Asprin, Robert Lynn – Catwoman – Tiger Hunt (With Lynn Abbey)

“Does he work for the Connection?”

“He does some work for the Connection,” Batman corrected. “But, then again, according to what I’ve learned, so has the Wayne Foundation. I’ll trail him, work my way up the ladder, but Gordon set a time limit. I don’t see Tiger yielding fruit quickly enough.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll keep looking for these Connection transactions and hope I get lucky, hope I find something floating in the Black Sea.”

Wayne hammered a lengthy keystroke command and the phosphorescent green army began marching up the screen again. He hunched forward, the glaze formed on his eyes agian.

Alfred found his butler’s voice. “Forgive me for saying this, sir—but it seems to me that if you’re looking for this Bessarabia, you’re not going to find it in a computer. You’d do better looking in a book. Have you considered going upstairs and using the library?”

Bruce Wayne hadn’t. He lowered his hands to the keyboard, stopping the data march, while his fatigued mind summoned all the reasons books were inferior to sophisticated data-processing techniques—provided, of course, that the data existed in processible form. And in the matter of Bessarabia, it did not. Muttering under his breath about the fallacies of communism, Bruce Wayne prepared to disentangle himself from his ergonomic seat. His knees were numb, his ankles unresponsive; he lurched forward, catching his balance for a moment with his knuckles and spreading such handwritten notes as he’d made in the last five days across the console table.