Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  “Tell me about that text you got.”

  “It summoned me to meet somebody at a diner I drop in to every day. And there he was.”

  I paused and gulped. I was about to tell somebody his name for the first time. Everything I had told Kate had already broken the ground rules he had laid out. But somehow, to say his name aloud seemed like the real sin, even in the depths of the St. Clement’s subbasement.

  “Mr. White.”

  I described him in full detail, him and his henchmen. Or at least what I remembered about them, which wasn’t much. But it seemed what I knew about the head honcho didn’t amount to much, either.

  “His appearance is too common, David. Unless he’s got a police record, without a photo or real name, the description’s no use. Why the hell did he want to meet you face-to-face? That is not the usual way.”

  I talked to her about the conversation with White. His refined and cold-blooded voice. His sharklike eyes and contained expression. The iPad with which he monitored the coop where they were holding Julia.

  “And after he showed it to me . . . he told me what they wanted.”

  Kate, who listened carefully with her head to one side, tapping her foot on the floor, stopped dead. Her eyes were wide open and there was terror in them.

  “David . . . What have they asked you for, David?”

  I told her.

  “No.”

  She stepped back into the passageway.

  “Kate.”

  “No,” she repeated, and shook her head. “I have to inform the head of my detail. We have to put the president out of harm’s way this second.”

  “You can’t, Kate. If you do, they’ll kill Julia.”

  “David, I’m a Secret Service agent! There’s a plot to assassinate the president, for God’s sake! And I’ve got the freakin’ assassin right in front of me!”

  “She’s your niece, Kate. She’s only seven.”

  She stood stock still for a couple of seconds. Then she took a deep breath, turned her back on me, bent over and puked on the floor out of sheer tension. She leaned her arm against the wall and retched a few times while the vomit splattered the instep on her heeled leather boots.

  I watched her from afar while I tried to get hold of myself, and felt the sorrow and rage that afflicted her. I couldn’t console her, although I wanted to come close and hug her, body and soul, but it would have been counterproductive. One of the first things I learned as a doctor is that there are many more ways to hinder people than help them. Sad and cynical as it sounds, there’s less chance of screwing up if you do nothing.

  Despite that, and because I’m a jerk, I put my hand on her shoulder. Kate shook herself loose, roughly, then I stepped back. Just as well I did.

  A deep sympathy for her bowled me over. I know precisely what it’s like to hear something that turns your world upside down. Your heart misses a beat, because your body reacts before your mind. But the world doesn’t stop simply because your heart does; after a second or so it carries on beating and the information reaches your brain. If you’re smart—which Kate was, and then some—then what you’re told becomes a jolt of electricity that lights up a bulb in your head. The light unveils a dark room full of nightmares, a room which has always been there but you never dared go in. You will no longer lead your life in the comfortable living room where you used to put your feet up before a crackling fire. No, your life will now run its course in a slimy, gloomy cell. And there are more shadows behind the walls, shadows you dare not name.

  Nothing will be the same again, which is unacceptable.

  So you deny it. You assail the information every which way. If it is undeniable, your mind searches for ways to keep you in the living room, out of the dismal cell. Why do you think they always give news of fatal accidents in person? You’d be amazed how often a cop has to stop someone from shooting themselves seconds after telling them their wife or husband won’t be coming home that night, or any other.

  When you know there’s no choice, when you know the new reality won’t budge, your body reacts again, a second time. Kate’s did so by bending over and throwing up. When she straightened up, she banged on the pipes a few times, made them ring in an echo of her own frustration, and then cussed until she’d gotten enough anger out of her system to be able to talk.

  Then she leaned against the wall and faced me, in tears.

  “Damn you, Dave. Damn you for making me choose.”

  Somewhere in Columbia Heights

  Mr. White checked the time in the top right-hand corner of his main monitor and scowled. Dr. Evans had already been gone more than forty minutes, something that totally bucked his normal behavior. Obviously, the whole situation he was immersed in was completely abnormal, but David’s personality pattern predicted that in a crisis he would stick even more closely to his routine.

  The personality patterns White used to manipulate his subjects consisted of a set of tables and flow charts. After a preliminary study, the subject’s patterns were configured using the full range of personality types.

  Those tools were infallible. He didn’t get them from a psychology manual or anyone else. He had set them up himself after years of study, of direct observation, and above all with a callous, surgical understanding of human nature. If White had shown his results to the scientific community, they would have hailed him as a genius. At least until somebody asked what methods he had used to reach his conclusions, or what use he put them to.

  His total lack of scruples had allowed him to experiment on live subjects. Life upon life had been destroyed in the construction of those diagrams. For White, they were his main reason for living. He lived to modify, tweak and expand them. He had begun to chart personality patterns in the psychology department at Stanford. The classes bored him; the professors spoke too slowly for him. He had done most of the reading for his degree requirements before he finished his freshman year. He showed his tutor a draft of his first pattern at the start of his sophomore year. He had identified the personality traits of a concrete individual, as well as the factors or triggers that would lead said individual to commit a specific act.

