Every character's age is boosted by about ten years. Except Yurio. He still young. Also, with the way things are going right now and with what I've written so far, I think I will try (keyword here is try) to update every Saturday or Sunday. That might change once the school year rolls around, but we'll see. Word count: 4,728.
Chapter Two: A Good Thief
Victor remembered the exact moment when he first stepped into Detroit. It was not when he first stepped off the airplane that took him across the planet from St. Petersburg. Not when he went through customs. Not when he stumbled out of the airport and into a taxi. Not when he collapsed into his new apartment—having no furniture, he and the young boy travelling with him simply collapsed onto the floor.
No, Victor first stepped into Detroit when he emerged from the apartment, jet-lagged and driven by hunger. He took Yuri's hand in his and told him not to run off. Victor knew city could be dangerous, especially for small children who didn't speak much English.
This city reeks, he thought. Like a sewer that clogged and spilled onto the streets.
"You'll get used to it," laughed a large woman from behind a food stand when he asked her why it smelled so bad.
Victor didn't want to get used to it. He didn't like the dampness, the perpetual smell of mold and mildew and whatever else the city had to offer. He had paid good money to make sure he and Yuri got to live in a decent apartment, one with a functioning heating system, a working stove, and rust-free pipes. He paid for Yuri to attend school, then paid another handful for his school supplies and new clothes. Victor had paid and paid and paid and paid, digging himself further and further into debt with only the promise that he would begin work for the company and eventually be able to return the money.
Later, Victor often wondered what would've happened if he hadn't taken the job and stayed in St. Petersburg. Or even if he had accepted a different offer with a less enticing pay.
Somehow, he doubted the outcome would've been much different either way.
-::-
"Yuuri Katsuki," the man in front of him introduced himself, sticking out his hand. Then, shakily, "Yuuri with two U's and an I."
Victor didn't shake it, just took in his supposed partner in crime from head to toe. He narrowed his eyes as they travelled over the stranger, the chemist Eddington said would "help" Victor in his job of breaking into the research center of Massive Dynamic, alleged thieves of highly-valued research.
"Massive Dynamic is owned by Blackwell," Eddington had explained. "It's highly protected, no thanks to you, and their research center is also extensive. There are probably at least half a hundred projects that will be there. You're going to need help with identifying the right research and the right samples."
If it had been up to Victor, he would've set the entire building to the torch. But Eddington wanted his research, and he had hired Victor to be a thief, not an arsonist. Besides, a strange, cruel part of Victor wanted to see Blackwell in financial ruin and humiliated in the public eye before the end. A burnt-down building could be covered by all kinds of insurance—though the loss would still be substantial. Stealing his prized project, a strain of wheat resistant to stem rust, and returning the research to the rightful owners would be the first part in humiliating Blackwell and bringing him one step further to ruin.
So Victor agreed.
The chemist would go with him into the building, but Victor could not ensure his safety. They were to meet in a little alleyway a block away from the target, then Victor would head in first. That had been the other reason why Eddington sought him out—he had designed Massive Dynamic's security himself while he was with the holding company, and Victor knew the layout like the back of his hand.
And yet, "Yuuri with two U's and an I" looked much too young and much too innocent to be doing any kind of breaking and entering. Messy black hair, watery brown eyes that reflected the moonlight, and a blue jacket that hung loosely around his narrow shoulders. The chemist shivered in the cold night air, drawing the overlarge jacket around him. He barely came up to Victor's shoulder, and if he didn't know any better, Victor would've mistaken the researcher for a college student or maybe even a high school student.
Why did Eddington pick him? Victor thought bitterly. Why did he have to pick someone with that name? Surely he must know if he heard the stories.
"There must be other qualified chemists out there," he voiced out loud to Yuuri. "Why did that Eddington guy pick you?"
Yuuri turned dark red. "Is there something wrong with me?"
"No, should I be worried?" Victor replied. Then, he snorted. "I suppose Eddington was smart. You still look like a minor."
"I'm thirty-three," he stuttered back, turning even darker.
Just four years younger than me, Victor told himself. But he looks a lot younger. He doesn't look like he should be breaking into a high-security research building owned by a billionaire plutocrat at three in the morning. He looks like he shouldn't be near any of this.
