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and pulled it out. It hung by a chain next to the door. I tried the door again. Nope. One more flip of the switch and I tried the door a final time.
    Apparently once all the restraints are removed from a locked door, you don’t need to apply the same amount of force to open it. So, a little bit, I slid the door off its tracks. I pulled so hard to open it, against the opposing force that was no longer there, that it jumped right out of the rails and I found myself standing there holding a sliding glass door. For just a moment I thought about waiting for Anka to come back. Let her see me holding a door that I’d just ripped out of the wall. That would earn me some man-points back. But it started to get heavy so I just shimmied it over and leaned it against the wall.
    Since there was no help for it, and since I still wanted to get some air, I stood out on the little deck outside the room. It was barely wide enough to stand normally, but it gave me the view to see the rocky beach below and more of the dirty underbelly of the bridge above. The sound of traffic, the river and the occasional airplane approaching PDX over the river, all combined to create a white noise that actually soothed me. The stress of being shot at and chased started to fade a bit.
    “We’re to stay here tonight and then we’ll catch a train up to Seattle at oh-six-hundred tomorrow.”
    “You mean six in the morning?”
    “That’s typically what oh-six-hundred means.” I could sense her about to sigh again.
    “Well, if we’re staying here tonight, you’d better help me get this door back on its tracks.”
    She looked from me to the door and back. For a moment I thought my responsible suggestion had averted a point-stealing sigh, but it just amplified and delayed the inevitable. She closed her eyes tightly as if she were squeezing a zit on the bridge of her nose with her eyebrows. After a deep breath, she silently walked over to assess the door situation.
    We struggled with the door for fifteen minutes before Anka decided that we needed to call the front desk. I mentally shuddered at the loss of yet another point. I was doing poorly at this. The hotel maintenance man was gone to the store for a while, so they offered to move us to another room. We accepted, that is to say Anka decided for us, and hastily gathered our things, that is to say Anka’s things, and moved across the hall. I supposed they gave us a room not facing the river to thwart my door opening prowess.
    “Well,” Anka looked at me, trying to avoid another sigh, “we’d better settle in for the night.”
    “What? It’s noon!”
    “There’s not much to be done about it. They have train tickets for us at oh-six-hundred. We’re to remain here until then. No side trips, no excursions. We follow orders.”
    “Whose orders?”
    “You know I can’t tell you that.”
    “Yeah. You were going to tell me about Burlicus Rex and the Burl-ceratops though.”
    “How do you come up with…never mind, I don’t want to know. You’re right. I was telling you about them. They work for Antonio Gutierrez, the leader of the Cuban secret police force. Known as ‘ El Tigre ’ to the intelligence community, Gutierrez is known to take side jobs for extra cash. At this time we don’t know if he’s working on the books or off them. He may be under the direction of the Chinese to secure this technology, since the Cubans don’t have the resources to implement it effectively. Gutierrez is—”
    “Wait, wait,” I interrupted, “you mean to say that I’m running from Tony the Tiger?”
    For a long time she just stared at me with that ball-withering gaze, but just before she started talking again, I thought I saw a flicker of a smile. I’ll assume that was a draw.
    “Mr. Gutierrez is dangerous and motivated, but his supply chain is limited, especially this far from Cuba. That’s one of the reasons that Grosskopf selected OHSU for his secret lab. It’s likely that the,” she cleared her