Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  I couldn’t hold myself back when I heard that. I burned up inside with rage, which overcame my natural shyness and willingness to talk things over, a flamethrower burning down a paper wall. I put both hands on his desk and brought my face to within inches of his.

  “You listen to me, Meyer. If you mix my wife up in this again, I swear to God I’ll make you swallow your teeth.”

  “David, back off!” Stephanie shouted, getting up.

  “He threatened me! You heard him, right? You’re a witness!”

  “And I’ll do it again. He mentions my wife once more, I don’t care if I end up prescribing Tylenol in Alaska. I’ll break his face.”

  Meyer would not back down to start with. His mind was working full speed; I could almost hear him think. After a few moments he swallowed, sat back and raised his hands in a sign of appeasement.

  “All right, all right. No need to fly off the handle. We can talk this over like civilized people.”

  I nodded my head and took my hands away from the table but did not believe him for one second. We had both gone too far, and things would not stop there, no way. The consequences for me would be harsh as soon as I stepped away and Meyer no longer feared for his skin. But right then I couldn’t have cared less about my future at St. Clement’s, at least not as long as it lasted until nine o’clock Friday morning.

  I had to toss him a bone. Something he could gnaw on to buy me time. For all that Meyer made me sick, I needed to avoid a showdown with him and to put off payback time for a few days.

  “I know exactly what you want, Meyer.”

  “I want the best for this hospital.”

  “No. You want to be on TV. You want your press conference Friday afternoon. You want to break the news to America. You want your fifteen seconds of prime time.”

  He looked at me, speechless. I’d hit the nail on the head, and we both knew it, although he’d never say so out loud. For the drab, second-rate pen pusher he was, a junior who had never earned his stripes, that would be a dream come true. A TV appearance was the Holy Grail for nonentities.

  “I can fix it,” I added. “I don’t know what went on this afternoon, but I can get back the Patient’s trust.”

  “It was the White House chief of medical staff who called. Name of Hastings. I spoke to him,” Dr. Wong said.

  “Hastings wanted me to operate at Bethesda. I refused,” I said with a withering look at Meyer, to see what he thought now of my lack of team spirit. He said nothing. It was no use; he had made his mind up about me, and to be fair he was not far off the mark. But I could still make him think I gave a damn. “The First Lady took it up with her husband and everything was fine. She’s the key.”

  “Can you go over Hastings’s head and get through to the president?”

  “I think so.”

  Meyer pressed his hands together under his chin and smiled. He must have been pondering what suit he’d wear for the press conference.

  “Fix it. Get him operated on in my hospital and we’ll be square, Evans. But if you don’t come up with the goods, I’m afraid you’ll be up before the board.”

  I felt like quitting there and then so the operation would never go ahead at St. Clement’s. Or better still, like jumping across Meyer’s desk and knocking that smug look off his face, but I couldn’t afford to do that.

  He’d given me what I was after, so I nodded and walked away.

  “Evans, wait!”

  Dr. Wong ran out along the corridor after me. I didn’t stop, although it was hard to leave my boss behind, even as pissed off as I was.

  “That asshole flayed me alive in there, and I can’t say you stuck up for me.”

  “He’s right, Evans. I told you the board had complained about your approach to pro bono ops. You could have eased off the gas a little. You can’t always shoot from the hip.”

  She was right. They’d warned me several times, but that didn’t mean Meyer wasn’t a greedy, soulless shit. Sure, I hadn’t helped matters. I normally made quite free with resources, but I had really gone overboard since Rachel’s death. My guilt complex was a huge lodestone skewing my moral compass.

  “I dropped my guard once, and look what happened.”

  “Saving a few poor suckers won’t bring back your wife, Evans. There’s no wrongs to right. We all saw her, strolling along the corridors without a care, no sign she was sick. I was in a few ops with her myself right before she was diagnosed, hour after hour on foot, but she was as focused and sharp as ever. Nobody could have seen it coming.”

  She may truly have thought that, but her words rang hollow, a bid to make it up to me after she’d let me down before the manager. Also, if St. Clement’s took the operation back, she would get in on the act. With me in the theater, of course. And giving interviews all evening.

  All at once, everybody wanted a piece of the Patient. They had scented blood in the water, and were circling around and baring their teeth. I think until then I hadn’t quite appreciated the First Lady’s concern over picking the right surgeon for the job. She had wanted to avoid exactly such antics, which made her decision to pull me out at that stage of the game even more baffling.

  “Thank you, Dr. Wong,” I said without a backward look. “You can go back to practicing your smile in the mirror with Meyer. They say blue looks best on TV.”

  I reached the elevator and rapped the button three or four times until the doors opened. I couldn’t wait to get well clear of the executive suite.

  “Evans, I’ve got you pegged,” she said behind me as the elevator doors closed. “You’re an awesome doctor but naive and headstrong. Don’t blow it now that you’re so close. Think of your daughter when you make that call.”

  If only you knew.

  Kate

  Night had fallen over Silver Spring. A light drizzle sprayed droplets on Kate’s back while she searched through the trunk for a canvas bag the size of a vanity case.

