Marvel Classic Novels--Spider-Man, page 58
“I thought they called you Jigsaw.”
“They called me lots of things!”
“Now, that I can believe.”
He chuckled. Nobody else could talk to him that way and get away with it. But there was something about her cool, sardonic deadpan that always got him right where he lived. Maybe it was opposites attracting. “I love you, too, dear.”
“Seriously, Jonah—I don’t like this. You should stay where it’s safe.”
“Playing it safe didn’t get me where I am today, Marla. And I’ve been sitting up in that executive suite too long. That’s why people doubt my credibility—I’m too cut off. I need to get back to my roots, back in touch with my city. I can’t get the best out of my reporters on this story unless I join them in the trenches, remind myself of how it feels.”
He sighed. “Mostly, I just need to do something. I don’t like feeling helpless.”
After a thoughtful moment, Marla spoke again. “I understand. Do what you must. But please, Jonah—take care of yourself.”
“I will. Don’t you worry about that.” He hefted his old service revolver, freshly cleaned and polished, to renew his feel for it. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it; he was no killer. But if it came down to Spider-Man or him, he would be ready.
His head security man, Berkowitz, didn’t like the idea any more than Marla had. “You should let us accompany you, sir,” he insisted.
“No way. I need to get out there and make contacts, find informants. If I’ve got Men in Black hovering around, it’ll scare off anyone who could tell me anything useful. Naww, Jigsaw Jameson works solo,” he insisted. ‘‘You guys will have to keep at least a hundred feet away. Try to be inconspicuous.”
The matter was settled. Jameson pocketed his revolver and notebook, changed to a good pair of broken- in walking shoes, donned his brown fedora and trench coat (one pocket containing a cell phone with the police and his security on speed dial—he wasn’t an idiot), and hit the pavement. Once his chauffeur dropped him off in the right part of town, that is.
* * *
SPIDER-MAN had nowhere to go.
He had tried going home. When he’d swung down to his building after fleeing Aunt May’s home, he’d spotted MJ just arriving. He’d been relieved to see her until that same spider-sense twinge had overcome him, warning him away from her. He’d retreated to the roof of the adjacent building, hoping to watch and see what was going on, but an ongoing low-level buzz of danger had made him too agitated to remain, and he’d swung away until it had subsided.
Later, when MJ called him on his cell and asked where he was, the tingle in his head warned him not to tell her. He didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to believe she and Aunt May weren’t who he thought they were. He knew there was a chance that something was wrong with his danger sense itself.
But how could he take that chance? Spider-sense was like the fire alarm at school—you had to take it seriously every time, treat it as a real emergency even though most of the time it was some kid pulling a stupid prank. Because if you ignored it even once, you ran the risk of exposing yourself to real danger. So Spidey had to keep trusting the warning tingle, even though he knew there was a chance he shouldn’t be. Until he got some real answers, he had to play it safe.
Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time, he thought as he perched atop the broadcast antenna of the Empire State Building—the only place where he could survey the whole city and be sure no one could sneak up on him from above (although with his luck, he thought, the bi planes would be along any minute to shoot him down). His enemies had played such cruel tricks on him in the past. A few years ago, the parents that he’d believed dead since his early childhood had apparently turned up alive and become part of his life for a time, only to be revealed as android impostors programmed to kill him. The memory of having his parents ripped from him again, a formerly abstract loss gaining a harsh immediacy, still tore at him. He couldn’t bear the thought of MJ and May being replaced by android impostors . . . but he couldn’t get it out of his head.
Particularly because it would mean that whoever was after him knew his identity. Could Jonah know? Is that why he was so belligerent toward me at the Bugle? There were other possibilities. Norman Osborn knew his identity. And Oscorp certainly could provide him with the technical resources to build these robots—after all, Mendel Stromm had been Osborn’s partner in the company before Norman had framed him for embezzlement, sent him to prison, and started him on the vengeful course that had made him into the Robot Master. But Osborn was securely in prison, Spidey knew; he’d confirmed that on general principles when he’d been there to visit Smythe and Electro.
