"Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

little demand for this
legendary substance among people with respiratory illnesses.
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.
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.