Jane slid a private-currency card through the slit beneath the window. The pharmacist swiped Jane's card through a reader, studied the results on the network link, and began to show real interest. Jane was politely abstracted from the line and introduced to the pharmacist's superior, who escorted her up to his office. There he showed her a vial of a more modern analgesic, a designer endorphin a thousand times more potent than morphine. Jane turned down his offer of a free trial injection.

When Jane haltingly brought up the subject of bribery, the supervisor's face clouded. He called a big pnvatesecurity thug, and Jane was shown out the clinic's back entrance, and told not to return.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. The famous KISS acronym had always been Jane's favorite design principle. If you need access, keep it simple. Bribing the staff of the clinic sounded like the simplest solution to her problem. But it wasn't.

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-finned Jane's ideas of the clinic's internal layout.

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.