No good sitting around speculating, Spidey decided. He was on edge, needing to act, needing to get some answers. So he’d simply have to go down there and see what he could find out. He’d start at the bottom, go through every lowlife informant he could get his webs on, and shake them until something involving robots fell out. Or something involving Jameson.
What if Jameson himself is a robot? It would explain so much. But then, if it were true, it would require forgiving the real Jonah. And that was a prospect Spider-Man was not yet willing to contemplate.
* * *
“JIGSAW” Jonah Jameson had quickly learned that the reporting business wasn’t as easy as it had once been. All his old underworld informants were long gone, and he was too high-profile to sneak around effectively. So his attempts to get a bead on things through the criminal grapevine met with severely limited success. He had to flash his revolver a couple of times to avoid getting roughhoused, and faced a few harrowing moments under pursuit before Berkowitz’s men showed up and scared the bums off.
So he decided he was going about it the wrong way. These are high-tech crimes, he reminded himself. Lots of high-tech companies getting robbed, their parts showing up in fancy robots. Maybe I should start at that end. Surely investigating the scenes of the robberies themselves, talking to the makers of the stolen equipment, could give him a good grounding in the case. If he weren’t so rusty, he would have started there.
Of course, Ben Urich had been looking into these robberies for days. But Urich didn’t have Jameson’s keen nose for arachnid involvement. What’s more, he was kind of chummy with his own pet vigilante, Daredevil— himself a known associate of the wall-crawler. It’ll take my more objective eye to find the proof that Spider -Man’s behind this.
But that proof was elusive. He interviewed all the companies that had been hit, talked to their engineers, visited the warehouses and inspected the damage. The first high-tech theft, of the Venus robots from Cyberstellar, had been committed by Electro, of course. The second one, committed between that and the Diamond District rampage, had involved damage consistent with the use of the Venus probes to break into the warehouse. Jameson could readily believe that Spider-Man and Electro had been in it together. But the other robberies had taken place after all the stolen Venus robots had been destroyed and accounted for. If the webhead had been at any of those warehouses, he’d hidden his trail well, apparently by using more robots instead of his own strength and webbing. Jameson saw where the doors had been cut through by torches or high-powered blades. He watched the security tapes and saw the static of electromagnetic interference filling the screen. He read police reports revealing that large amounts of equipment had been removed in a short amount of time. Spider-Man could carry great weight on his back, but it would be logistically unfeasible for one man to carry out so many heavy crates in one trip, not without help.
“What would it take to build these kinds of robots out of the stolen parts?” he asked the engineers. They told him that the robot that had trashed Jameson’s office and the two that had chased Spider-Man across Midtown East had been fairly basic and could have been constructed in a matter of days with the right machining tools—but only if the builder had been a robotics genius. Many of the stolen parts had been repurposed in ways the engineers had never considered, ways that amplified the power and endurance of the robots and increased their agility and reaction times. There were relatively few people in the world who had such gifts for robot-building, including Reed Richards, Henry Pym, Victor von Doom, and Alistaire Smythe. Smythe, Jameson thought. I’ll have to look into that. He hates Spider -Man, but after the way I cleaned his clock the last time, maybe he hates me enough to make a deal with the wall-crawler.
But many of the stolen components had no clear robotics applications, or so their designers told him. He couldn’t keep straight all the things the engineers told him about rapid prototyping systems and carbothermic extraction and whatnot, but it all added up to one thing: Whoever had stolen these components must be putting together one serious science project, something that had to go beyond building killer Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots to stage bouts atop Manhattan skyscrapers. And they’d probably need considerable skill, precision equipment, and a sizable power supply to get it done.
