Thursday, July 15th, 2009, 23:20
New Jersey
Gotham City
East End
The warehouse looked abandoned from the outside. Cracked windows, rusted fire escapes, the kind of urban decay that made Gotham's East End look like a war zone twenty years after the fighting had ended. But Malik could see the signs that marked it as something else entirely. Security cameras hidden in the shadows, reinforced doors disguised as rust-eaten metal, the subtle modifications that turned a derelict building into a fortress.
"Three weeks of surveillance," Selina murmured, adjusting her night vision goggles. "Twelve girls brought in, none brought out. Supply trucks every Tuesday, always the same driver, always cash payments."
They were crouched on the roof of an adjacent building, watching the warehouse through a gap in the roofline. Malik felt different tonight, more focused than he'd been during the Morrison job. That had been about files and information. This was about people.
Living people trapped in basement rooms, according to the intelligence Selina had gathered from sources she wouldn't name.
"How many guards?" he asked.
"Six total. Two outside, four inside. They rotate every four hours, but they're sloppy about it. Probably figure nobody's stupid enough to hit a trafficking operation run by the Bertinelli family."
Malik had heard that name before, during his research for Dr. Sanchez. The Bertinellis were old-school organized crime, the kind of family that had been operating in Gotham since before his grandparents were born. They specialized in businesses that required absolute silence from their victims.
"What's the plan?"
"Simple extraction. We get the girls out, we disappear before anyone realizes what happened." Selina's voice carried the kind of calm that came from years of doing impossible things. "The police will get an anonymous tip about the location in exactly two hours. Long enough for us to be gone, not long enough for anyone to move the evidence."
"What about the people running it?"
"What about them?"
"Do we just leave them to set up somewhere else next week?" Malik's question carried frustration. "Morrison lost some files. These guys lose some inventory. Big deal. They'll be back in business before the police finish the paperwork."
Selina turned to look at him, her expression unreadable in the darkness. "What are you suggesting?"
"I'm suggesting that some problems require permanent solutions."
The words hung in the air between them, and Malik realized he'd crossed another line. Not just criminal behavior, but something darker. The willingness to consider violence as more than just self-defense.
"That's not how we work," Selina said finally. "We're thieves, not executioners."
"And what happens to the next group of girls these people kidnap while we're congratulating ourselves on taking the moral high ground?"
Selina was quiet for a long moment, studying his face with the attention she usually reserved for security systems. "One thing at a time, Malik. Tonight we save the people who can be saved. Tomorrow we worry about preventing it from happening again."
They made their way into the building through a skylight Selina had compromised during an earlier reconnaissance. The interior was a maze of machinery and makeshift rooms, the kind of industrial space that could be reconfigured quickly if the operation needed to move.
The guards were exactly where intelligence had predicted. Two playing cards in what used to be the foreman's office, two more watching television in a break room near the loading docks. Professional enough to be dangerous, lazy enough to be overconfident.
Selina moved through the shadows like she'd been born to them, disabling the first pair without raising an alarm. Malik followed her lead, his training with Ted paying off as he rendered the second guard unconscious with a sleeper hold that dropped the man like a broken marionette.
"Basement," Selina whispered, pointing toward a staircase that descended into darkness.
The smell hit them first. Fear, human waste, desperation. The kind of odors that marked places where people were kept like livestock. Malik felt his stomach clench as they made their way down the stairs, trying to prepare himself for whatever they were about to find.
Nothing could have prepared him.
Twelve girls in six rooms, chained to walls and beds, ages ranging from maybe fourteen to early twenties. Some unconscious, some staring at the ceiling with the kind of emptiness that suggested their minds had gone somewhere else to escape what was happening to their bodies.
Malik stared at them through the reinforced windows, feeling something cold and violent rising in his chest. These weren't criminals who had chosen dangerous lives. These were victims, kids not much older than him, taken from their families and turned into merchandise.
"Keys," Selina said, her voice tight with controlled fury.
They found the keys hanging on a hook near the stairs, along with files that documented the girls like inventory. Names, ages, countries of origin, prices. Human beings reduced to accounting entries in a business ledger.
The rescue took twenty minutes. Some of the girls were too drugged to move on their own, others too traumatized to trust their rescuers. Selina worked with quiet efficiency, talking to them in multiple languages, explaining who they were and what was happening.
Malik found himself focusing on the practical aspects of the extraction, planning escape routes and timing while trying not to think too hard about what these girls had endured. The academic papers he'd written about criminal psychology suddenly felt like intellectual masturbation compared to the reality of standing in rooms where evil had been packaged and sold.
They were leading the last group toward the exit when footsteps echoed from the staircase above.
"Shift change," Selina muttered, checking her watch. "They're early."
The new guards weren't expecting to find the basement empty or to run into two intruders leading a group of escaped victims toward the loading dock. The confrontation should have been manageable. Two guards, two of them, and Selina was carrying enough non-lethal weapons to handle a small army.
But Tony Marcelli, the shift supervisor, wasn't interested in taking prisoners.
"Fuck this," he snarled, pulling a pistol from his jacket. "Boss said anybody tries to steal his property gets put down permanent."
Malik saw the gun swing toward Selina, saw her reaching for her own weapon, saw the moment when he realized she wouldn't be fast enough.
His response was instinctive, driven by months of training with Ted and a fury he hadn't known he possessed. The throwing knife left his hand before he'd consciously decided to use it, flying across the space between them with the kind of accuracy that only came from hours of practice.
It took Tony in the throat, severing his carotid artery and dropping him to the ground in a spreading pool of blood.
The second guard took one look at his partner dying on the concrete and decided that whatever the Bertinellis were paying him wasn't worth dying for. He ran for the stairs, leaving his weapon behind in his panic to escape.
Malik stared at Tony's body, watching blood flow across the warehouse floor while his hands shook with adrenaline and shock. He'd just killed someone. Not in the heat of combat, not in immediate self-defense, but in a single moment of violent decision-making that had ended a human life.
"Malik." Selina's voice cut through his shock, firm but not harsh. "We need to move. Now."
The rest of the escape passed in a blur of motion and adrenaline. Loading the girls into a van, driving to a safe house where other people would take care of them, making sure they were far away from the warehouse before the police arrived.
It wasn't until they were back at their apartment that the reality of what had happened hit him fully.
"I killed him," Malik said, sitting on his bed with his hands still shaking. "I actually killed someone."
Selina sat down beside him, her expression serious but not condemning. "You saved my life. That's what matters."
"Is it? He's dead because of a decision I made in less than a second. What if I was wrong? What if there was another way?"
"There wasn't. Tony Marcelli was going to shoot me, and then he was going to shoot you, and then those girls were going to disappear forever." Selina's voice carried certainty. "You made the right choice under impossible circumstances."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've seen what happens to people who hesitate when lives are on the line. Because those girls are going home to their families instead of being sold to the highest bidder. Because sometimes the only way to protect innocent people is to stop the people who hurt them."
Malik thought about the files they'd found, about the girls chained in basement rooms, about Tony Marcelli pulling a gun on someone trying to rescue victims from a nightmare. The academic framework he'd been developing for understanding criminal behavior suddenly felt inadequate for processing what he'd experienced.
"Does it get easier?" he asked.
"No. And you shouldn't want it to." Selina's expression grew serious. "The moment killing becomes easy is the moment you become something you don't want to be. Tonight you killed someone to protect innocent people. That's necessary violence in service of justice. Hold onto that distinction, because it's the only thing that separates us from the people we fight."