Chapter 93

[ 1,204 words ]

Julian’s POV

Zane put the tablet on my desk at nine thirty on a Wednesday morning with the expression he wore when something had happened that he found entertaining and he suspected I would not.

“You need to see this,” he said.

I looked at the screen.

A woman. Early thirties, dark hair, wearing a carbon fibre suit that had been purchased somewhere that sold carbon fibre suits to people who wanted to look like they wore carbon fibre suits. She was standing beside a car, a decent car, not the right car, holding a helmet with a blacked-out visor. She was looking at the camera with the expression of someone who had decided they were being mysterious.

The caption beneath the video read: I am Catwoman. Always was. #Catwoman #UnmaskedMyself

“There’s more,” Zane said.

He took the tablet back and scrolled. There were more. Considerably more. Fourteen more, as it turned out, spread across four platforms, ranging from the vaguely plausible, a woman who actually appeared to have some racing background, based on the way she held the wheel in the edited footage she had posted, to the entirely unconvincing, including one who had filmed herself in what appeared to be a supermarket car park at night and another who had posted a single photograph of herself in sunglasses and called it done.

Fifteen women. Fifteen women had publicly claimed, across the past three weeks, to be Catwoman.

“It’s a trend,” Zane said. He sat down and crossed his ankles on the edge of my desk, which I had told him not to do and which he continued to do. “Someone started it, someone else copied, and now it’s a thing. The racing forums are losing their minds p>

“How many of them can actually drive p>

“Two, maybe three. The rest are—” He gestured vaguely at the tablet, “aspirational p>

I watched the footage. All fifteen of them, which took me forty-three minutes; I was thorough even when thoroughness was not strictly necessary. I watched every clip they had posted, every edited race video, every carefully positioned photograph. I watched the way they held their steering wheels and took their corners and managed their braking points.

None of them were Catwoman.

It wasn’t a close call. It wasn’t a question of degree or margin; the distance between what these women were doing and what Catwoman did on a circuit was the distance between someone who had read about racing and someone who had been breathing it since they were a teenager. Catwoman’s line was not a learned thing. It was not something you could study and replicate. It was the product of years of instinct built into muscle memory, of thousands of laps taken at speed until the geometry of a corner became something you felt rather than calculated.

The woman in the supermarket car park did not have Catwoman’s line.

None of them did.

I closed the tablet and handed it back to Zane.

“Well?” he said.

“No p>

“That’s it? Just no p>

“They’re not her.” I picked up my phone. “None of them are anywhere near her p>

Zane uncrossed his ankles and leaned forward. “Julian. Fifteen women have publicly claimed to be the person you’ve been trying to find for four years. Does that not p>

“It tells me she’s significant enough that people want to be her,” I said. “Which I already knew.” I pulled up the Dubai security contact’s number. “It also tells me that whoever she actually is, she’s watching this happen and finding it either amusing or alarming. Probably both p>

“You think she knows about the trend p>

“She follows everything that happens in the racing world. Of course she knows.” I pressed call and held the phone to my ear. “And she knows that every woman who falsely claims to be Catwoman draws attention away from whoever Catwoman actually is. Whether she planned it or not, this benefits her p>

Zane looked at me for a moment. “You think she started it p>

“I think it doesn’t matter if she did.” The call connected. I switched to the logistics of what I needed, the camera package, the drone coverage, and the facial recognition deployment across the event perimeter. My Dubai contact listened and confirmed, and I ended the call and made two notes on the pad on my desk.

Zane was still watching me.

“You increased the Dubai package,” he said.

“Significantly p>

“Julian. Dubai is six weeks away, and you have fifteen fake Catwomans generating noise, and you’re increasing security deployment. Some people might say that’s p>

“Efficient p>

“I was going to say obsessive p>

“Same thing.” I set the pad down. “She’ll be in Dubai. I’ve been certain of it for months, and I’m more certain now. The Dubai 24-Hour Race is the biggest underground event on the calendar. She has never missed it in four years.” I looked at Zane. “And this year I will have every entry point covered, every face documented, every vehicle tracked from the moment it enters the perimeter p>

Zane was quiet for a moment. “And if she doesn’t come? If the fake Catwoman noise makes her go to ground p>

“She won’t go to ground.” I said it with the certainty of someone who had spent four years studying the pattern of how someone moved through the world. “Catwoman doesn’t go to ground. She adapts. She finds the angle. She wins.” I picked up the phone again. “Going to ground is not in her nature p>

Zane looked at me with the expression he produced when he had decided to say something and was choosing the right moment. “How are you this certain about someone you’ve never seen p>

I thought about the Bronx. The tyre mark is still warm on the bridge road. The timing of thirty-one races across four years that never once conflicted with an IG Technologies board meeting. The sentence about warm air. The way she had taken the inside line in Vegas twelve years ago at a speed that had made me question everything I knew about what was possible.

“Because I’ve been in the same space as her more times than either of us knew,” I said. “And every time, she leaves something behind.” I set the phone down. “A pattern. A decision. A line through a corner that nobody else would have taken.” I looked at the window. “She thinks she’s invisible. She’s not. She’s just moving faster than everyone who’s looking p>

Zane was quiet for a long moment. “Until Dubai p>

“Until Dubai,” I said.

He picked up the tablet. Scrolled through the fifteen fake Catwomans one more time with a slight shake of his head. “This is genuinely funny, by the way. As a side note. Completely separate from everything else p>

“I know it’s funny p>

“The supermarket car park one, especially p>

“Zane p>

“Right.” He stood. “Dubai. Six weeks. I’ll coordinate with the security team.” At the door he paused. “Julian. When you find her — and I’m saying when because apparently I’ve accepted that this is happening — what exactly is the plan p>

I looked at the window. At the city outside, moving and indifferent.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said.

Which was not entirely true.

But it was true enough for today.

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