly opens and she is confronted by Xiao and the guard, with Xiao motioning her to give up the phone. Her earlier suspicion is confirmed when the first things Xiao does is take out the battery and pocket it before returning the phone to her and motioning her out of the restroom and back upstairs, where they march her to the archive at the far end before he leaves her there with the guard.
Theo knows their approximate location, but now that the phone is off, it is indeed useless; and Xiao is probably going to take Bruce’s phone as well, or at least try to, and even if he does not succeed, it might get damaged, leaving her necklace tracker as the only reliable way of determining their exact position. Its maximum range is only about ten miles, but if the ROS are about to make their move, they will know to come to Castelletto anyway. It will just be a matter of Theo getting hold of the tracker ID and passing it on.
She remembers perfectly the single directory entry on her usual phone under F: Fox, Lucius, that holds his mobile number. She knows that by making this call and saying what she said, she has effectively abandoned the pretence of Bruce not being the nominally deceased owner of Wayne Enterprises, but right now, it looks like it is by far the least of their worries.
***
Xiao did not seem concerned about locking her up in the archive room, since it only has Varese’s old files while they keep theirs in their offices and apparently keep all important information on the stick. So much the worse for him; once she is satisfied that Xiao has gone into the meeting room by the sound of the door opening at the other end of the corridor, it takes her five seconds to knock the guard unconscious, get his gun, and upset a bookshelf on top of his prostrate body for good measure. She does not care how many broken bones he may have, or if he will live, though she suspects that he might. She’d have few qualms shooting him, for that matter, but would rather not precipitate anything with the noise of a gunshot right now. She peeks out into the corridor; so far everything seems quiet, so she picks the reception room halfway down the hall as her next destination, figuring that she should at least try to find out what happened to Gianfranco.
Not surprisingly, there are two guards in the reception room. When they see her close and lock the door behind her, they stare at her in momentary incomprehension until she whirls into action to take out one of them in two seconds flat and similarly dispatch the other one two more seconds later, before they have had time to engage their brains and draw their guns on her. This really isn’t the time to be concerned about excessive violence, merely excessive noise; she still refrains from shooting, but grabs both their guns and, taking the clip out of one of these for her own safety, hits each guard in turn over the temples with the grip of the gun as hard as she can, drawing blood and eliciting a sickening sound each time; if she has cracked their skulls or given them a concussion, so much the better; that way she can be sure that they won’t follow her or cause trouble to others. She has a moment of panic when she rifles through their pockets looking for the key to Wu’s office only to find them empty, until she sees it sticking out of a lock in the door leading into the other room.
Gianfranco is lying on the floor next to the desk, bloodied and sobbing, but alive, with duct tape over his mouth and his hands cuffed behind his back. He notices her and shakes his head when she comes up and crouches next to him, dropping the two guns on the bloodstained carpet; she figures that at least there should be no harm in pulling off the tape, and as soon as she has done that, the reason for his warning gesture becomes clear.
“Don’t try to get me to stand up... I can’t... they’ve broken both my legs.”
It feels like a punch in the gut; she fights the bile rising in her throat even as she works to pick his handcuffs open with a pin she pulled out of her hair. At least judging by the huge pupils in his eyes, he must still be in shock and unable to feel the full extent of the pain. Still, she wishes she had brought painkillers, and wonders if she might have, after all.
“Do you still have the other key?” she asks, and is relieved to see him fumble in his jacket pocket and produce it. She has locked both the reception door and the door from the reception to Wu’s office from the inside of the respective rooms, and would rather use a shortcut.
“Wu just had a fit of rage when he saw me here so he didn’t think about how I got in, or ask me,” he explains feebly, tears still rolling down his cheeks. “I suppose he thought I’d managed to open the same door he’s been using.”
“I’ll be right back,” she tells him as she takes the key and gets up. “I swear,” she adds, seeing his worried look.
She runs back into the archive room, where the guard is now uttering soft moans but not stirring, and picks up her handbag before returning to Wu’s office and locking the direct door from the inside with Gianfranco’s key. But a fumble through the inside pockets of her handbag reveals no medicines.
“Did you manage to keep your phone?” she asks Gianfranco next, after pulling out a sofa cushion and setting it down to make an improvised pillow for him. It might be a hopeless idea to call an ambulance when the site is sealed off from the outside world, but at least that way it might be persuaded to stay and wait outside until they are freed.
