The Kingmaker

13 - Casual

 "Thank you so much, Professor," gushed Eden. "I really appreciate it. I actually have almost all of my assignments done, I was just worried you wouldn't allow me to take the quiz early before I left."

"I understand, dear. Extenuating circumstances. I'm happy that you're taking the initiative to hand everything in early instead of asking for an extension. Samantha, you said your name was? I'm getting on in years, names and faces don't stick so well anymore."

"I totally understand, I didn't expect you to remember me - I usually have to sit at the back of the lecture hall. But anyway - yes, I figured that a surprise family trip to Paris isn't quite the same as a family emergency, and it wouldn't be fair to everyone else if I pretended it was. I can't ask for an extension because of an unexpected vacation, you know?"

"I wish more students had your integrity. I'll give you your quiz early Friday before class, so come a half hour early, Samantha."

Integrity, ha. Eden wondered how the woman could possibly say something like that without gagging on her own bullshit. It was surreal, standing in front of someone who so brazenly cultivated an entire ring of chemistry-attuned, drug-cooking criminal students under her thumb...including good old Nathan. It was because of this very woman that Nathan and Brook had met in the first place.

If only Eden had acted on this knowledge long ago, but she simply hadn't thought it was relevant to her life. Just another one of those things, she had thought. Anyone could have dirty secrets, including fussy looking, tenured chemistry professors - indeed, even chemistry department chairs - working for Alexandria University. If only Eden had been a little more interested, a little more invested. But she'd been the opposite of her mother who sought to root out all things crooked and criminal in her sight: Eden had been far more passive about such things.

That passivity had come to an end now, but not in the way her mother would have wanted. Indeed, the only reason she was seeking out these crooked, criminal things was so that she could exploit them to her own ends.

Eden waved goodbye to the older woman and hefted her backpack on her shoulders. It had been a while since she'd last been on campus, it was almost nostalgic. Funny how the reason she was back on the grounds of Alexandria University had nothing at all to do with education. It was just as well. With this scratchy bob-cut wig and these cheap-ass colored contacts clouding her vision, she wouldn't be able to read a single thing anyway.

"Oh, wait, Professor Goodwin -"

"Yes, dear?"

Eden sucked in her lower lip and nibbled on it in embarrassment. "Um, I was wondering if you'll be in the science building anytime this afternoon or evening? I know you're so busy with fall finals coming up, but I was just going to drop off the write-ups that I already have completed. I would be happy to work my way around your schedule, though, so if you'd rather I wait until tomorrow...?"

"Hm, I don't return to the lab or my office after this lecture since it's a three-hour class. I'm afraid it'll have to wait until Friday."

"Oh, that's perfect," said Eden. "I'll get it to you first thing on Friday, then."

"There's no rush, dear," the professor told her with a distracted smile. She glanced over her shoulder. "Take your time."

Eden smiled back as the older woman turned away in a hurry. Excellent. If Goodwin wasn't returning to the building today, the chance that Eden would be found out was very low indeed. It was still Tuesday, and three days out, no one would even remember Eden being in the area.

A half hour later, she was pounding on the door of one of the laboratories on the lower floor of the building. Her wig was mussed, glasses askew, and she was now wearing the stained lab coat she had fished out of a bargain bin in the morning. With her backpack hanging haphazardly off one shoulder to complete the look, she didn't think it was an exaggeration to say she had perfectly pulled off the appearance of a harried TA.

Bang bang bang!

"Oh, my God, let me in," she grumbled as students passed her by with strange looks. Undeterred, she pounded on the window of the door again.

Someone ambled over to peer through the glass at her, and Eden mimed opening the door. "I don't have my ID!" she said loudly, emphasizing her discontent with a severe frown. "I need you to open it for me from the inside!"

That definitely wasn't code - technically, no one was supposed to be allowed entry into the chemistry laboratories without their student or faculty ID to pass through the door scanner. But who cared about code? Doors were routinely propped open for students to pass on through whenever the intro classes came in as a gaggle to do their experiments together. And if Eden remembered correctly, the last time she had been on this campus eight years ago, all she needed to do was ask to be let in.

But then again, that had been a long time ago, and she was well known as the resident child prodigy. She had been easily recognizable, which meant that she was far more trustworthy than she was now. Right now, she looked just like anyone else - in other words, they had no reason to bend the rules for her.

"Uh...We're not supposed to let each other in."

