Chapter 7: Kree Methodology, Applied

The parking lot was empty at eleven forty-three.

Marcus sat in the truck for three minutes and watched the school's exterior cameras complete their rotation cycle. He had timed the cycle twice before tonight — once on a Tuesday during parent-teacher conferences, once on a Thursday when he'd stayed late grading and walked the perimeter on the pretext of needing air. Fourteen seconds of overlap on the northwest corner where the lot met the service entrance. Enough.

He was carrying a canvas equipment bag that looked like every other equipment bag a chemistry teacher might carry after hours. It contained, among other things, a thermos, a handheld refractometer, a portable gas chromatograph the size and shape of a thick paperback book, and precursor compounds sourced through three separate academic supply channels over the preceding two weeks — each order small enough to be routine, each account belonging to a different institution, none of them traceable to a pattern unless you were already looking for one.