by J. G. Jurado
A shiver ran down my spine. If I lied and White caught me, if he knew something I didn’t, if I had overlooked something . . . it would all be over. And if I told the truth, Kate was toast. They’d find and kill her.
But Julia would be safe.
For a moment I felt tempted to make a clean breast of it, double-cross Kate and buy my daughter a few more precious hours. White’s invisible and all-powerful eyes saw everywhere. And he had promised to forgive. I simply had to tell the truth.
That’s how good the creep was.
“No, I haven’t spoken to Kate. As far as I know, she’s at her folks’ place.”
There was silence again, and on it went. I bit the inside of my cheek until I could taste the blood filling up my mouth. Finally White spoke again.
“Game on, doctor.”
And he hung up.
I sank into the chair and quivered with the stress and humiliation I had had to endure. My back was in knots, and I felt I couldn’t take any more upsets. I gently laid my cell down on my desk and gaped at it, a deer in the headlights. White had not found me out, although I got precious little consolation from that, if any.
As I tried to mollify myself, I wondered whether I should play catch-up with Kate, warn her White suspected she was in on it, but right away I realized I couldn’t phone her till she gave me her new number. I could call her work phone, but she had warned me against that. Now we had to be wary not only of the kidnappers, but also of the Secret Service. In those first few hours, we naively thought it would all work out. That we would be free of the nightmare.
I had scarcely gotten my pulse back to normal when my office phone rang. I picked it up automatically, glad to be able to dive back into my work for a few seconds.
“Neurosurgery, Evans speaking.”
“Wong here. Where the hell have you been all afternoon?”
“Treating the Patient, boss.”
“With your cell turned off and without answering your pager . . . Damn, Evans.”
“Orders from the escort,” I lied, at least in part. “And you can believe that where they took me, even the pager wouldn’t have worked.”
“Okay, makes no difference now. I’m in Meyer’s office. I need you to come straight up.”
There was something very unsettling in Dr. Wong’s tone of voice.
“What’s up, Steph? Something wrong?”
“Just get your ass here, Evans.”
I had no option but to take the elevator to the top floor. By this time, nearly all the lights up there were out and the offices shut. The execs don’t go in for working late; fat chance. The Muzak was turned off and the deep-pile carpet swallowed my footsteps, giving me the impression I was floating down the deserted corridor.
When I got to the door at the end, I went in without knocking, something that really pissed Meyer off. A churlish show of rebellion which had only a slight effect, now that the manager’s secretary had left for the day.
On the other side of the door, Meyer and Wong looked at me like thunder. My boss was sitting with her arms and legs crossed. Meyer’s jacket was off, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He was stretched out in his chair, his hands behind his head. Big sweat stains darkened his bespoke shirt.
“What have you done, Evans?” my boss said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He doesn’t know. He says he doesn’t know,” Meyer exclaimed, and stared at the ceiling.
“The White House called,” Wong said. Then she stopped, as though she couldn’t bear to go on.
“What did they say?”
My boss spoke some more, barely opening her lips.
“You screwed up, David. You won’t be doing the op.”
Instantly, I felt the ground give way under my feet, and I was plunging into a bottomless pit. I was still standing on the carpet but inside I was falling down and flailing my arms to try to grab a handhold.
And then the text landed.
BAD PLAY, DAVE.
Kate
She could only just see the roof from where she was.
The afternoon was fading and a portentous leaden sky glowered over the Evans house. The tightly packed clouds loomed and held their breath.
Special Agent Kate Robson aped them, breathing very slowly and trying to concentrate. She hadn’t staked out a house for three years, and when she did she’d had a partner and at least a couple of units’ backup from the local force. They always maintained constant radio contact with headquarters, and above all, when they moved in they made damned sure the suspects knew exactly who was hammering on their door.
Since she had begun to guard the First Lady, she had boned up on every scenario in which she could be involved while on duty, by making use of maps, photographs and prior on-site inspections. In the most complex cases they would stage virtual dry runs using powerful software that mocked up each last detail of the sites they were to visit, and they had at least three backup routes. The program even perfectly displayed the insides of buildings, based on blueprints and photos taken by agents on recon weeks before the event.
Kate had never operated this way, with so much left to chance and so few aces up her sleeve. And, what was worse, with her niece’s life at stake.
She began to make a mental list of the things she couldn’t do but got bogged down. Everything she could think of was out of the question. She had no team or time to set up an undercover action, she couldn’t approach the house directly because she didn’t know whether the cameras were also aimed outward, she couldn’t tell whether somebody else was watching from a distance . . . She would sooner make a list of what she actually could do.
Her first trump card was that she knew the house. Although she hadn’t come by for months, she could find her way around the place blindfolded. Getting in would be relatively simple. To do so without being seen was another matter.
