Jack & Selina

Internet cafes are a dying phenomenon. When the internet was new and connections were expensive they flourished, but once prices of connections and the equipment fell into the range where they were cheaper than television sets it wasn't long before just about every home had one and the only people that needed internet cafes were visitors from overseas with a desperate need to check their emails. Now even they had Blackberrys and laptops with mobile or wireless broadband for that with hotels providing web services as part of the room deals.

As such the internet cafes that sprang up in the latter part of the last century were closing down faster than the record stores that you could have found on every high street in the nineties, but nowhere in the noughties. MP3 had killed record stores that had been trading profitably for decades, and cheap internet access was killing off the last of the web cafes. But they were not all gone yet. Gotham City, being a major metropolitan hub, still had a few and I had pinpointed several in the Gotham Gazette that I had read earlier in the day. These days they had private booths that perverts used to browse child pornography without having to worry about IP addresses being traced back to them. Cybercriminals also used them extensively rather than risking backtraces that would see law enforcement agents who were becoming more adept at internet crimebusting running up against dead ends.

The trouble was that I couldn't exactly wander into a brightly lit shop dressed as I was - still in Arkham grey pyjamas hidden under bloodstained black combat gear. Sure it wasn't the maximum security red overalls usually associated with Arkham escapees, but it wasn't exactly inconspicuous attire. If I walked into a cafe looking like this the proprietor wouldn't think twice about picking up the phone and dialling 911. After a dry day like today, though, it didn't take long to find a washing line with jeans and sweaters that hadn't been gathered in before nightfall - just a quick walk around the back gardens of a quiet suburb - and I was fortunate enough to find a black hooded sweater that was large enough on my frame that when I put the hood up my face was pretty much in shadow.

It wasn't exactly dry, but it was close enough and I put the stolen sweater and jeans on over my pyjamas anyway so that the damp didn't abrade my skin. With the stolen eighty bucks and packing a loaded revolver I stood outside the PCafe Internet Cafe studying the tariff taped to the window as the skies opened up above me and sent the rain pouring down. Ten dollars an hour, or twenty-five bucks for a private booth, plus reasonable prices on coffee and snacks. My stomach purred in anticipation.

I pushed open the door and laid a twenty down on the counter for an hour of surf time, a black coffee, a ham sandwich and some chocolate cake, trying not to look at the smiling assistant, a skinny woman in her late twenties with long black hair. She peered at me suspiciously as I made my order and I glanced about the room as I spoke in an attempt to keep my features hidden from sight, then she gave me a token to put into a box alongside each computer that activated a timer that in turn switched on the monitor - a crude but effective technical solution. It looked like I had the place to myself. I was refamiliarising myself with surfing the internet when the coffee and food arrived. I didn't look up to thank the woman, just kept focused on the screen with the hood of my sweater still up, keeping my face mostly hidden from view. When she had gone back to the front desk I tore open all three sachets of sugar that she had left and poured them into the coffee before sipping at the scalding liquid carefully. The sandwich lived for a grand total of eight seconds while the mouthwatering aroma of the chocolate cake filled my nostrils. Later, I promised myself, setting aside the cake as a productivity reward. Now it was time to get down to work.

Basic Google searches pulled up the news services, and I read about my escape from Arkham on a couple of sites. Eleven killings they credited me with, I noted - nine guards and the two crew of a helicopter that had apparently been collecting an injured inmate for medevac to an emergency room at a more conventional hospital. That was bullshit. The cover-up had already begun, it seemed. There was no mention of guard towers being chewed up by machine gun fire from the gunship that had picked me up thinking that I was the escaping assassin. They gave no name, had released no photographs of me, just stated that an armed and dangerous inmate had managed to escape and that the public should remain vigilant and report anything out of the ordinary to the police. There was no mention of the van driver, but I was fairly certain that the pilot had been alive when I had left him slumped over his stick. Perhaps whoever had orchestrated my assassination attempt had subsequently assured his silence with a knife across the pilot's throat but I set that aside for the moment. The important part was that there were no images of me linked to the news reports of the escape, probably because the last thing they wanted was for the Russians to find out that I had broken free.

