He heard shouting behind him, but he ignored it. He came to the junction in the corridor, the place where it met the hallway that followed the curve of the building. Where would the stairs be? He’d seen them when he was brought here for the first time, but now he couldn’t remember — did he go left or right?
He had to pick one. He went right.
They’d made a mistake in letting him eat and sleep. He’d recovered some of his strength, and he had always been a fast runner. He dashed past a series of doorways, some of them open to show empty rooms. He remembered the bars on the windows, the impact-resistant plastic that covered them on the inside. No point entering any of those rooms. He needed to find an exit, a way out of the hospital altogether, if he had any chance of getting away.
Up ahead the curved hallway opened into a sort of lobby. There were restrooms up there, and — yes — a bank of elevators. He had no time to wait for one of those, but he knew that generally where you found elevators you found emergency stairs as well.
He got lucky. If the door to the stairs had been labeled in Russian, he would have just passed it by — he couldn’t read the Cyrillic characters. But the doorway also showed a pictogram of someone running down steps ahead of a cartoon flame. Fire stairs — perfect. He hit the door with his shoulder and found, as he’d expected, that it was locked. Fire safety was less important than not letting your inmates escape, he supposed. He hit the door again, and again.
Behind him he heard rubber shoes chirping on the linoleum floor.
He hit the door again and the lock snapped. Cheap manufacture, not meant for this kind of abuse. Chapel burst through the door and down a flight of concrete steps. It was dark in the stairwell but as he descended, taking the steps two and three at a time, automatic lights flickered on overhead.
He had no idea even what floor he was on, or how many flights down the street was, but he didn’t care. He heard people yelling at each other above him and just kept hurtling down the steps, fast enough that if he missed a riser he would probably fall and break his neck.
He didn’t fall. One flight down, dash across the landing, two flights, another landing, three flights—
He heard someone moving below him, footsteps hurrying up the stairs toward him. He heard the squawk of a portable radio and knew the hospital’s security guards had been alerted about an escape attempt. Well, he would just have to improvise.
Four flights down, five, and then he ran around a landing and saw a man below him, a man in a dark green uniform carrying a radio in one hand and a heavy wooden baton in the other. No gun.
Chapel launched himself off the landing, into the air. He came crashing down hard on top of the security guard, whose body broke his fall. The man cried out, something in Russian Chapel didn’t understand. Chapel grabbed the baton out of the man’s hand and hit him a couple of times with it, hit him until he stopped protesting.
Then he was off again. Down another flight. Another. Up ahead the stairs ended at a short corridor. At the end of that corridor was a sign covered in warnings and writing he couldn’t read. The door had a push bar and it looked like an alarm would sound if it was opened. It had to be an emergency exit to the street.
If he could get through that door, if Chapel could get out into the world, he could count on his training for what to do next. Find some clothes, get some money, find some way to contact Varvara and her vory friends, find a way out of Russia—
He hit the push bar at full speed, expecting the door to crash open, expecting to spill out into sunlight and chill morning air and freedom, and—
The door didn’t open.
The push bar moved under his weight. He could feel a latch inside the door retract, could feel the door shift in its jamb. But it wouldn’t open.
It must have been sealed off somehow. Maybe the security detail had a way to lock it remotely, and they’d sealed off every exit from the hospital as soon as they heard an inmate was loose. Maybe the door was just rusted into place.
Chapel hit the door with his shoulder, hit it again and again until he felt like he was going to break the bones in his one good arm. Still it wouldn’t open. He could hear people coming up behind him, hear them getting closer, and there was nowhere to go except back, right into their path. He hit the door with his left shoulder, probably damaging the sensitive electrodes implanted in his stump, but who cared, what did it matter, anything could be fixed—
A needle sank deep into his neck. He whirled around, as ferocious as a tiger, to find Kalin right next to him. He thought he would kill the man then and there, bite his throat out if need be, gouge him in the eyes, smash his trachea…
… but he suddenly… felt very… woozy. Very… weak.
“Only a sedative,” Kalin said.
Chapel sank down to the floor. He just wanted to sit down for a second. Then he would start fighting again.
“Not too much,” Kalin said. The FSB man squatted next to him, to look in his eyes. “Half a dose, really. I need you conscious for what comes next.”
Four orderlies, this time. Even though Chapel would have found it hard to stand under his own power. His head felt light, and even his teeth felt numb. Well. He’d won a small victory, then. A tiny, barely meaningful one.
When they cut off his arm, it wasn’t going to hurt as much. The sedative would help kill a little of the pain.
His eyes rolled around to look at Kalin, and he realized that he was being asked a question. He had floated away for a little while there. Kalin smiled and repeated his query, very slowly.
“What is your name?”
Chapel smiled back.
“You do understand, don’t you? If you have a name, that makes you a human being. That gives you certain rights. I won’t be able to amputate your arm if you have rights. But only if you have a name. What is your name?”
“Marie Antoinette,” Chapel told him.
The drug didn’t take away the fear. It didn’t keep his fight-or-flight reflex from kicking in. Inside his head Chapel was screaming, begging to be released. But he could use the drug, use how sluggish it made his muscles. He could at least pretend to be composed.
He promised himself he would hold out right until the last minute. That he wouldn’t give in until they strapped him down on the operating table. Who knew? Maybe this was all a bluff. Maybe Kalin wouldn’t go through with it.
Yeah, right, he thought. He knew better. That wasn’t the way the world worked. Not his world, anyway.
“How did you meet the terrorist Asimova?” Kalin asked.
“She wasn’t a terrorist,” Chapel said. “She was a patriot. More of a patriot to Russia than you are, asshole.”
Kalin beamed. “So you admit you knew her. This is getting us somewhere.”
Damn, Chapel thought. He’d slipped up. Maybe the sedative had hit him harder than he’d thought.
“How did you make contact with her? Who was her handler? Tell me this much and I will put off your surgery for a day. Come, come, my friend. What does it matter? She’s dead — there is no need to protect her now. How did you meet her?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Kalin sighed in frustration.
Well, now. There was another little victory. Chapel was really racking them up. He’d managed to annoy the senior lieutenant.
Maybe he could force the man to raise his voice before they cut off his legs, too.
The elevator doors opened on the basement level. Tiled walls and bad lighting. Not much longer now.