Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  Vlatko thought it over for a couple of minutes while Kate stared at the wallpaper.

  “Okay, officer. Let’s go to my place.”

  Vlatko took only a couple of minutes to cram his stinking clothing into a backpack. He had flown the coop with little more than he stood up in. Another twenty minutes and Kate’s car braked to a halt a half block from the kid’s apartment.

  “Here we are. Which one’s your apartment? Can we see it from here?”

  “Yes, it’s on the sixth floor. First window on the left,” he said, pointing upward.

  “You left the light on?”

  “I’m afraid so, I left in a real hurry when Svetlana warned me.”

  “Okay. Out you go.”

  “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  “I don’t want anybody to see us together. Walk quietly. Although you can’t see them, agents are watching you this second.”

  The youngster gave her a nervous look.

  “Will you be watching, Agent Robson?”

  “My shift’s over. I need to hit the sack.”

  “I’d feel better if you stayed too.”

  “You’re asking me to keep my ass on this seat all night while you’re snug in your bed? In your dreams.”

  Vlatko hesitated before he got out.

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Okay, then, I’ll stay. Now get out of here.”

  “Thanks for everything you’re doing for us, Agent Robson,” he said with a smile.

  He got out of the car.

  “Vlatko,” she called after him through the car window.

  The young man turned around to face her. Kate paused for a second. But it was too late now. The die was cast.

  “Nothing. Sleep well.”

  She watched him walk to the door of the apartment building. He cut an ungainly and innocent figure. A nice kid who just wanted to be with his girlfriend, to work and finish his studies. She kept her eyes on the boy’s window for a long time, until the light went out.

  Don’t think. Don’t think.

  There is nothing harder than making your mind go blank. When you’re in an unlit car, on a godforsaken street, watching an innocent young man’s doorway and waiting for some of the most murderous and pitiless human beings on earth to appear, the task is practically impossible.

  And if at that moment the person your thoughts revolve around should call, your soul can turn inside out.

  “David. Where are you? How did you get to call?”

  29

  I arrived home at about nine p.m. I wasn’t alone. Parked on the sidewalk opposite was a sedan with a couple of Secret Service agents inside, exactly as McKenna had promised.

  I was beyond tired, although the pain in my chest had subsided by the grace of St. Vicodin. I felt hot and my eyes were swollen and irritated. I needed a big slug of whiskey and twenty hours’ sleep. But the second I closed the door behind me, my phone rang.

  “Nice escort you’ve got yourself there,” White said.

  I backed into the door and let myself slither down until I was sitting on the floor.

  “There they go, wasting taxpayers’ money again.”

  “This greatly complicates matters.”

  “You should thank me for getting McKenna off our back.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Dave. Your performance today has been brilliant. And the way you showed the supervisor the phone, so that I could see his defeat on camera, that was a stroke of genius. You’re a natural. I regret that after tomorrow we won’t be working together.”

  I was too enfeebled to insult him.

  “I wish I could say the same.”

  “Get some rest, and leave all the lights off so the Secret Service think you’re asleep and lower their guard a little. At one o’clock sharp, go out through the yard to the next street. Wait for my men there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, Dave. Leave the cell at home. I don’t think those meatheads will be smart enough to have put a tracker on your signal, but we can’t run any risks now. Not when the prize is so close.”

  He hung up and I complied. For the most part. Because although I left my iPhone behind, I took along the phone Kate had given me. And I left the house two minutes before the appointed time. At last I could get far enough away from the bugged phone to talk to Kate.

  I walked up the slope in my yard and sheltered behind a tree. There wasn’t a soul on the street, nor any sound other than the distant squawking of the TV in the Salisburys’ house. They were a deaf old couple who always fell asleep on the sofa.

  My precarious hideaway kept me out of the two heavies’ sight, so I punched in the number and Kate answered on the second ring.

  “David. Where are you? How did you get to call?”

  “On the street. I don’t have much time. They’re coming to pick me up to go see White.”

  “And your phone?”

  “He’s ordered me to leave it behind. You get anywhere?”

  “I’m following a lead I’d prefer not to discuss. What’ve you been up to these past few hours?”

  I gave her a quick roundup, including the bit about the rats and how White could act against Julia merely by pushing a button.

  “We won’t let him do it. Will you be in the operating theater tomorrow?”

  “Yes. It’s been a real nightmare of a day. There was a change of plan yesterday that almost scrapped the whole ball game.”

  “Don’t give me that ‘ball game’ crap, David. Speak straight. Call it murder.”

  “Will that make you feel better? Because it certainly won’t do it for me.”

  “It nearly always hurts to do the right thing, eh, Dave?”

  “Do you really want to talk about that now?”

  “I can’t think of a better time, David. In a few hours I might be dead.”

