Investigation in the Clock Tower

What's taking him so long? Barbara Gordon asked herself as she looked at the gigantic clock that acted as her hideout's primary window to the outside world. One of the perks of making an active clock tower her main base of operations is that it was always blatantly obvious what time it was provided you can read a mirrored clock face, something that Barbara got used to doing very fast. What she hadn't gotten used to was the loud bell that went off every hour on the hour, and as the clock ticked over to eight o' clock, Barbara was thankful that she was able to convince Bruce to 'neglect fixing' the "broken" bell in the Gotham Clock Tower that he just so happened to own. She had enough problems without having to risk going deaf in her own sanctuary.

And that's what it was, regardless of whose name was on the paperwork. She had been using this place as her personal hideout since the beginning of her career as Batgirl, and over the years she had make several additions to make it her own. The space was cluttered with a cot that she could rest in if she needed to, a small area in the corner where she could train and practice her batarang skills, a trophy case where she kept mementos of her greatest personal victories, and her pride and joy: a state-of-the-art computer rig generously provided by Wayne Tech. Sure her personal laptop was her true baby, but she couldn't deny that this setup was sweet as hell and a processing powerhouse in comparison. More than that though, it was a show of trust from Batman himself, a sign of acceptance and approval for her activities that was able to shine through the gruff and overly serious shell that he put around himself. The gesture alone meant so much more to her than the hardware itself.

Just as she was about to check on the new program she was testing, her ears picked up on the sound of footfalls in the rafters between the constant ticking of turning gears. Turning her head to look up into the darkness, she said, "You're late."

"Saying I'm late implies we had a set meeting time," the jovial voice of Dick Grayson responded as he did a front flip down to the floor, dressed in his Nightwing garb, "All you did was tell me to get here as soon as possible."

"Yeah, and I know how long it takes for you to get here from Bludhaven," Barbara shot back, "So again, you're late."

"Okay, so I made one or two stops on the way," he said with a shrug, "Sue me. You didn't make it sound that important. If I knew it was, I would've hurried."

"That's because I'm not sure if it is yet," Barbara said, "But it could be, hence why I wanted to talk in person. There's some stuff I want to show you."

"Ooooookay?" He walked up to stand by her, "What's this all about Babs?"

She looked dead into the eyes behind the black domino mask and said, "Charlie Simmons."

Dick sighed, "Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I'm guessing Bruce told you about the whole pheromone thing too?"

Barbara nodded, "Yeah, he did. It got me thinking about what we thought we knew about him, and I'm starting to think he's been playing us all."

"Babs, look, I know you never really liked the guy, but playing us? Come on... he was as blindsided by this as we were. He's unlucky, not malicious."

"I'm not so sure about that," Barbara said, "I told you about when I went to patch things up with Kara, right? Well ever since then something has been nagging at me... I heard some weird noises coming from his room, and when Kara and I went in, he said something about people saying he had a feminine groan."

Dick raised a brow, "What? Why was that so weird?"

"Because I never told him that what I heard sounded like a woman," Barbara said, "Which means he knew that's what I would interpret what I heard as..."

"Okay, that's... weird, but circumstantial at best. That better not be all you have."

Barbara scoffed, "Come on Dick, you know me better than that. Of course there's more. I didn't push too much into it at the time, and in hindsight maybe I should have, but once I heard about the whole pheromone thing it stopped being so easy for me to brush aside. And then I remembered that Kara told me Charlie lost his cell phone when he was kidnapped by Metallo. So on a hunch, I went out to Metropolis yesterday... or more accurately, the woods outside of Metropolis. And I found this."

She grabbed the cell phone in question off her desk and held it up for him to see.

"You found that in the woods?" Nightwing asked, astounded, "What was it doing out there? And how did you even manage that? That's miles of woodland. There's no way you could've searched it all in one day."

"I didn't need to," Barbara explained, "I looked at a satellite map of the area and found all of the spots in the forest within five miles of the city that had clear areas where the sky was visible, or more accurately where the ground was visible from the sky. Those were the places I narrowed my search to, since those were the only areas it could have fallen out of his pocket without completely shattering and make finding it pointless"

Dick furrowed his brow, "Okay, I must be missing something. Wouldn't that have made it worse? The trees would have at least broken the fall."

"Not if it fell out after Starfire landed there."

"Alright, I get that, but so what? Maybe he got airsick and she needed to land to give him a break."

"After being ferried around all over the place by Kara for months, I doubt he'd have a problem with airsickness," Barbara said, "The truth is, I don't have enough evidence to know why they landed, but them landing at all is suspicious given that Star could have stayed up there for hours, and that would have been safer than landing."

"Yeah, it would have," Dick admitted, stroking his chin, "Especially since she told me she thought she was being followed. If she had landed after that, it would have made her an easier target."

"Assuming she was being followed at all."

"What, you think she lied about it?"

"It's possible..." Barbara started to say, before he cut her off.

"No it isn't. She wouldn't have lied to me about something like that."

"Are you sure about that?" Barbara asked, turning to face him, "You told me that Starfire was acting weird shortly before she broke up with you. Have you considered that it could have started here?"

