by J. G. Jurado
It took untold strength, courage and unfailing love to make that decision. Very few would dare to do the best for their loved ones in that way, regardless of the cost or consequences.
What if Rachel could see me now, see how I’d lost our daughter? What would Rachel want me to do to get her back?
Team Evans. Yay!
The sound of the three of us, chanting our family battle cry, rang through my mind. Two decades devoted to medicine, the childhood dream of a boy who wanted to follow in his adoptive father’s footsteps and be a doctor, my very conscience. It all disintegrated, as quickly as a sandcastle swept away by a strong wave.
If Rachel’s sacrifice had taught me anything, it was that the welfare of those you love comes before all else. If I had to forgo my integrity, my ethics, every single thing I stood for, I was ready. I would play White’s game, but I wouldn’t be putty in his hands. I could play games too.
“Have it your way, you goddamned son of a bitch. I’ll do it,” I muttered in an empty room, in an empty house, in the dead of night.
And a few seconds later came a text that made my hair stand on end.
YES, I KNOW.
53 hours before the operation
Somewhere in Columbia Heights
White sat back in his chair and allowed himself a slow, smug smile. The leather upholstery hissed quietly as his skin slid over it. All his clothes were carefully folded on a classy ebony stand. The silvery glow from the screens lent an unearthly sheen to his totally naked body, which sparkled here and there with drops of sweat that dotted his skin.
It was hot.
He stood up and walked to the kitchen, his barefoot steps echoing off the empty walls. The small apartment was unfurnished apart from a foam mattress in a corner and a huge flat table with eight twenty-seven-inch screens mounted on steel supports screwed into the woodwork. In a high-turnover neighborhood full of postgrad students and yuppies starting out on the career ladder, the dapper Mr. White was quite unremarkable.
He opened the fridge and a flurry of ice-cold air gave him goose bumps. Each of the five shelves was stocked with bottles of Hawaiian Punch. A flavor for every tray: Fruit Juicy Red, Wild Purple Smash, Lemon Berry Squeeze, Polar Blast and Island Citrus Guava. He went over the names in a low voice, a quiet mantra, until he opted for the first one. He picked up a cold bottle and promptly replaced it with another of the same flavor he had fetched from the cupboard. A completely full fridge consumes less energy than a half-full one. White always considered the environment.
He went back to his seat and to eyeballing the screens, which relayed pictures of the Evanses’ home. The cameras had been carefully concealed, although the aim wasn’t that Dr. Evans shouldn’t know they were there.
Quite the opposite.
He tapped a few keys on the laptop that controlled the whole shebang. Every screen showed Julia’s burrow, six minutes previously. The audio feed amplified the slow, heavy breathing and the doctor’s whisper murmured like a gust of wind.
“Have it your way, you goddamned son of a bitch. I’ll do it.”
The text message tone boomed out of the loudspeakers. White hit the space bar and zoomed in. Evans’s face showed up on all eight monitors, at the precise moment he read the text. His tense expression, his eyes like dinner plates.
That’s it, Dave. Now you can see the extent of my power. There is no escape, White thought as he swigged the punch.
He looked longingly at the gritty mascot, the unmistakable Punchy. Political correctness had stripped him of all his character. It was way funnier back in the eighties, when the character used to ask his victims whether they’d like some punch, then let fly with a good wallop. Whenever he saw the ads, sitting on the white Persian rug in his parents’ living room, White would laugh out loud.
His had been a happy childhood. That of a spoiled only child, like all New York investment bankers’ children. He had seen more of the servants than his blood relatives, but that was no problem. Nobody had smacked him, abused him or given him major trauma.
White was just the way he was.
He was born that way, and there was nothing to be done. He knew that clearly when he was eight, in the park where the au pair took him every afternoon. A little girl fell awkwardly from one of the slides, landed on her left arm and broke it. The end of the fractured bone poked out through her skin and was covered in blood. She howled in pain and stood up. Most of the kids clinched their arms in sympathy.
White didn’t.
That day he understood he was a unique and self-reliant being. Human beings have leaky boundaries. They feel other people’s pain, see their emotions affected by those of others. They live their lives connected to the rest by a sort of emotional grapevine.
White was unburdened by that flaw.
His total lack of empathy put him a cut above the rest. He could read others’ feelings and interpret them, without those feelings sullying him. That evolutionary step forward was most practical.
Learning how to make use of this knowledge had been a long hard road. White took years to find out that every human being has a boundary between the comfort zone of their hopes and fears, and the quicksand of their wishes and needs. To achieve a total surrender of the will, you had to push them out of the former without sinking them into the latter.
Up to the tipping point.
Everyone had a different personality type. For somebody such as Dr. Evans, violence was no more than a back-page story in the Post, something that did not impinge on the confines of his world. At bottom, human nature is the denial of death, and a committed doctor is the epitome of that denial.
To get a subject with such strong convictions to resort to violence, you had to burn his bridges, one by one. Steadily, until you forced him to embrace the contradiction between his beliefs and reality. By plotting a road map with pinpoint precision. With someone more unthinking and not as straight as Evans, he would have cut the response time.