Instead of an answer, Gianfranco points her to his phone lying discarded on the floor, its back cover open and the battery missing.
“Right,” she mutters. A quick look at the desk shows that there is no landline phone, either. “Listen, I’m sorry about this...” She is shamefully aware of how lame it sounds.
“You shouldn’t be.” Apparently, having actually stared death in the face and having been subjected to excruciating pain has given Gianfranco a kind of fatalistic courage. “I’m sorry I fucked it up.”
“Not your fault,” she argues. “What happened?”
“Wu caught me at the safe with the door open, he and Xiao came in before I could lock it and saw me. I think they were sitting in Xiao’s room just down the corridor, so they heard me walking past and came over to check.” That finally explains why she and Bruce heard nothing until Zhang showed up, no footsteps or voices of people walking past the meeting room on their way to Wu’s room to alert them to the fact that Wu and Xiao were already there. So 8 am must have been too late. “I’d only had a few seconds, I’d just put the stick into the safe and I was about to enter the code. At least this way he thought I was stealing it, he still doesn’t know you’ve got the stuff off it. And then he was too furious and didn’t want me to scream so he didn’t really ask me anything, just put the tape over my mouth and had Xiao call in the guards.” So those were the running footsteps they heard when Zhang joined them. If they’d only known, if they’d only decided to push their way out of the room, he might still be OK... except that Wu, Xiao and the guards would have locked the door on them from the inside, and without Gianfranco’s key they would be facing a sealed room. “Listen, if I don’t make it - “
“Bullshit.” She interrupts him with more vehemence than is warranted, anger at his tormentors getting the better of her. “You will make it. We’re not going to be burying two generations of your family in as many weeks. Can you shoot a gun?”
“I... suppose I can,” he says, uncertainly.
“Ever done it?”
“N-no,” he admits.
“OK, look here.” She picks up one of the guns, the one with the clip still in, and takes the safety off. “You hold it like this,” she closes her fingers around the grip, “and pull the trigger. It’s easy, just be prepared for the loud noise. I’ll go get the second clip, just a sec,” she adds, getting up. She unlocks the reception door and picks up the clip she took out when she struck the guards and left there in her hurry to get into Wu’s office, noticing that the guards are still unconscious. Back in the office, she snaps the clip into place and disables the safety. “I’ll shoot the locks on both doors to this room so no one can open them unless they ram them through, so you can be sure Wu’s scum don’t get in, and I’ll shoot the reception door lock so those two assholes are trapped in the reception. We’re expecting the ROS to get here soon, so it may be a good idea to take a look at who gets in before you shoot, but don’t take too long deciding, they’ll probably wear body armour anyway.” She is about to go for the locks, but then remembers something else she wanted to ask him. “Did you see if Wu took the stick with him?”
“No,” Gianfranco says quickly. He sounds excited to recall it now; the pain must have messed with his thinking too much for him to have remembered to mention it earlier. “He put it back in and reset the code. Maybe you could - “
She is at the safe with her handbag before he has finished, and he trails off, realising that she is planning to do just what he was about to suggest.
A few seconds later, the UV light reveals the fresh prints on four keys: 1 5 6 8. She closes her eyes, trying to figure out what the hell the combination might be. She does not have the drilling pack now so if she cannot guess it on three attempts, it’s over. Maybe Bruce was right talking about explosives, after all. The first two figures give her a flash of hope; did he increase all the values in the old sequence by one? 0 4 8 9... does not add up. This one no longer has a four, so it is not a Triad code. She swears in frustration and shakes her head, but just as she opens her eyes and looks at the keypad again, she is struck by the shape made by the fluorescent pink dots in front of her. One in the upper left hand corner, two centre and right one line down, one centre another line down.
Damn, that’s it.
This time, she presses “8 1 5 6” with a steady hand, and five seconds later, the stick is in her pocket.
“How did you guess it?” Gianfranco asks her, amazed.
“All he has done is shift his finger one line up from the original combination, 0 4 8 9. I remembered the shape I saw last night.”