"...More than considered it," Dick admitted with some hesitance, crossing his arms in thought, "I even asked Kori what was wrong, but all she told me is that things weren't working between us anymore and that she needed to... move on. But I don't know what could have happened to cause her to act like this."

"Neither do I," Barbara said, "Not yet. But I think there could be a connection between that night and your break-up."

"What, you think Charlie had something to do with it?" Dick asked.

"Come on Dick, you're smart. You have to have at least suspected some fishy business by now. Don't you find it just a little too coincidental that you guys started having relationship problems so soon after this incident when there was no sign of it before? Something's up, and I know you feel it too."

Dick was quiet for several moments. Eventually he said, "Okay, so hypothetically let's say they are connected, and Charlie somehow convinced Starfire to break up with me for whatever reason. Right now all we have is conjecture and gut feelings. Where's the proof?"

Barbara turned to her computer and pulled up the file holding what data she managed to salvage, "I was hoping I could find something on the phone, but it wasn't easy getting anything out of it. The battery was dead, and there was some water damage from sitting out in the elements for almost a week, so I couldn't get the phone itself to work. But with a bit of work I was able to recover some stuff off of the memory card."

Dick leaned over to look at her screen, his arm brushing against her shoulder, "And? What did you find?"

"Not much, unfortunately," she confessed with a sigh, "The only thing worthwhile I found was this."

She opened up the call history and pointed at the screen, "In the window of time between when he was kidnapped and the news broke publicly about what exactly happened to him, there was a call from a number not listed in his contacts. I traced it, and it belongs to a burner phone that had already been ditched by the time I found it."

"Okay, yeah, that is suspicious. Why the heck would someone with a burner phone be calling him?"

"My guess was to check to see if he was alive," Barbara said, "You have your phone on you? I want to double-check something."

Dick reached into his utility belt and pulled out his cell phone, handing it off to her as he said, "Please don't tell me you called me all the way over here just to look at my cell phone."

"Not just that, but this will help me confirm something," she said. She punched in the pin number that she knew by heart at this point, then opened his call history and scrolled down until she found the call to Starfire from that night, "Okay, let's see... yeah, this call came in after yours. Which means whoever was calling him likely only knew what happened after the action was already over."

"So it wasn't someone who was there, but who heard it from another source," Dick said, "But Charlie's name didn't hit the news until the next morning, so whoever this person is had inside information, but wasn't there to personally witness the attack or they probably would have tried calling sooner. Or at least someone who personally knew Charlie and knew he was going to be there."

"Exactly. But if they were using a burner phone, it was someone who didn't want their communications with him to be traced. To me, this points to one particular possibility: he had a mole in the Justice League."

Dick turned to her, eyes wide, "Whoa, hold on a second Babs. That is one hell of a leap in logic. All you've got is a time stamp on a suspicious call."

"Do you have a better explanation? The time lines up pretty close with when the alert went out to the Justice League about an attack on one of their own."

"Maybe he has a relative who's in some shady line of work?" he suggested, before sighing and asking, "Even if we assume you are right, who would this mole be? And why would he want to have a mole in the League in the first place?"

"Well if he knew what his power was doing to Kara, he might have wanted someone to let him know if anyone in the Justice League was onto him. As for who it might be..." She slumped into her seat in defeat and admitted, "...I don't know. His pheromones only work on Kryptonians, so that narrows it down to four people. It obviously couldn't have been Supergirl, and Superman was on the scene before the call happened..."

"...Plus according to Lex's research, the pheromones only work on female Kryptonians," Dick added.

"Right. So it wasn't Connor either. The only other person who he could have mind controlled is Power Girl, but if she had been exposed to him sooner, she probably would have been protected from Lex's artificial pheromone like Kara was."

"So that's a dead end," Dick muttered, "Unless you think he might have someone on the inside who isn't actually influenced by his pheromones."

"Maybe? I'm not sure." Barbara sat back up and started going over the other windows she had open on her computer, "It was enough to get me suspicious though, so before I left Metropolis I stopped by Kara's place and set up some hidden cameras throughout the apartment."

"Uh, you know that she and Charlie are both on the Watchtower, right?" Dick asked, "Why bother bugging the place now?"

"It wasn't like I could have done it the last time I was there," she explained, "Kara was already wary of me then, and I didn't want to ruin my attempt to regain her trust by setting up some hidden devices she would've found the moment I left anyway. But with her in space right now, I had the perfect chance to place them when she wouldn't expect it. If she doesn't know to look for them, they have a chance of remaining hidden long enough to..."

She lingered on a particular window, one with a line graph and a long string of code that had finished running at some point while she was talking to Dick. "...Huh..."

"What, what is it?" he asked, coming up next to her to see for himself.

"Okay, so while I was waiting for you to get here, I started testing this program I developed that's able to scrub through video files and pick up moments of high activity, then highlight them for me so I can go back and review it later."

"Sounds like the kind of thing Bruce had me do back when I was Robin," Dick said with a chuckle.