As Jameson looked into Smythe, he found that the man had remained securely in his prison cell at all times, not appearing to be a viable suspect. Dr. Doom was unavailable for comment. Richards was an unlikely suspect, but Jameson consulted him for advice on robotics and possible underworld figures with the necessary skill. Richards had little time to consult—some thing about the Fantastic Four being “just on our way out of the dimension”—but he suggested that Jameson might want to take a look at Phineas Mason, an inventor whom he alleged to be an underworld figure known as the Terrible Tinkerer.
Jameson dropped in on Mason at his workshop, finding him to be a real cool customer, practically a robot himself. The man gave away nothing and didn’t react to intimidation. Jameson almost had to admire him for his rare ability to withstand the Three-J Degree (as his old reporter buddies had called it) without so much as breaking a sweat. “Don’t think this is over,” Jonah told Mason before he left. “I’m gonna keep my eye on you. And if I catch so much as a single strand of webbing on you, you’ll wish you’d never heard of Jigsaw Jameson.”
‘‘Who?”
Nonetheless, the more Jameson investigated, the more a thought began to nag at the back of his mind. He tried not to listen, but it became harder and harder to ignore. Finally, he had to let himself acknowledge it. This doesn’t feel like Spider-Man’s doing. There isn’t a single clue that points to him. It was one thing to dismiss that when he was sitting up in his suite on the forty-sixth floor, to assume that his reporters were just missing something. But the more time he spent down in the trenches, the more he refreshed his memory of what it felt like to chase a story, the harder it was to deny that this story wasn’t leading him in any direction that had webs at the end of it.
No, he told himself. Spider-Man has to be involved. He’s after me and my family—that I know for a fact. There must be a connection between that and the robots. Maybe . . . maybe he’s just an accomplice for someone else, he grudgingly admitted. Maybe his attacks on my family are a sidebar to something bigger.
But he has to be a part of it. I’ve put my reputation on the line for that position—I can’t back away from it now. I have to stand by my convictions! I have to be right!
But wasn’t one of his convictions a belief in reporting the truth? In following the evidence wherever it led and reporting it accurately?
I will find the truth, he swore. But Spider-Man is going to be a part of that truth. He has to be.
Doesn’t he?
TEN
AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
“SO Peter still hasn’t come home?”
Mary Jane shook her head as she took May’s coat and hung it up. “He’s answering his phone, at least, but he won’t tell me where he is. It’s like he doesn’t trust me anymore.”
May patted MJ’s arm. “Don’t take it personally, dear. After what happened the other day, I think something must be wrong with his spider-sense. The poor boy’s jumping at shadows.” She shook her head. “I’ve worried about something like this ever since I found out. Having spider genes mixed in with his . . .” She shuddered. “Senses it isn’t natural for a man to have . . . I’ve been afraid it would do something to his mind. Especially that danger sense putting him on edge like that time and time again. Take it from an old worrywart—the more often you let yourself get scared, the stronger the habit becomes. It’s too easy to become afraid of the tiniest things.”
MJ sighed. In some ways, it was a relief to have May to talk to about this. When Liz, Jill, and Peter’s other friends had come by to ask after his whereabouts, she’d had to brush them off with an excuse, hating herself for lying to people who cared for Peter and had a right to know whether he was all right. And in the process, she’d deprived herself of the opportunity to share her burden. The freedom to pour her troubles into May’s sympathetic ear was a godsend. But at the same time, May was unburdening her worries on MJ and giving her more angles to worry from in the process.
“I don’t know, May,” she finally said. “He’s just changed so much lately. The past few years have been so hard on him,” she said, swallowing down a surge of guilt at the way she’d added to that by walking out on him. “And now this happening to his students . . . he was really blaming himself, and then I guess he just . . . decided to get angry instead. He changed. I thought it was a good thing at first, but he just kept getting more angry, lashing out at the world. I think he’s using the anger to hide from the pain.” She gazed out the window, wondering where he was. “I wonder if maybe it’s not the spider-sense going wrong and making him act this way. Maybe, instead, getting so hostile and defensive has thrown his spider-sense into overdrive. He’s decided to push the world away, and his spider instincts are, well, taking it literally. And it’s becoming a vicious circle, making him paranoid.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what we can do.”