“Listen, seriously, are you people CIA? You can’t just be a Swiss security firm, no one’s that good. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
She chuckles in response. “I can swear that we aren’t CIA. And we aren’t from any other intelligence agency either. But I can’t say any more than that. I have to get out, I wish I didn’t have to make a lot of noise shooting the locks but I think it’s best if I lock you in here - “
As if on cue, she hears gunshots from the corridor outside. She jumps up like a scalded cat, grabs one of the guns she is about to leave for Gianfranco, opens the reception door again, happy to see its occupants still slumped on the floor where she left them, and shoots the outside reception door lock twice. She then re-locks the door leading to it from Wu’s office, takes out the key, and shoots it twice as well, for good measure, before putting the gun down by Gianfranco’s side again so he has two guns and one and a half clips between them. She then kisses him on the temple and instructs him, not quite helpfully, to try to stay alive, and after flashing a quick grin at his you too, runs out of the room, locks the door, and shoots the lock with the archive guard’s gun that she still has tucked into her belt. She has done all she could for Gianfranco, for the moment; but now that Bruce has obviously provoked Xiao, or the guards, or both, into shooting at him, she must try to find him and either provide covering fire or at least stay as close to him as she can, as her necklace is the beacon that their rescuers would be following. Maybe with the ultimate bargaining chip in her pocket, she can keep them alive long enough for the necklace to serve its purpose.
19. Selina’s payback
The meeting room is empty save for an unconscious guard next to the table; she stops by just long enough to take the clip out of his gun for a spare and whack him on the head with his own weapon to make sure he does not come around battle-ready. She runs a quick count in her head; of the twelve guards who must be on duty in a single shift according to their estimate, between her and Bruce they have taken out four so far; she is positive that at least two of the three gatehouse guards will stay where they are to block the entrance to the site, not to mention the exit from it, leaving six plus Xiao, Zhang and Wu himself for Bruce and her to deal with.
A few feet from the guard, she sees the broken remains of Xiao’s walkie-talkie - Bruce must have got hold of it somehow to stop Xiao from calling reinforcements and coordinating his men - but no discarded cell phones; either he still has it or Xiao does. Back in the corridor, she throws the empty gun out of the nearest window and, pulling out the loaded one she is carrying, she turns left and heads downstairs.
At the bottom of the stairs is Zhang, whimpering from what looks like a gunshot wound to the chest; either it was an accidental case of friendly fire or Bruce used him as a shield not thinking that Xiao would shoot at a fellow gangster; she is past caring so long as he is out of the action. This leaves eight adversaries instead of nine... unless Xiao or Wu manage to call in the second-shift guards. Which, she realises grimly, must be the reason she now sees Xiao running out of the building, chasing a gangly man who does not look like a guard. Must be one of those two real technicians that Bruce mentioned, who looks to have chosen this moment to make himself scarce, but Xiao’s real reason for running out must be to reach the gate and either instruct the gate guards to call in the second shift, or do so himself. She can only hope that they are housed far enough away to buy her and Bruce a few more minutes.
On his way Xiao almost bumped into two guards, one of whom she recognises from the gate, who now burst into the weaving machine room ahead of her and to her left with their guns drawn before she has had time to shoot them. She can hear the voices and shots coming from within the room, but when she gets to the doors she discovers that they won’t open inwards without a key. She kicks the door and swears in frustration, but it gets her nowhere. So long as they are still shooting, Bruce must be alive; but she hates having to use that as an indicator. At the worst count, there are seven of them in there versus one of him, including six of them with guns; she would not call these odds uneven in hand-to-hand combat, but a gunfight is another matter.
At that instant, she hears Wu yelling from further inside the room. The first time her gadget does not decipher it, but when he repeats the words, the Bùyào pāi is reported to her as Don’t shoot; and indeed, the gunfire stops. She wonders if it is a good thing... either it is the worst-case scenario meaning that he is down and wounded and soon to be taken captive, or a not-quite-best-case one meaning that he has done something dangerous enough to rule out firearms. Trouble is, in that case it would be just as dangerous to him.
A final desperate kick at the double doors still achieves her nothing; she can either wait to see if Xiao comes back, assuming that he would have the key, which could be any length of time later, or try to chase Xiao outside, which would take her and the pearls further away from Bruce...
...or find another way to get closer to him. She turns back to the stairs and practically flies to the upper floor.
***
The rope is still where she left it, dangling off the central window. She is sorry not to have the sliding mechanism with her as it will take a few seconds longer to rappel down, but at least she is glad she is wearing a Kevlar-lined pantsuit. As soon as she has reached the ground-floor windows -a nearly-continuous strip of glass high along the production room walls - she fashions a crude sort-of-harness for herself using the free end of the rope and, sitting suspended in it, flips up the big stone on her ring to reveal the carbide cutting wheel. It takes a few seconds and careful handling to cut out a rectangular pane of glass the height of the window, about three feet, and wide enough for her to slip through, and she has to cut out and push through tiny holes at the top corners first so she can grip the glass and pull it toward her to fling it down outside, where the noise will be less noticeable to the room occupants, rather than push it inside where it would shatter with a loud crash.