Somewhere on the internet was a zip file containing my entire toolcase of hacking utilities, but for the life of me I could not remember where I had left it. It was quite possibly lost forever and I would have to start again from scratch with basic hacking scripts that could be download from numerous hacker forums on the internet, but I couldn't do that here without administrator rights to the operating system that they would not allow me, and most servers that I intended to target had adequate defences against those anyway. Those scripts were for kiddy hackers and learners and of limited usefulness against secure servers. This was not yet a hacking or remote database intrusion task, however. Tonight was just a low level information gathering exercise. The skills that I needed to learn quickly could be picked up over the internet relatively easily - skills like breaking and entering, disabling or bypassing burglar alarms, picking locks, stealing cars and motorbikes, Vulcan death grips and all the other stuff that a fugitive on the run needs to know in order to survive from day to day.

Obtaining a laptop and sorting myself out a web connection could be done easily when I had the money, but without being able to search for a legitimate job the only way I could get that money and get on with my life was by illegal means. Carjacking and mugging was straightforward but yielded low rewards that made those crimes unfeasible. I needed to move into something bigger and more lucrative, which obviously meant exposing myself to a greater risk of discovery and capture, but what choice did I have? I had a mission to complete and sitting on my ass on a pile of newspapers watching kids do half-assed stunts on their BMX bikes through peepholes in whitewashed windows was no way to accomplish that. Obviously there was no way I was going to be able to steal an Ohio class SSBN out of Pearl Harbour and launch armageddon against the Russians and Chinese, but there were other ways of winning the end-game that while not quite as efficient and in your face as global thermonuclear war could be equally cataclysmic.

Merely orchestrating a total breakdown of social and economic order in the United States would have global knock on effects that might end up serving me adequately, I figured. That was a long and winding road rather than the arrow straight to the heart that a nuclear attack constituted, but ultimately they both ended up at the same destination. Averting tipping point was all that mattered.

I wondered how long the scientists reckoned I had before it was too late and asked Jeeves. The answer came back as seven years - 2016 was the earliest accepted prediction. Cool. I returned to the more immediate issues and devoured the chocolate cake in no more than seven seconds.

There was nothing on the internet about my primary target other than a facebook page that I was unable to browse even after setting myself up an account under a made up name. I put in a request that she add me as a friend, but after my hour had expired nothing came back. Either I was being ignored or she wasn't online. Probably the latter. She'd get a blast out of the name I'd chosen and if she had any sense would have added me straight away if for no other reason than to be able to track me down online by setting GCPD's cyber-squad on my ass. I got back down to researching my tasks, taking mental notes from websites as disparate as 'how-it-works' and 'rotteneggs' as I learned how to do basic illegal acts with maximum effect for minimum risk. Tricks of the trade, techniques and methods, even advice on selecting low risk targets. It was all there on the internet. They say that the best place to learn how to be a criminal is in prison, but that only held true before the internet took hold. In prison you only learned from people that had been dumb enough to get caught, but on free to access websites were the lessons learned from those that had successfully evaded conviction their entire lives, and you didn't have to bend over and take it up the ass to pick up those hints and tips, either, and that's always a bonus.

I watched the assistant amble over in my direction and seeing as I was the only one in the place I braced myself for a confrontation. I glanced at the meter on the desktop, noting that I had just five minutes left before it timed out and the screen died. "Closing in thirty minutes." She called over the partition, looking directly into my face as I acknowledged her with a nod. Well, if there were no pictures of me and no descriptions mentioning my scarring on the newscasts I figured I could take a chance and relax a little. I pulled another twenty out of a pocket and asked her for some more coffee, a cheese sandwich, another slice of that scrumptious chocolate cake and one more hour of web time. She wavered as I flipped back my hood and put on my puppy dog eyes, that wounded, pleading look that worked so well on Harleen. Her eyes went wide as I revealed my permanently smiling visage to her and the imploring look was thus ignored.

