Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  “What? No, of course not.”

  “Great, then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?” he said with fake jollity. “You’ve got ten minutes to convince Hastings and get your patient back. Otherwise, we’re through.”

  He hung up again.

  I dawdled over my next move. Should I try to warn Kate or go ahead with White’s orders?

  It would be stupid to get in touch with her right away. White will surely be watching, listening, keeping a closer eye on me than ever. I can’t let it show I know my house has been broken into, I thought.

  I dialed Hastings’s cell, but it went to voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message and called his landline. I let it ring until it went through to the switchboard.

  It’s really late. What if he’s gone home for the day, won’t be back till tomorrow and turns off his cell until then? No, that’s impossible, no doctor would do that. There must be some other reason.

  I dialed again. Finally, somebody picked up.

  “Medical staff. Hastings speaking.”

  “Captain Hastings, David Evans here.”

  “Dr. Evans?” He sounded surprised, and a little guilty. “How did you get this number?”

  Good question. From a psycho killer who wants me to whack your boss.

  “I Googled it. Tell me, what’s the problem?”

  “Didn’t . . . Didn’t your bosses tell you?”

  “Yes, they told me I got the chop. The decent thing would have been for you to inform me personally, Captain.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Evans. I didn’t think it through.”

  And into the bargain you avoided the hassle of giving me the bad news yourself.

  “Sincerely, I am at a loss. Would you care to explain why?”

  “I am not authorized to disclose details of my patient’s decision to you, doctor.”

  “You went to a lot of trouble to get me to the White House and persuaded me to take on a patient and an operation I wanted nothing to do with. And now they cut me loose with no more than a phone call.”

  “Doctor, please. You must understand my position. I shouldn’t even be taking this call.”

  “And I shouldn’t have been a mile underground this afternoon.”

  The captain snapped to attention. I could hear him square his shoulders.

  “If you mean to reveal such knowledge acquired in the course of professional practice, that would be a breach of ethics. And a dereliction of duty to your country, too, Dr. Evans.”

  “I’m not about to reveal anything, Captain, I’m not a moron. I’m simply reminding you I’ve already gone beyond the call. I’m asking you for the same professional courtesy.”

  Hastings uttered a long sigh.

  “Fair’s fair. I’ll tell you what happened if you promise me a favor. I need the MRI scan you did for the president today. I believe you have it.”

  “Be right with you.”

  I had the Patient’s scan in a flash drive in my pocket. The request allowed me to sift through my pockets and put Kate’s cell in my top desk drawer while I pretended to look for the drive. White might have planted a camera in my office, so I had to take good care. I tried to thumb a message at top speed on the BlackBerry. I had only a few seconds.

  “Dr. Evans? Are you there?”

  “Yes, yes, one second.”

  “I have to run, Evans.”

  WATCH OUT. I THINK THEY KNOW SOMEBODY’S IN MY HOUSE. DAVID.

  “Wait, I’m looking for it.”

  I hit the SEND button, withdrew my hand from the drawer and fought back the urge to sigh in relief. I hoped the message would help put Kate on her guard, although she already knew her presence there would raise suspicion. The thought of what my sister-in-law might be having to endure drove me crazy, but at that juncture, I had Hastings to consider.

  “Now I’ve got it, Captain,” I went on, pretending to have found the drive at last. “I’ll gladly send it over with the rest of the case notes.”

  “No need, I sent the surgeon over to pick it up an hour ago, he should be with you shortly. I must ask for your cooperation, Dr. Evans.”

  “Sure. Just tell me what happened.”

  “The First Lady changed her mind. She spoke to another doctor who convinced her he was the best bet.”

  “What do you mean? But she said—”

  “You have a daughter, right? What would you do if she were ill?”

  “I would do the best I could for her. Whatever it took,” I said, after a pause.

  “Well, that’s what’s happened.”

  “I want to talk to the First Lady,” I said, my voice a little too strained.

  “The First Lady is at an official reception for the French prime minister. She can’t talk.”

  “But if I could just—”

  Hastings cut me short. “Listen here, Dr. Evans. The family has made its choice and there is nothing you can do about it. Take it like a professional.”

  And without further ado, he hung up.

  I could not believe it. They had hung me out to dry, without even giving me a chance to defend myself. I was stunned, but the surprise I felt was nothing compared to what was waiting for me when I read White’s next text.

  GOOD JOB, DAVE. IT’S ALL GOING ACCORDING TO PLAN.

  Kate

  When she spied the submachine gun’s outline, that settled matters. She realized that until then she hadn’t entirely taken David’s word for everything. Not because his explanation seemed to come out of left field, for day in, day out, she dealt with potential threats and assassination attempts on the president—more than ten the year before—that the public never got to know about. And not because his tale sounded far-fetched, either. On the contrary, experience had taught her that the simplest and most convincing stories most often turned out to be bull. No, she hadn’t quite believed him because she didn’t want it to be true.

  Be that as it may, the shadow of a stranger showed up in one of the frosted glass panes next to the door. And in his hands, the menacing contours of a gun. There was another guy with him, or at least that’s what Kate guessed, for somebody was forcing a key into the lock.

