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    Then bullets were flying again, whining hornets in the air, and Wallace’s feet carried him forward without instructions from his conscience-bound consciousness. Crossing Walnut Street, Wallace narrowed his focus to a pair of stairwells tucked against the front face of the gate house and leading down below street level.
    The first, closest to the corner, was the entrance to the Broad Street subway. On any other day, the subway would have been an ideal place to lose or waylay his pursuers. But today it promised him nothing, for below he would find no trains, no crowds—only locked gates.
    The second stairwell was the wrought-iron-ringed street entrance to the former Irish pub in the basement of the gate house. He angled toward it and hurled himself over the edge recklessly, saving himself from broken bones by snatching a handhold on the brass railings on the way down. Then he crept back up the crumbling concrete stairs for a glimpse of his adversary.
    It was Chambers. The officer was a hundred feet away, dragging his right leg as he walked steadily toward where Wallace hid. Chambers, stalking him with grim confidence of vindication. Chambers, determined to erase an error. He did not even waste a bullet firing at Wallace’s head, knowing that, momentarily, he would have a much easier shot.
    There were only two choices, Wallace realized, both with little appeal: compromising the gate house, or dying where he was.
    He stole another look over the edge. Chambers was just sixty feet away, close enough for Wallace to read both pain and cold-eyed purposefulness on his face. But this time, Wallace saw something else: Chambers was alone, with no radio visible on his hip. Which meant that no one knew where he was, even if he had been able to call in an alarm before leaving the jeep.
    And Wallace knew then what he had to do. Seizing two loose fist-sized fragments of concrete, he hurled the smaller blindly up and out in an arc toward Chambers. He leaped to the bottom of the stairwell and used the larger to shatter the small window in the pub’s wooden door. Reaching through the opening, he frantically clawed at the locks, knowing that the sound of breaking glass would pull Chambers in like a magnet.
    The door fell open at last, and Wallace dove inside. But instead of fleeing, he lingered in the pub, crouching behind a half-wall near the inside entrance until he saw Chambers’ shadow in the stairwell. The badge was moving more slowly now, and Wallace realized there was a danger he would grow too cautious and decide to wait for support. That could not be allowed to happen.
    “Hey, nigger-boy!” Wallace called out. “How’s your buddy, huh?”
    Chambers’ only answer was to keep coming down the stairs, the barrel of his revolver leading the way.
    “Fuckin’ black monkey, you’re too dumb to live,” Wallace taunted. “You’re never going to catch me.”
    This time the answer was a bullet fired through the doorway. It thudded into the half-wall where Wallace had been hiding and exploded through the other side in a shower of wood splinters and plaster bits. But by then Wallace was already on the move.
    Playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek, Wallace led the badge higher and higher in the building, careful not to let Chambers too close, careful not to draw too far ahead. There was a noisy race in the stairwell, third floor, fourth, fifth. Wallace kept up the taunts to keep Chambers coming, exploiting the badge’s single-mindedness and his wounded pride, his pain and his hate.
    All the time, Wallace was feeling for the gate, for the faint touch of its energies. Like all experienced runners, Wallace had learned to read the shivery sensation in his body and to follow it to its source. With a call as clear as a siren song, the gate guided Wallace through the midnight maze of the hotel.
    Finally, at the end of a long hallway, he saw the telltale glow, spilling out through one of the open doorways and splashing across the facing