"I know that," Eden said impatiently. She adjusted her glasses with an angry poke of her finger. "I'm not here to do anything. I just need to check the supply room to see if we have enough solution for the Chemistry 101 class coming in for their titration lab."

"Uh..."

Hm. The young man was freckled, tall, gangly, likely a senior or even a grad student. On second thought, he was probably an actual TA, unlike Eden. She'd have to be careful with this one.

"Fine," she snapped. "Don't need to let me in. Just check the supply room for me and give me two liters each of copper sulfate, magnesium sulfate, aluminum sulfate, sodium hydroxide -"

"I'm in the middle of something...I can't step away that long..."

"Dude!" Eden jabbed a finger into the glass, making the young man flinch backward on the other side of it. "There's no freaking solution left in the other lab room. I need, I NEED to do this right now!"

"Uh..."

"Oh, my God. Please. I'll be like five minutes. I'm in here almost every day anyway so I know where everything is. It'll be fast, okay? I cannot f**k this up, dude."

She slapped her hand against the glass for good measure, making him jump again.

"PLEASE."

"Jesus, I - alright, hang on," he muttered, and Eden inwardly smiled. Had to love students. So ready to break the rules for desperate fellowmen with just a little prod or two. When the door finally swung open, she charged forward with a string of grumbling complaints on her lips and mentions of making Goodwin angry here and there. Just a little extra spice to make the student move out of her way, that was all, and it clearly worked if his speedy escape back to his station was a reliable indicator.

Eden glanced over at the supply room, which was, of course, propped open. Convenient. Completely against laboratory safety precautions among other things, but students were students. Laziness in the name of efficiency was king.

The motion sensing lights flickered on automatically when she entered it, and another discreet glance outside assured her that the student had his back turned. Completely oblivious, excellent. She was free to rummage around as she liked so long as she didn't make too much noise.

The noise could come later, Eden thought with a grin, and then she got to work.

She was there for far longer than she had promised the student who had let her in, but perhaps he had been so engrossed in his work that he had forgotten she was even there. All the better for her; it gave her time to find what she needed. And she would, even if she had to comb every shelf in this massive room. Things couldn't have changed so much in eight years.

It was nearly twenty minutes later when she finally succeeded, and she pushed aside a dirty rack of used lab glassware  to reveal a clear plastic jug filled with red powder inside. Red phosphorus. Even better, the jug's contents were already half-used.

Goodwin had always been a resourceful woman, Eden understood now that she was older and wiser. What were drugs, really, besides products of recreational chemistry? And so she used her position as chair of the chemistry department at the highly prestigious Gotham University to fish out the perfect candidates for her business - the business of grooming talented, susceptible students into gifted "chefs" - lab operators responsible for creating and crafting raw product. Illegal product. Crystal meth, to be more specific.

Eden had no idea who Goodwin was grooming now, or what deplorable circumstances they were in to be cooking crank with their chemistry professor, but that wasn't her problem. It wasn't as if she wanted any meth, and she had nothing personal against anyone besides Goodwin.

Moreover, she wasn't trying to outright kill the woman, either. Eden just needed to make the woman a few enemies, get someone hurt, mar her reputation. The good stuff.

Eden fetched a container of aluminum zinc shavings off the shelf among a few other powdered substances. Nothing reactive - yet. Not until someone tried to use the red phosphorus to cook. With careful movements, she poured the powdered chemicals in and swirled the red phosphorus around, before setting it back just the way she had left it.

If all went well, the next time one of Goodwin's student chefs tried to cook up a new batch of methamphetamine, they would be getting a nasty, volatile surprise instead in the laboratory room. The fumes alone would be enough to sear the lungs of anyone stupid enough to be working without the proper safety equipment, but with the application of heat, someone was bound to get burnt.

It was unfortunate that Goodwin was the one least likely to suffer injuries, and yes, it was probably going to be some poor, disadvantaged, desperate student getting f****d over by the sabotage. But maybe they ought to count it as a turn of good luck when they promptly fled the meth-cooking business. Maybe straighten their crooked ways and such. Honestly, Eden was doing them a favor by getting them out from under Goodwin's thumb.

But those were just details. The most important thing was that this accident was going to do things to the woman's reputation that she wouldn't be able to repair so easily. She would eventually recover, of course, accidents happened from time to time. But there would be a nice little vacancy in her corner of the market, just in time for Eden to conveniently exploit the demand vacuum for her own purposes.