White’s cell phone vibrated on the tabletop. Just like David’s, it was a very exclusive model. It had been modified using state-of-the-art technology, and its signal was protected by a 128-bit encryption key. He didn’t bother to see who was calling. Only one person in the world had his number: his employer.
“It’s under way.”
The voice at the other end of the line mumbled a few words in response. White barely listened to him. His eyes were still glued to the monitors.
He pressed a key to bring the picture back to real time. It looked like the doc was asleep.
White frowned, bemused. He’d never seen him do such a thing; cling to that sweatshirt that way. He thoughtfully stroked his earlobe and jotted something down on his iPad.
Tomorrow would be a most interesting day.
8
When I got to the hospital the morning after, my mind was racing.
Soon after I received White’s terrifying text, I had fallen asleep. I was pooped. Discovering they had bugged my house with microphones and God knows what else sent shivers down my spine. But after a thirty-six-hour shift and all the emotional rushes that followed, I was too worn down to do a thing about it.
I was painfully aware when I woke up. As I showered and got dressed, I felt my privacy had been invaded; I felt a pair of dark and dirty eyes spying on me from every corner. I was never much into spy movies or TV shows, but Rachel used to love them. I tried to remember what I had learned from watching Homeland and Person of Interest, although I’d had only half my mind on them, with the other half buried in a novel or the Journal of Neurosurgery. All I remembered seemed like kids’ stuff or hackneyed.
I understood all too well why White had sent the text right when he did. He wanted to make it obvious he was eavesdropping on my every whisper. But that morning I had to go to work. He had made it abundantly clear I was to keep to my regular routine and do nothing at all to draw attention to
myself. I was sure he had tapped my home phone and cell. But would he have tapped the hospital phones too? I kind of doubted that. An attendant told me once there were more than nine hundred lines in the building. White couldn’t possibly tap them all. Unless he had hacked into the exchange and screened calls to particular numbers, such as 911 or the FBI. Damn, I didn’t even know whether such a thing was possible.
At that very moment my cell rang. The caller ID was blank.
It was him.
“Good morning, Dave. You’d better get a move on, there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic on Sixteenth.”
“Thanks for the traffic update,” I said in a tone which belied my words.
“Stop looking at that lamp. There’s no camera there.” I jumped back from it and turned my head every which way.
“Neither is there one on that picture, nor that wall, Dave. Or maybe there is. That’s none of your business. You will not search for cameras or bugs. Should you find one by chance, you will leave it be. We don’t want to lose touch, do we?”
“Guess not,” I mumbled, swallowing my humiliation.
“Now you have to call Julia’s school and tell them she’s sick and won’t be back until Monday. Go on, I’m waiting.”
I obeyed, using the landline. When I picked up my cell again, White was humming a tune I couldn’t make out.
“Good job, Dave. Just one more thing. You’ll be spending a lot of time in a huge building full of telephones, computers and all kinds of other items that are perilous for your daughter. You will be tempted to use them to cry for help. Don’t be. You may not think so, but I am watching. Continually. In more ways than you can comprehend.”
The message chimes sounded. I pulled the phone away from my ear. A text had now landed with a photo. When I opened it I saw my daughter imprisoned in that filthy pit. She had her eyes shut and her arms were wrapped around her knees, her head resting on them. She was trying to sleep.
“If you don’t play ball, Dave, this will be the last picture you see of her. Don’t forget.”
He hung up without giving me a chance to reply. I looked at the photo for a second longer, but it evaporated in the blink of an eye.
I looked for it like crazy in my inbox and the photo gallery, but it had been deleted from both. That shithead had total control over my phone, a point he made in a text I got that very moment.
TIME FOR WORK.
Cussing again, I got into my car and tried to think.
A half hour later, as I went down to the changing room, my mind was boiling over.
I tried to weigh all my options, but some things I had worked out. First, White was full of it. He couldn’t watch me every second, the less so in as big a place as that. Second, I had to get in touch with someone. Third, if I, or whoever I got in touch with, took one wrong step, Julia was dead.
Because I had seen his face, they would likely kill me too. Although if I lost Julia, I cared little what they might do to me.
I went to my locker, but instead of grabbing my own white coat and scrub set, I walked to the storeroom and took out some of the worn gear that smelled of cheap bleach, which the residents wear.
All of us surgeons are alpha personality types. Men and women in this job all fight to be top dog, the best there is. We spend our whole day in pissing contests and the same goes for how we dress in surgery. Believe it or not, they make overpriced monogrammed scrubs and caps in the most outrageous colors imaginable. That’s how we set ourselves apart from the residents, nurses, staff physicians and others. We’re on top, and we like to rub it in.
I didn’t have to operate that day, but I did need to be sure I was carrying no gadget White could have bugged. I completely stripped off, then put on some scrubs and a white coat that was generic and unlabeled. I didn’t take my stethoscope or anything else that was mine.