A car drove past and Kate instinctively hunched up in her seat until she realized such a move would make her look more suspicious than sitting still. She drove a black Ford Taurus belonging to the Secret Service fleet, in which she was due to go back to work the day after. The agents used them almost routinely as private cars at the end of their shifts, one of the job’s few perks. The “almost” included one tiny detail: no one outside the service could get in the car. Those were strict Secret Service rules, which in effect meant that if you had family, you had to buy yourself another ride.
That was not the case with Kate, for whom “starting a family” was a fuzzy item in her life plan. An unreachable goal, something she longed for but could not see herself pulling off. Like climbing Everest or winning the state lottery.
The spotless Taurus proved the point. If she climbed into her father’s Dodge Ram, screws strewn on the carpet got stuck in the soles of her boots. When you rode in Rachel’s Prius you could tell without looking you’d have to shake the crumbs loose from the pleats in your pants, because Julia was not exactly a stickler for cleanliness.
Life taints you. Families cramp your style.
She grabbed the disposable Nokia phone she had just bought at T-Mobile, a few blocks away, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter with a cable that had set her back more than the cell. It took a few minutes to charge the battery enough to turn it on. When she did, she texted David on the cell she’d lent him.
AM HERE. WILL KEEP U POSTED.
She scrutinized the house again. It was a lovely four-bedroom Colonial-style house, painted light steel blue. There was a grassy slope that partly hid the rear if you came up a quiet side street, like the one Kate was parked on at the time. From the white picket fence that lined the street to the back door, it was about twenty yards. She swiftly worked out how long it would take to run that far downhill. About four seconds. Four seconds in which she would be exposed to whoever might be watching the house. Not the ca
meras. If her plan worked, she could zero in unseen but wouldn’t have much time.
In Secret Service planning meetings, they assigned a failure rate to riskier options in a scenario, known colloquially as the snafu rate. Any snafu rate above 15 percent was immediately ruled out. Given how little she knew about Julia’s kidnappers, her plan’s snafu rate was at least 60 percent, which was looking on the bright side.
She gave the steering wheel an angry thump. Every hour that went by lengthened the odds on finding Julia by the deadline. She had to get into that house. There was nothing for it but to gallop ahead with her plan.
All around her, automatic sensors were switching on houses’ outdoor illumination to shed pockets of light amid the pale indigo dusk. Kate looked at the time. It would be dark in a few minutes, so it was best to wait.
She couldn’t help plucking from her wallet a small photo, which she had swiped the day before from her mom’s album. It had been taken after a lacrosse game when they were both at high school. As ever, Rachel’s uniform was immaculate, while her sister’s was a mess of grass and sweat stains. Rachel’s smile looked to have been painted by the delicate brushstrokes of an Italian old master; Kate’s was a wild animal snarl. Little sis leaned on her stick with her right hand, with her left arm protectively draped over Rachel’s shoulder and holding her crosse.
It was ever thus. Born January 4, 1978, Rachel was fated to be the daughter Aura Robson had always wanted. But Jim wanted a son and heir to take after him. So in December that same year a second baby came along, but one born without the longed-for piece of flesh between its legs.
The girl kicked up a storm from the word go, even when she was in her mother’s belly. Complications during labor forced the doctors to give Aura a hysterectomy. When he heard what gender his daughter was and that there would never be a Jimmy Boy Robson, the stern Virginian didn’t even wait for them to discharge the baby from Maternity. He drove off and drank the night away in a roadhouse. He didn’t get to see his daughter until some friends took him home two days later.
Kate swigged some water from a bottle which had been in the door panel for a couple of days. It had an aftertaste of unwashed laundry and a musty smell that reminded her of the scant affection her father showed her.
Jim, in his way, had come to love the girl they showed him when he was done with his binge. But there was always something holding him back. She would always be the one who had deprived her mother of the energy and life force she should have passed down to their long-awaited son.
Kids, contrary to what grown-ups tend to think, are not dimwits. They have the capacity to grasp complex feelings from early on, and the rift of disappointment as wide as the one Kate’s love needed to span, to get through to her father, would be no exception.
How do you compete with a human being who never came into the world, with a notion or a yearning? The obvious answer is: you can’t. Despite everything, Kate had grown up determined to be the Robson boy. Her unruliness was a constant pain in the neck for everybody, but it stuck out most in her relationship with Rachel. They had grown up together, as close to each other as two sisters can be. Nevertheless they were complete opposites. Rachel was as calm and quietly beautiful as a mountain lake, while Kate was a fireball. They started school in the same class and little sis became big sis’s protector.
It was Kate who swallowed a centipede when Rachel lost a silly childish “dare,” then chickened out. It was Kate who snuck into Mr. Eckmann’s room to retake the math test Rachel had flunked. Kate was the one who had stood up for her sister when they were caught playing hooky in sixth grade.
At night they would tell each other secrets from opposite sides of the bedroom they shared, until they fell asleep. Rachel had talked to her about parties, boys and tunes. About how when they both grew up they would live under the same roof and have a pair of adoring husbands. The room smelled of bubblegum, erasers and Mom’s cheap moisturizing cream. And one night, when Rachel cried her eyes out and whispered to her sister that Randall Jackson had overstepped the mark while they smooched under the back stairs, Kate didn’t think twice. She leaped out of bed, pulled on some boots, sat on her bike in her pajamas and rode around to the Jacksons’ house. She threw pebbles at Randall’s window and when the groper came out to the porch, she punched out two of his teeth.
