by J. G. Jurado
Seated on the edge of a velvet sofa with her legs crossed at the ankles, she was so engrossed in typing on her iPad she didn’t hear Hastings’s polite knocks on the door. She raised her eyes when we entered and rose to greet me. Her bearing was even more impressive in person, with an aristocratic air, but there was also a warmth in her voice that belied her expression.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Evans.”
I mumbled a polite response, but she appeared not to hear it as she turned to quiz Hastings:
“How was it?”
The medic quietly cleared his throat and dithered over how to break the news.
“Well, you see, the president will not give way on the hospital, while Dr. Evans wants it to be done at St. Clement’s.”
“May I ask why?”
I replied, “For a solid medical reason: I need to be in my element. And political reasons don’t count in this game.”
“Dr. Evans, if I got my husband to change his mind, would you operate?”
“To tell the truth, ma’am, I wonder if I’m not in over my head here.”
She smiled, a sad and spontaneous smile, a genuine smile.
“We’re all in over our heads here, doctor. I cried all through the first night I spent in this house, out of happiness and fear. I know what it is to shoulder a heavier burden than you can bear.”
“There are people who have the mettle for this job, ma’am.”
“Thank you for putting it so politely.”
She paused for a second, looked over my shoulder and was either digging into her memory or choosing her words carefully.
“You know why we picked the neurosurgeon the way we did, Dr. Evans? When Bill Clinton had his knee operation years ago, there was literally a line of surgeons stretching outside the operating theater door. They all wanted to say they had operated on the president, and each one stuck his oar into the operation. They did not see beyond the office. We”—and her lips trembled a little at using the pronoun—“don’t do that.”
“Power and influence were used to choose the best available, ma’am. I don’t see much difference in what you suggest.”
“No, doctor. Judging by raw numbers, we could have chosen Alvin Hockstetter. I believe you know him well.”
I shuddered to hear the name of my old chief resident at the Johns Hopkins. That man still unnerved me even though I hadn’t seen him in more than five years. It was an obvious ploy, and we all knew it, but it was one I couldn’t help falling for.
“You also showed him the scans?”
The First Lady nodded.
“And he was willing to operate,” she added.
Damned right he was. Alvin Hockstetter was the most arrogant and pretentious pig I had ever met. He was also a self-promoting genius who chose his patients, whom he saw as no more than a bundle of cells, with infinite care. Hockstetter did not believe in the soul and thought disease was no more than a touch on the tiller of life.
He had a point. In biological terms, cancer is not an error, but one of the manifold ways in which nature clears the decks to make way for those next in line.
In human terms, that damned son of a bitch was the same enemy that had killed my wife.
“Ma’am, tell me why I’m here, then.”
“One of the Secret Service agents assigned to me accidentally overheard a conversation with the man who visited you in your consulting room. Your name came up and she told me she knew you.”
That stunned me. She could mean only one person, but we hadn’t spoken in months. Both she and my father-in-law blamed me for what had happened.
“Kate Robson? But—”
“Agent Robson is an admirable woman. When she said you were related, I asked her what kind of doctor you were. She said she didn’t know, but you were a good person, which is all I needed to know.”
That show of quiet humility was a lesson in itself. The excuses with which I had masked my fears were finished. There was only one thing left to say.
“Me too, ma’am. I will operate on your husband.”
12
I couldn’t say how long I spent on the floor of that car. My legs ached from squashing them against the front seat, and my coccyx was wrecked.
Gray Suit and Blue Suit were the world’s most boring chauffeurs. They didn’t even put on any music, I guess so that I’d lose track of the time. They asked for my cell, checked it was off and kept it in the glove box.
“We’ll give it back to you when we drop you off at the hospital.”
After a long while—I’d say between three-quarters of an hour and an hour, but that’s only a guess—I felt my legs cramp up and a clammy feeling of anxiety washed through me as the car came off the freeway and drove for a few minutes along back roads. Then we took a dirt road, which hurt my behind all the more. I don’t know whether there was a single pothole the sedan did not drive over, but if so it wasn’t for lack of trying by Gray Suit. I swear that asshole sought them out, every last one.
The wheels scraped the gravel, painfully jarring my bones and teeth. Then the car slowed down a bit and we were back on a tarmac road. After a few seconds, daylight had gone and the car came to a halt.
“You may get up, doctor. Apologies for the inconvenience,” Blue Suit said unconvincingly.
I grabbed the front seat as best I could and managed to pull myself upright. My limbs were stiff and my senses dull. We were in complete darkness, with no other light than that shed by the dashboard, and in a strange place. It was akin to a garage, but the walls were too close together.
Several lights abruptly came on and dazzled us in a bluish glow, and I clasped my eyes with my hands. A long metallic click rang out, echoing for a few seconds deep inside my ears, then the whole car began to move.
