have to be enough.
I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the door and crouched low. If Katerina was waiting on the other side, she could only react to it opening. Moving fast enough, I could get through before she fired, then it would just be a matter of getting close. Speed at the start was critical. I shifted my weight between my feet and planted myself, visualizing the path I’d take just beyond the door. I played through the next five seconds again and again in my mind. When I was sure, I turned the handle.
I tore the door open and sprinted past the threshold. I was as alert as I’d ever been in my life then. My vision was a sequence of hyper-detailed still images flashing, one after another at the center of a dark tunnel. My first step beyond the door was on the second stair directly ahead. I bounded up, three steps at a time, scanning for movement.
I came around the first landing and paused for a split second. It could have cost me my life, but so could blindly running through a tripwire or IR field. The stairwell ahead, as far as I could see, looked clear.
I kept still and listened. The door below swung shut, and the sound echoed up the stairwell. There was the steady drip of water as it lightly cascaded down the steps, and the sound of my own breathing. I was alone. There was no trap, no Jovian fire team waiting in ambush, no proximity mine or rogue agent.
I climbed the next flight of steps. Then the one after, and the one after that. My pace picked up as I rose higher and higher, my caution giving way once again to the pressure I’d felt before. Katerina had a six-minute lead on me, and it was growing by the second. My hesitance entering the stairwell couldn’t be helped—it would have been the perfect killbox had anyone been so inclined—but the time I took to reach the Swan Rooms was entirely within my control.
I raced up those winding steps with all the speed an augmented human possibly could, which is to say it was less than a fifth of the time it should have taken. I never grew winded. The pump where my heart used to be kept an even, quiet flow. My legs pushed off the 800th step as easily as the 8th.
The door to the Swan Rooms was locked with a pattern code. The elevator would have let Katerina out into a living room, but the stairwell entrance was behind a faux closet in an adjacent room. Unless she had taken the time to search for it, it was unlikely Katerina had even noticed. It was an aesthetic choice that was now serving a practical use.
I swiped in the pattern on the lock. Triangle, triangle, circle. The hinges quietly groaned under the weight as the maglock depolarized. I then pushed the two-foot-thick door open and stepped through into the Swan Rooms.
At a glance, there was no doubt that she had come this way. Clothes were strewn on the floor, and the sink in the kitchen was wet. The hotel staff were barred from entry and didn’t have keys to the room. No one from Section 9 ever used the suite either, although we sometimes did allow visiting dignitaries to use the room if only so we could record them for possible kompromat.
It looked like Katerina had quickly swapped clothes and washed up. Changing one’s appearance is standard spycraft when trying to evade pursuit, and in retrospect I should have done the same, but at the time all I could think about was her slipping through my fingers because I was too slow. I hurriedly crossed the suite and walked out into the hotel.
There were two different ways to get down to the hotel lobby. Katerina could have gone either right or left, and I had no way of knowing which route she had chosen. Facing two equal options, I arbitrarily decided to head right.
If she was already outside, she would have disappeared into the city by now. As I jogged through the hotel corridor, I passed a couple who stared at me as I went by. I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but then I remembered I was covered in Dr. Markov’s blood and carrying a length of pipe.
When I reached the ground floor, I was confronted by a member of the hotel’s staff. He