"Ever steal something? Break into a building?"
Yuuri shook his head. Then, he added weakly, "But I have some other skills."
With a sigh, Victor turned away. The plan had been simple enough if he were to break into the building by himself, though still a bit of a challenge. But now, with someone inexperienced there, Victor didn't need just good knowledge of the security system and a few skills—he needed luck, and lots of it, to get them both in and out of the building. Admittedly, the job would've been made easier if Victor had hired a third person, but he had no intentions of trying to find a proper thief to help the job along. No, this job was his and his alone. His revenge and his revenge alone.
Blackwell will pay tonight, he thought as he tilted his head back to look at night sky.
The moon was out tonight, high in the sky like a giant lantern, and Victor could see the outline of Massive Dynamic looming overhead. A blight on the moon. With a sudden surge of rage, Victor wanted to erase the outline of the building, paint over it with a white brush until the moon was whole and circular again.
"Fifteen minutes," he told Yuuri, checking his watch. "In fifteen minutes, I'm going in. You're staying out here for another twenty. If I'm not there opening the door for you, make a run for it. You know where to run, right?"
"I'm not an idiot," he protested weakly.
Victor shook his head. Running from the rain or running for fun was a lot different from running for life. "Wasn't calling you one."
As a last-minute check, Victor made sure he had everything he needed. He felt the warm lump in his overcoat's right pocket, the solid rock in his left, the tightness of his shoelaces, the lockpicks up his sleeves, the gloves on his hands to prevent leaving fingerprints, and the wallet with his now-expired identification card. He rubbed the key card against his phone another solid twenty times, ran through the camera positions and rotations in his head, the security patrols that happened at night. He had a small window for the plan to work. Small, but doable. He had checked over it thousands of times in the past weeks of planning, and at least another half hundred times just in the past few hours.
He bent down to touch his toes, stretching.
Five minutes to go.
As he straightened, he realized Yuuri was giving him a skeptical look.
"Spit it out, Yuuri with two U's and an I."
"Why are you wearing that?" he asked, giving Victor's tan overcoat and slightly-loose suit a nod. "Don't thieves usually wear all black?"
"I'm not a thief," Victor corrected.
Yuuri snorted, but he didn't press the issue. "How are you going to break in then?"
Victor smiled. "Thieves break in by finding entrances. But like I said, I'm not a thief. I make entrances. I'm going walk in through the front door."
The chemist just looked confused, but Victor was out of time to explain. He tapped his watch, reminded Yuuri to wait twenty minutes before going to the front door, then rounded the corner and took off. The moon glowed brightly in the night sky, and the watch on Victor's wrist began its countdown.
-::-
Victor came to a halt in the dark alleyway behind the building and glanced at his watch. It had taken him three minutes and thirty seconds to zigzag through the alleyways. One minute and thirty seconds to go until the plan kicked into action.
The back of the building was guarded by two domed security cameras on either end of the wall and pressure-sensitive alarms that went off if someone tried to open the back door from the outside. A third security camera hung over the back door, ever-watchful. There were no fire escapes or ladders, just the door and a long stretch of unscalable, smooth granite broken only by a singular vibration-sensitive window three stories up.
A fool might've looked at the back of the building and chalked it up to a lost cause. A fool would've taken one look at the cameras and the unscalable wall and looked for a different entrance. An even more foolish thief would've tried to disable the cameras, with bullets or rocks or by hacking into the building itself (which would've been hard enough to begin with). That would set the internal alarm system off, and security would come running out of the building. Perhaps, a better thief might've wondered why there were two domed cameras on either side instead of one at the center, but still would've left with no idea of how to break in.
Hidden in the shadows of the alleyway, Victor smiled to himself. The cameras couldn't pick him up in the alleyway, and in a moment, they wouldn't be able to pick him up at all.
Victor ran through the capabilities of the dome analog cameras through his head. Infrared compatible, clear color picture correction, 23x zoom, 685 TVL. All housed within that small little dome. All of which were useful, to a certain extent, but the most important thing the darkened glass offered was keeping the direction they were pointed in hidden from thieves.
180 degrees rotation capabilities, Victor thought. It can't point everywhere at once, so it rotates from side to side.
