fic: Chinese Boxes 5/11

[01cheers]

13. Mission prep

As of the following morning, she has a different name again, for the next few days, at least; and Gianfranco Varese has a different fiancée. Instead of the sunny blonde Chiara Dametti, he will be courting sultry brunette Chiara Damiani, if courting is the right term for avoiding anything that might piss off her dangerous boyfriend. They spent the better part of two hours after they flew back into Lugano at the Wainwright Security office, producing an Italian carta d’identità for her; as a paper booklet with limited security features, it is a lot easier to fake than a passport, and is a valid ID anywhere in Italy, should she need to show it. The legend they’ve concocted has her as a Piemontese, essentially a French-Italian who has lived most of her life in France, which should explain her fluent French and less-than-fluent and slightly French-accented Italian.

Once the document is ready they go out for lunch with Theo before they need to head out of town in the early afternoon. The conversation is lively but not uniformly so in all directions: Selina and Theo have no problem talking, nor do Theo and Bruce, but Selina and Bruce exchange relatively few remarks, and the tone of these is more reserved than usual, at least on his side; Bruce is still cross with her for cornering him into letting her in on the dealings with Wu, but cannot say so openly as otherwise he would invite taunts from her suggesting that it was his jealousy talking. For once Theo is not picking up on this dynamic, too preoccupied with the idea of the two of them galloping off to take on Wu & co on their own, with minimal resources and no one more capable than poor scared Gianfranco for support. Needless to say, the remotest suggestion of his participation is immediately dismissed by Bruce invoking his kids; Selina is glad she does not have any, or else she suspects he would have locked her up inside a vault sooner than let her join him.

“I wish you would wait a few days, Brandon,” Theo persists, giving Bruce an accusing look; he does not need to be told whose idea this urgent plan is. “I’m waiting for the China NCB contact to get back to me on the intermediaries and on the beneficiary owners of the fronts, and for our boys here to get the full lists of COSCO ship schedules and ports of call so we can cross-reference the yarn shipments to them. Of course it would be good to get this Wu’s fingerprints so I could ask for a proper database check on him, but with a bit more time, you can probably get them without locking yourselves in there. And then we could just ship it all out to the Carabinieri to take care of.”

“If we wait a few days we’ll never know when they start suspecting something and change their routine enough to hide it from us,” Bruce argues. “Or if they decide to kill Gianfranco in the meantime. You yourself said that the Italian law enforcement is hard to mobilise because there are two agencies to deal with. We can get in and get the evidence we need and then wait for them to move.”

“You could probably get enough evidence if you just unleash our happy little hornets’ nest on them without going in yourself,” Theo counters.

“The drones?” Bruce replies, smirking. “Don’t worry, I already have them sitting right outside their fence in two cigarette packets waiting to be switched on. But we’ll get more info if we go in first, map the premises and then send them in. Saves battery power, too, meaning we won’t have them wasting it on unnecessary detours so we can get more footage of the parts we need to see before the battery dies. Besides,” he adds, “Wu gave us the appointment already, if we stand him up he’ll know something’s off. And we’ll have the Kevlar to keep us each in one piece.”

“Which doesn’t protect against head shots,” Theo reminds him grimly. “But it’s better than nothing. Are you sure this supplier of yours is any good? You should have told him to come here with the fabric, we could have run tests on it in our lab to check that it has the ratings he claims...”

“I’m sure he’s good,” Bruce promises him. “I’ve dealt with him before, he’s reliable, works on major US defence contracts. And he can’t come here, he is only at the airbase for a couple of days and has a full agenda. He sent me the basic specs on the Kevlar, it looks quite impressive, high resistance and less... obvious than the usual kind. I’ll find out more when we meet.”

“The best thing to do would be see if you can get your hands on any of the stuff Wayne Enterprises makes. From what I hear, they’ve been looking into enhancing Kevlar properties for ultrathin body armour, and their research capability is legendary, so if anyone has top-of-the-line fabric, it’s them. Perhaps you could use the Wayne contacts you got those micro-propeller drone engines from, or maybe this guy you’re meeting can help you. I know there’s very little time left, but still.”