"Well unlike him, I don't have an orphan boy to do my grunt work for me," Barbara teased, "Anyway, I decided to run the footage from the hidden cameras in Kara's apartment from last night through it, since those are several hours worth of video I already had on hand, and with the two of them off-world there shouldn't be much activity for the program to pick up on, other than when I was first setting up and testing them. Perfectly predictable where the spikes in activity should be, so I would know if the program is working or not. But..."

She pointed to a spike in the middle of the line graph, "Right here, there's a sudden spike on activity from multiple cameras. Either my program's glitching out..."

"...or your cameras caught an intruder," Dick finished, "Think it might be our mystery caller?"

"It'd make sense," Barbara said as she navigated to the video files in question, "With Charlie and Kara in the hands of the Justice League, someone would have to go in and get rid of any incriminating evidence. Now let's see... according to the graph, the first activity spike was in the living room..."

Barbara found the video from the living room camera and jumped ahead to shortly before the point where the graph told her the activity started. Letting the video play out, she and Dick watched as the skylight was pulled open, and a tall feminine figure descended into the apartment. The fiery hair and purple costume gave away her identity pretty much immediately.

"Starfire...?" Dick muttered, staring at the screen in shock, "What's she doing?"

"Not sure, but we're about to find out."

Starfire looked around the room briefly and, not seeing anyone around, made a beeline for the bedroom. Barbara paused the video, brought up the video for the camera in the bedroom, then skipped ahead to where she stopped the living room feed. The video resumed as Starfire entered the bedroom and flicked on the light. Barbara noted that the alien girl appeared on edge, her fingers twitching slightly and her facial muscles tensed in anxiety as she looked around the room.

"She's looking for something..." Barbara muttered.

Starfire dropped to her knees and looked under then bed, then went over to the closet and slid open the door. She smiled and pulled a basket out from the closet, before reaching both arms into the basket and digging through it, eventually pulling out...

"Is that... is that Charlie's underwear?" Dick said in disbelief, "What is she-"

Starfire suddenly pressed the boxers she was holding against her face, and her chest rose as she inhaled deeply, an action she repeated over and over again.

"Whoa, what the hell?!?"

"It's like she's addicted," Barbara muttered, before letting out a gasp, "Oh my God... she is addicted."

"To his pheromones?" Dick asked, "How? They only work on female Kryptonians..."

"Yeah, and the League knows that because of Lex's data," Barbara said, pausing the video, "But... but he only tested it on humans and Kryptonians. That egomaniacal bastard got tunnel vision when he saw something he could use to possibly control Superman, and either didn't consider or didn't care about the possibility that it could affect more than just those two groups."

"Which means he, and by extension the League, have it backwards," Dick said, "It's not that only Kryptonians are affected by the pheromones..."

"...it's that humans are immune to them."

Dick's eyes went wide, and he looked at Barbara in shock, "Babs, Kori is planning to let Charlie stay at the Titans Tower! If he gets in there with her in charge-"

Barbara sprang into action, yanking down her cowl and grabbing her headset. Quickly punching in the code to Wally's JL commlink with one hand while holding the mic of the headset with the other, she said, "Flash! Flash, it's Batgirl, are you there?"

The speedster's voice came through the headset. "Yeah, what's up?"

"Nightwing and I just discovered something big about Charlie. Has he been released yet?"

"Yeah, I was actually about to head down..."

"Okay, perfect. Don't do or say anything to let anyone else know what's going on. I need you to bring him to the Clock Tower first. I'll explain more when you get here."

"Okay, I'll be there soon. I just need to finish up here first..."

"Finish up what? Oh wait, you're trying to say he's with you now, right?"

"Right, see you soon."

"Good to hear. Batgirl out."

As she cut the connection, Dick asked, "Why didn't you tell him about the pheromones? We need to warn the Justice League..."

"Except we don't know how far Charlie has managed to spread his influence, or the true limits of his pheromones yet," Barbara said, pulling her cowl back over her head, "Which means we don't know who in the Justice League is already compromised, other than the human members. Before we tell the League anything, we need to isolate Charlie from anyone who might help him escape, and press him on what his plan is and how his pheromones really work. Once we have that, we'll let Bruce know what we found out and figure out our next move."

"Okay, sounds like a plan," Dick said with a nod. He then looked at the still image of Starfire on the monitor with a frown and said softly, "How did I not see what was happening to her...?"

Barbara hesitated a brief moment, then reached over and gave her friend's hand a squeeze, "Hey, it'll be okay. We're going to fix this, and get her and the others back to normal."

"I hope so," he said.

"And knowing Star, she's not going to hold it against you. She'll be leaping right back into your arms and making the rest of us gag at her sugary sweetness in no time," she added with a smirk.

Just then, there was a loud rush of air, and a red and yellow streak rocketed up the stairwell and into the room. Flash came to a stop in front of them, and directly behind him was Charlie, looking out at the city though the clock face in utter bewilderment.

Barbara quickly let go of Dick's hand and stood up, tensing up and preparing for what Charlie would do next. This was the moment she had both anticipated and dreaded since she first met the guy at the café. She felt a rush of adrenaline, and the thrill of a cage trap finally slamming shut.

I finally got you, you son of a bitch.