"Spot of bother with some drug dealers." I shrugged. She reached across and tried to take the twenty off me, but I pulled my hand away leaving her stretched and off balance. I pulled another ten from my pocket and added it to the other two. "About that extra hour?"

She took the thirty dollars and winked at me. "No problem honey, but I get the full lowdown on that scar of yours, deal?"

"Well...." I began, somewhat taken aback, then thought better of it. "Sure, if you give me unrestricted access to the OS." I ventured. She walked around the partition and leaned over me and I could feel her small breasts pressing against my shoulder as she commandeered the mouse and tapped the admin password into the logon screen. She smelled faintly of apples, as if her morning shower gel and shampoo had worn off throughout the day leaving just the barest residual trace behind.

"Don't screw my computer up, ok?" She warned me as she turned her back on me and went off to make my coffee and stuff. I missed her already, the warmth of her body against the back of my neck and her mint augmented breath wafting past my nostrils, overpowering the apple scent, and the gentle movement of her breast against my shoulder as she breathed. She was quite attractive in an unconventional way, probably would be classified these days as a cross between a young MILF and a grown up goth, but after a year of celibacy it didn't take much to get my juices flowing. Another month or so at Arkham and I'd have been sorely tempted to go for one of the overweight, flabby breasted dragons that conducted the physiotherapy sessions, such were my levels of pent up sexual frustration after nearly a month of provocative fencing with miss Quinzel.

Now I got to work properly. I hit the state DMV's central server, once I'd downloaded the necessary tools, customised a script and scrounged up the password off the internet - that alone had taken twenty minutes of searching. The DMV was the easy one, though. All the cops had access to it and some who put money before ethics tended to sell their monthly passwords on. From there one or two inevitably made it onto the internet. After trying two out of date passwords I managed to find one that gave me access and downloaded the details that I had come here in the hope of finding.

Turns out she was a bit of a bad girl. Three parking violations and a speeding ticket - all unpaid and outstanding - glowed in red when I called up her details. Seventy miles per hour in a fifty-five zone! I shook my head wryly as I clicked a tick in the PAID radio button and then did the same for the parking fines, too. I had all the information that I needed for now. I heard the shutters going down over the windows as I backtracked and deleted my footprints so that the payments would not be picked up as fraudulent having come from an unauthorised IP address. Finally I logged off the DMV network and uninstalled the hacking kit and deleted the scripts off the C drive. Next I set myself up a free account on Mediafire with an easy to remember name and uploaded the zip and rar files that I had downloaded just in case I needed them in the future - stuff like that always comes in handy, if only as a time saver. There were other organisations that I needed to infiltrate but they would have to wait as they were significantly harder nuts to crack and would take time that I didn't have. For tonight my time was up.

The woman came back after locking the front door and dropping the shutters over that. "You'll have to leave the back way, sorry." She told me. "Anything else I can get for you?"

"No, all fine here. Nearly done." I answered without looking up.

"Whatever you installed, can you make sure it's gone?"

"Already done. It was just a bittorrent client, anyway." I lied. "Do I get five bucks change for only using the half hour?"

"Not a chance, buster." She grinned.

"It's Joe, by the way." I told her, offering a hand as I stood. She took it and I held her a little longer than was appropriate for a social greeting, staring into her hazel eyes. She tried to hold my gaze but those eyes of hers kept flicking down to my jawline.

"Selina." She smiled as I released her fingers. The hand hovered there in mid air for a heartbeat, then she abruptly jerked it back and used it to sweep her long black hair back over her ears. "So, about that scar?" She pressed, her curiosity getting the better of her. Might even kill her one day, I mused as I suppressed a flicker of irritation over the attention my defects were getting.

"Over a drink?" I ventured, hoping to put her off. Surely a woman like this wouldn't want to be seen with me in public.

"Love to." She agreed.

"You know a good bar around here?"

"Nowhere thats quiet enough to talk." She laughed. "It's all student bars and night clubs around here. But I do know someplace we can go."