Poor old woman. They would say things like how she was getting on in years; maybe she couldn't be trusted anymore. Maybe she ought to hand over the keys to her kingdom to a successor - after all, how efficient could a seventy year old woman be in this kind of business?

Ah. Eden replaced the cap of the jug and stealthily left the supply room. In the laboratory, the male student who had let her in was too busy tending to his numerous test tubes to pay attention to her, and so with quiet footsteps and a slow latching of the door behind her, she made her escape.

Things were going to turn out just fine, she told herself. Not for others, but certainly for herself.

And she was going to be ready for it.

--------

"So how'd you end up in this shitfest of a city?"

At the sound of the gruff voice, Zero looked over at the man next to him in the driver's seat. They had been riding along in the armored SUV for an hour now with two other men in the backseat, utterly silent. One of them, he was sure, didn't speak any English at all. Not that that was necessary. Pulling triggers and dodging bullets was a universal sort of language.

"Needed the money," Zero said shortly.

Better not to let anyone lure him into conversation any deeper than that; it wasn't as if he wanted to make friends. He was working for DaleCorp purely as a cover in the event he was taken into custody and questioned. The last thing anyone wanted was for the wrong people in Alexandria to hear that the mark had escaped and slipped back into her home city. And considering that the Alexandria City Police Department was nothing but a mass of eyes and ears for the "wrong people," they might connect the dots if they looked a little too hard into Zero's background.

That would end badly.

But working as an armed mercenary for corporate interests - well, no one would think twice about him. There were hundreds more in this exact line of work all around the city, a necessary precaution all intelligent businessmen took when they came here. Alexandria held premium value for business expansion, true, but only when one actually survived it.

The problem was that this job, although it wasn't nine to five, required more of his time than he liked. He needed every advantage at his disposal to track down the target and extract her, but when he could only do that under cover of night when he wasn't "working" for DaleCorp, he could scarcely follow every promising lead in good time. And leads didn't last forever. Some of them dried up within hours. Information that was good in the morning could become chaff in the wind by lunch, and all those opportunities were passing Zero by every damn day.

Maybe he ought to take his chances and simply leg it solo around the city. He would just have to make sure the police never caught up to him in the event that things got out of control. And maybe he was being pessimistic: wasn't it possible that Eden would go with him peacefully, give in without a fight?

Of course not.

He'd been watching her for years now, ever since they began trying to reintegrate her slowly into normal life. She was a valuable asset, worth ten of her colleagues easily when she was still half asleep, but they couldn't keep her under lock and key forever. She was a loose cannon, but their thought had been that maybe they could contain the explosion, maybe tame it.

Not so. He would have warned them about the stupidity of their decision to relax their grip on her a long time ago, but he had let it go simply because he disliked her less than their mutual employer.

And then later, he had let it go because of other reasons.

Classic story. She was beautiful, she was intelligent. She was - exciting. Even though she didn't know he even existed, he had felt like he was a part of her life after enough time passed. It took scarcely more than two years of being posted on the rooftop of the building across from her workplace to memorize her schedule. Her favorite foods, which colleagues she spoke to the most, what temperature she preferred to keep her office at (yes, he had definitely misused the high-powered binoculars he'd been given for the job of guarding her from afar).

And eventually, he came to think he had developed a generic fondness for this woman who seemed so ordinary. Ordinary, despite the rumors that she was unequivocally the most unrepentantly sociopathic woman anyone could ever lay eyes on. He had doubted them.

Until, one day, he saw a look flash in her eyes as she spoke to one of the men she worked with. Under, actually - the Arthur fellow who had been her supervisor. They had always had a tumultuous relationship, but it seemed to Zero that her opinion of him scarcely amounted to anything more than that he was an annoyance. But as he watched them through the glass window of her office with his binoculars (again, yes), he saw it. It was something in the quick smile she had flashed at Arthur as he prattled on about budgets and money and wastefulness (Zero's lip-reading skills were more than passable).

She had wanted to kill him.

It wasn't bloodthirst, nor was it anger. It was simply -

Zero had leaned back and let the binoculars fall to his side. He'd not seen an expression like that in a long time. He'd seen it on the face of cold despots, of hard killers who took lives just to line their pockets and not out of any particular greed. He'd seen it on a lot of people.

Boredom. Irritation. Casual brutality.

I should kill you so that I don't have to listen to you anymore.

And that was the moment Zero had known he was f****d.