PROLOGUE

The moment was right.

The moon casting its pale glow over the outline of his body, the frosty winter air whipping past his face and cape, the Dark Knight swooped into the abyss. His aim was true, the grapnel line he hurled catching the flagpole thirty feet down as he began his rapid descent to the alley below. His momemtum throwing him into a wide arc a moment after passing the flagpole which he secured purchase, he swung down and across two stories before releasing his grip of the line.

Going into a flying kick, his boots hit their mark on the back of the unsuspecting hoodlum he had been watching all night.

"Y-you…you broke my back, asshole!"

Batman leaned over the fallen man, violently grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and lifted him to his face. Whatever back injury the hoodlum might have suffered wasn’t severe. "You’ll live," he said in his gritty-overtoned voice. "But only if you tell me what I want to know."

"I don’t gotta tell you jack fuckin’ shit, you rubber-luvin’ faggot!"

Holding him with one hand, Batman cuffed him hard across the jaw with a fist. "I’m not going to ask you again."

The man quivered in Batman’s grasp, a tooth escaping with the blood he spat from his mouth. His fearless demeanor was only a front. Batman could see it in his eyes. "All right, all right! What do you want to know?"

"You worked for Ra’s al Ghul."

"Yeah, I worked for the Demon. What’s it to you?"

"The deliveries I’ve seen you running to the docks—what are they and where are they going?"

"Just drugs, man! Kiddy shit. Y’know, weed, heroin, maybe some cr—"

Batman took him up with both hands again, shaking him. "It was a virus, wasn’t it? The virus!"

"What are you talkin’ about? What virus?"

As he had before, Batman responded to the man’s showing of uncooperation with a fist to the face. Yanking him closer, he looked the man straight in the eyes. "Ebola Gulf-B!"

"Yes…yes! It was, all right? Now quit fuckin’ hitting me already!"

Batman’s detective work had all pointed to it, but the hoodlum’s confirmation of his worst fears sent a shiver down his spine nonetheless. Visions of millions of people dead or dying, blood pouring from their eyes and pores as every organ in their bodies liquified. The original Ebola Gulf-A virus had struck Gotham hard, killing thousands, but through the help of others they’d been able to come up with a cure. It was by pure chance the Order of St. Dumas, the same order that brainwashed young Jean Paul Valley into being the last in their line of assassins, had the cure in its records. The new-and-improved strain a dying aide of the Demon had told him of in the Sudan a month ago, if released, could prove to be unstoppable. "I just need to know one more thing. Where is it going?"

"New York, man! New York!"

That he did not know. Satisfied but agitated, Batman let the hoodlum fall to the garbage-ridden alley pavement, muttering as he walked away, "New York…"

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