  I took some time before answering, while the images of the night it all happened came back to my mind. Julia had gone to bed, and Rachel wouldn’t be back for couple of hours. Kate had come over to see her niece on one of her rare days off. The three of us had dinner together, just as we had done many a time. Kate and I drank wine, just as we had done many a time. We chatted for a while on the sofa, just as we had done many a time.

  Then, without warning, she kissed me. And that we had never done.

  I was too stunned to react. For a decade, only Rachel had kissed me, so Kate’s lips pressed on mine felt odd, overwhelming. Somewhere outside of us was the sound of something breaking that would never be fixed again.

  I didn’t kiss her back, but I did not fend her off either, I don’t know whether out of fear or confusion. But Kate understood right away what she’d done, what I didn’t feel, so she drew away from me. She was dying of shame, blamed it on the wine and ran off. The day after she called me to say sorry, and I said we should tell Rachel, hard as that might be.

  Because it nearly always hurts to do the right thing.

  “Kate, I know what you’re doing for Julia,” I replied. “And I am endlessly grateful.”

  “No, David. You have no idea. Of what I’ve done or what I’m about to do.”

  Her voice broke down at the end of the sentence, into a wounded whimper. I could hear her sobbing quietly, as if choking on emotion.

  “It doesn’t matter what happens, you and I can never be together, can we, David?”

  “All I can offer you, Kate, is the truth.”

  “Then say it, I need to hear it.”

  The ensuing silence could not have lasted more than a couple of seconds, but on that cold and lonely street it seemed to take a lifetime and to be as deep as the ocean.

  “We can’t be together.”

  “I saw you first,” she said in a whisper.

  It took me a second to realize she was talking about the day Rachel and I met, at a campus party.r />
  “I know, Kate. But the moment I saw her, there was nobody else for me. She was all I’d ever wanted.”

  “I hear you. She was a very brave woman, the bravest person I have ever known.”

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  “And that’s coming from somebody whose job it is to stop bullets meant for someone else?”

  Kate laughed, a sweet but heartrending laugh.

  “I protect others because I’m incapable of protecting myself. I wish I had her sort of bravery. David . . .”

  “What?”

  “You never told her? You never told her that I kissed you?”

  No, I never did. I didn’t want to drive them apart. It would have been ugly, messy and painful. Because I was wrong, and now I know that. When doing the right thing causes harm, maybe you need to find another way.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “No. Wherever she may be, she’ll know the truth.”

  I had wanted to tell her. I didn’t dare. And then she went away without warning, so now I’d never be able to tell her, or ask for forgiveness.

  “Kate, if you want to ask for her forgiveness, find Julia.”

  I didn’t intend to put it so bluntly, but that’s how the words came out—harshly, pitilessly. I knew I had broken her heart once and for all before I heard her reply.

  “I know that’s all you want me for. Consider it done, David,” she said icily. And hung up.

  Before I could call her back to say sorry, the headlamps on White’s henchmen’s car appeared at the end of the street.

  30

  “Have you noticed? There’s something about Juanita.”

  White was drinking coffee when his stooges dropped me off at the Marblestone Diner. As ever, we were alone, with the sole exception of Juanita.

  “What about her?”

  “The waitress likes us, Dave. She’s watching us. Our little American Idol contestant is checking us out; she strokes her hair when she looks this way. And she doesn’t understand that we would never take notice of someone like her, an uneducated, unskilled cow.”

  I wasn’t going to lower myself to reply to that vile comment.

  “Less of the ‘we.’ ”

  “Well, well. So now plural pronouns don’t agree with you?”

  “I know perfectly well what you are. And you are nothing like me. Or anybody else.”

  White guffawed. The son of a bitch was in a great mood.

  “Well now! So the chief mechanic has realized what’s wrong? A failure of the limbic system, in my prefrontal lobe? You think I wet the bed and was an arsonist as a child? You think the cats in my apartment building used to disappear, Dave?”

  “I don’t doubt it for a second.”

  “You’re wrong, Dave. It may be that, by normal standards, I am what you take to be a psychopath. But believe me, I’m not the one with the problem. It’s the rest of you who are limited by your boundaries. And tomorrow you are going to cross them.”

  I decided to have one last try.

  “Why don’t you wait, White? Even if the operation is a success, he’ll be dead soon. I don’t think he’ll last out his term.”

  “You just don’t get it. I thought you were better than the rest, Dave. People think too much. They always mull over a heap of different scenarios—within ten years, twenty years, heaven, hell, the consequences, blah, blah, blah. Juanita, more coffee, please!”

  He smiled and lifted up a fork that was on the table. Its three tines glittered in the lamplight.

  “But what is important, what is real, Dave, is the here and now. Choosing the moment. There’s nothing else, there’s no moment beyond right now. This fork is real, this moment is real. You say he’ll be dead soon, without understanding that the client who has contracted me needs him to be dead now. Right now.”

  Juanita came up to us, armed with a coffeepot and a smile. She leaned over my cup and began to fill it.

