The intruder made no sound and cast no shadow, yet Batman followed its movement along the back wall to the corner, then forward along the side wall toward the street. It stopped in the corner opposite his own. Had he, himself, been spotted? Batman gathered his strength, rising into a crouch, balancing on the balls of his feet, prepared for anything. But nothing happened. The intruder had found a vantage point identical to his own. The intruder was waiting, just as he was.

Without warning, the Gagauzi began to sing. Four of them chanted words and rhythms that sounded remarkably similar to Native American music, but the fifth produced an eerie, droning sound from deep in his throat that sent an involuntary shudder down Batman's back.

Filtered through the almost inhuman chorus rising from the sidewalk, Batman heard what might have been a resigned sigh. He relaxed, no longer expecting an attack. There was only one, inescapable, conclusion: The intruder was here to witness the same transaction. The intruder was virtually invisible, which implied a mask and gloves---in short, a costume not dissimilar from his own. The Russian's words came back to Batman---They will hire your enemies. From this moment on, Batman's attention was divided, and his options were limited.

Catwoman settled. Her teeth were clenched, her fists were tight enough to tremble, that infernal wailing grated painfully in her ears and---not fifty feet away---Batman was hunkered down in the shadows, no doubt ready to play havoc with her plans.

The cape had given him away, although she knew it was mostly luck that had her looking in the right direction when he reacted to the wailing. Whatever the cape was made of, it waivered ever so slightly from the movement beneath it. And how did she know it was Batman? She didn't, but of all the things she could imagine hiding under a cape, Batman was the worst, so she assumed it was he.

And she seethed.

Eddie Lobb belonged to her. She knew that nothing legal was going to happen on the sidewalk below. And she knew Batman well enough to guess that he'd gotten wind of it and that he was here to stop it. Whatever Eddie Lobb had promised his boss, wasn't going to happen---in a big way. But, dammit, Eddie Lobb belonged to her. She didn't intend for him to think that all the costumed fates of Gotham had conspired and united against him. She intended that he look into her masked face, and hers alone, until he recognized his doom. For a moment, no longer, Catwoman wondered what, exactly, she intended to interrupt. Some sort of drug deal? An assassination? It didn't matter. All that mattered was Eddie Lobb.

Batman didn't really matter. Let him do what he wanted, so long as Eddie saw her first.

The seething stopped, her fists unclenched. She opened the unreflecting wool sack and pulled out a coil of nylon rope.

Let him come over and try to stop her, or even, ask what she was doing. She'd tell him. Maybe they could work out a deal.

She crept over to a ventilation pipe rising from the asphalt. After making certain it was well anchored, she knotted one end securely around it, then ran the rope back to the front wall. Her plan called for getting the drop, literally, on Eddie as he arrived, but the roof was much too high for free-fall. She peered over the edge, mentally measuring the distance to the pavement---about sixty feet. Then she carefully recoiled the rope, wrapping it between her elbow and the palm of her hand, counting by two with each revolution. When she reached forty, she knotted a trio of loops into the rope and laid the entire coil carefully atop the wall. Now the rope would get her safely down to dropping height.

Across the roof, Batman shook his head slowly. He'd recognized Catwoman as soon as she moved toward the pipe. He watched her stand in his full sight and fuss with the rope. He had a pretty good idea what she meant to do. Batman didn't count Catwoman among his worst enemies, and he would have liked to know how the Moldavians had managed to contact her, but stealing the icon was her kind of job.

Too bad. Considering what he'd already done to the icon, Batman might have been tempted to let her get away with it, but he wanted to follow the box to the Connection, not back to the Commonwealth of Independent States. He'd have to stop her. He figured he could wait until she started to move---no sense risking the noise of a scuffle, although it was hard to imagine that the Gagauzi could hear anything but their own wailing voices.

Indeed, they couldn't hear anything else, but the two disparate personalities on the roof heard a booming sound that quickly resolved itself into an automobile stereo system with its volume control set for stun. It was not a sound either expected to hear, and they tracked its approach down the avenue. It slowed. It became abruptly silent. Without acknowledgement, they both crept forward. They saw what they wanted to see: a solitary walker headed this way in the next crosstown block, but hadn't made the noise. That had come from a high-riding 4 × 4 rolling blind and mute around the corner.

Catwoman gathered her rope. Batman pressed his hand against the cement capstone on the wall, muffling the sound of the thermite with his gauntlet. This wasn't in anybody's script. Maybe the gregarious Gagauzi had sung the wrong song. Catwoman drew her legs up onto the capstones, then dared a glance over her shoulder. Their eyes met for an instant, and they could no longer pretend to be unaware of each other.

The Gagauzi sang. The 4 × 4 cruised closer. Finally someone, Batman guessed the young Russian, spotted trouble coming toward them. Then all hell broke loose as the windows of the 4 × 4 came down and shotgun muzzles pointed outward. From the roof it was possible to see the flash as the shots were fired, but not to know where they struck. But someone screamed. The 4 × 4 stopped, and a trio of lanky youths in red satin jackets got out on the far side. They were firing their guns as they came around toward the sidewalk.

Batman's options had been reduced to a single imperative innocents were being slaughtered. It was time to go below. Snapping the filament into a pliable steel groove in his gauntlet, he vaulted over the capstone. The last thing he saw was Catwoman glowering at him.

Despite the billowing cape and the dragline, Batman dropped like a stone, as he'd expected. He was ready when his feet touched the pavement and the dragline began to recoil. For an instant---less than a second, less than a heartbeat---his body was going in two different directions; then the dragline whipped out of his hand and his knees bent to absorb his excess momentum. No gymnast dismounting from the high bar or rings could have stuck the landing better. The cape was still furling around his shoulders when Batman took his first defiant stride toward the gunmen. In his peripheral vision he could see that two of six ex-citizens of the former Soviet Union were lying on the pavement. Two more had panicked and run, but the last pair was fighting back, no quarter asked or given, bare hands and a particularly nasty-looking knife against modern firearms.

The Gagauzi would be a force to be reckoned with if they managed to arm themselves into the twentieth century, although it was Batman's self-appointed task to see that didn't happen. He advanced on the nearest satin jacket. The kid---he couldn't have been more than fourteen---pumped to the gun and fired, aiming right where he was supposed to: at the yellow-and-black emblem on Batman's chest where the thin polymer armor was bonded to a sturdy layer of Kevlar. Batman didn't blink. The kid threw away his gun with a scream and headed for the 4 × 4. Batman let him go.