by J. G. Jurado
I jumped out of my skin. I don’t suppose I have to describe the scene—the footage was replayed before, during and after the trial. The moment in which the evil doctor made the switch and the courageous chief of the president’s security detail interrupted him.
“Turn that down, for God’s sake. You want to deafen me?”
But what the cameras did not see was what was going on behind my back. The sudden noise had startled me and I had let go of the real pouches. The others were already in place, so now all four were mixed up in there together.
“Do you have a minute, doctor? Allow me to introduce you to the panel of experts. That way you’ll recognize their voices later.”
I began to feel skittish; I could feel my pulse racing in my neck and there was a sensation in the pit of my stomach which, if it wasn’t panic, was just as good. How the hell was I going to get back the original pouches and take them out of there? I couldn’t turn around and let them see me touching the trolley. I had no gloves on and I hadn’t sterilized my hands. If anybody suspected the trolley had been contaminated, everything would be held up. And Julia would be running out of air.
“I’ll be right with you. I want to check everything is in place.”
“Hurry up.”
I could feel the rest of the people up there with McKenna looking at me. My head buzzed as it tried to solve the problem. How could I remove the correct pouches?
Got it. Temperature.
I poked my fingers in up to the knuckles and prodded the bags, which was a lot harder to do than it sounds, behind my back, with the palm of my hand twisted around and all eyes on me. I could distinguish the cold packs from those that had been on my back for more than half an hour. I yanked out the cold ones and shoved them into my pants.
“Doctor?”
“Be right up.”
On the way to the stairs leading to the observation room, I threw the real pouches into a trash can. I had a slight dizzy spell, the feelings of tension, euphoria and guilt swilling together inside me. If I had been alone, I would have burst into hysterical, manic laughter. Instead the laugh was stuck in my throat, a half-bitten morsel I was gagging on. I had to clear my throat twice before knocking on the balcony door.
McKenna opened the door for me. The balcony was a cramped space, a mere one hundred square feet with a couple of rows of seats, a few monitors and a glass wall at a forty-five-degree angle that commanded a view of the operating theater, almost right over the bed. Four men were in there, although I had eyes only for one.
First was McKenna himself, who steered his bulk aside to let me past.
Second in line was Lowers, with his folksy smile and breezy manners. He looked familiar from a medical magazine.
Third was Hockstetter, with his arm in a sling and giving me a look that could kill.
But the fourth guy wasn’t Ravensdale.
The fourth was Mr. White.
Kate
She observed the farm from a hilltop. She had left the car on the other side, well out of sight of the farm’s occupants.
To follow them all the way there had been quite an achievement. They had stopped twice on the way, once to fill up with gas and again at a greasy-spoon truck stop by the Virginia state line, where they chowed down for an hour and a half while Kate nibbled on a couple of stale granola bars she had found in the glove box.
That part of the trail hadn’t been too hard. The Mercedes had traveled slowly, ten miles per hour below the speed limit. As the men were armed, they obviously didn’t want to risk the state troopers stopping them to give them a ticket, then asking them to open the trunk or get out of the car.
Kate had had to step up precautions when they went through Gainesville. They were no longer on a freeway, where trailing somebody was just a matter of keeping your eyes on their rear lights from a half mile away. Now they were on two-way back roads, with a lot less traffic, which went through towns. She couldn’t drop back too far, nor could she turn off her headlights. She had to stay out of range of their rearview mirror, or they would notice her. Which meant she might lose them anytime.
As dawn broke, they made their way into Rappahannock County and Kate began to feel uneasy, because there the highways were just ribbons of blacktop, bordered with orange, that crisscrossed the green expanse.
There were very few towns, just a bunch of scattered farms, which got farther apart as they went. Out in the boonies, there was no way to follow them at a safe distance. She would have to rely on sheer instinct to follow them, hoping to catch sight of the Mercedes’s side markers from afar as it went around a bend. Her heart sank with each minute that passed without seeing them.
The inevitable happened. She lost them.
It took her more than twenty minutes to realize they were no longer in front of her.
I must have gone past an unmarked turnoff. But where?
Worried to death, she turned the car around and drove back past a couple of regular-looking farms. And beyond that, not far from where she had last seen them, past a dirt track.
She wasn’t so clueless as to take it, but carried on until she hit a northbound back road, drove around the hill that the track she’d seen skirted, then walked to the top.
She kneeled down by some poison ivy which had turned a glorious orangey-red color with the fall. At the foot of the hill was a gently sloping dale. In the distance, she could see Shenandoah Mountain through the mist, and heard cardinals warbling on and off to greet it.
Kate knew the lay of the land well, because she and Rachel had grown up an hour’s drive away, on a farm not much different from this one. That Arcadian spot was in the Virginia heartland, the last bit of wilderness to have fended off the maw of the excavators. An earthly paradise.
And two hundred yards from her vantage point, far from the main highway, was the spot where the kidnappers were hiding out.