We were in an elevator. No buttons or signs, just slabs of naked steel. The journey took a couple of minutes, which I spent rubbing my calves to bring back the circulation. When we stopped, the wall in front of the car slowly rose to reveal a cramped garage. There was room for twenty cars, although the spaces, marked out with red lines painted on a shiny gray floor, were all empty.
Gray Suit parked in the spot closest to the one door in the garage. They both got out of the car and I followed suit.
“This way, doctor.”
The door opened as we approached and we entered a short passageway that led to another elevator, which had no control panel either. After a brief descent, we emerged in the middle of a rather untidy rectangular room. There were boxes and papers everywhere, also what looked like the remains of office furniture. The place was lit up by wall-mounted lamps that cast blurred triangles of light interspersed with patches of darkness. A somewhat objectionable dank and dusty smell hung in the air.
“Where the hell are we?”
Gray Suit shrugged.
“Tread carefully, doctor. This part’s fairly neglected.”
We took a route that cut through the mess like a knife. At the other end of the room were several doors and another elevator. I was rooted to the spot, mouth agape, when I passed in front of one of the doors. Inside was a dusty replica of the Oval Office, a perfect imitation, exactly as I’d seen it a thousand times on TV. Even the window behind the desk faked daylight so convincingly I began to doubt we were deep underground.
A cough from my merry companions returned me to reality and we took one last elevator down. It opened up into a passageway lined by glass walls, with several rooms that had the appearance of hospital wards running off it. At the end were consulting rooms, separated by medium-height steel panels. In one of them, with the door open and on the phone, was the president. I wondered how his cell could have coverage down there, although the very existence of that place raised enough questions.
I was about to enter the consulting room when the door closed, or at least that’s how it appeared at first. In fact somebody had blo
cked my way. He was very big and seemed to buy his clothes two sizes too small. Hell, the world seemed two sizes too small for him.
“Dr. Evans, I’m Special Agent McKenna, head of the president’s detail.”
He didn’t offer his hand.
Me neither.
We stared each other down for a few seconds and luxuriated in the mutual ill will that now and again—fortunately seldom—arises between two total strangers. He had close-cropped hair and a neat goatee around his mouth. His skull shone under the lights and ex–navy SEAL was written all over him.
I nodded slowly.
“My pleasure.”
“You have been invited to these premises at the president’s express wish. Everything about them is top secret and your discretion is requested. I am sure we can rely on your silence.”
If only you knew.
“Officer, doctor–patient confidentiality—”
“Yeah, I know the spiel,” he interrupted me.
“Then I don’t know why you asked.”
Spite flashed in McKenna’s eyes, while his perfectly trimmed goatee cracked into an expression of annoyance and disgust.
“You’re right there, doctor. Maybe I should begin to trust my own insight a bit more.”
I had seen too many National Geographic documentaries to take that alpha male crap, particularly from a guy whose jacket still stank of minestrone.
“Have you finished pissing on my leg or can I go see my patient?”
A light grunt told me what a mistake I had made. Bullies are normally put out when you don’t let them intimidate you, basically because they’re one-trick ponies. When the one and only trick they know fails them, they’re up the creek. But McKenna was nobody’s fool, and my refusal to cringe merely got his back up. He flexed his arms and his suit strained to contain the muscular overbooking inside it.
I swallowed hard but stood my ground.
If it had been a bar, that bully would have wiped the floor with me. But his master’s voice interrupted our tryst.
“Doctor, come in, please!”
The agent stood aside, stone-faced again.
“See you tomorrow, doc,” McKenna whispered to me on my way past him. “I’ll look forward to it.”
I had no time to wonder what the hell he meant, because the president was already walking toward the door to greet me.
“I hope our meeting here doesn’t bother you. I think you will find everything to your satisfaction.”
I omitted mentioning my knees still hurt from the journey.
“Where on earth are we, sir?”
“My predecessor had all this built. The terrorist alert back then was sky-high, and there were signs a dirty bomb might go off in Washington. This place was devised to shelter the president and his cabinet in case of such an attack. Complete hospital installations, food and water supplies . . .”
“They’ve kind of forgotten about it, haven’t they?” I said, wiping my finger on a dusty counter.
The president shrugged his shoulders.
“There is an end to our funds, doctor. When I took over the administration I had to choose, and this place was not a priority. There are others like it. The main thing is that we have this,” he said, pointing behind him.
I couldn’t fail to notice the gigantic metal tube that took up half the room. It was an MRI scanner. A German model, one of the best, six or seven million dollars’ worth. A little old, maybe eight or nine years. It may not have had the latest software updates, but that was a minor hitch. The human brain has not evolved much these past two thousand centuries, so a couple of years wouldn’t make a big difference to the scan.
I asked the president to undress.
“I know the drill, no metallic objects, I have no hairpins and I don’t need a blanket, thanks,” he said nervously, trying to crack a joke.
An absurd, strange feeling came over me when he tiptoed behind a little screen. As I switched on the machine I could hear him carefully folding up his clothes on the other side.