“I’ll see what I can get,” Bruce replies, straight-faced. Sitting next to him, Selina is doing her best to keep that famous poker face of hers, which is an uphill battle considering that she knows that this guy Bruce is meeting is the Wayne CEO. “I don’t expect us to get into prolonged gunfights out there, anyway.”

“Just don’t do anything too stupid,” Theo tells him with a hint of a scowl. “I need my star consultant back alive,” he continues, tipping his head to Selina. “And I’d rather you came back too. I don’t want to think of the possibility of this company having a different owner.”

***

They leave right after lunch, after they agree that Bruce will drop off their villa keys, cell phones and her tablet - he is taking his laptop to Prato - and any other remaining compact valuables at the office in the morning for safekeeping, and pick up car keys from Theo - with the Sesto being too obvious, he is lending Bruce his spare car to drive to Prato this time. But for now, they are once again in the Sesto, headed east to the US Air Force European airbase at Aviano, just over two hundred miles east of Lugano near the Slovenian border.

“Will it help if I say I’m sorry?” she ventures when they have been in the car for the better part of half an hour and barely said two words to each other. It was the same on the plane earlier that morning.

“Depends on whether you get back in one piece,” is the muttered reply.

“I have no intention of getting myself killed or otherwise fucked up.” Not unless you have that intention, anyway. “I really think I can help.”

“I have no doubt you can help,” he answers, his voice slightly more animated. “But it’s a question of risk and reward. I still say the risk is too great.”

“By that logic, it’s just as great for you. You can’t judge the two of us by a different measure, Bruce, I didn’t spend years chasing criminals in Gotham, but I’ve faced down plenty of them, in prison and out. It’s only fair that we share the risk now.”

“Fair, maybe. I just don’t like it. I’d rather know that you’re safe than walk into danger with you.”

OK, at least he is talking now. “Guess what, I feel the same. But I think if we do it together, our chances of getting out are better than otherwise. I actually think our chances aren’t really that bad,” she ventures, doing her best to sound more convinced than she feels.

“You’re forgetting the great variable of Gianfranco fucking it up for all of us,” Bruce replies wryly. “I believe he’s honest with us now, but I still don’t trust him not to do something incredibly stupid at the worst possible moment.”

She allows herself a laugh. This is as close to being forgiven as she’d hope for. “Well, if he does, I’ll be right next to you kicking his ass.”

He gives a somewhat exaggerated sigh. “It’s a deal.” Apparently, he has finally given up on being angry with her.

By then they have reached the Milan ring road and are crawling along with the traffic before heading east. “Theo was right, you should have just asked Lucius to come to Lugano,” she mutters when they have moved less than half a mile in a minute.

“There are two reasons it’s not the best option,” Bruce counters. “First, if that happened it would be difficult to manage things in a way that he and Theo wouldn’t cross paths, like the lunch today - I couldn’t tell Lucius to go have lunch on his own, and I’d promised Theo we’d go out for a bite. I don’t want to think of what will happen if those two meet. Even if Lucius plays along, it’ll be as good as writing Bruce Wayne on a post-it note and sticking it to my forehead, and I’d rather not let it come to that.”

She wonders wryly how long Bruce will manage to keep this two-timing status quo, but chooses to say nothing.

“And second,” he continues, “I’d like to see the new plane he’s flying here. He’s pulled strings in the Pentagon thanks to the Tumbler and Bat helicopter contracts to let him land it in Aviano under the pretence of a test flight. Lugano is too small for it to land, not to mention Swiss and thus non-NATO, and Milan Malpensa has no military base.”

She simply shakes her head in response. He’ll never grow out of fast-vehicle toys.

***

“Liar,” she turns to Bruce accusingly, once she has managed to move her jaw again. The way it dropped a full inch a few seconds ago was rather embarrassing, but luckily, he was not watching her.

Bruce turns to her now, all innocence and wounded virtue.

“You do own a space shuttle,” she insists, by way of an explanation. Once they were past the security perimeter with the passes Lucius had procured for them collected at the gate and had reached the airfield, she was in no doubt about which new plane Bruce was referring to, in spite of the two squadrons’ worth of F16 Fighting Falcons sitting there. The F16 is a beautiful plane for sure, but the gleaming fat needle with its backswept slanted wings seeming little more than a forward extension of stabiliser fins is truly out of this world. Even for her not being as mad about military toys as Bruce, it was worth the nearly three-hour drive to see it.

