He pounds on the door with his fists. The door that stopped blast tabs and acid and twenty years of careful enemies. The door that opens with a lockpick and patience.
He knows this. He designed the lock. Forty pins in staggered tumblers, each one requiring a specific pressure held while the next is found. Ten minutes, maybe twelve, and the mechanism yields. He has a lockpick in his left pocket. He built it himself from a dental mirror and a piece of spring steel. It's the best lockpick he's ever made.
He hits the door again. His knuckles are splitting. The composite absorbs the impact and redistributes it across the molecular structure exactly the way he specified in the original order. He is testing his own work and his work is passing.
The lockpick would mean standing still. Feeling each pin with his fingertips. Listening to the tiny sounds the tumblers make when they're almost right. It would mean ten minutes of nothing but attention — no force, no plan, no enemies to be smarter than. Just a conversation between his hands and a mechanism that would answer if asked correctly.
He hits the door. The hallway is filling with smoke. He has perhaps four minutes.
The thing on the other side of the door is not important. Tax records. A photograph. A coffee mug with a chip in the rim that someone held every morning for six years without mentioning the chip because mentioning it would have meant admitting she noticed everything he broke.
He reaches into his left pocket. The lockpick is warm from his body. He kneels in front of the lock and closes his eyes and puts the tip of the pick into the first chamber and feels the pin resist and yield and resist and yield. The smoke is at his shoulders now. He finds the second pin. The third. His hands are very steady. They've always been steady. That was never the problem.
By the sixth pin the smoke is in his lungs and he is coughing but his hands don't shake. They never shook. He built the door and the lock and the hallway and he married the woman and broke the mug and replaced it with an identical one she never drank from.
The fortieth pin drops into place. The door opens.
The room is empty. He cleaned it out himself, years ago, because a man in his profession doesn't leave things behind. He steps inside and closes the door and sits on the floor and holds the lockpick and the smoke fills the room and his hands are steady and the door is open and there is nothing on the other side of it that he didn't put there and nothing he didn't take away.