  “Emotions are changes which prepare the individual for action,” he told the professor. “If we stir the right emotions in the individual, we can steer his acts from the outside. By remote control, so to speak.”

  The professor had gaped at him in horror. He shredded the sheets White had shown him and really lashed out at him.

  “Psychology is not about aberrations of that sort. It is the study of human experience to improve it, not to subject others! This is absurd, useless and barbaric!”

  White did not listen to the end. He walked out and left him with the words in his mouth. He had already foreseen that reaction. And much else.

  Eleven days later, the professor—a jolly and kind family man, a lover of wine and poetry—killed himself in his living room, in front of his wife and three children. The detectives on the case were stumped: the death made no sense at all. The man had no debts, no drug or gambling problems. They searched for lovers and dirty laundry, without success. Finally they shelved the case, to the vexation of family and friends.

  White smiled. He had foreseen that, too. The personality type he had taken to the office was the professor’s own. He had spent the following days exploiting the man’s weaknesses until he drove him to his death. He wasn’t altogether satisfied, though. He had estimated he could make the professor commit suicide inside a week. The delay was doubtless down to small errors in the subject’s personality pattern, defects that could be fixed over time. New specimens would be needed for that.

  College had nothing to offer him now. He dropped out and traveled around Europe and Asia, to build up his library of personalities and develop his system to control them, to take the most unexpected people to extremes. An Italian bishop, an NGO volunteer in Bombay, a Danish cloistered nu
n, a Vietnamese grade school teacher. A Basque terrorist, a Corsican drug runner, a Swedish underground bookie, the madam of the most exclusive brothel in Moscow. They had all been his unwitting subjects, and they had all died by their own hand, or that of others, after they had committed horrendous deeds.

  But that would not suffice for White. He wanted to plot the complete map of human will. Not simply to have the definitive remote control, as he justified it to himself. Deep down in the process was a secret yearning to know what made him tick himself. He was a monster, and he knew it. And like all monsters he was prey to his own private loneliness. If he could hold sway over other people’s emotions and empathy, perhaps he could understand the things that were missing, the huge void in his own heart, which he could fill only with vanity, by notching up one hit after another.

  But for that he needed money. White’s parents had at first given way over his “sabbaticals” in Europe, although in the end they got fed up and cut him off. So White had had no option but to hawk his peculiar wares among people even less scrupulous than himself.

  His first client was a capo in the Neapolitan Camorra who had been eagerly seeking a certain writer who had published a book about his clan’s doings. White told him to slap a million euros on the table, for which he would hand him the writer’s head. The mobster had laughed, because plenty before White had tried to track down the writer and failed. But as he had nothing to lose, he agreed.

  Six weeks later, a uniformed cop entered a bleak restaurant in Naples’s dire Scampia neighborhood. He was carrying a blue Samsonite wheelie bag. He went to the back of the joint, where two enormous gorillas stood in his path. He addressed the fat, bald man behind them, who was eating ravioli with fried sage leaves by candlelight.

  “Your American friend has entrusted me to give you this. The padlock code is one-six-one,” said the cop, who couldn’t help but show his fear.

  The mobster waved the cop away. One of the gorillas opened the case and lifted its contents into the flickering light. The capo wrinkled his nose at the smell but tucked back into his ravioli, wolfing it down. The day after, a numbered account in the Cayman Islands, belonging to a company whose sole shareholder was Mr. White, received a tax-free transfer of a million euros.

  He congratulated himself on the operation. He would have preferred to approach the writer and persuade him to give himself up. That would have been a real achievement. But he was still working at his craft, so he had had to resort to taking on two bodyguards and a legal secretary, all of whom were inexorably burned up in the process.

  But for all that, White was happy. He had found a way to meld his passion with satisfying his material needs. For the first two years he had to nose out clients, but as time went by and results came in, they ended up waiting in line for his discreet, costly but very effective services. He was sought after not only by criminals but also by the shadiest branches of intelligence agencies across the world. White took extreme care with the latter and always kept a triple firewall between the client and himself. Many of the straw men he sent into the field were tortured and bumped off in his clients’ fruitless efforts to uncover a contractor’s identity.

  White cared little about that. His sole concern was to be able to pick and choose his contracts, depending on whether they allowed him to enhance his diagrams and hone his tools.

  He had come to make those tools infallible . . . until now.

  White opened the iPad app that controlled his sound system and played his favorite tune, the one he listened to time and again, compulsively, while he plotted his subjects’ patterns—Leonard Cohen’s “The Future.” The singer’s warm, hoarse and silky voice boomed out from the speakers.

  White hummed quietly as he switched from the app to the photo album and clicked on the David Evans file. It held more than a thousand snaps, all taken between the day he had agreed to operate on the president and that very morning. White cracked a devious smile when he noticed that some had even picked up the Secret Service detectives who had tailed David to make sure he was kosher. If only they knew.