After a moment, May spoke. ‘‘Well, I simply won’t accept that, dear. Peter needs us. We’re his family, and we love him. There’s nothing that can overcome fear better than family. We simply need to find him, sit him down, and have a good long talk.” She gave a small, inward-looking smile. “Lately I’ve found that can work wonders.”
MJ turned back to the window. “Sure, May. Find Spider-Man, wherever he is in all of New York, and convince him to come down and have a talk. Easy.”
“But we’re not looking for Spider-Man, dear. We’re looking for Peter. And that’s our advantage. We know him better than anyone.”
“Maybe. But right now, I think he’s becoming more Spider-Man and less Peter by the day.” She frowned, for a thought was forming in the back of her mind. May started to speak, but MJ held up a hand for quiet. “Wait a minute.” She concentrated, let the thought emerge. “Maybe knowing both Peter and Spider-Man can help.”
She went to the closet and began to rummage. “I know I’ve seen it here somewhere.”
“What is it, dear?”
“Back when Peter started out, when he first built his spider-tracers, he didn’t tune them to set off his spider -sense like he does now. He tracked them by radio. He used a—yes!” She found what she was looking for—a hand-sized box with an antenna and small screen—and showed it to May. “A tracking device! A while back he modified it to pick up the new kind of tracer, once when his spider-sense wasn’t working. He’s kept it around as a backup ever since.”
“And you think we can use that to . . . what? Home in on the tracers he carries with him?” May asked hopefully.
She slumped. “No. I think it only works when they’ve been turned on. They don’t go active until they hit something, or until he squeezes them to trip the switch.”
“Oh.” May mulled it over for a moment. “But he was using one of his trackers to follow Mr. Jameson, wasn’t he?”
MJ gave her a humorless smile. “We know where to find Jameson. He’s hard to miss.”
“But Peter could still be following him—or maybe he’s found someone else to follow. And maybe—”
“Maybe if we pick up a tracer he’s following, we can find him, too!” Excited, MJ turned on the tracer.
Nothing.
She ran over to the window and swept it around, but still there was no reaction. “Does it have fresh batteries?” May asked. “I always change the batteries in my flashlights and smoke detectors every Daylight Savings Time.”
MJ smiled despite herself. “The status lights are on. It’s scanning. But there aren’t any tracers in range.”
“Ohh, I feel like I’m in Mission: Impossible. What would Peter Graves do next, do you think?”
“Go to his trailer and study the script,” MJ replied.
“What was that, dear?”
She turned to face May. “I guess if we wanted to find a tracer, we’d have to do what Peter does—Parker, not Graves. We travel around the city and hope we get a hit.”
“That’s awfully haphazard,” May opined. “Once we get Peter back, we should try to help him refine his methods.” Then she frowned. “Oh, dear. Peter’s work takes him into some rather disreputable quarters, doesn’t it?”
“I should do it alone, May. I have self-defense training.”
“I’m no shrinking violet myself, dear!” May insisted. “Did I tell you about the time I solved a robbery at the Restwell Nursing Home . . . ?”
* * *
AS Spider-Man leaped around the warehouse rafters, dodging a hail of bullets, he found himself reminded of something: Guns were loud. Especially when fired indoors. His ears were ringing, and he could only imagine that the gang of petty hoods he’d tracked down here were giving themselves permanent hearing damage.
Usually, he could ignore such things. In the heat of battle, he could surrender to his spider-sense, let his instincts tell him when to dodge and how to move, and shut out the distractions of the more conventional senses. Now, though, he didn’t know how far he could trust his danger sense. So he had to remain alert—still relying on it for warnings he couldn’t get any other way, but staying ready to override his instincts if he noticed something that didn’t fit what they were telling him. So far, those instincts weren’t steering him wrong; right here and now, he was definitely in danger. And hearing loss was the least of his concerns.