Every step I took in this business drew me farther away from the everyday medical world, the terrain in which I had learned to move and where everything was under my control. I had an almost physical feeling of being part of a movie.
In this screenplay, however, at least for the man in front of me and the gorillas outside, I was the bad guy. If they had the faintest idea of what was afoot, they wouldn’t care in the least about my motives. They would pinion me to the ground and handcuff me. And Julia would die.
I could not allow that.
When my patient emerged from behind the screen, clad in hospital PJs, I looked him up and down in surprise. Physically he had improved somewhat, doubtless thanks to having scaled back his activities in the past two weeks. I knew he had seldom set foot outside the Oval Office and one columnist had even wondered why he was under White House arrest. Usually, second-term presidents woke up one morning to discover they had a big plane ready and waiting, and made the most of it. Nevertheless, at that time of year, when he should have been hard at it, the president had cut his public appearances down to the bare minimum.
He looked better and had even put on a bit of weight. He caught me watching him and patted his paunch.
“I know, my wife remarked on it yesterday. She hadn’t seen my waistline expand for some time.”
I nodded politely.
“Lie back, sir.”
He climbed onto the machine’s long tray and flinched when his bare legs touched the cold surface.
“Sure you don’t want the blanket?”
He shook his head.
“No, but I would appreciate some earplugs. I never could stand loud noises.”
On a nearby table there was a box of wax plugs, which I handed to my patient.
“Try to keep as still as possible,” I said, and went into the small glass cubicle which housed the machine’s control panel.
For the thirty-eight long minutes it took the machine to do its job, the darkest thoughts mired my mind. I felt trapped, a rat in a dark hole, and the animosity I bore toward the man who had put me in the impossible position of having to kill my patient shifted bit by bit. While the huge cylinders inside the machine excited the billions of hydrogen atoms within the president’s brain to capture a perfect image of the tissue, I felt resentment swell inside me. Boxed in that cubicle, dozens of yards underground and with no room to move, I felt ensnared.
Claustrophobic.
I have always felt scared in situations from which there is no escape. I guess that comes of being a product of the system. I would tremble every time the Social Services woman firmly hauled me off by the scruff of the neck and took me to a new foster home. There I was, locked in with strangers who did not want me, but for the government check that came every month they kept me. They were the same old people, wherever they were. The same old sullen, vacant expressions, the same old pizza stains on the guy’s shirt, the same old nicotine-yellow fingers on her. The same old lost orphans crowding the passageways. As soon as I moved in, I would stay in the rooms closest to the door if it was too cold to go out. I hate the rain. I hate walls. I hate people deciding for me.
When my adoptive parents took me to their home, I wreaked havoc. Just in case. They had the limitless patience to understand and force me to make the second-bravest decision of my life. They made me love them.
The bravest—and the best—decision was to marry Rachel. With quickie divorces these days, that may seem a trifle, but I’m not one to go back on my word once I’ve given it. For a commitment-phobe, that was a big deal.
Now I could not forget that some years earlier I had taken an oath never to do any harm to others.
Just then a half-formed image on the screen made me frown. It was not good.
When the tray buzzed out, my patient stood up and began to rub his arms and l
egs to get back the warmth and movement.
“Damn, that was a drag.”
I nodded slowly. I wanted to get this over with but still had to give him the bad news, something I did not fancy. But if anybody was used to reading that kind of thing in people’s faces, it was him.
“It’s grown, right?”
“The growth rate has increased, sir. This is not good at all.”
He was quiet for an instant.
“It’s not so terrible, is it? After all, there’s only a few hours to go before the operation.”
“The more tumorous tissue there is in your brain, the harder it will be for me to remove it, sir. That raises the chances it will spread. Or that in the process I make you into a USDA Grade A cabbage.”
He burst into one of his nasal laughs, the one heard in multitudinous speeches. But the gloomy half-smile he gave me was new, a side of the president precious few got to see.
He got up and went behind the screen. A few seconds later he came back with a pack of Marlboros and a lighter.
“You smoke?”
“No. And according to your chief of staff, you quit six months ago.”
“I’m afraid in that respect we haven’t been too straight with the voters,” he said as he lit up and sat on the stretcher.
I was tempted to tell him this was no place to smoke, but it was his goddamned bunker. I had given him news that would entitle anyone to have a smoke.
“A lying politician. Why am I not surprised?”
“Why do you hate politicians?”
“I don’t hate them. I’m just not wild about the fact they exist.”
He puckered his lips, amused by the situation. People didn’t usually speak to him that way.
“You don’t like me, doctor?”
“Actually, I voted for the other guy.”
Hell, it wasn’t true. But you can’t let them see that.
“Doctor, I know you’re angry about all this. I mean, me dragging you out here, and because we are not going through regular channels. I can tell you we’ve had to break the rules dozens of times in recent years. I’m sure you know, or you can guess. Lately everything gets out on Twitter. Damn, even when we went after Osama there was some guy tweeting about it.”