  He checked out the last photo taken, a screengrab from a camera planted in an electric socket in the kitchen. In it David thoughtfully gazed at the empty booster seat before him, the chair in which he sat his daughter every morning. Everything had gone according to plan until then. He had had to break contact for the time David spent with the target, but that, although irksome, was inevitable. All tracking systems were up and running again.

  But there was nothing to track. The neurosurgeon had left his cell on his office desk and had now been absent for forty-seven minutes.

  The pattern indicated he wouldn’t normally be gone that long. The pattern indicated he would never be without his cell.

  Unquestionably, those were normal acts, in another person, in another situation. But not in this one, not with David. The pattern said not, and the pattern was always right.

  “Was I wrong about you, David? Will we have to play hardball?”

  He glanced at the screen that monitored the inside of the cubbyhole where they were holding Julia Evans. The girl was sitting down, rocking back and forth, her eyes glued to a spot on the wall in front of her.

  “You need control, David. Control and stimulus.”

  White reached for his phone and called one of his minions.

  “It’s me. I have a creeping suspicion something is up. I need you to go to the snack bar and cast an eye on our doctor friend.”

  15

  We let a couple of minutes go by in silence to allow Kate to cool down. I made no apologies, no excuses, for involving her, nor did I bemoan the unfairness of what life had thrown at us. Even if, at whatever price, we managed to save Julia, everything had already gone to pot. I would be expelled by the Board of Physicians and Kate from the Secret Service. If we didn’t land ourselves in jail. We had conspired to commit the felony of concealment, which in Kate’s case would also entail high treason.

  And nevertheless, to feel sorry about it was no use. White had happened to us, like a cancer or a storm on the high seas. To think, Why me?—top of the self-pity charts—was ludicrous. Kate could accuse me all she wanted, but I had no choice. And neither did she.

  We had to protect Julia above all else.

  When Kate had collected herself enough to look me in the face again, something had changed inside her. It was a subtle change and I wouldn’t have caught on had I not been expecting it. But it was there, hidden behind her eyes, although I couldn’t put a finger on what it was exactly just yet.

  Nor did I have time. Kate began to talk in a cold, professional voice. Once she had processed what she was letting herself in for, the part of her brain set aside for such matters took over. She asked me for dates, places, details. She made no note of what I said, because there could be no record of what I told her. She merely committed it all to memory.

  “David, I want you to understand something,” she told me. “I have received basic training as a federal agent, specifically for the Secret Service, but I have no experience in dealing with kidnappings.”

  “Don’t call on anybody else, Kate. Promise me.”

  “That’s the problem, David. I’m all alone. This will not end well.”

  “You have a better idea? You trust anybody enough to tell them the score without the whole of Washington knowing within the hour?”

  She studied the toes of her shoes and sought the answer we had both known to begin with.

  “No. This is too big. Whoever unmasks it will be made. And Julia will simply be a footnote in their report. I can’t count on anybody.”

  “I can help you,” I broke in.

  “No, you can’t. You’re the girl’s father, you have no training, and if they see me near you they’ll suspect in a jiffy. We cannot rule out that one of them is watching you.”

  “Not only that. They have done something to my phone. They listen
in on my calls, and I think they can even hear what I’m saying. And they can send me texts from screen alerts.”

  “A remote operator must have overridden the handset.” She nodded thoughtfully. “That way the kidnappers don’t need to plant a homing device, listening gear and security cameras on the subject. Your iPhone does all that for them. They must have the hands-free mike, the camera and the GPS chip permanently activated. Shit, they don’t even have to bother fitting batteries. The guy they’re spying on kindly recharges the battery every night.”

  “Now that you mention it, lately my battery’s been running down a lot sooner.”

  “Because of all the apps they run without you knowing. Cocksuckers . . .”

  “That tell you anything about them?”

  Kate bit her lips, worried.

  “For starters, that they’re very good. And they really know their shit. You say your cell switched off before the agents picked you up?”

  “It didn’t go out in a normal way. The screen went all weird on me.”

  “I don’t know how they did it, but I do know why. A set of electronic countermeasures surrounds the president. Some are public knowledge, such as the frequency hoppers which stop anyone from setting off a bomb by remote control when the presidential motorcade drives by. And others are classified, including a gadget which scans a room for surveillance devices. That’s why they switched off the cell, because otherwise we’d have been wise to them.”

  “So there is something screwy about it.”

  “If I could lay my hands on that phone and take it to my buddies at Computer Crime, we’d know far more about these guys in a matter of hours. Hacking into that sort of device is very hard work. Only a few people in the world are up to such a job, and it can’t be done without leaving a trace. But taking your cell with me is out of the question. Unless . . .”

  “What?”

  “It would be useful for me to know if you lost sight of your phone for some length of time recently, if you’ve had it serviced or something.”