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 gnngos, as well as a monster public hospital, a big septic killing zone very poorly managed by the remains of the Mexican government. Jane watched a beat-up robot truck rumble past, marked with a peeling red cross. Then she watched her hands trembling. Her unpainted fingertips were ivory pale and full of nervous jitter. Just like the jitter she had before a storm chase. Jane was glad to see that jitter, the fear and the energy racing along her nerves. She knew that the jitter would melt off like dry ice once the action started. She had learned that about herself in the past year. It was a good thing to know.