  “Human beings only reach their full potential when they are capable of giving free rein to instantly satisfying their needs without a moment of doubt,” White concluded.

  At that very second, he sat up slightly in his seat, grabbed Juanita by her hair ribbon with his left hand and knocked her head against the table. The poor waitress’s forehead barely made a sound as it struck the Formica, compared to the clatter made by the cups jumping up from their saucers. With his right hand, the one holding the fork, White stabbed Juanita at the bottom of her skull. The fork sank up to the handle in the soft flesh, reaching the medulla oblongata and killing her instantly. Juanita’s legs gave way, her limbs turned to jelly. The pot smashed to pieces as it hit the floor, drowning out the dull thud of Juanita’s body as it collapsed in a heap.

  As quick and simple as that. One second there had been a friendly, attentive person beside me. Three seconds later, nothing but a bag of flesh and bones lying in a pool of coffee.

  White merely had a few spots of blood on his starched shirt cuffs. He took a napkin from the metal container on top of the table and tried to rub them off, but without much success.

  “Well. This will never come out. I’ll have to throw it away,” he said, genuinely disgruntled.

  And me? What did I do during those three seconds in which a human being was rubbed out before my very eyes?

  Absolutely nothing.

  We might say that it all happened too quickly, that I was overtired, that I was frozen in horror. It would all be true, but I’ve thought it over a lot these past months. And what if I had known a couple of minutes beforehand what was about to happen? Would I have done anything? Would I have warned her?

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know and that terrifies me, maybe more than anything that had happened before or would happen the day after. Because White had won. He had taken me to the point where the opposing forces of humanity and expediency canceled each other out.

  “I know why you did that,” I said when I got my wits back together.

  White had finished scrubbing the spattered blood on his shirt and scrutinized me.

  “Why have I done it, Dave?”

  “You’ve just eliminated the only witness to have seen us together.”

  “True. I had a need and I satisfied it. Now I feel better.”

  “And what about me? I’ve seen your face. I could describe every pore on your disgusting skin. Have you decided how you’re going to kill me when this is all over?”

  He elegantly tut-tutted, a teacher reprimanding a pupil.

  “My dear Dave, it would truly relieve me to end your existence. Believe me, I’m not thrilled that you know who I am and what I do. But we have a bond. Tomorrow afternoon, the whole wide world will know your name. Disposing of you would draw too much attention. It would be too much of a coincidence.”

  The lie sounded tremendously persuasive, although I didn’t buy it for a second. But with just seven hours left until the operation began, my fate didn’t come into it.

  “How do you want me to do it?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  White put an attaché case that had been beside him on the seat on the table. He opened it and placed the contents in my hand, two metallic pouches with black labeling on them, each the size and shape of a packet of M&M’s.

  “Now do you understand?”

  Of course I understood. The smart bastard had given me the infallible means with which to kill the president in front of a dozen witnesses, without a single one suspecting a thing.

  “They’re so perfect. How did you manage that?” I asked in amazement.

  “That’s my little secret. Replicating the pouches exactly was the easy part. The hard part is getting the right pouch to its destination.”

  What I had in my hand were packets of Gliadel. Each pouch holds four wafers of soluble ma
terial the size of a quarter. They cost more than a thousand bucks a pop, because they are capable of doing the magic that finishes off a surgeon’s handiwork. Right where we complete incisions, we apply one of those silver bullets packed with a localized chemotherapy dose. For an additional $8,000 (we charged the patients triple that), we could extend the sufferer’s life by retarding the reappearance of the glioblastoma.

  But of course, those particular patches would not work.

  “What do they have in them?”

  “A very unusual toxin that acts within a few minutes. For your own sake, it’s best you don’t know the name.”

  It made perfect sense. When the president died they would perform an autopsy, although bearing in mind that he would have died on the operating table, it would not be a very thorough autopsy. Even in a worst-case scenario, to find a toxin in a test you need to know which one to look out for. They don’t show up out of the blue. A compound from the list of usual suspects would be virtually undetectable.

  “I don’t know if I can switch the real bags for these.”

  “You’d better find a way. Because if you fail me tomorrow, I won’t leave her to suffocate, Dave. I won’t even press the button to release the rats. That will only happen in the unlikely event of my being unable to dispense some more creative form of justice. What would be appropriate for Julia?”

  He paused briefly and tugged at his lower lip, pretending to think up something.

  “I know . . . I have a client in the gulf, a sheikh with idiosyncratic tastes. He has an enormous secret chamber in his palace, decorated in bright colors and totally soundproofed. Inside there’s a merry-go-round and a cotton candy machine. Your daughter would last him weeks.”

  The horror of what he had just said stabbed me with an ice-cold knife.

  “Listen, White. You can do what you like to me. I know you will, in any case. But if you harm my daughter again, you’d better kill me first. Otherwise, the world won’t be big enough for the two of us.”

  White flashed me a saintly, delicate and condescending smile.