Which was why there had to be two, one to point in either direction the entire time. One on either side of the building while the camera hovering above the door was perpetually fixed on the entrance. Victor had seen to the programming of the cameras, told the company to get the dome analog security cameras instead of the traditional infrared cameras used by other buildings in Detroit. Some had laughed at him, saying those were for school buildings, but Victor had insisted. You did not want to give away your play before the game started. If a thief could see where the camera was pointed, a thief could dodge out of its range.
Every quarter hour, the dome analog cameras on either side rotated 180 degrees. Always in sync, always exactly on the quarter hour.
Currently, they both would be pointing in the general direction towards the mouth of the alleyway Victor lurked in, smack in the middle between the two cameras. But when the watch on Victor's hand hit 3:15 AM, they would rotate to point away from the alley, hiding Victor from view. The surge of power to the two cameras on either side would momentarily black out the one hovering over the back door, and those precious ten seconds would be Victor's window.
Not much room for error, but Victor liked the odds.
The watch on his hand beeped, and Victor silenced it with the press of a button. Holding his breath, he waited a second longer before taking off. In a flash, he sprinted from the alleyway and hurled himself at the back door with as much strength as he could muster, using his momentum to smash into the steel door like a battering ram.
His shoulder hurt more than he would've liked to admit, and Victor staggered backwards from the force of the impact, nearly knocked off his feet.
"Shit," he muttered under his breath, clutching his shoulder. At least that should've set off the pressure sensors.
Knowing his time was short, Victor sprinted away from the entrance before the security camera above could flicker back to life and catch a glimpse of his face. Despite the throbbing of his shoulder and the pounding of his heart, Victor felt a wild surge of glee as he moved to the air duct a few meters from the door, conveniently out of sight from all three cameras until the next rotation.
Step one is done, he thought as he pried the grate away easily. He had removed the screws two days before to make sure the second step took as little time as possible.
The air duct would've been a thief's second way in, if said thief could even figure out how to bypass the cameras. However, Victor knew better than to try to crawl his way into the vents. He wouldn't have fit in them in the first place, but there were even more difficulties inside the small tunnel. About two meters in, laser detectors were installed for the sole purpose of keeping out the thieves with knacks for crawling their way through the dark.
Carefully, Victor reached into his coat's right pocket and withdrew the warm lump he had been hiding. The chickadee he gently cradled in his gloved hands gave him a disgruntled chirp.
"Sorry," Victor whispered as he released the bird into the vents before shutting the vent again, leaving the gate just a little askew.
Phase two done. The young black-capped chickadee had a wingspan just shy of seven and a half inches, small enough to fly in the vents, big enough to trip the lasers, and common enough for Victor to get his hands on in time.
Quickly, Victor ran back a few paces, still out of sight of the cameras. He had less than thirty seconds before the security guards came running, but there was still one more thing needed to be done.
I hope my aim is still good, he prayed silently as he hurled rock stored in his other pocket at the third-story window.
Victor didn't bother to see if his aim was true; he was already running for the alleyway when the sweet sound of shattering glass reached his ears.
-::-
Mind and feet both racing, Victor allowed himself a moment to relish in his victory as he weaved through the alleyways before coming to a halt in front of the Massive Dynamic building, hiding underneath the shadows of a tree on the sidewalk. The easy part had been setting off all the alarms—though even that had been difficult with the tight timing. Now came the hard part.
Cursing his already-receding hairline, Victor ran a hand through his sheaf of silver hair and tried to smooth it down as much as possible. He tugged at his overcoat, brushed the dirt off of his knees and elbows, and took a deep breath.
Look respectable, he told himself. Respectable and angry.
The ten-minute wait felt like an eternity, and Victor couldn't have been more relieved when the watch on his wrist beeped a second time.
Taking in another deep breath, Victor emerged from the shadows. Step by purposeful step, he walked up to the building and threw open the glass double doors, each one swinging inward to reveal Victor in the middle.
The building itself cost a fortune to build, and it required another fortune to secure. When he had first visited the place, Victor had been struck by its beauty—the granite floor and glass walls and every polished surface glittering like the building was its own supernova. Even the little orange trees in every corner and in front of the elevators were real.
