Learning to Swear in America (18 page)

He extended his plastic key card, ready to swipe it through the scanner, when a clot of shadow detached from behind a shrub and stepped between him and the door. It was one of the American security men, a big guy with short hair, arms crossed over his chest, staring at Yuri. Yuri took a sharp breath but didn’t want to show that he was startled. He leaned toward the scanner, hoping the guy would move, but he stayed planted. Silence stretched, then snapped.

“I’m trying to get into hotel.”

“Yeah. Where were you?”

He hesitated. “I took walk.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Around.” He shrugged.

“Uh-huh. You meet anybody?”

“I don’t know lot of people in North America.”

“Uh-huh. You have a handler?”

Yuri stared at him, genuinely taken aback. He thought he might be in trouble for fraternizing with locals, or leaving the building on general principle. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might think he was actually up to something. He thought about the flight schedules he’d printed and wondered if that had made Fletcher suspicious. Of course, breaking into his office and trying to photograph documents might have added to the impression.

The man stared him down, then swiped his own card and held the door. Yuri walked up the stairs to the fourth floor. Didn’t want to be alone in an elevator with the guy. He could hear the man’s heavy tread behind him.

He held his key out as he neared his room, wanting to shut the door before the man could say anything else. Not wanting to run to do it. It would only make him look guilty, and undignified. But the security guard put an arm across the door, so that Yuri’s face was in his shoulder. The thing was the size of a ham.

“You’re not supposed to be out of the building, Dr. Strelnikov.”

Yuri turned to look at him, and the guy’s face was right above his. Not angry, just matter-of-fact.

“Nobody said,” Yuri muttered, and swiped his way into the room. The guy made him duck under his arm. Yuri kicked the
door with his foot before he turned around and threw the dead bolt and chained the door.

He wasn’t supposed to leave the hotel. But Saturday was the prom.

Yuri kept a laser focus on his work for the next couple of days, but by Saturday afternoon he was fidgety. He stood at his desk, bouncing a pencil on the metal band that had held its eraser in before he chewed it off. He walked to the cafeteria, got an orange juice and drank a little, then reviewed what he had done that morning, looking at how it fit into the totality of the work. He was in good shape—done, really, except for double- and triple-checking. And then he had to persuade Simons and Pirkola. They were still working, but he was the one who wasn’t supposed to leave the hotel—and the dance was tonight. No time to reestablish trust with Fletcher and get his blessing to go to the prom. That meant sneaking out, or blowing off Dovie, leaving her standing alone in the parking lot. No flowers, no date. He was pretty sure that would be a big deal to her.

Dinner with Simons and Pirkola was fast, and the conversation terse. Yuri was thinking about how to get out of the hotel if a guard was watching him there, too. Maybe it would be better just to leave from the NEO building. They would know he’d left, but they’d never find him, never think to look at a high school dance. Still, it would be harder to get out to see her another day, if he threw it in their faces like that.

Pirkola cupped his hands over his face. Behind them, his face turned red.

“Goddammit, my stone came back.”

“Can it come back? I mean, it’d be another stone, wouldn’t it?” Simons said.

“I don’t care. I’ve got a freaking kidney stone, and it freaking hurts.”

“Is pain bad?” Yuri asked.

“Yes, pain is bad.”

Yuri flushed. Someday he was going to have to learn how to use English articles.

“This pain is a freaking galaxy of red giants,” Pirkola said.

“You’ve got trouble with rocks of all sizes,” Simons said, pushing a green bean into his potatoes. He looked up. “Something’s going on.”

“I’m gonna have to go back to the hospital. Have them zap this thing.”

“I don’t know what the problem is, but an hour ago a couple of people were running to Fletcher’s office. They wanted him immediately, but he wasn’t in,” Simons said. “He was off campus talking to some Pentagon brass.”

“Who was looking for him?” Yuri asked, just to sound interested. He wasn’t thinking about Fletcher. He was thinking about the way Dovie’s legs rose and fell fractionally when they were tucked beside him on her sofa.

“Some guys from spectral,” Simons said.

“God, this hurts,” Pirkola said. “I’m gonna get out of here.”

“Me, too,” Yuri said, yawning. “I’m going to make early night of it, get some sleep. I think I’m still fighting against virus.”

Three minutes later he’d gotten Simons and Pirkola out of his office, rubbed his hockey puck for luck, and was slipping down the back hallway when he saw two men pound on Karl Fletcher’s door. One of them held a printout pinched between his index finger and thumb. It looked like he’d carry it with tongs if he could. Yuri hesitated. He didn’t want the director to see him leave. From down the hall he could hear Fletcher bark permission to enter, and the men disappeared into the office. Yuri waited a moment, then continued down the hall. As he passed the door, he caught a fragment of conversation.

“We made assumptions based on incomplete data,” a man’s voice said. “And just on the probabilities. Guess it shouldn’t be a surprise.”

“It’s a little bit of a surprise,” Fletcher said. “It’s a little bit of a goddamn surprise.”