She led me out through a door labelled 'staff only' and paused at the alarm panel, punching in a four digit code that my mind recorded for future reference as the arming beeping began. She ushered me out through the steel back door and locked it behind her, which silenced the beeping, then she closed a heavy wrought iron gate over that door and secured it with a padlock the size of her fist. She slipped her hand through the hook of my elbow and nudged me toward an old, beaten up Volkswagen Rabbit parked under a light in the wide alley. I waited while she got in the car and leaned across to unlock the passenger door, then I slid inside as she removed the steering lock and threw it onto the back seat. The engine started after about ten seconds of cranking, spluttering into life with reluctance as she revved it harshly, blowing off the cobwebs of a long day's rest.

She pulled off jerkily. "Clutch is shit." She offered lamely. I bounced in the seat and reached back for the seatbelt as she remembered to turn the headlamps on moments before she steered the car into the stream of traffic speeding down main street. For a moment I wondered if the drive to our mystery destination would be fraught with more peril than my escape from Arkham, then my attention was drawn to a pair of police cars parked where I had left the van, blue lights scything through the night. Bugger, I swore inwardly. There goes the shotgun. I was down to six bullets and thirty bucks. Selina changed lanes without indicating or checking over her shoulder and cut across an intersection, picking up speed. My right leg involuntarily pressed against an imaginary brake pedal and my fingers gripped the door handle a little tighter.

She crunched her way through the gears as the dodgy clutch reluctantly yielded to her demands, punctuating the journey with the nasty dull metallic grind of worn out brake pads scoring deeply into equally worn out brake discs. I half expected to see bright orange sparks shooting out of the wheels as I peered nervously out of the side window. We'd gone maybe two or three miles out of the city when she banged the car up onto a kerb and turned to me, saying cheerfully; "Here we are!"

I peered doubtfully out of the windscreen, frowning. "Where's the bar?" I asked.

"Did I say I was taking you to a bar?" She purred, staring directly into my eyes. I was about to say something when she reached across and pressed a finger against my lips to silence me, then she ran that finger along the ridge of raised flesh that outlined my scar, making me shiver as it glided softly from the corner of my mouth and along my cheek toward my ear where normal skin had grown back to leave just a pale pencil thin line. Her face moved closer to mine, her eyes filling my vision. "Please don't spoil the moment." She whispered.

Who was I to refuse a lady? Her lips puckered at the same time as her eyelids fluttered closed and I felt her hand upon my thigh as she moved in even closer. I lost focus when I felt her mouth against mine, and I closed my eyes and used my lips to part hers. Her hand slipped around the back of my head and her fingers tangled in my hair. I felt her tongue tentatively press against mine, and responded more eagerly with my own. I knew it wasn't my first kiss but it felt like it just might have been for my teenage memories were long gone. This was a journey into unfamiliar territory as the warmth of her mouth and the soft pliant flesh of her tongue melded with my own.

I felt her fingers tighten suggestively high up on my thigh at the same time as her other hand tugged lightly on my hair and I wondered if she was going to just climb on top of me right there and then, but when we broke for air she slumped back in the drivers' seat, ripped the keys out of the ignition, turned out the headlamps and threw the door open with a squeal of unlubricated hinges.

I followed Selina into her apartment block wordlessly just as the skies opened up above us and the rain began to fall again, trailing her up the stairs and waiting patiently while she fumbled her keys into the door and pushed it open. I half expected her to start tearing my clothes off the moment she closed the door behind me, but instead she turned on the light, locked the door, hung her keys up on a hook and hung her jacket up on a nail hammered into the wall.

"Drink?" She asked as she brushed past me in the narrow doorway, leading me through to the darkened main living area. A jet black cat mewed as she crossed the room to the kitchen, then stretched on the cushion it had been sleeping on and padded after her in expectation of supper. It paused at the doorway to the small kitchen as its light snapped on, looked over it's shoulder at me, then raised it's tail to demonstrate what it thought of me by showing me it's anus and disappeared around the corner. "I don't have any beer, so it's red wine, chilled sparkling white wine or more coffee, sorry." Selina called.