The Mercedes could no longer be seen, but she knew right away that this was the place. There were three buildings. The farmhouse, from whose chimney rose a thin plume of smoke. A stable to the north of it, with fresh tire ruts leading to the doors, which in all likelihood was where they kept the cars. Beside the stable was a gasoline-fired generator. In the gap between the latter and the house there was a mound of dirt several yards high.
And finally there was a barn to the south, which they obviously weren’t using to store hay. No barn she had ever seen as a child had the latest satellite communications antenna.
Kate pulled out her cell to confirm there was almost no coverage. Only one of the five bars was showing while the 3G icon was crossed out.
That antenna provides the bandwidth to monitor the girl in the dugout. It’s here. They’ve got her inside.
She looked at her watch. Three minutes before the president’s operation was due to begin.
Now she had to choose. She could call McKenna, explain what had happened and tell him to get David out of the operating theater. Then call in a heavily armed SWAT team, who would take a couple of hours to get down there and storm the farm. In the knowledge that by then White would have been forewarned and exacted whatever vengeance he had decided upon by remote control.
Or she could go in, with surprise on her side and trusting that God, luck and training would tip the balance her way in a mission impossible against untold enemies who outgunned her.
She hesitated for a second, wavering, for the umpteenth time in the past forty hours, between the call of duty and her feelings.
Finally, she picked up the cell.
On the Observation Deck, Operating Theater 2
The best part was seeing the look on David’s face when he realized he was there.
He had moved forward to shake White’s hand, feigning indifference, but his eyes abruptly went glassy and betrayed a whirlwind of emotions. White was flattered to be the only one who held the key to what was going on inside Dav
id’s head at that moment.
“Hello, Dr. Evans. I don’t know if you remember me, we met at a conference in London a couple of years ago,” he said in his best British accent.
There was a long hiatus while Dave looked at the iPad that White was clutching to his chest.
That’s right, take note. I’ve got my finger on the button. One push and your daughter dies.
“Of course. In the Marblestone, wasn’t it?”
“What an excellent memory you have.”
That Dave himself had been obliged to corroborate his alias had been the icing on the cake. Not that White needed it. His highly placed employer had tipped him off about Peter Ravensdale some time back. He was second on the list of experts the White House had drawn up.
“Have you come all the way from London?”
“I’ve just flown in from New York. I rented a car at the airport and got here half an hour ago.”
“It’s quite a surprise to see you here.”
“And an exciting opportunity for me to learn from you. They say you are faultless.”
They had gotten in touch with the real Ravensdale on Tuesday, the same day Svetlana died. They sent him an e-mail from the State Department asking what his fees would be to supervise an operation and whether he’d be interested, without mentioning the patient’s name. Ravensdale had replied to accept. He said they wouldn’t even need to fly him over from London, because he would already be visiting patients in New York.
Eleven hours later he was dead, his corpse in a safe place, while his cell phone, e-mail account and documentation were in White’s hands.
The president was right about reining in the NSA. It was so big that not even those it was meant to protect were immune from its prying and conniving. All it had taken to get White into the hospital had been to use PRISM software to tap into the Secret Service database, alter Ravensdale’s details on file there to match White’s, forge a British passport . . . et voilà, Peter Ravensdale had a new face.
When he showed up on the second floor that morning, a Secret Service agent had done no more than check his ID, frisk him and call McKenna. After all, he was merely an observer who wouldn’t even come close to the president, right?
“I try to be,” Dave said. “Besides, you will all ensure I don’t make any mistakes.”
Lowers uttered a pleasantry while Hockstetter mumbled an impudent remark about having to take what you could get. White ignored them. He was savoring the moment.
This was his masterstroke, his secret weapon for wiping away his victims’ last remaining scrap of willpower. He was always in at the kill, to make sure they fulfilled his wishes. The face of a neighbor among the crowd, the mailman nobody noticed, the photographer poised behind his camera. The first time had been in Naples, when he had dressed up as a cop to deliver the head of the elusive writer to the Mafia man who wanted him dead. From then on he couldn’t resist seeing with his own eyes how the last domino passed the tipping point and toppled perfectly into place.
And now the tall green-eyed man who was already on his way out of the observation deck was about to complete his masterpiece, his Sistine Chapel.
“Good luck, Dr. Evans. We’ll be here, following your work with great interest.”
32
After I quit the observation deck, I went back to my room. My presence wouldn’t be required in the operating theater for a couple of hours. Sharon Kendall would take half that time to sedate the Patient. Dr. Wong would use the other hour to perform a craniotomy and lay bare the area on which I would work. She would make an incision around the skull, peel off the scalp and cut into the bone with a circular saw. Nothing you couldn’t do yourself with household tools. Except that we do it accurately, so we can then put it all back together again.
I wasn’t involved in any of that. Although short and simple, it was a very intense and physically tiring business which neurosurgeons in charge of the delicate parts usually delegated to residents and less experienced staff. It’s not because of arrogance. An operating theater is very stressful, a thousand times more so in the exceptional situation we found ourselves in, in Theater 2. The idea was that the experts should be fresh when they got to work.