  Kate looked on, peeked out of the basement doorway, and for a moment she thought of going upstairs and trying to escape through one of the windows, but she decided that was playing with fire. It would take time to get there and she would have to break through them, as they were very small. The odds that she would give herself away were too high. Nor could she stay in the basement. A few more seconds and she’d be trapped in there, with nowhere to hide.

  I can’t risk an exit through the basement windows, not without being able to see exactly how many of them are out there waiting.

  Instinctively, she climbed the stairs and walked at a crouch into the living room, treading carefully so as not to make any noise. She gently unholstered her gun and held it in combat-ready stance, at forty-five degrees to the ground. She had to do her utmost to avoid a shoot-out with the interlopers and would use it only as a last resort.

  They can’t see me here. If they don’t get back, Julia dies. If they find me, Julia dies.

  Behind her she heard the front door open. Kate could feel her breathing calm down and settle. The anxiety and doubts that had assailed her dissipated. Her shoulders straightened, her ears pricked up and her pulse beat more slowly but strongly in her neck, a one-armed drummer playing a funeral march.

  The only way out is to retrace my steps and vamoose. Without a single goddamned clue. Shit.

  She bridged the three-yard gap to the covered balcony. Maybe it wasn’t so bad the kidnappers had shown up. If she got out of there unnoticed, she could follow them or, at worst, scribble down their license plate number.

  We’ll have Julia back asleep this very night in her bed, instead of in some shithole. All I have to do is make
it to my car.

  She opened the sliding door, slowly, silently. The rail was very stiff, so Kate had no choice but to lay her gun on the floor and shove the panel with both hands. The prowler’s heavy footsteps stomped behind her, in the hallway. She opened the door enough to wriggle out, grabbed the gun and closed it behind her. She managed to get away from the panel just as the other guy came into the living room.

  Good. Now for the patio door, then that’s it. You’re home free.

  She stole away from the living room door and squatted as she made her way along, with her back to the outside wall. The patio door was only four yards away, at the other end of the porch, which was enclosed by a waist-high wooden partition and six big glass windows.

  Whoever was inside abruptly switched on the living room lamp. An oblong of light lit up the space Kate had vacated only seconds before. A man’s face appeared outside, looking in through the window from the other side. He shouted in a foreign language.

  Shit!

  Kate flattened herself against the wall, with no more cover than the shadow of a metal table. She saw that all that saved her from being spotted was the glow of the living room lamp, which had blinded the man outside and given her some shade. She crawled over to the sofa area, realized her body was nudging the chairs over the parquet and prayed they wouldn’t notice.

  The man inside was also shouting, although not so loudly and in a much deeper voice. He must have given the guy outside an order, because he shifted and headed for the patio door.

  Kate shrank down as best she could and kept tight hold of her gun. She could feel a bead of sweat dribbling down her back and slowed her breathing to a minimum. She was scared but not jumpy. Ensconced between the sofa and the wall, she was at the mercy of two or more foes, and with the odds stacked against her. Despite that, the rushing adrenaline made her feel stronger and more alive than she had been in ages.

  The footfalls halted next to Kate, and she felt a chill. The heavy was so close she could have reached out and touched him. He partly turned his back to her as he reached for a pack of cigarettes. She plainly heard the cellophane crackle as he opened it, the rustle of his fingertips on the top, loosening a cigarette, and the striking of a match. She smelled the match, the first puff of tobacco, the gun oil. She saw the hard-bitten look on his face, his huge, callused paws covered in latex gloves, the unmistakable squat, oval shape under the submachine gun barrel.

  PP-19 Bizon. Russian job. Expensive and seldom seen outside their special forces and very grim criminal elements in eastern Europe. Para­bellum nine-millimeter ammo. Less of an impact than my MP5 but able to unleash a wall of fire: sixty-four rounds per clip, three times the norm.

  If he catches you, that ruffian can rip you in half.

  In the same situation on any regular assignment, she would have stood up, jabbed her gun in the suspect’s temple before he knew what was happening and arrested him on the spot. But this was not a regular assignment, nor could she do it by the book. She could only pray the snooper kept on toward the living room, without turning toward her precarious hiding place. It would take only a flick of the living room light switch to reveal her.

  Please. Walk. Walk.

  The man lurched and Kate’s heart leaped. He didn’t turn around, however, and entered the house.

  It’s now or never.

  Kate set off from the other side of the sofa and crawled over to the patio door. The intruder had left it ajar, so she could slip out without a sound. She cringed when her body made contact with the soaking-wet grass but didn’t dare get up. She couldn’t run to the street, because she didn’t know whether anybody else was out there. And there was something far more urgent: she couldn’t go without deactivating the jammer, or they’d be on to her.

  She crawled to the shed, closed the door behind her and yanked out the jammer’s cord to turn it off. Then she saw a text from David, sent twenty minutes before.

  WATCH OUT. I THINK THEY KNOW SOMEBODY’S IN MY HOUSE. DAVID.

  No shit, Sherlock.

  She dropped down between the recycling bin and the lawn mower, and shivered with cold, her clothes dripping with sweat.