She sees now that her descent trajectory has put her at the middle of the chemical treatment room; she could think of better entry points and has a moment of worry wondering if she will be able to get into the weaving room from there, but at least she can see that she won’t need the rope once she is inside, as she is directly above the elevated gangway running along the side of the room nearest to her, less than seven feet below the window ledge. And now that she is no longer cutting glass and has an unobstructed window into the room, she can hear the fight inside; Bruce must have led them in there, no doubt figuring that a room full of complex equipment is both a better hiding place and not a good venue for firefights. It sounds like he is right; she still cannot hear any shots.
Still sitting in the harness, she pulls out the USB stick from her pocket and fastens it to the side of her necklace with the carbine; that way she won’t have to worry about it falling out, and it will be easily deployable as her bargaining tool if necessary. Next, she takes off her shoes and sticks them into her jacket pockets - it won’t do to land with a loud bang her heels are bound to make on the metal gangway floor - and climbs through the opening she has cut, pulling the rope harness inside the window with her and hanging from the ledge before dropping softly about a foot or two down to the gangway.
Getting her bearings, she sees that she is indeed in the middle of the room lengthwise, hidden from view by the equipment, storage tanks, and pipes standing between her and the flat treatment vats and dryer units flanked by the open passage along the opposite side. The room is about twenty feet high, and now that she is crouching on the seven-foot-high gangway, her position puts her line of sight about halfway up.
There are steel beams, about ten feet apart and two-thirds up the room height, running parallel to the short wall and carrying fluorescent lighting strips in addition to their structural reinforcement purpose; they must be thirteen feet above the ground and six feet above the gangway floor, with the nearest one just over her head. Perhaps she can attach the rope to the beam and swing down and over across the room... but she dismisses the idea as unfeasible; even if there was enough rope left, which there isn’t, to do that she would need to fasten the rope securely to the centre of the beam, instantly revealing her position. With a thirteen-foot drop to the ground, climbing onto the beam and jumping down would make it anyone’s guess whether she would land in a condition to fight unless she managed to crouch down and hang from the beam by her hands before jumping; still not the best option.
She can see a ladder leading down from the gangway at the far end of the room, but it would take too long to go there, climb down, and run the length of the room to join the fight, not to mention that it would leave no element of surprise whatsoever; besides, she needs to know the reason for the apparent ceasefire before she can decide whether to draw her gun. So she scuttles over, still barefoot, keeping her head down and her shoulders hunched, to the weaving room end where the others are, hoping that there will be a ladder there as well.
No such luck; she is stuck seven feet above ground and about twenty five feet across from the action, with no easy way of descent as she is behind the storage tanks for what must be the solvent for the toxin treatment, if she remembers what Lucius said correctly. But now that she is closer and can smell the sharp chloroform-like odour, she understands why no one is shooting. There is a sort of mist spreading from a burst tube at a juncture point where it goes into the toxin treatment vat, the noxious vapour slowly filling the room with what looks like a more concentrated layer at the bottom. Carbon disulfide, Lucius said, extremely flammable and with a low boiling point, which means that it evaporates quickly and is also highly explosive in vapour form. No wonder Wu ordered his goons not to shoot; he does not want his little poison factory blown up unless there are no other options, especially while he is in it; and no wonder Bruce has led the chase to a spot where he was able to reach the right spot to inflict the damage that could impose this sort of stalemate.
Except that it is not really a stalemate. From what she sees with a growing sense of thrill, it is clear that now that Bruce has levelled the playing field and forced the other men into unarmed combat, he definitely has the upper hand. He has already dispatched two of the guards - she can only see four of them plus Wu in the room - and they can do virtually nothing to him, even without the Batsuit and the fancy gadgets. She has seen quite a few fights, and is pretty good at it herself, but what she is watching is a master class, his moves efficient, effortless and almost elegant; almost as if he were toying with them, while Wu, who has been staying out of it, is standing there obviously debating whether to try to engage this major threat himself or retreat until reinforcements arrive. In a matter of seconds, Bruce has dealt with the other three men and is in the process of disabling the fourth...