Bruce looks relieved at the reason for her accusation, and actually has the gall to look mischievously pleased. “The operative words were, as I recall, not to my knowledge. It was still in the early stages of prototype development when I... left. And no, it doesn’t fly in space, it stays in the stratosphere,” he concludes, as if the revelation made the craft less impressive.

“Still the fastest thing to carry a human that isn’t rocket-propelled,” Lucius says from behind them. They were too busy gawking at the plane to notice him walk up. “I left Gotham half an hour after you left Lugano, and I still beat you here by more than an hour,” he says, grinning. “Selina?” He has finally put two and two together as to who Bruce’s companion is; understandable considering he has only seen her face to face once, and she was wearing a mask. Apparently, the name of Céline Caille did not ring a bell immediately, and Bruce did not tell him who exactly he was bringing along. “Good to see you again! I was right then, wasn’t I?” he continues, winking at her.

She remembers it, his throwaway line back in Gotham, at the height of the war. I like your girlfriend, Mr Wayne. Lucius knew it before either of them did. “Well, he is a lucky guy,” she admits, smiling back at him.

“What are you two talking about, taking bets on me?” Bruce questions them, looking from one to the other.

“Not quite. Lucius took a bet on me about half a year ago. You probably don’t remember, but he called me your girlfriend back then,” she explains.

Interestingly, Bruce looks like he does remember. “He was a few months early, that’s all,” he counters, shaking his head the tiniest bit.

“How fast does it fly?” Selina asks, eyeing the plane again once they are past the hugs and back pats.

“Mach 5.5,” Lucius supplies, unhelpfully. “About four thousand miles an hour,” he clarifies. “It’s called hypersonic, as opposed to supersonic, which was, up to now, the fastest manned non-space aircraft. It flies with a pulse detonation engine; instead of burning fuel, it effectively explodes it in a continuous series of micro-explosions, thousands of pulses per second. The engine has no moving parts and much higher efficiency than a conventional jet. And now that we’ve reached optimum mixing of fuel and oxidiser, we are at a weight and cost level sufficient to enable production past the experimental prototype stage. For a start, we’re working on a long-range, high-speed recon aircraft that flies high enough to be out of range of any current defences. That’s what this one is,” Lucius gestures to the needle. “Ours is the only viable prototype now that both competing military projects, the Blackswift and the Borealis, have been mothballed. After that we are thinking of producing commercial planes. We’re way ahead of NASA and the other manufacturers like GE and Pratt & Whitney in terms of developing and testing this. I daresay Wayne Enterprises is going to be a household name in a few years’ time,” he concludes with a proud smile.

Strangely, Bruce seems less than unequivocally delighted at the prospect.

“Unless we beat you to it,” he parries, looking sideways at Lucius; she cannot quite tell how serious he is.

“We?” she questions him.

“Bruce’s English researchers,” Lucius explains to her. “Don’t know if he told you that he owns an outfit called Reaction Engines Limited in Oxfordshire.” So that’s the research facility he mentioned back at their first dinner. “They’ve been working on an alternative to the pulse detonation engine for hypersonic travel called a precooled jet engine. Ever heard of something called Scimitar?” he asks Selina.

She shakes her head. “Nope. Only the sword kind.”

“It’s part of the research for the European LAPCAT programme for commercial hypersonic flight,” Bruce takes his turn to explain. “They’ve developed a lab scale precooler and tested it successfully under representative conditions. Doesn’t fly yet, but it’s a matter of months. The issue is the amount of liquid hydrogen it needs, but it’s going to be a lot quieter than the pulse detonation kind. Don’t know if you’re managed to deal with it, Lucius,” he continues, almost-tauntingly, “but last time I heard, it sounded like a giant jackhammer.”

“We’re working on it,” Lucius concedes. “It’s better already than you last heard. And it’s still as fast,” he finishes, grinning again.

“Have you flown in this?” Selina asks, turning to Bruce.

