Raindrops slap her forehead. She levels the lens at him, praying the light will be good enough. He rattles on and on about how great everything was when he was getting nookie in the oval office and how his library will teach everybody in this awful state to read.

The shutter button gives way under her long finger and the camera blinks once. She reviews the shot on the small color screen. It's horrid. If only the van hadn't turned over on the interstate, spilling her zoom lens into a fetid Arkansas stream.

She pushes herself through the crowd, dodging umbrellas, feeling the crinkly clear plastic of emergency rain slickers against the skin of her arms. It sends a shiver down her spine and for a split second her mind reaches back and yanks out the voice of the tech support guy. Her e-mail was down. He kept trying to help her, but she was so distracted by his voice that she eventually had to get somebody else, then take a long shower.

An umbrella catches in her hair and pulls her back to the event. She's got to get closer if she's ever going to get the shot. The velvet rope is wet and sagging, hanging there like a stray dog's tail. There's no going beyond the rope. Two huge men with plastic in their ears are installed just beyond it, their eyes slowly scanning the crowd for crazies or desperate photographers with insufficient lenses.

She uses her eyes, which have turned blue-green in the pale cloud-filtered light, to search for another possibility. The library is huge, all glass and right angles. It's finished, but they've left some scaffolding up a few yards from the podium just to remind everyone that it's brand spanking new. If she hurries, she can reach it from inside the library before the speech is over.

Man, can this guy talk. Loves the sound of his own voice. She doesn't mind it so much, actually. And there's something alluring about his silver hair and broad shoulders.

She holds the thought, pushes her way back through the wet politicians and trailer park residents to the van. She can reach the rear of the library by hiking through a tangle of Arkansas forest. If she doesn't get kidnapped by hill folk, she should be able to find a way in. Her boots are waterproof, special Marine issue from when she was imbedded with the Seals in Southeast Asia.

She grabs a green slicker from the van and plunges into the woods, hood up, camera safe in a padded waterproof case. She follows a churning stream, trudges through the mud at its banks. She crouches low, using the techniques Jimenez taught her. Was he ever a pretty thing to shoot; showing her how to skin a deer, build a tiger trap, become invisible in dense vegetation. Dark skin pulled taut over round muscles, green and black face paint speckled with sweat.

She realizes, as she creeps through the ferns and mulberry bushes, that this is a gaping hole in national security. She snaps a few shots, makes sure to get some secret service guys in the frame and vows to pitch the story when she gets back home. The security of the nation is hot right now. She might even get a bonus.

She moves slowly and silently from the tree line to the back of the library. There's still a dumpster full of construction debris sitting near a door to the service and delivery area. The back of the library is ugly, all pipes and whirring machines and things that nobody wants to see. The service door is the color of rust, not yet marked "service" or anything else, but she's broken into enough buildings to see it for what it is.

The door is locked tight. She curses under her breath, tunes an ear to the speech. He's still going strong, going on and on about unity. Talk like that will turn everybody into neo-con wage slaves in less than two years.

But she's still got to get the shot. Her editor, a little guy named Sal, will really blow his top if she doesn't get the goods. He's still upset about her Bangkok expense account. He trims his moustache every day and brushes his teeth every time he has a cup of coffee, which is every 20 minutes. He can't imagine how someone can drink that much rice whiskey and get that many massages.

The dumpster is full of complete crap. But to her trained eye it is a cornucopia of larceny-enabling instruments, the Wal Mart of B&E. A four-foot length of rebar pokes out near the top. She grabs the rim of the dumpster with one hand, leaps up and snatches the bar like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone.

It's heavy, but her arms are toned and strong from the Kung-Fu story she did last month. She believes in total emersion, got a black belt faster than any of Master Wong's students ever have.

The door pops open easy enough. She takes a deep breath, the moist air focusing her chi, then exhales and releases the energy like a pound of lit cordite. She doesn't know the floor plan, but has an instinct for these sorts of things. She races through an uncharacteristically dust-free storage room and into a stairwell. These places are all the same now, elevators out in the open and stairwells hidden away in the back. She makes a quick estimate, decides that the window she's looking for is on the fifth floor, probably a bathroom window.

She pushes open the door to the fifth floor, makes her way through a hallway covered with gray carpet. She's exactly eight paces in before she realizes that she's tracked gobs of sticky red mud all over the place. She'll have to burn the boots later, in case the CSIs get a good shoeprint.

She instinctually heads west, charging until she spies the little blue lady sign over a metal door. It's unlocked. The bathroom is pristine. She apologizes to the janitorial service under her breath and heads for the window, which is high up on the wall. It doesn't take long to confirm it's the right one. Grungy scaffolding pipes span the window frame like scan lines on a detuned TV. She's tall, but still has to jump to flip the latch, jump again to give it a shove.

The window flips open, rotating on an axis, top in, bottom out. It leaves an aperture just big enough for her slim frame. She steps back, gathers herself into a ball of energy on the tile floor and leaps. Her hands catch the sill, fingers latching on like talons. She pulls herself up easily. Pull-ups are no problem. In Israeli boot camp she once did fifteen in a row, then beat the living snot out of her Kra Maga instructor, who was cheating on her with a reporter from Baton Rouge.

She eases herself through the opening, her long body straddling the sill. It is sharp against the soft skin of her belly, but her muscles resist the pressure, keep her teetering in limbo until she can reach out and grab a grubby pipe. She heaves herself the rest of the way out, scaffolding quivering as she tucks her legs under her and hangs, just for a second. She doesn't want to drop just yet, checks the boards below her. They look nice and strong and she lets go, lands lightly and immediately goes into a crouch. She is amazed that she has not been hit with sniper fire. The scaffolding should be covered by at least two guys, invisible guys in ghillie suits somewhere out there in the forest. But she does not feel the familiar sting of a bullet, not anywhere on her body, and begins to make her way down the scaffolding, getting closer to her target.

She stops halfway, snaps a shot of the million multi-colored umbrellas and shiny plastic anoraks, all the politicians with their faces upturned in total admiration. The shot's one in a million, the shot that 8-year-olds will scribble on in their history books. But it's not the shot she was sent to get. She stows the camera and swings out over another level, muddy boots aimed at wet pine boards.

This level is perfect. When he addresses the left half of the crowd, his face is in full view. The clouds even split, letting a few holy-mary-mother-of-christ rays of light through. They strike through the thick raindrops and land on his face like the fingers of the almighty himself. It's perfect. She puts the camera to her face, peers through the viewfinder. The shot is off-center. She'll have to lean out a bit to get it just right. She reaches out with her left hand, wraps it around a vertical pipe for stability, then leans, camera pressed to her face.

He looks at the left half of the crown, douses them with kind words of thanks. He's wrapping it up. It has to be now. Just a bit farther. . .

The pipe moves. She has enough time to drop the camera and grab the pipe with her other hand. Then it's falling like a felled tree, angling toward the podium with increasing speed, her latched onto its end like some kind of insane pole-vaulter. She looks out over the crowd, sees pale surprised faces raised in her direction. She looks down at him, a former world leader oblivious to the world around him, beaming into the shocked masses.

She lands right on top of him, pushes him and the podium to the ground. Her hands press against his chest, her blond ribbony hair falls in wet locks around his head. He looks up at her, pale blue eyes cool and serene. She is breathless. "Hello," he says dreamily. "Are you an angel?" She has time to snap one shot before he passes out.

© 2008 Dustin Driver