Randy’s father took Kate home and talked with her parents. There were stern words but Kate sat with her arms crossed on the sofa and kept silent over what had led her to smash in the football team captain’s face. Things didn’t cool down until a panic-stricken Rachel sloped downstairs in her nightie and spilled the beans.
“I regret my son’s behavior and I beg your pardon, Jim. You can bet he’ll be duly punished,” Mr. Jackson had said, wringing his hat in shame.
Jim had watched him leave from the doorway without a word. When the sound of the car engine faded into the night, he had turned to Kate and showed her the bike’s chain lock she had wrapped around her knuckles before she punched Randy.
“Was there any need for that?”
“He’s got twenty-five pounds on me,” Kate had answered with a shrug.
Jim kept his smiles to himself, but Kate knew she’d been right. Now, many years later, as she was about to do the craziest thing ever, her opinion on the matter hadn’t changed one bit.
Sure there was a need.
To protect your family you do whatever it takes.
Kate took a deep breath and opened the car door.
18
“When was this?”
“Couple of hours ago.”
Dr. Wong avoided my eyes so I knew right away there was more to it.
“What’s up, boss?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s up’?” Meyer interrupted with a guffaw like a rusty old saw cutting wood. “Do you really need to ask? Look, Dr. Evans, we take you in here, we give you a berth at St. Clement’s and the chance to prove you can be a top doctor. All that despite your, um, record.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
Meyer opened a drawer and flung a red file down on his desk, one of the ones they cooked up in Human Resources to run the hospital. I didn’t need to look at the name on the edge to know it was mine. He was just the kind of rat to dredge up the subject at such a time.
“Ah, ‘record.’ That’s executive lingo for ‘past events I can rake over and use against you.’ I guess you’re not about to refer to my success rate in surgery.”
Meyer blinked several times, amazed.
“I know about the problems you had in Johns Hopkins with the head of neurosurgery, but—”
“No you don’t.”
Meyer’s blinks became a sickly grin, a pair of monkeys deftly pulling at the corners of his mouth. He was rarely interrupted and could not brook outright contradiction.
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t know what you’ve got on paper, but believe me, it won’t even come close to the truth. I had no problem with Dr. Hockstetter; he has a problem with humankind. In any case, I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”
The manager paused and then started again. He’s one of those who, if you butt in, repeats his whole argument from the top, in case you might have forgotten what he said six seconds before.
“I’m up to speed on the problems you had at Johns Hopkins with the neurosurgery chief, but my predecessor chose to overlook them. Normally, that sort of disaster would have put your career back a couple of years, had you fixing up cow punchers’ heads in North Dakota or someplace. Instead, St. Clement’s gave you a break. We let you start over. My predecessor could see you had potential, sure. But potential counts for nothing without proper supervision and a guiding hand.”
“Are you insinuating it’s my fault we missed our shot to operate on the Patient, Meyer?”
“It is, though, isn’t it? We’ve had no trouble in all the time
since they first came to us. Then today up you pounce, go missing for hours to see him, and lo and behold, we get a call from the White House to tell us St. Clement’s is no longer the hospital of choice. You’re the only one who’s been in contact with them, so you’re the only one who could have dropped the ball.”
I could not believe this. Was he jealous?
“Is that what’s eating you? That you didn’t get to see the president? You didn’t miss much.”
“Potential is nothing without teamwork. And you are not a team player, Evans. You squander hospital resources, you find any old loophole to take the patients’ side. Most especially if they don’t have a dime. Like that gangbanger the paramedics dumped on the emergency room yesterday.”
Stephanie glanced at me then and raised her almost invisible eyebrows, her way of saying “Told you so.” The hospital’s star patient of the decade had slipped away, a one-off chance to get in the history books. Now that that had gone south, they needed a scapegoat. It mattered little that it was because of me the president had approached them in the first place. What mattered was who put him off.
Meyer despised me in his cold and trite way, but for him such sentiments could take a backseat as long as he got what he wanted. He would have to explain this away to the hospital board, and now he had the excuse and someone to point the finger at: the spendthrift doctor. Any stick would do to beat me with, and the nearest one he had was the Jamaal Carter case.
“I treated a human being, Meyer.”
“At high cost. I don’t run a charity, and this foolishness does not pay your salary.”
“No, my salary comes out of the six-figure bills you hit the clients with—after I’ve saved their lives, that is.”
Meyer leaned forward, his face livid with anger.
“You think you’re the only talented doctor on the block? There’s hordes of brats out there who can crimp an aneurysm as well as you and who know which side their bread’s buttered on! You cost this hospital good money, Evans, and you know it! We’ve put up with your fooling around these past months because, after all, you’ve lost your wife and . . .”