  20

  I was still trying to make sense of White’s text when the person I hate most in the world opened my office door.

  In all fairness, my daughter’s kidnapper and his minions now held that title. But Dr. Alvin Hockstetter had worn the laurels for so long it was hard to bump him down to second place.

  I distinctly recall the first time I saw him, in the lecture theater at Johns Hopkins, the best hospital in Baltimore, the country and probably the world, too. It was my first day as a resident, and I was one more among a score of youngsters eager to see His Eminence, the “Pioneer of the Brain,” as Time magazine had dubbed him. He was of medium but imposing height, and when he passed me by on his way to the lectern, I felt I was a klutz, all elbows and knees beside what back then I took to be the paragon of elegance.

  Alvin Hockstetter had two furled caterpillars for eyebrows, slim fingers at the end of long, sturdy arms, and a belly as prominent as his ego. He bounded up to the dais with an alacrity that belied his plumpness and looked at us from behind an oily smile for a few seconds, until he was sure he had our complete and undivided attention.

  He began to speak in a practiced baritone that came from deep inside his chest, and dropped one of the smartest lines I’ve ever heard.

  “You know the difference between God and a neurosurgeon? It’s that God knows he isn’t a neurosurgeon.”

  We all fidgeted in our seats and burst into hesitant and awkward laughter. Some of us had grown up in God-fearing small towns in the heartland, and although we might only have been “kinda sorta” devout, the joke still verged on blasphemy. It was also as accurate a description of a neurosurgeon as they come.

  “It’s funny, but it’s no joke. You are in the holy temple of medicine, the Vatican of hospitals. Neurosurgery is its Sistine Chapel. We, my dear novices, are here to fix God’s mistakes.”

  He pressed a key on the remote he had concealed in his hand and the screen behind him changed to display an MRI scan of a healthy patient alongside one of a patient with a brain tumor.

  “Would one of you be so good as to remind us what angiogenesis is?”

  No one raised their hand. We were still too awestruck by Hockstetter to dare. We were a penguin colony on the edge of an ice floe, each trusting the next guy would take the plunge first to see whether there were any sharks.

  “Come on, take a shot. We’ve just weaned you off school; all that learning is still fresh. You, for heaven’s sake, put your hand down. We’re not in grade school, even if you still smell like diapers.”

  “Angiogenesis is the process whereby new blood vessels are formed from preexisting ones,” a tremulous colleague said, and put her hand down.

  “Exactly. An essential life process. And cancer’s top weapon.”

  He changed the presentation display to focus on the healthy patient, except that it now showed a video of the same MRI. It zoomed in and switched to a 3D projection of the neurons. One was darker than those around it.

  “There you are, my novices. Your Creator’s biggest mistake. A minute, insignificant, damaged cell. Any other in its place would trigger apoptosis—cell death; it would fragment and dissolve into the organism. Nonetheless, the process has failed, and the cell has decided it won’t die off. Not only that, it’s begun to replicate itself.”

  The dark, mutant cell split into two, then four, then eight. The camera zoomed out to show the tumor’s exponential growth.

  “This process would halt right away but for angiogenesis, my novices. This astrocytoma would grow a scant couple of millimeters before it would be starved of the oxygen it needs to keep eating and breathing. But this purportedly intelligent design is rife with slipups. Numerous things that ought not to go wrong do go wrong.”
>
  The cells in the display recruited blood vessels, robbed the host organ of its life energy and grew out of control. The attack did not stop with devouring the host organ but spread through the bloodstream to take over other areas: the greatly feared metastasis. That animation was terrifying, even for our hard-boiled minds, which had learned to internalize such matters. Underneath lurked the gut fear that one day what you saw on the screen could happen to you.

  “So these dumb cells that wanted to be immortal wind up killing the organism that supported them. That’s it, folks.”

  Hockstetter tapped another key to end the presentation and the hospital logo was displayed again.

  “My dear novices. You have studied for years to grab a pew in this room. So far you’ve crammed your heads with facts, but your education begins here and now. You will begin to answer the question: what is man?”

  There was the odd wary glance, which Hockstetter didn’t fail to notice.

  “As it’s your first day, I’ll bow to your unsullied political correctness. Okay, what is a human being?”

  “A primate from the hominid family,” a guy in the front row said.

  “Not bad, my dear novice. You would surely get great grades in zoology. No, I mean what we really are.”

  No one answered. Hockstetter’s sarcastic tone cowed us all.

  “We are machines full of tubes, engines and valves. And machines must have a purpose.”

  “Survival,” somebody piped up.

  “Right,” Hockstetter said, and could not have looked more surprised if a cow had just mooed Beethoven’s Fifth. “We are all survival machines. Especially in your case, my dear novices. And now, look around you. What do you see?”

  “Competitors,” somebody said.

  “To paraphrase the great Professor Dawkins, for one survival machine, another unrelated survival machine is mere background, such as a cloud or a rock. All that distinguishes it from the rest is the way each machine reacts, because it has the same innate transcendental mission: to preserve its immortal genes. At any price. Which allows us to charge the insurance companies top dollar and keeps the American public arguing over who should pay rather than why costs are so high.”