As she hung there, the cool salty air blowing gently across her shoulder blades, her black shrouded form almost invisible in the waning moonlight, she listened for footsteps. Exactly Fourteen seconds after she checked her watch, the small, noise-canceling ear-bud in her left ear alerted her to the sound of footsteps. Three men, walking close enough to chat but far enough to provide cover in a fight, were approaching the kill zone. She watched a sliver of lighted hallway through the window of the dark, empty break room as she inhaled for two beats. At Sixteen seconds a large man with an imposing looking rifle on a strap around his shoulder walked into view, without breaking stride he quickly scanned the break room for movement but didn't catch the motionless form of Mei at the dark window. At Seventeen seconds, a small, nervous looking man with a leather briefcase stepped into view and Mei moved the blowgun to her lips. At Eighteen seconds, just as the third man (almost a carbon copy of the first man, with an equally imposing gun) stepped into view, Mei forcefully exhaled her held breath through the blowgun.
The first inkling of danger the nervous man felt was a tiny prick on the side of his neck, he slapped instinctively at it but came away with nothing. The tiny curare dart was less than a millimeter long and designed to dissolve on contact with its target, and the dart was fast. By the time his brain had registered the prick and sent the signal to his arm for the slap, the dart had already pumped the deadly poison into his muscle fiber, where it quickly went to work. By the time his hand made contact with his neck, there was nothing left of the dart but a sticky residue, and the poison had found its way into his bloodstream. The man was as good as dead, but he didn't know it yet.
Mei knew she had fired true as soon as the shot was off, she didn't need to see the target react to confirm it, but she waited for the reaction anyway, no reason to get sloppy. She clicked her heels together, depressing the button on the small winch strapped to her left ankle. The winch began reeling the thin, nylon cord back in, pulling Mei up the side of the building with it. When she reached the window she had started this from, two floors above the by now convulsing nervous man, she clicked her heels again and came to a stop. She deftly climbed into the building and stretched to get her circulation in rhythm again. Pressing the button on her other heel with one outstretched finger sent a signal that made the anchor point for her nylon cord decouple itself from the wall several feet above the window. She caught the falling anchor with her other hand and let the winch pull the rest of the line in, silently.
Mei finished stowing her gear in the small black backpack she had left near her exit window. Then she donned the backpack and stepped into a crouch on the still open sill. She let herself fall forward into a dive, flashing past the window she had been so close to several moments ago, smiling with satisfaction at the downed man and the panicked scene that she briefly glimpsed. Once she was out of sight below the window she pulled the small ripcord and the specially designed parachute unfolded from her back. She expertly guided herself away from the skyscraper and towards the water, several hundred feet below.
Three minutes later, when the on site nurse arrived at the scene of the convulsing man, Mei Lynn Kanzashi was already coming in for a silent landing on the rooftop of her hotel, three blocks west of the skyscraper. Five minutes after that, she was walking down the hallway in her hotel, wearing nothing but a hotel bathrobe and carrying a gym bag with her gear in it over her right shoulder. Nobody paid her a second glance as she walked calmly to her room and stepped inside.
