The first notion that occurred to her was to wonder how they managed to fire off at least four rounds without detection. Tasìa had spotted a Sinsonte Acoustic Array on the radio tower the first time she walked the track around the football field soon after arriving.

The spooks must have used a sound suppressor on the rifled fired at the vent.

She peeked through the grid screen, searching for a possible angle for the origin point. A few moments of scanning the tower in front of her, Tasìa found the only plausible trajectory (assuming the gunman wasn't impractically dangling from a rope). The shot came from the tower rooftop; one more story up from the duct outlet where she now crouched.

Her next question - could she peek further out without being seen? Would even moving the vent out of her way catch someone's attention?

The space between the tower and the Spore Isolation Ward formed an alleyway limiting the line of sight for any spotter. However, from Tasìa's calculation, the drone that normally circled the yard would make a pass by the alleyway every eleven minutes.

She knew its route by heart from studying its movement during her walks on the yard. Tasìa checked her watch as she did a quick estimation of the time that it should pass.

She had less than two more minutes to wait. She started to count from one hundred and twenty back to one. Counting backward, Tasìa had found on previous heists helped to steel her nerves.

When the drone made its pass at eleven seconds left in her count, the sound of its gyro-rotors harmoniously doubled with another set on the other side of the alleyway.

The new drone hovered on her right; the same side the bolts had been shot out. Tasìa put her eye up against the crack between the vent and the wall. She was careful not to cause the vent to shake as the drone passed by.

Tasìa was relieved to discover that the twin drone was routed in a path that merely mirrored the drone that she had familiarized herself with over the previous several months.

She realized as she walked the track six months earlier while she studied the drone route pattern, there was at least one highly exploitable security lapse.

Now she witnessed the original lapse being compounded.

Incredible.

Tasìa heard a low, slow screech she recognized as the sound of a golf cart brake being stomped on from just beneath her. She cracked open the vent slightly and peeked down.

Two maintenance men entered a storage shack that lined up with the vent.

They cracked jokes at one another unaware of her presence. Bemused, Tasìa also noticed on the asphalt just beneath their feet were fragments of shot-out bolts catching a glint of the early evening sunlight and reflecting it harshly.

If the maintenance men paid any attention to their surroundings they would have caught sight of it. It wasn't there job to look for suspicious things, so naturally they didn't notice the odd occurance.

They loaded up the vehicle with rolls of wiring before driving back out of the alleyway.

After they left, she had six more minutes to surveil the tower before the drones came back around. The tower was four stories in height. A square fifty-by-fifty yard design bearing no façade ornamentation.

It most notably lacked windows. A conspicuous exception in appearance to every other building on the compound.

She spotted an entry shack on the roof of the tower facing away from the yard. Fifteen yards separated the tower from the Spore Isolation Unit.

Tasìa pushed the vent out of her way and she peered out. Quickly, she snapped her head back.

Maximum sized black F-150 trucks were parked in front of a squat building to her right. They were used for patrol. There were two windows and a doorway set in the squat building with a line of sight on her location.

Damn, Tasìa thought. Just when I convinced myself this was going to be easy.

She had a choice to make. To do the run after the drones passed by in a few more minutes, or go back and wait till near the end of her work shift in the SIU when it would be dark.

She did not want to go back until her task was complete.

This close to dusk, already, dim light provided ample cover in the shadows of large objects. She peered down at the storage shack; Tasìa calculated the minimal time of risk for being sighted.

She could make a straight drop on to the shack as she repelled with her arms pushed upward on the walls to counter her descent. The fall would give the guards in the squat building a chance to sight her between one to two seconds.

If she lay flat on the rooftop they would not be able to see her after she had made the quick decent.

If she then flipped over to the opposite wall facing away from them, she would still stay out of their sight.

The last bit of exposure would occur with her mad dash across the alleyway. That last maneuver would take her three seconds at the most.

The squat building they used for patrol routing lined up with the tower so they had no line of sight on the tower wall itself unless someone was taking a smoke break out by the far wall.

As she heard the double hum of the drones, Tasìa reviewed her plan, and she decided it was sound. She was going to pull it off.

When the drone passed by, she pushed against the vent and dropped down. Executing the maneuver was a simple matter of muscle memory for Tasìa. If timed correctly with her arms pushing up to counter the descent there was little risk of injury.

She pushed up and then swinged down.

The maneuver was executed without error. Tasìa thrust up at the right time at the end of the descent, and turned in mid-air with her weight properly distributed just before she impacted on the roof.

However, Tasìa made one crucial miscalculation she realized as she lay flat on the roof while listening for a reaction. The blare of a handheld transceiver came from one of the F-150s.

"Five. One. Five. I think we might have another jumper from off the SIU building."

She had not noticed that one of the parked trucks was occupied. From his vantage point, off the ground by several feet, he would soon spot her on the rooftop if she did not move.

She flipped off the side of the maintenance hut rooftop. She did have one advantage working for her, Tasìa realized when she glanced back towards the F-150 just before she flipped over. His line of sight was severely limited near the ground due to the enormous size of his vehicle.

She quickly crawled low across the alleyway and she pushed herself up against the wall.

Tasìa heard an annoyed voice answer the call the patrolman inside the parked F-150 had made.

"Jesus Christ! What kind of fucked-up-shit goes on in that building that those doctors kill themselves like clockwork?"

In a deep baritone the patrolman answered in turn.

"You know what, Jaime? I don't even want to know."

She climbed up the four storied wall in less than the two minutes it took the patrolman to walk from the parking lot to the alleyway.

After glancing around to make sure the rooftop was clear, she lay down to rest against a roof support that held a drain pipe in place as she listened in on the conversation.

"Jaime, I must be seeing shit. There is nothing over here."

"Disappointed?"

"That there is no dead body leaking gut-fluids all over the cement? You underestimate how squeamish I am. Wait a second… found something."

"You telling me you missed spotting a dead body on your first go-around?"

The patrolman who stood below her shook his head and laughed at his friend's jest. He raised his head to peer up at the vent with the shot out bolts.

"I found fragments from vent-hold bolts lying on the asphalt, Jaime. Looks like our neighbors have been target practicing."

"From the doctors out of Mengele, the spooks out of Pinochet, and that war criminal I know I saw smoking a cigarette on that rooftop over there, I love my fucking job."

"Easy on that last bit, Jaime. This may be a two-way transceiver, but you never know who is listening in."