He turned his attention from the car windows to those on the near side of the clinic. All except the first of three or four running toward the back had their blinds raised. Glenn saw an overnight attendant in lab whites filling out paper forms at a desk behind the last window. Insofar as he could tell through his lenses, they were charts comparable to the sort nurses and doctors would hang from beds in hospitals that treated patients of the human variety. There was, he noticed, bluish light flickering from somewhere in the room . . . probably a television set. It wouldn’t hurt if the attendant had its sound up.

“Okay,” Ricci said. “You ready?”

Glenn nodded.

“Give me exactly two minutes.” Ricci tapped the face of his WristLink. “Remember . . . anything goes wrong, head straight for the car and take off.”

Glenn hesitated. This had been another point of disagreement between them, but Ricci had been relentless in his insistence on drawing the heat if there was a foul-up.

Ricci stared at him in the dark, waiting for his second nod. He gave it with slow reluctance.

“I thought it’d be ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ ”

“Bullshit,” Ricci said. Then he slipped away toward the left, bent low under the ponderous boughs of the hardwoods.

Hoping the cops would continue to lean back in their seats a bit longer, an eye on the tritium dial of his own watch—not quite as jazzed as Ricci’s, but accurate—Glenn knelt into position with the rifle.

Ninety seconds later he sighted through its night scope, counted down the final half minute to himself, and then pulled the trigger with a silent prayer.

The muted crack of the subsonic round leaving his weapon was no louder than the hammer click of a dry-fired revolver. It traveled straight through the cruiser’s open window, skimmed between the cops and the windshield, and struck the interior of the passenger door’s frame.

The startled cops jerked in their seats as the sabot burst open on impact to release its superconcentrated fill of dimethyl sulfoxide and zolpidem—a soporific aerosol formulated to be instantly absorbed into the bloodstream on contact with skin or mucous membranes. Glenn knew a microscopic amount of the agent would be enough to knock out someone the size of a pro-basketball center within moments, and neither of the cops was built like Shaquille O’Neal.

They dropped off into unconsciousness, spilling over each other in the front seat of the car. The two probably hadn’t had time to wonder what was happening to them. Their exposure to the chemical incapacitant would leave them with pounding heads, queasy stomachs, and a whole lot of confusion when they recovered. But they would be alive and well.

Glenn produced a long exhalation of relief, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and looked out past the treeline with his binocs.