He looks somewhat crestfallen. “Not yet. Lucius wouldn’t let me until he was sure they’d dealt with all the glitches so it wouldn’t explode mid-air. Now that you’re flying it yourself, Lucius, it’s only fair that you let me try it.”

“I need to think about it,” Lucius answers coyly. Bruce mock-glares at him but does not press the point.

“So how’s your Swiss company doing, Mr Wainwright?” Lucius asks when they finally walk away from the aeronautical wonder to go look at the Kevlar inside the office compound. “Did he tell you I helped him develop his company’s business and set up his alter ego ten years ago?”

“He helped me set up both of them,” Bruce jumps in. “This one and the Batman. I’d picked the name, but all the Wainwright documented backstory that was added after that is his doing, and so far it’s holding up nicely,” he finishes, before answering Lucius. “We’re doing fine. It isn’t anywhere as big as Wayne, will never be, but it’s doing good business, and I like what we’re working on. I’ve brought you some of our toys to take a look, I’ll show you later.”

“Can’t wait.” Lucius seems to have a habit of grinning at Bruce, like an indulgent uncle watching a favourite nephew. “Right now, I think I recognise one of my toys that I made for you a long time ago,” he continues, tipping his head fractionally at Selina’s pearls. “I once put a mini GPS tracker into the clasp of this necklace at Bruce’s request.”

“I know,” Selina answers him. “It’s still there. I have you to thank for him asking me to dance, then. You see, the first time we met in a... non-business setting, he surprised me at a party to take this necklace back from me.”

“Back?” Lucius repeats.

“I’d... borrowed them first, before he actually gave them to me.” Which means that the pearls have brought them together twice already.

“Ah. I forgot you were good at other things besides fighting.” Lucius can’t help the smirk.

“Yes I am, that’s what I have to keep reminding him about when he tries to keep me out of this. Safecracking, all kinds of theft, generally snooping around...”

“And taking prints,” Bruce adds. She cannot tell if he is being literal or sarcastic, but is glad that he no longer sounds sulky when her participation is brought up.

“Well, I’ve brought something for you that should help you in the snooping around department,” Lucius says, turning to her, when they are inside the temporary office he has commandeered at the base. “Bruce told me you needed something that would provide instant automatic translation from spoken Chinese without the speakers knowing about it, and of course he knows that we’ve developed just the thing for the CIA.” He takes a cigarette packet-like object out of his silver titanium briefcase, and she wonders if all spy gadgets come packaged in cigarette-packet-sized cardboard. “Basically, the technology, or its components, have been around for a while, things like speech recognition and voice synthesis software and online translation engines and Bluetooth in-ear speaker-microphones. We just put it together in one package, and fine-tuned the software to make it focus on a chosen language while filtering out the rest and reduce the error percentage enough to make it useful.” Once he has taken out the contents, the gadget looks like a couple of commonplace items, a pink silicone in-ear speaker, like a miniature hearing aid, and a chip unit the size of a mini mp3 player. “You switch it on here,” he shows her a sliding switch on the chip unit, “and the speaker activates automatically. I have Mandarin speech recognition and English voice synthesis software preloaded, assuming that Chinese is the most important language you need to understand, but I can switch it for Italian if I got it wrong.”

“No, you got it right. I’ve been practicing Italian for the past month and a half, I can actually understand it pretty well by now,” she reassures him. “Can I try it out?”

“Of course,” Lucius pulls up his laptop and calls up a Chinese radio station site. “In fact, I suggest that you practice between now and your meeting so you know exactly what it’s like. But first,” he continues, opening his briefcase again and pulling out what looks like a plastic-wrapped quilted golden cushion before ripping off the plastic and letting the fabric spill on the desk in loose folds, “let me show you the other thing I’ve brought for all of you.”

This, then, must be the much-vaunted Wayne Kevlar - her cat burglar suit, just like Bruce’s Batsuit, was made of the black-coated variety, but she knows enough to remember that gold is the natural, untreated Kevlar colour. The shiny quilted fabric looks surprisingly flimsy and soft; she knows that Kevlar is used for sports clothing and boat sails and the like, but she would have thought that body armour would look, well, bulkier and sturdier.

“Does this stop bullets?” she asks, unable to contain her incredulity.