...when Xiao creeps in from the weaving room while Bruce has his back to him and leaps up to him to hit him on the back of his head with the butt of an assault rifle.
***
Dimly, through the haze of shock in her head, she hears Wu yell his Bùyào pāi at Xiao when he flips the weapon around and aims it at Bruce; Xiao scowls but obeys. Bruce, amazingly, rolls back to his feet and manages a vicious kick at Xiao, but he is still reeling from the blow and it does not take long, now that it has become an uneven fight in a different way, for Xiao and Wu to subdue and handcuff him.
“His phone got a message,” Xiao barks to Wu, and she hears it in the incongruously even English tones. “I can’t read English,” Xiao adds, perhaps unnecessarily, as he hands the phone to his boss. She wonders what could have made Bruce surrender it; perhaps he threw it at Xiao as a distraction tactic, or walked up to hand it over as a way to go for the other man’s walkie-talkie as a higher-value target; doesn’t matter by now. What matters, unfortunately, is that Xiao had no time to take out the battery and Bruce apparently considered the phone a limited threat and forgot about the Wayne Enterprises IT people and their message, and forgot to disable the message alert that he set up last night so he could hear it, or rather feel the vibration, when she sent her OK messages while stealing the stick.
Wu stares at it, reads it out loud in a harsh accent. “We have it all.” He translates it for Xiao and frowns. “American number. I told you they were CIA, both of them, you dumb fool.” He looks as if he is about to kick his lieutenant before he thinks better of it, unfortunately, and instead hands the phone back to Xiao, who promptly smashes it with the rifle butt before flinging the rifle aside and turning to Bruce once again.
“You fucking spy,” Xiao hisses as he kicks his adversary, who is now unable to retaliate. “Fuck you,” Bruce snarls back, in English, and on hearing that, both Wu and Xiao set upon him with their fists and feet until he is unconscious, and she bites her lip until she draws blood so as not to scream while she struggles in vain to block the memory of another uneven fight a few months ago and wrestles with the rising panic to think of a way of stopping them.
At present, they do stop; but the reason makes her heart stand still.
“Take him away out of here and shoot him,” Wu orders. “Then we look for the woman.”
She is paralysed with dread; all she can see is Bane, dragging his unconscious form, still in the black armour but with the face unmasked, out of sight, away from her, to a likely death. All she can remember is herself, the traitor, watching from behind iron bars, her conscience burning with the fresh brand of shame at what she had allowed to happen.
It is happening again.
But this time, there are no bars keeping her away, and she knows what she is going to do.
She climbs up on the metal railing of the gangway and on to the narrow steel beam above.
***
“Wu Ming!” The man starts, then turns abruptly, tipping his head up at the unexpected summons. He scowls when he sees her balancing halfway down the beam and a good seven feet over his head, a gun in her hand, flicking the safety. She had a momentary attack of dizziness when she straightened up on the beam a couple of seconds ago - the solvent vapours from below must be getting to her as well - but the cold steel beneath her feet is sobering her up.
“Stupid bitch.” The translator helpfully conveys Xiao’s words to her. Wu says nothing. Xiao picks up his assault rifle and aims it at her, thinking she will believe his bluff.
“You know you can’t do it, or else you’ll blow this place up, unless that’s what you want,” she mocks in English, giving up the pretence now that it no longer matters, ignoring the fact that Xiao cannot understand her; it is good enough that Wu can. “The moment either of us shoots, this whole room will explode. I don’t care, I’ve lost all my family’s money anyway,” she adds, remembering her invented backstory, brandishing the gun to show them that the safety is now off. “Same goes if either of you tries to come up here,” she says, seeing Xiao eyeing the gangway. “Or if you do anything else I don’t like. But if you leave him,” she tips her head at Bruce, unconscious at Wu’s feet, “and your weapons here and back off to the other room, I may be persuaded not to do it.”
“You’re making a serious mistake,” Wu hisses at her in his mangled accent. The incongruous flashback does nothing to help her state of mind, but by now, the crazier she is, probably the better. Besides, few mistakes could be more serious than the one she already made back then.
“Maybe,” she concedes. “But if you don’t get out and leave him here,” she repeats, “you’re both dead and your factory is finished.” It is the perfect Mexican standoff; both parties hold the means to each other’s destruction, and neither one can shoot. Even if they do obey, it will leave her and Bruce without an obvious exit route; but she hopes that they may survive long enough for the ROS to get in there.