Expensive doesn't mean invulnerable, Victor reminded himself.
He spotted the frenzied looking security guard at the polished granite desk, talking frantically into the headset. The security guard was still young and new to the job, just as Victor had anticipated. They would always stick someone new to one of the more boring jobs before moving the employee up the line, more of a receptionist than an actual security guard. Victor was relying on that tonight. That and the fact that it was a Saturday morning, smack in the middle of the graveyard shift.
Victor smiled to himself. When one of the numerous sensors was tripped, the front desk was simply alerted. They would send another guard to check out the disturbance. But when three or more sensors were tripped, the building went into a different alarm mode. Specifically, an alarm that could not be turned off by the front desk. An insufferably loud and raucous alarm that sounded more like a school bell than anything else. And it had been ringing for the past ten minutes while Victor waited outside, watching the security guard at the front desk stew in the chaos and noise.
Saturday morning in the early hours before dawn, new to the job, with an insufferably loud alarm ringing and echoing through the entire building. Anyone in that position would be grasping for any solution—even a silver-haired, ex-security consultant solution.
"What the hell is going on here?" Victor bellowed with as much authority as he could muster, marching his way towards the front desk. "You!"
The security guard practically squeaked. "Yes, sir!"
Victor could get used to this.
"Well?" he yelled. "Why are all the alarms going off?"
Before the security guard could answer, Victor reached into his wallet and pulled out his identification card, one that showed his position as an expert with clearance to highest-level security for all facilities belonging to the holding company. He waved it in front of the guard's face, and he was glad when the man paled. Clearly, he had missed the expiration date in shock and had not been there long enough to recognize Victor's name. Victor doubted many employees would recognize his name in the first place, but it was still a good precaution to make sure a new guy was at the front desk.
They keep a skeleton crew at night, Victor told himself as he pocketed the card. Skeleton crew means this is the only guard I'll have to deal with since the other ones are all running about outside.
"What's with the noise?" he asked again. "I got dragged out of bed for this!"
"We're working on it, sir!" he answered, then spoke into his headset. "Someone threw a rock through the window and a bird got into the vents."
"A bird," Victor repeated, trying his best to glower.
"Yes, sir," the guard squeaked. "Bird."
"You're telling me I was called out at three in the morning for a bird."
Positively petrified, the guard gave frightened nod.
"Well, then, what are you waiting for?" Victor yelled over the alarm, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "If it was an accident, get me up to the control room and let me turn this cursed bell off. Chop chop!"
The guard squeaked again and whirled on his heels, scrambling towards the elevator. Victor followed, strolling right past the metal detectors and the first security checkpoint, making sure his heels clicked against the granite floor as ominously as possible. The poor guard was going to lead him right past all the checkpoints, and from there, it would be easy. Or at least Victor hoped.
The elevator gave a ding, and they entered. Thirty floors and a basement, just as the building plans indicated. The guard scanned his card and punched a button.
"Floors above ten are for research, yes?" Victor asked cautiously.
The security guard nodded, eager to please. "Floors eleven through twenty are just offices. Twenty-one through thirty are actual labs."
"Smart," Victor commented. "If the labs catch on fire, everyone would still have a way down."
"Yeah, no fire escape." The guard gave a nervous laugh. "Can't make it for the thieves, right?"
"No, you can't," Victor replied. He gave the security guard the best look of admiration he could muster without laughing. "And it's a damn thing we have people like you in here at night."
"Yeah," the guard continued as the elevator came to a halt on the eighth floor with another ding. Apparently Victor had gotten him into a talking mood now that he wasn't practically quaking in his polished shoes. "Even though there aren't a lot of people here at night, someone's got to make sure the building's secure."
"Who comes here at night?"
"Oh, mostly just a few researchers working on deadlines," he supplied quickly. "And some international scientists from Hong Kong or London or something."
"I see."
The guard scanned his own card at a door. It clicked and swung open as the card was approved, and after they were inside, the doors slammed shut. The sounds of the alarm muted behind them.
Good, thought Victor. Get me through all the checkpoints with that little card of yours.