“Does it ever,” Lucius says with more than a touch of pride. “This isn’t ordinary Kevlar, it’s a composite material based on woven Kevlar fabric, with enhanced ballistic resistance and higher dimensional stability to achieve shallower impact profiles. We use plain-woven Hexcel Aramid, high performance 600 denier Kevlar KM-2, and a shear thickening fluid based on colloidal silica provided as a water suspension, but as a means of preparing a stable concentrated dispersion we replace water in the suspension with ethylene glycol, a solvent, and then add an equal volume of ethanol to aid the impregnation of the fluid into the fabric. The composite fabric is first heated to remove the ethanol, and the ethylene glycol is then removed by drying the fabric at even higher temperature, leaving only the silica particles dispersed within the individual fibers in the fabric yarn. To prevent leakage of the silica, and because Kevlar is known be sensitive to moisture, we encapsulate the impregnated Kevlar layers in heat-sealed polyethylene film, and cover the film with a layer of untreated Kevlar on either side.”

She has a strange sensation of listening to a foreign language she has studied but not quite mastered; she can make out individual words and just enough of the overall meaning, but large chunks of it still escape her. “What’s shear thickening?”

Lucius seems oblivious to the fact that his audience does not share his double PhD in physics and chemistry. “In scientific terms, it’s a non-Newtonian flow behaviour characterised by significant increase in viscosity with increasing shear stress. It is a reversible process that can induce dramatic changes in suspension microstructure, and induce highly nonlinear behaviour. At low strain rates that occur with normal motion, the fluid won’t restrict movement. But at the high strain rates that happen at ballistic impact, the fluid will thicken and in doing so, act as a shield. The fluid forms jamming clusters resulting from hydrodynamic lubrication forces between particles, so-called hydroclusters. This instant liquid-to-solid transition makes a lot of difference is in energy absorption and dissipation, so the treated Kevlar has superior ballistic impact and penetration resistance without any added bulk or loss in flexibility.”

“Am I supposed to understand any of this?” Bruce challenges him; Selina is relieved to hear that she is not the only relatively-clueless listener.

“No.” Lucius’s grin grows wider. This must be something of a running joke between the two. “The only thing you really need to know is that the ballistic performance of the eight layers of impregnated Kevlar used in here is the same as that of a standard 20-layer Kevlar vest, but as you see it’s much more flexible and has half the thickness of the 20 layers at only one-tenth of an inch, so there’s no bulk to show. You can both make vests to wear next to the torso and stitch this into the lining of your suits to give you double protection that won’t be visible and won’t trip any detectors. It should be enough to protect against medium-velocity bullets, from handguns and most submachine guns; there may be bruising, but no internal organ damage. Hopefully you won’t run into rifle rounds.”

Now that Lucius has explained it in practical terms, she is impressed. Basically, he is giving them functional body armour in the shape of a thin layer of lining. She finally understands the logic behind Bruce’s seemingly absurd request to Gianfranco to bring a girl with a sewing machine to his Prato villa; when he mentioned it earlier, she had a hard time imagining the concepts of bulletproof Kevlar and sewing machine in the same context.

Even Bruce seems to regard the Kevlar with a sense of wonder, judging by the way he is fiddling with a corner, feeling the flimsy fabric.

“Do you want to try it out?” Lucius asks.

“No, I trust you,” Bruce concedes. “I’m curious, but I don’t want you to raise eyebrows at the base by first asking for a gun and then firing it. Let me show you something we’ve made to help us there,” he offers, pulling out his own supply of cigarette-packet packaging, which Selina recognises as the drone containers. “Since Wayne mothballed the sonar research because of its privacy infringement potential, we’ve gone a different route at Wainwright, as you probably remember, and started developing our spy tools as standalone purpose-built units. I’ll leave you these two boxes for your entertainment, but first, let me show you.”

Selina, who has already seen these in action, or at least in motion, goes to an adjacent room to test out the Chinese translator - and while Bruce and Lucius play around with what Theo called a happy little hornets’ nest, she listens to a few minutes of the Chinese radio station broadcast - and is impressed. It is not 100% perfect; there is the occasional glitch or phrase that makes no sense in English, but that should probably be expected with a tonal language where the same combination of sounds can mean radically different things depending on the tone it is pronounced in. Still, without speaking a word of Chinese, she can understand the majority of what is being said, and both the speaker and the smooth generated voice it emits are comfortable enough for her to imagine listening to it all day.

