The Adversary by Michael Walters Page A

older ones who tended not to stir from their apartments till later in the day. He put the door on the latch, and then stepped quietly out into the corridor.
    Nothing.
    He walked, as silently as he could manage—and surprisingly so for one of his bulk—toward the head of the staircase that led down to the lobby. Tunjin’s apartment was on the first floor, so from the top steps he could peer down into the entrance to the apartment block. It was a depressing hallway—a mix of discarded debris from previous tenants, a couple of stacked bicycles, and piles of uncollected mail and newspapers. But it was, at least, apparently unoccupied.
    Tunjin made his way slowly down the stairs, trying to ensure that his movement was not visible to any external observer. The main doors to the apartment block contained large glass panels, but the glass was sufficiently filthy and the interior of the lobby sufficiently gloomy that no movement was likely to be visible from outside.
    Tunjin moved forward slowly, reaching down as he passed to pick up two items from the pile of discarded items that littered the lobby. The first was an old broom, apparently thrown away because the head was worn out. The second was an old pencil stub. Improvisation was always his strong point.
    He stepped slowly across the lobby, still keeping back from the door to ensure that there was no risk of his being seen from outside. Through the grimy glass, he could see the shaven-headed figure he had spottedfrom the bedroom. There didn’t appear to be any other observers that he could see, although it was possible that there was another at the opposite end of the street, out of Tunjin’s sight. The man was looking bored, pulling on another cigarette and shuffling his feet. Tunjin waited until he had turned his back, sheltering from the breeze to light another cigarette, then he stepped forward swiftly and jammed the broom handle firmly into the pull handles on the doors, preventing them from being opened from the outside. Then, crouching down so that he was still invisible from outside, he locked the doors with his own set of keys and then forced the pencil stub hard into the lock, breaking off the end to ensure that the lock was solidly jammed.
    He felt a little guilty about this. He was undoubtedly going to inconvenience the other residents of the block, and he just hoped that there would be no other, more serious consequences—in common with many of the Soviet-era apartment blocks, this unit had no other escape route in case of fire.
    But given that he was unsure when Muunokhoi might decide that he had exercised enough patience, or even when the boredom of the man outside might precipitate him to take some unsanctioned action, Tunjin thought it was prudent to try to buy himself a little extra time. It would be possible to break the glass in the doors, of course, but the glass would be toughened and the act of breaking it would be conspicuous even in this relatively deserted thoroughfare. And there was no other route into the building, other than that which Tunjin was planning to adopt as his exit route,and this, he hoped, would not be immediately obvious to an outsider.
    He slipped back from the doors, and then began to climb the stairs as rapidly as his considerable bulk would allow. The worst symptoms of his hangover seemed to have receded now, though he couldn’t claim that he felt well, either physically or emotionally.
    He passed his own floor, and carried on climbing past the second and third floors, wheezing heavily by now, his breath coming in short spurts. There were definitely times when he thought that a healthier lifestyle might be recommended.
    Finally, he dragged himself up the last flight of stairs on to the fourth floor. There were no apartments up here, only a couple of storage and utility rooms, mostly filled with junk. His objective lay in the far corner of one of the cluttered rooms—a skylight in the ceiling with a