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.