By the time she is done with trying it out and returns to the other room, Bruce and Lucius are also done playing their recon games; she makes it back just in time to hear them discuss subsequent arrangements, and learn about a welcome change of plan. Lucius, apparently concerned for their safety and able to smoothly present it, not unlike Selina, as a series of arguments about the utility of his skills, has just called his senior contact at the Pentagon to request authorisation for him to land the hypersonic at Pisa Galileo after a short jump. Luckily for them, the airport nearest to Prato has a large military contingent in addition to the civilian operations, and the Italian Air Force authorities must have been curious enough to see the craft to have granted flyover and landing permission quickly and without any hassle. Lucius cannot come to stay in Prato for fear of the Chinese tailing them, but this way he will maintain a mobile office at Pisa airport for the duration of their stint, assuming that it will be over in less than a week, under the pretence of taking an impromptu long weekend in Italy, a privilege that he rarely permits himself despite being a CEO of an industry giant. Selina does her best to express her thanks to him before they part company that evening after a quick dinner at the airbase canteen, the two of them bound back for Lugano and Lucius about to fly to Pisa; nominally her gratitude is just for the Kevlar and the gadget, but judging by the way Lucius looks her in the eye, he understands the full meaning.

***

Before they leave for Italy for the fourth time in two weeks the following morning, she gives Bruce her cell phone to hand over to Theo in the office, but not before she has scribbled the PIN code on the battery inside. Theo does not need to know it yet, but this way she can always tell him later where to look without needing to disclose the code over an unsecure connection; in the worst case, if she does not get a chance, he’ll figure it out sooner or later if need be. And Bruce doesn’t need to know that she is prepared to tell Theo the code, or why she is prepared to do so; he doesn’t need to know that she has typed up a memo on it with her bank account details, stating that in the event of her death, the money in the accounts should go to the Wayne Foundation. She has no time for a formal will, but hopes that it will be admissible in lieu of one. If she doesn’t make it back, she wants Bruce to know that he has, indeed, made her a better person, that he has made her care, even if she isn’t sentimental enough to write a confession of love to Bruce himself and thinks that he wouldn’t be either, even if it is probably true for both by now.

He is waiting for her downstairs to set the alarms, lock the house and take both their keys to the office together with the rest while she takes the bike to the Lugano train station. She stops in front of a mirror on the upper landing before joining him, and is struck by the same déjà vu moment for the second time in six weeks. Same girl, same town this time, same necklace. But instead of heading out for a date with a man miraculously returned from the dead, she is heading out for what will be arguably the most dangerous, and certainly the least materially profitable, caper of her life.

_______________________________________

Notes to Ch 13

The Aviano airbase is the NATO/US Air Force in Europe base in Italy, hence I used it as Lucius' arrival point. The Pisa airport does, indeed, double as a military airbase.

Info on both pulse detonation engines and hypersonic craft in general is scarce and vague and refers a lot to prototypes and mothballed projects; but it is a known fact that hypersonic craft have been tested successfully once or twice, and unsuccessfully most recently this July, when the thing blew up somewhere over the Pacific. Reaction Engines Ltd in Oxfordshire is a very real company; but needless to say, rather than belonging to Mr Wainwright, it largely belongs to its founder, Alan Bond, and indeed works on developing a Scimitar precooled jet engine for the European LAPCAT II hypersonic flight project.

The translator gadget is fake as such, but is feasible in principle; it would be a simple matter of pairing up existing speech recognition software with a translation engine - if you've used Google Translate you'll know it isn't that bad. The practical difficulty would be the percentage of error in speech recognition, though I suspect that something like this may actually turn up several years down the line. I basically gloss over that and assume that it lets Selina understand the gist.

The info on Kevlar, including the silica impregnation technology, was lifted from actual scientific research. I don't expect anyone to be so profoundly masochistic as to read a 9-page paper on Kevlar treatment, but just to show where I got the gist of Lucius' Kevlar geekery from, here is the link.

(end of Ch 13) - continued in part 6