Ten
The boy gently pats the woman’s arm as she sits in the chair. He believed she was simply asleep, but he has to be sure. She does not look well. Her forehead is glistening with sweat.
“Mom? Mom, are you okay?”
She opens her eyes slowly, focuses on the boy. “I guess... I nodded off there.”
“You’re sweating like crazy. For a second it looked like you weren’t even breathing.”
Her gaze moves beyond the boy. “Oh, Lord, I didn’t even put the groceries away. The ice cream’ll be melted.”
The boy gives her arm a squeeze. “I already put it away. You should have sent me to the store instead.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly capable. A little extra exercise never hurt anybody.” She finds enough energy to smile. “Why don’t you get us both a little ice cream? It’s chocolate. I’ll sit right here. My legs are killing me.”
The boy gets out a couple of bowls, takes the ice cream from the freezer, and spoons out two small servings. He hands one bowl to his mother, then perches himself on the arm of her chair while he eats his. She eats hers very slowly, as if this simple task takes effort.
Chocolate is his favorite. But he finds himself too worried to enjoy it. He doesn’t know how much longer things can go on this way.
Tuesday
Eleven
The four elevators at the Sycamores Residences, a thirty-story York Avenue apartment tower just below Sixty-Third, were in constant use. Kids heading off to school. Men and women leaving for work. Nannies arriving to look after toddlers. Building maintenance staff heading to the top floor to vacuum hallways, working their way back down to ground level.
New Yorkers headed out from this residence to every corner of the city. Some worked at nearby Rockefeller University. Several units in the building were set aside for visiting professors and scientists who came to Rockefeller from all around the globe.
Although an exact count was not known because residents came and went, some people had guests, and others had sublet their apartments without informing building management, it was generally believed that any given time about nine hundred people lived in the Sycamores Residences. The building, like so many others in the city, was a small town unto itself.
Only three of those roughly nine hundred people were in Elevator Number Two when it happened.
Fanya Petrov, forty-nine, a visiting scientist from Russia, was staying on the twenty-eighth floor; she had been waiting the better part of five minutes and the elevator still had not arrived. She followed, with increasing frustration, the digital display above the doors, telling her where the elevators were. She’d hear them traveling through the shaft, whizzing past her floor on the way to the top of the building. Often, inexplicably, the elevator car would sail right past on its descent, not stopping to let her on. Was someone from building maintenance overriding the functions?
Since coming to New York three weeks earlier, she had learned that the magnificent view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge that had at first so impressed her was not worth the aggravation of the slow elevators in the building. She’d have been happy with a room on the first or second floor. Who needed a view? She had learned that if she was to be on time for her appointments at Rockefeller, she had to allow herself an extra ten minutes because of the elevators. She’d take the stairs, but really, was she going to go down twenty-seven floors? It wasn’t particularly exhausting — she had done it a few times — but it was time-consuming. And she just knew that the moment she entered that stairwell, the elevator doors would be parting.
She blamed the children. And their parents.
There were so many youngsters in the building, and they always forgot something. Only yesterday, after thinking she’d caught a break when the elevator showed up almost immediately, the doors opened at the twentieth floor to allow a young man and his ten-year-old son to board. As the doors were closing, the boy shouted, “I forgot my lunch!”
“For Christ’s sake,” his father said, sticking out his arm to stop the doors. “Go!”
The boy bolted from the elevator, ran down the hall to their apartment, fumbled about in his pocket, looked back, and said, “I don’t have my key!”
Fanya had closed her eyes and said to herself, You have got to be kidding me. Well, not exactly that, but the Russian equivalent. Fanya spoke English fluently, but she was not up to speed on American phrases of frustration.
The father dug into his pocket and said, “Here!” He tossed the keys so the son could retrieve them halfway down the hall and, of course, he failed to catch them.
Future scientist, Fanya thought.
“Sorry,” the father mumbled in the woman’s direction.
The polite thing to do, she felt, would have been for him to step off the elevator and let her continue on her way. But no.
The kid got the apartment door open, ran inside, took a good two minutes to find his lunch, then came charging back down the hall to get onto the elevator.
Today, as she stood waiting, Fanya Petrov tried to think about the prepared remarks she would be delivering within the hour. Her area of expertise was “missing heritability,” traits that are passed down through the generations that cannot be found in the genome. The world had come to believe that a person’s DNA revealed everything, but it could not predict certain diseases or behaviors or countless other things, even when evidence existed that these characteristics could be passed on.
And while that was the subject of her talk for today, Fanya was an expert in other things, as well. Like bacterial pathogens, and how they could be spread among a population. Used, in effect, as weapons. Fanya knew a thing or two about what many in the world most feared: bioterrorism.
It was something she had studied a great deal back in Russia.
It was her expertise in missing heritability that had earned her an invitation to continue her studies in New York, but it was her vast knowledge about pathogens that might end up keeping her here.
Fanya Petrov did not want to return to Russia.
Fanya Petrov wanted to stay in America.
This was not something she had mentioned to her superiors back home. But she had mentioned it, discreetly, to another professor at Rockefeller who had connections with the State Department. A few days later, a message was relayed to her that her situation was being looked at favorably. If she were to seek asylum in the United States, she would be accepted — provided, of course, she shared everything she knew about Russian research into pathogens.
That was fine with her.
But Fanya Petrov was now very, very anxious. What if her superiors were to learn of her treachery? Would they summon her home before her application for asylum had been approved? Would she be thrown into a car and put on a plane before anyone knew she was missing? And what would happen to her when she got back?
Very, very bad things.
She had become so consumed with worry that when the elevator’s arrival was announced with a resounding ding, it startled her. Fanya sighed with relief and stepped into the empty cab as the doors opened.
She pressed G and watched as the doors closed.
The descent began.
“Please, no stops,” she said under her breath, in Russian. “No stops, no stops, no stops.”
There was a stop.
At the twentieth floor.