The last decision to make was whether or not to take my cell and pager.
Fortunately I was late, so there was almost nobody in the changing room, but for a while I froze solid, just staring at those gizmos like a man possessed. I was never apart from them and got into a flap whenever the batteries were flat or the charger light showed red. But at that moment those objects were evil itself to me.
To leave the cell in my locker meant losing contact with White. I knew he had meddled with it somehow, and I needed to be rid of it. But to break off might rile him and he could harm Julia in some way by taking it out on her.
And not only that. Right now that little four-ounce device was my one link to my daughter. I put it in my pocket and closed my locker door.
The metallic clang echoed around the deserted changing room as I made my way out.
Unfortunately, I was getting nowhere and the work was piling up. I had skipped breakfast, although stress and nerves had taken hold of my guts and I couldn’t have eaten a thing.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t let any of my feelings show. White had made that very clear: I had to smile. His weren’t the only eyes that would be on me over the next few days.
I got into the elevator and ran into someone from admin, a great big, chipper guy I got along well with. Straight off I could see in his eyes the first signs of rejection everyone has had since Rachel’s suicide.
“How the hell are you, Mike?”
“Well, doc, fighting off the anorexia, as you can see,” he said, patting his massive belly.
I laughed. “Seems you got that bitch under control.”
Mike laughed with me, surprised to see me joking again.
“Be seeing you,” I said as I walked out.
“Bet you’ll see me first,” he quipped, and kept on laughing even after the elevator doors were shut.
I took a couple of steps away from the elevator and had to stop for a second. The lights, the bustle, the phones ringing, the chairs and gurneys wheeling along the passageway, the nurses gossiping in the corner, the chief resident herding the kids from room to room, the smell of disinfectant. All the hustle around me, everything that went to make up the chaos I called home, was alien to me now.
I felt far removed, light-years away from all those jerks who didn’t get what I was going through. If they found out Julia had been kidnapped, they’d merely mutter, “Oh my God, how terrible,” shake their heads and go home to kiss their family and think it could never happen to them. It was exactly what they did when Rachel died. At most they would avoid me for a few months, a normal reaction in case my bad luck rubbed off on them. We hospital folk are very superstitious, and surgeons more than anyone.
A nurse ambled past me and said hello with a big smile, which I returned by ordering my face muscles to move.
The chasm between that woman’s carefree happiness and my torment made me despair.
I got a grip on myself and went to the nurses’ station.
“What’s up?”
“They called from Stockholm, something about a Nobel Prize they want to give you,” said Sandra, who was head of the day shift.
“Tell them I’ll pass. They’d give it to anyone these days.”
Sandra laughed. She was also surprised I had joked back. I felt a bit guilty. There has always been a covert class war between doctors and nurses. They believe they do all the work, while we take all the credit and give all the orders. We . . . Well, we can be quite despicable. I had always tried to avoid that attitude, but I realized that with my bad mood in the last few months, that good intention had receded and I had made everyone’s life around me a misery.
Although anxiety was now back in the driver’s seat.
“I’m off to my consulting room to prepare my rounds. I’m running really late.”
“Doctor, wait. We need to talk.” She rooted around under the counter and placed between us the folder with the surgery schedule in it for the next few days.
I tilted toward her and did a double take when I saw the name Sandra h
ad underlined. A name I did not need to raise too many questions.
“It’s to do with R. Wade. We have his medical records and billing details. His file is all in order, except for his Social Security number. I ran a check on it and got an error message. And the phone number they gave us always goes to voice mail.”
Small wonder nobody answered. R. Wade, male, born August 4, 1961, in Des Moines, Iowa, did not exist. The Secret Service had provided the phone and Social Security number. The operating theater was booked up for the whole of Friday morning, and the other one on that floor had a software review lined up which would never take place. No more than three people in the whole building knew the patient’s identity: the hospital manager, my boss and me. I had sweated blood over that, in a place where there are no secrets. But that was nothing compared to the fun and games we would have in the next forty-eight hours.
At all costs we had to avoid anyone knowing who would be operated on there. Because if one single person found out, she would eventually tell her husband, who would blab to his best buddy, who would tell his wife and tweet it . . . The operation could be canceled or rescheduled, which would mean curtains for Julia.
“Sure, they must have gotten a digit wrong,” I said, trying to make light of it. “Fill in the admission date with the one you’ve got, and we’ll change it later.”
“But, doctor, this is very irregular. And if the HMO gets to hear of it . . .”
“Believe me, Sandra, this patient does not have cash-flow problems.”
She looked at me, surprised, but said nothing. We were suddenly aware of how close we were to each other and I backed off. She clutched at her hair, embarrassed, and backed off, too.
“I’m afraid I have to get this straight, doctor. You’ve been on this case from the start, haven’t you? Couldn’t you—”
I didn’t have the patience or the energy to deal with this situation properly.
“Well, if it’s so important, take it up with Meyer—the hospital manager. He was the one who recommended him, damn it!”