A few rounds came through the door in his general direction, but this was the man at the top of the stairs firing down the hallway; the bullets were passing into the wall at a shallow angle and getting lost as they felt their way around its internal structure. The weapon was a submachine gun, firing pistol rounds with nothing like the kinetic energy of a rifle cartridge. But in a few moments this man would probably be standing squarely in front of the door firing straight through it, and Sokolov wanted to have himself and Olivia in a different place by then. He turned and strode into the bedroom, where Olivia was cramming things into a bag on her bed. He pulled the bag out of her grasp without breaking stride, stepped onto the terrace, and dropped it over the railing. With his other hand he had taken Olivia by the upper arm, and he now drew her onto the little balcony and got her to sidestep away from the open door and stand with her back to the exterior wall, which was made of brick; it would suffice to stop the type of ammunition that the surviving jihadist would soon be pumping through her front door. Sokolov then climbed up on the terrace railing and got his hands into some ivy that he had noticed climbing thickly up the wall. Jerking on this as hard as he could, he found that it would come away from the wall if he applied enough force but was well attached. So, lacking other options, he sat his butt on the railing, swung his legs over the edge, and jumped off. The ivy peeled away, showering him with mortar dust and vegetable debris, and he fell, jerkily, but only so fast, for a couple of meters, before it finally held fast and stopped him. From there he was able to get a grip on some window bars and clamber down to an altitude where it became possible to jump the rest of the way, striking the ground in a somersault. Rolling back up to his feet he ran around the side of the building to its front entrance, came into the entry hall, and ascended the stairs. People were shouting and screaming in their apartments. He tried not to think about what this portended, and he resisted the temptation to nervously check his watch. First things first. Looking up the stairwell he saw no one; the gunman had moved away from his earlier perch and probably gone to Olivia’s door. He heard another burst of fire from the submachine gun. So he took the remaining stairs three at a time and, after checking the Makarov, stepped out into the hallway on Olivia’s floor.