“No,” Alfred said. “I know what this means.” But Bruce forced him to say it.

“What does it mean, Alfred?”

“It means your hatred. It means losing the person I’ve cared for since I first heard his cries echo through this house.” He paused. “But it might also mean saving your life. And that is more important.”

Bruce glared at him. Calmly, coldly, he said the worst thing he could say.

“Goodbye, Alfred.”

The butler nodded, looking older and more tired than he had just moments ago. His shoulders slumped.

“Goodbye, Bruce.”

Bruce turned his back and marched up the stairs.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The doorbell woke him. Bruce rolled over in bed, waiting for Alfred to answer it.

Then he remembered.

He rose and threw on a dressing gown. No breakfast awaited him, and the house somehow seemed colder than it had before. Moving down the corridor toward the front, he called out tentatively.

“Alfred?”

The answering silence confirmed that last night had really happened. Bruce’s face hardened. Knotting his robe shut, he hurried down the stairs and threw open the door.

Lucius Fox gazed at him with surprise.

“Answering your own door?”

“Yes,” Bruce said tersely. He didn’t feel like explaining. “Could you decode the trades on that drive?”

Instead of answering, Fox handed him the morning paper. The front page headline was in huge type.

BATMAN BACK TO FOIL OR MASTERMIND STOCK RAID

The headline was accompanied by a blurry photo of the Bat in flight. A sidebar displayed a chronology of Batman’s career, beginning with his capture of mobster Carmine Falcone, so many years ago.

“I didn’t need to,” Fox said. “Page three.”

Puzzled, Bruce flipped past the coverage on Batman’s alleged return until he stumbled onto another, significantly smaller headline.

WAYNE DOUBLES DOWN—AND LOSES

Bruce scanned the article in growing dismay.

“It seems you made a series of large put options on the futures exchange. Verified by thumb print.” Fox shook his head grimly. “The options expired at midnight last night.”

Bruce looked up from the paper, reeling from the news. He had always preferred crime-fighting to high finance, but he grasped the implications of what he had just read. And the consequences were devastating.

“Long term, we may be able to prove fraud,” Fox said, spelling it out. “But for now…you’re completely broke. And Wayne Enterprises is about to fall into the hands of John Daggett.”

“The weapons.” Bruce instantly zeroed in on what mattered most. “We can’t let Daggett get his hands on Applied Sciences.”

“Applied Sciences is shut up tight and off the books,” Fox assured him. “But the energy project is a different story.”

Then it sunk in, that it was the worst of all possible worst-case scenarios—the prospect of a man like John Daggett, with his connections to Bane, taking control of the mothballed project.

Bruce realized he needed help.

“Miranda Tate,” he said, thinking aloud. “We need to convince the board to get behind her, instead of Daggett.” He knew what that meant. “Let’s show her the reactor.”