Page 18 of Victorious

Over the next hour, the remaining lab employees filed out.

The lights on the front of the building went dark.

While Victor waited, he slipped a hand into his pocket and curled his fingers around the vial there. He was down to one, from the original six. Thankfully, he’d stolen something else, along with Haverty’s compound.

His notes.

Victor had studied them so many times, he could write the formula from memory, though it did him little good. Back at Lockland, his interests had centered on biology, not chemistry, and even if he could have confidently recreated such a complex compound on his own, there was the matter of sourcing the ingredients, as well as the necessary equipment. Orders for highly controlled substances that might go unnoticed in a lab, but risked drawing attention outside of it.

Beyond that, the margin of error was too small, the stakes too high, the line between confident and certain as brittle as the one between living and dead.

Better to find a chemist, someone who could be persuaded.

Victor’s phone buzzed on the table.

June.

“Do you have an update?”

“What? No small talk?” Victor waited.

June blew out a breath. “EON’s done licking its wounds. Interim director is a woman named Helena Roy. Ex-member of the board. Stickler for the rules. And not a fan of yours.”

He heard the telltale sound of a body struggling as she talked.

“Are you in the middle of a job?”

“I’m multitasking.” The dull thud of a shoe connecting with a side. “Have you had any visitors?”

“No.”

“Weird that they can’t find you. Why do you think that is?”

Victor kept his eyes on the lab across the street. “Must be lucky.”

“Funny,” said June. “You don’t strike me as a man who’s ever put much stock in luck.”

Just then, movement caught Victor’s eye.

Ardley had returned to the lab, this time on foot.

Instead of using a key card to open the front doors, the chemist ducked down the alley on the building’s far side.

Victor rose. “I have to go.”

He killed the call before she could protest, and stepped out into the evening light, making his way down the block.

As he crossed the road, he glanced up, toward the camera mounted on a nearby stoplight. Held its gaze, and smiled.

June was right. He’d never needed luck.

Not when he had Mitch.

It had been a little over a week since Victor reached out to his old cellmate, in part to reestablish a mode of contact, and in part to issue a challenge. And judging by the absence of EON agents in his life, Mitch had succeeded.

Victor slipped down the alley, approaching the metal door the chemist had used. The one he’d wedged ajar so he could come and go.

It made no sound when Victor dragged it open and went in.