She stands there, on a narrow beam above a vat of poison; and she is suddenly at peace, looking down at Wu glaring up at her, Xiao swearing under his breath, and Bruce lying face down on the concrete floor, the man she once left lying on the floor of his manor house study and has left lying broken on the floor of Bane’s hell; now she has come back for him, a second time. So this is what it feels like to offer one’s life for a good cause; she is no saviour of cities and not much of a saviour of men, but she now knows exactly how he felt when he flew the nuke over Gotham Bay, not knowing if he’d make it... if she keeps him alive now, it will have been her greatest achievement, better than billion-dollar heists. This is her gravitational singularity, the point where everything comes together, where Selina Kyle the treacherous thief and Céline the repentant woman in love find their joint redemption, where she becomes him for a brief moment. If you can’t beat them, join them; she has had enough of Bruce’s suicidal tactics, so she is adopting them. This is her judgement day, her declaration of love and plea for forgiveness to a man who cannot hear it; this is it.
She remembers her fleeting thought in China, five thousand feet above Xining, that there could be worse ways to die than up in the air and looking at him; now may be her chance, but she wants to be sure that he makes it, and at any rate that he does not see her die, if that is how it ends. She looks down at Wu, livid and rearing like a snake, who cares about nothing but his poison and his money; she cares about nothing in the world right now, not Syria or China or even the Varese family, just an unconscious man she has twice seen going to his death, having once led him to it; a man she now cannot imagine her life without. And it gives her perfect freedom, and makes her laugh with relief: her debt has been paid, her burden has been lifted - and seeing her up there laughing, Wu and Xiao believe her, and are scared of her.
And at that moment, bad timing to trump all bad timing, Bruce comes around, still groggy from the solvent he has been breathing, twists his neck, and sees her. She cannot hear him but can clearly make him out saying you idiot, looking at her in unadulterated terror because he knows exactly what she is doing. Forgive me, my love; you would have done the same.
And then, as if she were watching a film, she sees the sealed central doors to her left falling outward and hears the weaving room doors behind the wall to her right smashed in, and watches as the Carabinieri ROS men run in wearing protective suits and masks, apparently knowing not to shoot. She flicks the gun safety on and tucks it into the waist of her suit again, and turns to walk back and jump back onto the gangway, but a movement below catches her eye: by then Wu has understood that she was bluffing to gain time and that he has lost everything, and has tried to make a dive for Xiao’s assault rifle before the Carabinieri get to him. He cannot reach it but he does manage to pull a handgun from the holster at his lieutenant’s side and even now is taking it off safety. It does not matter where he aims it; the shot will trigger the explosion, and while the ROS team may survive and even she might stand a slim chance if she holds on to the beam and manages to crawl back on it to make it back to the open window, Bruce will have no hope down below where the heavy solvent vapour is at its thickest.
She does the only thing she can; crouching down on the beam, she dives down thirteen feet to tackle Wu. She lands on top of him and they crash to the ground, sharp searing pain exploding in her stomach where his gun digs into it, seemingly echoed all over her body, turning her vision to black. Through the dark haze, she sees Wu’s wild eyes focus on the memory stick dangling from the pearls around her neck, and with his free hand he yanks at it, a useless desperate gesture as by now he will have no time to either hide or destroy it. All it does is break the string and send the pearls spilling - and the last things she knows before her eyes roll into her head and her mind succumbs to darkness are the pearls scattering across the floor and Bruce screaming her name at the top of his lungs.
___________________________________________
Notes to Ch 19
By way of a score for the second half of this, I had in mind a huge favourite, Hans Zimmer's Injection from M:I-2 (the film was OK, the score superb; but then I am obsessed with Zimmer's music even outside the Nolan trilogy scores). Every time I imagine a heroic sacrifice scene of some kind (a chronic thing, yes ;) ) I think of this one.
For a good look at a Christian Bale character kicking serious ass, it's worth checking out an early film of his called Equilibrium. Not a masterpiece, and with a bleak post-apocalyptic premise, but worth watching as it has three Bale-centric merits: he looks obscenely gorgeous in it, has a compelling (and needless to say, well-acted) character arc from major baddie to major hero, and has superbly choreographed, breathtakingly spectacular fight scenes. Unlike Batman, his character there has no issues with using firearms (and shoots what looks like a few hundred rounds of ammo), but when I thought of Bruce going against the guards here, I thought of Christian's Equilibrium fights.
(continued in part 9)