The very fact that I was sitting comfortably while the medical chief at one of the country’s best hospitals was doing the donkey work prior to my operating on the president of the United States had to be the high-water mark of my career.
If my father had been alive, I would have called him that second. I’d have told good ol’ Doc Evans the score. For sure he’d have given me some sage, homely and useless piece of advice, which would have warmed the cockles of my heart. If Rachel had still been around, she’d have been in there with me, keeping an eye on the Patient’s readings and glancing at me now and again, when she thought I wasn’t looking. And if I was alert enough, I could even have discerned a look of pride out of the corner of my eye. I know because she had always betrayed such a look.
They had both seen the kid I once was, and what I had made of myself. I thanked my lucky stars they weren’t here now to see what I had become: a weapon in the hands of a murderer, as responsible as him for the heinous crime we were about to commit.
I remembered the day my dad had found me playing with the kitten’s guts and initiated me in my career as a doctor. That day he forgave me. Twenty-six years on, as I stared blankly at the wall while a couple of bags of poison lurked in the instrument trolley drawer, I could only imagine him spitting in my face for betraying all that he had taught me.
Then I heard a quiet buzz. I had put Kate’s phone in a desk drawer. I doubted White would be observing me now through the camera on my iPhone, but just in case I had stashed it away inside my doctor’s bag.
I took out the BlackBerry, and when I read the text my heart derailed and tears filled my eyes. I had to read it again and again to check that my eyes weren’t deceiving me.
FOUND HER. I’M GOING IN.
DON’T DO IT, DAVE. TRUST ME.
She’s found her. But she doesn’t have her yet. Anything might happen.
Then a second text landed.
WHATEVER HAPPENS, I’LL LOVE YOU ALWAYS.
There was knocking at the door. I dried my eyes quickly before I turned around.
It was Wong. She came in with coffee from the vending machine and a tired smile. If she could tell I’d been crying, she didn’t say so. She leaned on the door, stirred the unappealing brew and nodded her head at me.
“I’ve lifted the lid, Evans. Now get in there and strut your stuff.”
Kate
She went back to her car, opened the trunk, took off her leather jacket and threw it inside. She pulled a blanket off a lockbox and opened it with a tiny key from her key ring, then locked away her keys, purse, everything she had on her. She wanted to carry nothing that might get in her way or jingle.
She took an MP5 submachine gun out of the case. She had dismantled, cleaned, greased and reassembled it on Wednesday night, so it was combat-ready. The ammo situation was more worrying. She had only three small magazines, forty-five rounds in all, which ruled out continuous fire. She made sure she selected single-fire mode, fitted one of the magazines and clipped the other two to a special belt. She also donned her gun holster and SIG Sauer P229 pistol, then hooked them to the belt, too.
Lastly, she put on her Kevlar vest. It was a light service model, with the letters SECRET SERVICE embossed on it in yellow. Her mind went back to the intruders in the Evans house and the shadows of the PP-19 Bizon guns they toted.
Sixty-four shots per magazine, she thought as she patted the vest with her knuckles. How many could this thing stop, if they hit me dead-on? Two, three?
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
She hesitated before she put her jacket back on. The combined weight of her jacket and vest would slow her down, but her white shirtsleeves were t
oo obvious. The black jacket would help her steal across to the barn.
You can take it off when it’s showtime. If you get to raise the curtain.
She climbed back up the hill, gripping the machine gun with both hands. She would have to climb down the other side very carefully, taking advantage of such natural shelter as the vegetation would afford her. She stopped off at a copse halfway down, to rest and to take a last glance at the farm.
They’re too confident no one will find this place; there’s nobody on watch. Either that or they’re too tired after last night’s little errand.
There had been at least three of them in the car, so they were most probably resting up in the farmhouse. To take on that part of the farm by herself was impossible. There would be stairs, nooks, blind spots and a million other places for them to hide, and many obstacles for them to throw in her way.
If Julia’s in there, we’re done for.
But the little girl wasn’t in there. She’d be in the barn, where they had their communications center and could watch her.
Okay, here’s the plan. In you go, release her from wherever she is being held and run uphill as fast as your heels will carry you. Can’t fail.
She couldn’t help having a wry chortle at her own stupidity. Julia had been shut away in a tiny space she could not stand up straight in for more than sixty hours. She might be injured or sick, and undoubtedly she’d be in shock. It would be hard enough for her to walk, let alone run. Kate would have to carry her herself.
How much would she weigh—forty-five, fifty pounds? God, this’ll be just great.
But she didn’t have a better idea.
She came down the slope’s last few yards with her heart beating nineteen to the dozen. Her breathing quickened and she could feel a sudden shift in the world around her. The light became brighter, harder, almost solid and unbreakable. Time slowed down and the leaves stopped falling from the trees to hover in midair. By the time she reached the barn door, her senses were as keen as could be, thanks to the adrenaline. She could distinguish every speck, every whorl in the grain and every little mossy shadow on the huge wooden door. She reached out for the rusty handle and could feel under her fingers the wrinkles from dozens of coats of paint applied over the decades. When she turned it, the quiet creaking was a thunderclap to her ears.