“Yeah,” the man said.

Yuri hesitated in the hall. A problem with the asteroid?
Mat’ tvoyu
—he’d have to stay.

“We couldn’t reach you.” It was the other man. “They didn’t want to transfer us to your cell.”

“Yeah. I was talking with the Pentagon,” Fletcher said. He sounded distracted.

Yuri could hear papers flip. Fletcher must be looking at the report. Then the click of plastic as he tapped his office phone.

“Yeah, get me the White House.”

Ah, something political. The Pentagon, the White House.
Not a science problem.

Yuri walked into the lobby, and the front desk called a car for him. He stepped out to the curb to meet it, opened the door himself, and sank into the backseat. He thought of Dovie and smiled at the driver.

“Hotel, please.”

The man nodded and accelerated down Oak Grove Drive, away from JPL.

In his hotel room Yuri shaved, more for the ritual of it than any real need, and put on a fresh white shirt and his gray suit. He practiced his lady-killer smile in the mirror. It hadn’t produced much carnage yet, but he had hopes. He added a raised eyebrow and decided it made him look sophisticated. How could she resist?

He didn’t know if he needed a tuxedo or not, but this was as good as it was going to get. Besides, he had the eyebrow thing. He threw his suit jacket over his shoulder, Mr. Casual, and took the elevator down to the lobby. A guard stood leaning against a post, arms crossed, alert. Not menacing, but not someone you could get around, either. Yuri picked up a newspaper off a folded stack and headed to the stairwell by the back door.

“Good evening, Dr. Strelnikov.”

It was the guard from the other evening, the one who’d
confronted him. The rear door was propped open, and he was standing just outside, in the parking lot.

“Good evening.” Yuri lifted the newspaper in explanation and trudged back upstairs. No way to get out of the lobby undetected.

He tossed the newspaper on his bed and went directly to the balcony. If he didn’t do this fast, he wasn’t going to do it. He stood on the lone chair and shut his eyes for a moment, trying to steady his breathing. Felt his gut twist. Then he imagined Dovie standing by her car in the yellow print dress, looking across the parking lot, waiting. He stepped out onto the railing.

He reached up. The parapet was low, and he got a solid hold on the top. Not so hard. But now what? He pushed off with his legs, pulling up at the same time. He swung free from the building, but didn’t make much upward progress. He hung for a moment, imagining some American official explaining his strange death to his colleagues in the physics department at Moscow State. “Yes, climbing up the side of his hotel,” the official would say.

Yuri pulled again, swung sideways a little, back and forth like a pendulum, hoping the lobby guard was still inside the building. He managed to land his left foot over the parapet, and crabbed his palms until he was sprawled on the top of the hotel.

Below him, his room telephone rang.

He stared down through the roof. It could only be Dovie—NEO was winding down for the night. Was she calling to cancel? After he’d dangled off the fourth floor of a building for her? His cell phone was in the pocket of the pants he’d worn to work—no
way to check. He’d find out later what she wanted—he wasn’t climbing down to answer a phone.

The roof appeared flat from the ground. Standing on it, however, he could see that it was divided into sections, each slightly pitched toward a basket-covered drain. He trotted bent over at the waist, tripped once on a condensate drainpipe but kept his balance. He reached the edge.

He grabbed the parapet and eased himself out, four stories in the air, feet searching for the fourth-floor balcony railing. Because the parapet extended out slightly, he had to swing in, toward the hotel, to find the railing. And he couldn’t see what he was doing. His heart slammed in his chest. He could feel his pulse ticking in his neck, feel it quiver in his fingertips. His mother would say something about tonic regulation of his vagal pathway. But she wasn’t hanging off a roof.

His feet found the railing, and he shifted so that he would fall inward onto the balcony. No way could he try to balance on the balls of his feet, as likely to fall off one way as the other. So he dropped down to the balcony, half rolling into the small area, to find himself at the feet of an elderly woman in a bathrobe, sitting with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Her legs didn’t taper at the ankle—they just became feet stuffed into lavender slippers that brought out the purple splotches on her skin.

“Evening,” he said, his accent changing the final consonant to a
k
. She stared at him.

He grabbed the railing and swung down, letting his hands slide over the posts, his feet kicking out, then finding the next
railing. He could hear an American baseball game playing on the television in the third-floor room as he landed, then clambered down to the second-floor balcony. He was waiting for the woman above to scream, wondering if she was calling the front desk, if someone would come out the lobby door right as he landed. After all this. He heard the same baseball game from the second-floor room and wasn’t sure he’d hear if she was on the telephone.

He dropped from the second-floor balcony to the ground, staggered for a moment, but kept his footing. No guard. She hadn’t called, or he’d been faster. He slipped between cars, eyes down, heading for the street that ran in front of the restaurant. A couple of weary businessmen stared at him but kept going into the hotel. Checking in, probably—no search in their pockets for key cards. They’d just seen a guy in a gray suit clamber down the hotel facade. Not likely they weren’t going to mention it to the clerk.