A partial curse, quickly silenced, escaped into the night.

Jacqueline tried not to think about the Senator’s daughter, but the image of her clad in a loose fitting cotton robe, hair hanging in newly-showered disarray, kept creeping into her mind at the most inconvenient times. Now was a particularly bad time because she had problems. The biggest one was the fact that she was hanging outside of a sixty-fourth story window.

’Don’t look down’ is wonderful advice but when there are armed men with orders to shoot to kill you, sometimes you just have to ignore the rules.

Swallowing hard, Jacqueline tried to prepare herself for the inevitable vertigo that was about to hit her and looked down.

It was like standing at the base of a skyscraper, looking straight up, except the sky and the ground had swapped places. She clenched her jaw to suppress the urge to throw up the last mojito. Or three.

No ledges or cracks to exploit showed themselves, just a long straight drop to the bottom.

It was time to improvise.