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 was yelling at me in what I assumed was Flemish. I shook my head and pointed at my ear, which only seemed to confuse him. I pushed past him and continued into the lobby.
I scanned the room, looking for anything that didn’t fit. A group of young men stood in a circle off to one side, talking. An old man reclined in a chair, nursing a coffee and gesturing through something on his dataspike. A tired woman led an obstinate child to the elevators. A well-dressed man sat on his luggage and argued with someone on a call.
Heads turned as I crossed the lobby. My eyes jumped from face to face, searching for Katerina’s features. It was likely she was already out there somewhere in the city, but if she wasn’t, she’d be the one person not reacting to the blood-soaked man with a weapon stalking through the hotel.
A trio of young women by the front entrance caught my eye. Two were staring and had slowed to a stop, but the third hadn’t. She was tall, with narrow shoulders and a lean build. She was wearing water-stained mesh upper shoes.
“YOU!” I shouted. The woman didn’t flinch.
I took off in a sprint, and the woman did the same. As she did, the shawl hiding her blonde hair fell away and she glanced back. We caught eyes, and Katerina smiled.
She burst out onto the street, slipping around two men trying to enter the hotel. I bowled through them, closing the gap to Katerina with every step of my prosthetics. She was absurdly, inhumanly fast in short bursts of action, but she was in fact still human. Her strength was fading. Her body was tiring. For all her speed, like the dark of an eclipse, I would eventually overtake her.
She veered off the sidewalk and into the road, then she moved with the flow of traffic. The cars did what they were supposed to and tried to avoid her. Vehicles swerved and slid to a stop in organized chaos, the onboard AIs coordinating a best-outcome response between each other. Katerina leapt on top of a coupe then jumped onto a utility van as it skidded to a stop. She continued down the street, hopping from one vehicle to the next as they weaved through and past one another.
I tried to follow her path, but the variables were different for me. By the time I’d reached one, the vehicle had come to a stop or was trapped in a tangle behind others. Katerina was using the traffic as a way to mitigate the advantage of my augments. I leaned on every bit of freerun training I had, but the distance between us only grew as I maneuvered around the jumble of vehicles while she coasted on top of them.
I knew it couldn’t last, and she was likely thinking the same. Eventually, the best-outcome response for every vehicle in the area would be to stop, and she would be back where she started with me right on her tail. I tried to anticipate what her plan would be then, but nothing made sense. She was stalling for time, that much was clear, but to what end? She couldn’t be leading me into a trap. Her path was too haphazard and left too much to chance. Was the plan simply no plan?
That’s when I heard the shouting. StateSec response units and officers on foot closed in on me from all sides. From their perspective, I was an armed man chasing a woman through the streets of Bruges after assaulting an employee of the Hotel du Lac. I dodged between two of the approaching officers and kept running after her, although at that point I wasn’t sure what I could really achieve. Even if I caught her, it wasn’t as if I could detain Katerina right in front of them. I’d have to kill her on the spot.
There was a cacophony of voices, all shouting something different. The only thing I heard clearly was an officer yelling, “Arrêtez! Arrêtez!”
It was probably for the best that I was only armed with a blunt weapon. If I’d had a firearm, I’m sure StateSec would have opened fire as soon as they had a clear shot. As it was, they were only trying to arrest me. I could outrun the officers behind me, but there were others closing in from the other side. The only real chance I had was to elude them without losing Katerina. With two uniformed officers up ahead of me, there was a solid chance that I could still get past them. I bent deep at the knees, took a breath, and jumped.
I sailed over the heads of the two officers, landed on my shoulder, and popped up into a sprint. Up ahead, I saw Katerina running on foot. The traffic had come to a standstill just as I thought it would. As long as I didn’t lose sight of her, I could still—
No. Two more StateSec vehicles pulled up on the street ahead between us, and officers piled out. This was no longer a question of catching Katerina, but of avoiding capture myself. I slowed and took stock of the threat surrounding me. I counted twelve officers approaching, armed with shock knuckles and metal alloy batons. Four officers on the periphery acting as interference and overwatch had guns out, held at low ready.
The advancing twelve all stopped just beyond arm’s reach. There always seems to be a moment just before a fight where everyone involved hesitates and must commit themselves to this thing that will almost certainly bring them harm. That moment usually ends when courage overcomes reason, and so it was that the bravest of the officers acted first and swung his baton at the back of my head.
I moved into the attack and wheeled around with a spinning elbow, hitting him square in the face. I felt the bridge of his nose give way. He went limp and folded over himself onto the ground. Another rushed me on the right, swinging an uppercut to catch me with his shock knuckles. I slipped the punch and parried the follow-up, then countered by stepping in with an elbow to his neck. The man choked and stumbled back as two others came charging in. I kicked the first in the stomach, and he doubled over, vomiting onto the street. The second one barreled into me and knocked me sideways a few steps. I raised the pipe in my hand to take a swing, but someone grabbed hold of it from behind. Rather than wrestle for control, I let it go and focused on the man with his arms wrapped around my ribs.
I clapped his ears with open palms, and I was surprised to see blood run from his nose and an eye flood with red. I grabbed him by the neck and arm, then threw him into the officers to my left. In the space that cleared, I found the footing to turn my hips over and back kick another officer in the chest. I heard ribs snap like dry brush even above the din of combat.