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and you won’t need to look for me.”
    I gave him one last look, took the papers from the table, and then exited the room. I put the DO NOT DISTURB placard on the door.
    The corridor was empty, and I looked for the nearest stairs. I wanted to find a back way out of this place and stay as far from Raakel’s room as I could. From what I was able to pick up from the one-sided phone conversation, the agent hadn’t informed the Germans about Raakel yet. He only spoke on the phone to other Americans.
    That could mean backup was coming. Or maybe there was no one to send. Maybe the agent was bluffing, and he was alone. I looked at my watch. I’d been in this damn hotel for more than two hours. I needed to get out and find Kat or John. Or Mary.
    I ran down the stairs, as fast as I could.
    I was flooded with confidence. Not only had I killed a Player, but I had successfully escaped from an agent. Of what agency, I didn’t know, but he was some kind of cop. State Department, maybe. From the consulate, perhaps.
    At the bottom of the stairs there were two doors, one to the hotel’s main floor and another to the back of the hotel. I cautiously stepped out a side door. It was lighter now; the sun had risen. There were still people in the street and in the park, but no sign of Kat or John or anyone else. I was going to have to go back to the safe house if I was ever going to find them. Odds were the safe house would be empty by now, and I’d have to call on the walkie-talkie. We hadn’t made contingency plans for if we got separated.
    I made a beeline for the closest train platform and started jogging. They’d be at the next targets now—other hotel rooms somewhere. Or would the Players all have gone to the plaza already? That’s wherewe had talked about eventually meeting them—we’d talked of getting snipers up on the roof of the buildings surrounding the spiral sunburst. But could we do that now? I was seeing cops all over the place, in cars with flashing lights or on street corners trying to do crowd control.
    There were clinics everywhere—or pharmacies, maybe. They were small, with neon crosses glowing. I wondered if Kat could be in one of them, getting better stitches than my uneven, crooked attempt. She’d need major surgery eventually. She’d told me that. Raakel’s sword had cut through at least some tendons—Kat couldn’t move her fingers more than a little painful twitching.
    The train stop was crowded, with Olympic guests everywhere. They were all speaking in different languages, and I could only catch a little. Terrorism seemed to be the same in every language, and I heard variations of Israel a lot.
    I waited in the warm morning air for several minutes before the lights of a train appeared down the line.
    â€œHave you heard?” a woman behind me said. “At the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. They found two people dead. There were others there too. A Japanese girl, they said, and an American.”
    â€œWhat?” another woman replied. “That’s just down the street from us.”
    â€œI know. I talked with a policeman and he said that there was a tremendous gunfight. A young woman managed to evade capture and is at large.”
    Mary, maybe? John had said that Tyson had gone down. And the Japanese girl—was she Mu? What could have been happening in the last two hours?
    â€œIs it part of the dreadful attacks on the Israelis?”
    â€œHe didn’t know,” she said. “Or perhaps he just wasn’t going to tell me. No one has made an official statement about any of this yet.”
    â€œIf they don’t have the terrorists contained, one would think they should issue a warning to the public.”
    â€œI do wonder if it’s something else entirely,” the first woman said. “The hostage situation would seem to have nothing to do with the Japanese or the Americans.”
    As the train drew closer,