Inside the cold server room, Victor strolled through the familiar shelves and wiring until he found what he was looking for. The computer that he would need to turn off the alarms and to find the files he needed for the job. Eddington would have his data back, and Victor would be one step closer to taking back what he lost. Still, there was one more part of his plan he needed to get right.
Victor prayed the insufferable alarm and sleep deprivation had made the security guard willing to cut corners to turn the damn thing off. Slowly, he sat down at the computer and pulled out his expired identification again. Holding his breath, Victor tried to scan it to gain access to the computer, anxiously awaiting the outcome.
The computer didn't respond.
Victor tried again. Nothing.
"Shit," he cursed, glancing over his shoulder at the hovering security guard.
If he asks to see my card to verify it again, this whole thing is doomed.
"What's wrong?" the guard asked, and Victor's heart nearly leapt out of his chest.
"It's corrupted," he said, remembering all the times he rubbed the card against his phone, trying to corrupt the magnetic strip. An expired card would trigger yet another alarm system, but a corrupted one—one that you rubbed or kept close to other strong magnets—would have no effect. The system wouldn't risk setting an alarm off at a high-clearance business person who had been careless with where to put a key card.
"Here," the security guard provided, handing Victor his own card. "Use mine."
And just like that, Victor's breathing eased.
"Thank you," he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. "I must've kept mine too close to my phone or something."
"No worries. It happens to the best of us."
Victor smiled to himself as he scanned the card and handed it back to the guard behind him. As expected, the computer flickered to life.
"Did you tell the others I'm already here?" he asked. He didn't want some loon to actually call an alarm company and have a real specialist show up just in time to ruin Victor's plan. He knew most alarm companies did not operate at such ungodly hours of the night, had counted on it, but it was best to make sure.
"No, I didn't. Didn't even call the alarm company before you got here."
"We get notified when a high-priority building like this gets into trouble. I was the closest one in the area, so they sent me." A flimsy lie at best, considering how quickly Victor had entered the scene, but he hoped the security guard wouldn't think too deeply on it.
Victor entered another command into the computer system, and with the press of a key, the din behind them ceased. The security guard let out a deep sigh of relief.
"I have to do some more work," Victor told him. "I'll see myself out when I'm finished. You should go check out the third floor or something. Go make the rounds and tell the others it's nothing to worry about. If it was just a stray bird and some teenagers throwing rocks, the building's secure. Oh, and get that bird out of the vents. Can't turn the detectors back on if a bird's still flying around inside. You have about fifteen minutes before the alarm system resets and the lasers turn back on. Understood?"
The security guard nodded briskly and scrambled out of the room, looking like he was taking orders from an army general. If Victor hadn't been so busy focusing on not getting caught in his schemes, he might've laughed.
"Here we go," he muttered to himself as he turned back to the computer.
He needed to reset the system, and doing so would turn off all the alarms. The system would need at least fifteen minutes to start up again, and that process would give him a small window to take all the research and the samples from the labs. In that precious time frame where all the alarms would be disabled, he needed to get Yuuri from the ground floor, get up to the labs, have a look around, get back to the server room, and then back to the ground floor. Of everything in the plan, this would be the hard part, especially since Victor had no idea how long looking for the samples would take.
Taking a deep breath, Victor reset the system with the tap of another key.
On the clock.
With the flick of a wrist, he produced a large USB drive. Eddington had given it to him and told him just to stick it into the computer, open it up, and let it do its work. The code Eddington's programmer wrote would copy all of the stolen files back onto the disk, then erase the files thoroughly from the computer system. Moving swiftly, Victor followed Eddington's instructions and raced out the door.
The elevator dinged immediately, and, no longer needing a key card, Victor waited patiently as it brought him back to the ground floor.
Right on time, he thought as he spotted Yuuri hovering by the front door. Victor gestured for him to come in, one foot in the elevator. Not a single security guard in sight. At least Victor had done his part of the plan correctly. If he hadn't been so short on time, he might've even stopped to admire his work.
"We're on the clock," he told Yuuri as the chemist ran to Victor's side, breathless and confused.
"How did you do it?" he asked, eyes wide.
Victor couldn't help but smile as the elevator began to move. "I told you. I'm not a thief."
Yuuri looked at him, clearly puzzled.
"I'm a good thief."