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Vivi Valdez popped a gummy bear into her mouth as she settled in for her fourth

evening of low-key surveillance. It was one of her favorite parts of the job.

She was alone, free to proceed as she liked. On the first day, she had identified an office

suite across the street from her target that emptied out by 6 p.m. Since then,

she'd spent the evening sprawled on industrial carpet in front of a picture window

with eyes on the entrance to the genetic research institute of Toronto.

She'd hacked Gritz closed circuit security cameras in the lobby so she could watch their

feet from her phone and made note of every entrance and exit cross-referencing with her list

of Gritz staff and associates. On the second night, she'd broken in.

That had been a fun evening, figuring out the weaknesses in each level of high-tech security.

Once she was in, though, Vivi had found the lab's kind of creepy.

She had stolen classified information from, at last count, four hostile nations,

and she was very comfortable sneaking around in the dark. But the lab was full of things she

couldn't interpret, equipment humming through the night, screens showing what were either

elaborate screen savers or magnifications of very tiny organisms reproducing as she watched,

glowing liquid, actually glowing, that she imagined would do horrible things to anything

it touched, or possibly turn her into an angst-ridden superhero.

Vivi's initial brief was too vague for her to figure out what she was looking for in that morass,

so she had planted a bug in the office of Dr. Nathaniel Sturgis, director of research,

and gotten the hell out, with plans to return once she had more intel.

...