Heavy Weather

At least one of the staff seemed happy enough to take her bribe money. Over a long-distance phone line from Texas, Jane had managed to subvert the clinic's receptionist. The receptionist was delighted to take Jane's electronic funds in exchange for ten minutes' free run on the clinic's internal phone system.

And accessing the clinic's floor plans had been pretty simple too; they'd turned out to be Mexican public records. It had been useful, too, to sneak into the building under the simple pretext of a drug buy. That had con-fi

Nothing about Alex was ever simple, though. Having talked to her brother on the phone, Jane now knew that Alex, who should have been her ally inside the enemy gates, was, as usual, worse than useless.

Carol and Greg-Jane's favorite confidants within the Storm Troupe-had urged her to stay as simple as possible.

Forget any romantic ninja break-and-enter muscle stuff.

That kind of stunt hardly ever worked, even when the U.S.

Army tried it. It was smarter just to show up in Nuevo Laredo in person, whip out a nicely untraceable debit card, and tell the night guard that it was ~iejanaro Unger out the door, or No bay dinero. Chances were that the guard would spring Alex in exchange for, say, three months' salary, local rates. Everybody could pretend later that the kid had escaped the building under his own power. That scheme was nice and straightforward. It was pretty hard to prosecute criminally. And if it ended up in a complete collapse and debacle and embarrassment, then it would look a lot better, later.

By stark contrast, breaking into a Mexican black-market clinic and kidnapping a patient was the sort of overly complex maneuver that almost never looked better later.

There'd been a time in Jane Unger's life when she'd cared a lot about "later." But that time was gone, and "later" had lost all its charm. She had traveled twelve hundred kilometers in a day, and now she was on foot, alone, in a dark alley at night in a foreign country, preparing to assault a hospital single-handed. And unless they caught her on. the spot, she was pretty sure that she was going to get away with it.

This was an area of Nuevo Laredo the locals aptly called "Salsipuedes," or "Leave-if-you-can." Besides Alex's slick but modest clinic, it had two other thriving private hospitals stuffed with gullible g

Jane made a final check of her equipment. Glue gun, jigsaw, penlight, cdlular phone, ceramic crowbar-all hooked and holstered to her webbing belt, hidden inside baggy paper refugee Suit. Equipment check was a calm-ritual. She zipped the paper suit up to the neck, over icr denim shorts and cotton T-shirt. She strapped on a plain white antiseptic mask.

Then she cut off the clinic's electrical power.

Thermite sizzled briefly on the power pole overhead, and half the city block went dark. Jane swore briefly inside her mask. Clearly there had been some changes made lately in the Nuevo Laredo municipal power grid. Jane Unger's first terrorist structure hit had turned Out to be less than surgical.

"Not my fault," she muttered. Mexican power engineers were always hacking around; and people stole city power too, all kinds of illegal network linkups around here... . They called the hookups diablitos, "little devils," another pretty apt name, considering that the world was well on its way to hell... . Anyway, it wouldn't kill them to repair one little outage.

Greg's thermite bomb had really worked. Every other week or so, Greg would drop macho hints about his military background doing structure hits. Jane had never quite believed him, before this.

Jane tied a pair of paper decontamination covers over her trail boots. She cinched and knotted the boot covers tightly at the ankles, then ghosted across the blacked-out street, puddles gleaming damply underfoot. She stepped up three stone stairs, entered the now pitch-black akove at the clinic's rear exit, and checked the street behind her. No cars, no people, no visible witnesses.....ane pulled a translucent rain hood over her head, cinched and knotted it. Then she peeled open a paper pack and pulled on a pair of tough plastic surgical gloves.

She slapped the steel doorframc with the flat of her hand.

The clinic's door opened with a shudder.

Jane had structure-hit the door earlier, on her way out of the clinic. She'd distracted her security escort for two vital seconds and craftily jammed the exit's elaborate keypad lock with a quick, secret gush of glue. Jane had palmed the aerosol glue can, a tiny thing not much bigger than a shotgun cartridge. Glue spray was one of Carol's favorite tricks, something Carol had taught her. Carol could do things with glue spray that were halfway to witchcraft.

Despite the power outage, the door's keypad lock was still alive on its battery backup-but the door mistakenly thought it was working. Smart machines were smart enough to make some really dumb blunders.

Jane closed the door gently behind her. It was chilly inside the building, pitch-black and silent and sepulchral. A good thing, because she'd immediately begun to sweat like crazy in the stifling gloves, hood, overalls, mask, and boots. Her armpits prickled with terror sweat as if she were being tattooed there. Cops-or worse yet, private-industry investigators-could do plenty with the tiniest bits of evidence these days. Fingerprints, shoeprints, stray hairs, a speck of clothing fiber, one lousy wisp of DNA...

Jane reached inside her paper suit through a slit behind its hip pocket. She unclipped the penlight from her webbing belt. The little light clicked faithfully under her thumb and a reddish glow lit the hail. Jane took a step down the hall, two, three, and then the fear left her completely, and she began to glide across the ceramic tiling, skid-dancing in her damp paper boot covers.

She hadn't expected burglary to be such a visceral thrill. She'd been inside plenty of ruined buildings-just like everyone else from her generation-but she'd never broken her way into a live one. A rush of wicked pleasure touched her like a long cold kiss on the back of the neck.

Jane tried the first door to her left. The knob slid beneath her latexed fingers-locked. Jane had a handheld power jigsaw on the webbing belt that would slice through interior door locks like a knife through a wedding cake, and for a moment her left hand worked inside the paper suit and she touched the jigsaw's lovely checkered rubber grip. But she stopped. She wisely resisted the urge to break into the room just for the thrill of it. Would they be locking Alex into a room at night? Not likely. Not night-owl Alex.

Stubborn, mean-tempered, night-owl Alex. Even at death's door, Alex wouldn't put up with that.

Next door. Unlocked. Room empty.

Next door. It was unlocked too. Some kind of janitor's supply, rags and jugs and paper. A good place to start a diversionary fire if you needed to.

Next door. Unlocked. The room stank. Like cough medicine cut with absinthe. Little red-eyed machines on the walls and floor, still alive on their battery backup. Jane's dim red light played over a big empty bed, then on a startling knot of hideous shadow-some kind of half-wilted monster houseplant.