Survivor | T. Drake

[14]

The new Red Hood of Gotham City, Jason Peter Todd, was a busy man.

He had too much to do on his hands and no second to spare.

He announced his dramatic entry into Gotham's underworld by seizing control of the drug market, forcing the drug lords to surrender as he got rid of seventeen of their suppliers. With the deed serving as a final nail in the coffin, he had succeeded in instilling fear into the hearts of those still associated with that business.

He knew it was only a matter of time for the biggest drug lord of them all, Black Mask, to figure out what was going on right under his nose. But until then, Jason would have easily swayed more than half of the suppliers to stop making deals with him and it would give Roman Sionis enough reason to consider the Red Hood as an enemy.

He wanted to be on Black Mask's list of enemies and he wanted to secure a spot that would make him desperate enough to get rid of him. That could only be possible if he directly competed for Black Mask's power.

True, his main target had been Joker all along but to get to him, he needed to use the famous crime lord as a chess piece in a game he was setting up.

Jason needed Black Mask to get to Joker and free him from Arkham using his sources so that he could abduct the psychotic clown later and serve his revenge. But for that, he had to make things so frustrating for Roman Sionis that he would end up thinking that there was no other way but to unleash the Joker on the Red Hood.

He knew Roman controlled Gotham's underworld and there were three illegal businesses from where he got all his money and power. The crime lord held the city's drug supply chain, the illegal weapons distribution chain as well as human trafficking under his control.

But still, he was not content and continuously expanding to take hold of the corporate world as well.

After a thorough investigation, Jason found out that Black Mask's future stronghold in the corporate world would be Drake Corporate.

Once a rival company to Wayne Enterprises, Drake Corporate had fallen into debt and bankruptcy under Jack Drake's hold. Currently, Jack was in a coma and his son Timothy was made the CEO of the slowly recovering enterprise.

Jason found all those coincidences very weird as they tied up to someone else controlling Tim. It didn't take him long to make that connection to Black Mask once he was able to get hold of his men who were funding Drake Corporate's endeavors.

Now he had another potential pawn that could be used against Black Mask but he needed to be sure whether Tim was worth all the effort or not.

So he began to keep watch on the boy, noting the times he came to Drake Corporate and when he went to the hospital to visit his father. Timothy Drake had a very strict schedule which made it seem that even a minute's delay could cost him his life.

Jason had only seen him from a distance but it wasn't hard to notice that the fifteen-year-old was always worried about something. As if someone was keeping a strict hold over him and he was struggling not to make any mistakes.

In a week, Jason had Tim's full schedule from all he could observe. Tim lived in a private villa on the outskirts of the city and he always had two guards accompanying him whenever he left that villa.

The accommodation in itself was heavily guarded but Jason hadn't seen any other significant occupant inside except Tim. He found out that a private tutor came regularly and left at his assigned times in the evening. 

By day, Tim would be at Drake Corporate, looking after his father's company. And only on weekends, he got the time to visit his father at the hospital.

That visit to Jack Drake was probably the only time when Tim was left alone for an hour or two, with the guards waiting for him in the car outside. That hour or two was the only open window Jason could get to abduct him.

He couldn't let the boy slip from his hands. Not after he had gone to great lengths to track everything out about him.

***

Tim's visits to his father were always the same.

He would be driven to the hospital by Black Mask's men and they would wait for him in the parking lot while he had exactly two hours to see his father. That time too was often cut short upon Black Mask's orders or if Lorena needed Maxwell and the car back at the villa for some of her errands.

On every Saturday, Tim would come to the hospital, make an entry at the reception as a visitor for Jack Drake then go to the isolated private suites where his father was kept.

Every time, it was the same repetition of the previous visit. He would sit there often in silence, hoping against hope that his father would wake up or just show him the slightest sign that he was there and could feel his presence. Sometimes he would talk but his voice was the only sound he could hear in the room aside from the faint beeping of the heart rate monitor.

Every visit ended the same way too. A very disheartened Tim would return to the parking lot from where he was taken back to the villa that felt like his current confinement.

But after a very long time, his visit to the hospital was going to be quite different from the monotonous repetition that he had gotten sick of.

That day too he came to the hospital, made his entry at the reception desk then trudged up the stairs to the isolated wing of the hospital. He pushed open the door to see his father as unresponsive as he had seen him last week.

He sat there on the chair beside Jack's bed, checking the pulse rate, the oxygen saturation, and all the other vitals displayed on the monitor attached to the bed.

Everything was the same as the last time he had seen him. There was no change in his father's condition whatsoever, neither for better nor for worse.

Dejected, he felt the time tick by, the painful sound of the clock ringing in his head. Fifteen minutes, twenty, thirty, and then almost an hour passed in painful silence.

His time was up, he had to return to the car by then and go back to Roman's villa.

But just before he was going to step out the door of the private suite, he felt a gloved hand cover his face and pull him back. 

"Don't make any noise, kid," an unfamiliar voice whispered and he started to feel drowsy, realizing that the glove was probably drenched in chloroform, "The sooner I can get you away from here, the easier it would be for both of us."

The next thing he remembered was his vision blacking out and he had fallen limp but not struck the floor. Whoever it was that had been close to him very easily flung him over his shoulder and just as abruptly as he had emerged, he vanished along with his unconscious hostage.

***