Chapter 406: Peter Parker's Godfather?
"Split up. Robin."
"Your assignment: locate Kingpin covertly and find a way to obtain a biological sample -- hair, a nail clipping, anything from his person. Bring it back. While you're at it, collect everything available on Fisk Industries -- his current business operations, corporate structure, recent activity."
"Three days."
The Gargoyle suit had barely cooled from its first field test when Batman had Robin's next assignment ready. Solo operation, which was uncommon enough that Robin registered the fact even as he was nodding.
The new suit existed. The new Batmobile did not. To build it, Batman needed the Adamantium formula, which required a starting point -- either a biological sample from Kingpin or an analytical reading from the shield figure's shield. Batman would pursue the second option himself. Robin would handle the first.
"The way you've structured this," Robin said, with the focused expression of someone thinking it through, "the intelligence gathering comes first. The sample collection would naturally happen last. After I know his patterns."
Batman looked at him.
"You want to finish the intelligence phase and then pick a fight with him directly."
Robin's grin was not quite fast enough to be innocent.
"...yes?"
"Not yet. The timing isn't right." Batman kept his voice even. "Kingpin currently operates as a legally recognized businessman with New York government support. The Luke Cage and Jessica Jones situation gave us leverage but not enough to justify direct action. When the moment comes to move on him, I'll need Stark Industries and Osborn Industries coordinating the approach. I'll tell you when it's time."
"Understood." Robin nodded, already turning toward the exit.
A hand caught his shoulder.
He looked back.
"Leave the axe. It's not compatible with an intelligence operation."
Robin thought about this for approximately one second, decided Batman was right, and pulled the greataxe from his back. He tossed it across the cave without particular ceremony. Batman caught it one-handed.
Robin left.
Batman turned the axe over in his hands, letting his gaze move across the runic engravings on the handle -- the ancient script that converged at the blade junction, older than any Runic system he had prior reference for.
"Norse mythology," he said quietly. "Runes."
He set the axe aside and opened an encrypted channel to S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury.
Hawkeye and Black Widow had returned to S.H.I.E.L.D. roughly two weeks ago on Batman's instruction. Since then: silence. Neither of them had been given encrypted communication equipment when they left -- Hawkeye had come back from Japan and Black Widow had come out of the Batcave, and issuing them devices at that stage would have created a security liability. Batman had made the deliberate choice to let them operate without a line back to him.
The calculus of reaching out to Fury was straightforward. If Fury answered and was clearly still in operational control of S.H.I.E.L.D., it would tell Batman that Hawkeye and Black Widow hadn't moved yet -- or had tried and failed. Fury's voice, his word choices, his response time, the texture of whatever he said would carry enough information to make the read. If someone else answered -- if it was Hawkeye, or Natasha, or an unfamiliar voice -- that meant the internal S.H.I.E.L.D. purge of the HYDRA names on Nathan Garrett's list had already run its course.
The line opened.
It rang.
Batman waited with the same quality of stillness he brought to every surveillance situation -- the kind that felt nothing like patience because it contained no restlessness to suppress. He sat with the sound and let two full minutes pass before accepting that no one was going to pick up, and closed the channel.
He closed his eyes.
Half of his attention went to rest. The other half began working through the problem of finding a man who did not appear to want to be found -- moving through the logic of how someone with Taskmaster's capabilities and training would structure his surveillance routes, where the gaps in New York's observation grid would look attractive to a professional who understood cover and counter-surveillance at an expert level.
He was thirty minutes into that exercise when the communicator sounded.
Batman had the channel open before the second signal finished.
The voice was not Nick Fury. It was not Hawkeye or Black Widow either.
It was Aunt May.
"Peter? Peter!" Her voice was relaxed, carrying the easy warmth she used when she had good news. "We have a relative visiting -- he says he was almost your godfather, back when you were born. Could you ask for time off from school and come home? He very much wants to meet you."
There was someone else in the room with her. Batman could hear the ambient change in her voice, the way she was framing things for a third party's benefit. She hadn't used the name Thomas Pennyworth -- she'd defaulted back to Peter Parker, the name she'd been using for twenty years.
Batman replayed the word: godfather.
He ran through everything he had pulled on the Parker family before establishing the Thomas Pennyworth identity -- a thorough search of every publicly available record, every documented relative, every connection to Richard and Mary Parker through their CIA service and before it. The data set was detailed. He had treated it seriously because any gap in it was a potential liability.
No godfather. No candidate who fit.
"Of course, Aunt May. I'll be there soon."
He said a few more words and closed the channel.
Forest Hills was covered. He had restructured the neighborhood's surveillance infrastructure as part of the residential security upgrade -- cameras at every useful angle, tied into the Batcave's monitoring system. He pulled the feeds and found the right frame within seconds.
The man was sitting in the living room of 20 Ingram Street.
He was large. The kind of large that wasn't about height specifically but about the total impression -- a man who seemed to occupy more physical space than his dimensions strictly required. Despite the early November chill, he was wearing a white undershirt under an open leather jacket, the zipper not touched, his chest filling the shirt in a way that suggested he had never once considered this unusual. Faded jeans. Heavy work boots.
His hair was thick and dark, worn long enough to be noticeable. The beard was dense, heavy at the jaw, with sideburns that curved outward in a way that made his face read as simultaneously rough and wild. The facial recognition system cross-referenced its database and returned nothing.
Batman did not spend more time on the feed. The man was already inside the house, a few meters from Aunt May, and that was not a situation he was going to observe from a distance.
He stripped out of the Gargoyle suit, handed it to the mechanical arm system for stowage in the deployment container -- which fed into the Batwing for aerial delivery on command -- and changed quickly into a dark blue plaid shirt and a coat. Civilian clothes. Peter Parker going home to Queens on short notice.
He moved fast.
When he pushed open the front door of the house on Ingram Street and stepped inside, he found Aunt May in her chair with a handkerchief pressed to the corner of her eye.
The sharpest version of Batman's attention came forward in a single instant and fixed itself on the stranger across the room -- on the rough-edged face half-obscured behind the slow curl of cigar smoke, watching him come in through the door.