  She put it under her jacket, where she had also secreted the holster for her SIG Sauer P229. She crossed the street and calmly strolled along the sidewalk like the girl next door coming home after a long day. She lolloped past the house, discreetly checked nobody was around and hopped over the white picket fence.

  Heading for the little backyard shed, she ran down the slope until she reached the wall at the bottom. The grass was drenched with rain, and she nearly slipped on the last stretch. She came to a halt with her shoulder pummeled against the plastic framework. The outdoor lights had not come on, because the Evanses were environmentally friendly. They used no timers or sensors, but turned them on manually when they were home. Even so, Kate cast a dim shadow on the lawn in the faint glow from the neighbors’ yard. The house next door was quite far off, and there was little chance they’d seen her trespass on her brother-in-law’s property. But they might spot her now and call the cops, who’d send around a patrol car. In which case the kidnappers would think David had called them. That could not happen.

  I have to open this right now.

  The shed was padlocked, but with some imported crap bought at Home Depot rather than a good old Master Lock. Her father would have had a fit had he seen it. Kate took five seconds flat to pick the lock with the clip off a pen. One advantage of having a hardware salesman for a father.

  She closed the door behind her on her way in but didn’t turn on the light. Instead, she grabbed a little flashlight to see her way around. She pushed aside a sack of fertilizer and found the automatic irrigation hose. The Evanses had an electric sprinkler, which they plugged into a socket in the shed. She unplugged the sprinkler and took the canvas bag from inside her jacket. She unzipped it and withdrew a small gray device, fitted with three antennas and a variable transformer. It was a standard signal jammer installed in temporary residences or cars when protecting people at risk from car bombings. It blocked any radio frequency signal within a fifty-yard radius.
Radios, cell phones, GPS, the works. For the president they used a special SUV packed with sophisticated apparatus that set up a bubble for a two-hundred-yard radius around the presidential motorcade. The only signals that could get through were from authorized personnel’s phones and Secret Service comms.

  Kate placed the jammer’s antennas upright, changed the voltage setting from 120 to 110, plugged it in and eagerly waited for the six LEDs to change from flashing orange to a steady lime green. She looked at her service BlackBerry and the newly bought Nokia phone. Both displayed “NO SERVICE.” That blocker was way cruder than the barrage-jammer SUV, but it did the job.

  She switched off the flashlight, opened the shed door a crack and looked at the house. Unless her intuition failed her, White’s cameras had to be connected to a SIM card to beam images directly. A pro wouldn’t hook them up to the victim’s own Internet connection, because detecting them would be a piece of cake and the upload speed would depend on the service provider. Kate could easily have checked it out if she had the hidden-device scanner she used at the agency, but hers had broken down the week before and the techs had yet to send her a replacement.

  It was double or nothing. The kidnappers would know something was up by now. They would be looking at monitors full of white noise and wondering what had brought that about. And even though they knew David was at the hospital, it was only a matter of time before they sent somebody around.

  She would have a few minutes, tops.

  “Heigh-ho, let’s go!” she whispered, as she always did before going on assignment. The mantra bucked her up and doubled as a spell to ward off bad luck.

  She opened the door and ran toward the house. She reached the back wall in a few strides. She crouched by the ivy-covered wall and rooted around in the bougainvillea patch for the false stone, where David had told her he kept the back door key. She couldn’t find it in the dark, but before she went any farther, she tried the door handle and it opened first time.

  So typical of David, Kate thought. They’d have had no trouble filling your house with mikes, I bet.

  The back door led to a covered porch with a couple of sofas facing each other on a parquet floor, where the Evanses would play backgammon of an evening while Julia pattered around the yard.

  That’s where it had happened. The night Rachel had worked late and Kate had one drink too many.

  Kate looked away. Merely conjuring up the memory made her feel guilty. He had been a complete gentleman and had never brought it up, but things had never been the same again between them.

  She opened the patio door and went into the living room. She couldn’t help looking at the mantelpiece. Rachel and David’s wedding photo was the same as the one in her folks’ sitting room. Kate had been to weddings and seen her fair share of brides. They always insisted on being the MCs and belles of their own ball. But not her sister, who had eyes only for her newly wedded husband.

  David had green eyes and blue-black hair. Hair to sing about, Rachel had said. In the last few months his temples had gone gray, and lines wrinkled his strong, gaunt face. David had aged five years overnight when his wife died. On the face of it, she was his only link to happiness.

  You loved her, Kate thought, and felt as if she was about to burst into tears. You truly loved her, which makes it all the harder to forgive you, David. I wish somebody would look at me the way you two looked at each other. If I had someone to love like that, I wouldn’t let anything happen to them.

  Next to the wedding pic was a framed photo of David and Julia. They were in a park. She sat on his shoulders while he had his mouth wide open with a silly look on his face, as he pretended to bite her knee. Julia was splitting her sides laughing.

  But he’s a great father who can give Julia more hugs and kisses in a day than Dad used to give us in a whole year. Absentminded and a bit of a mess, though. True, he could spend more time with his daughter. What father couldn’t nowadays? But when they’re together there’s nothing else in the world. Julia gazes at him in endless wonder. And David tries. He learns the name of each TV character by heart; he tells her stories. All in his clumsy way, but he really tries to bond with her.

  She came away from the mantelpiece and wagged her head. Too many conflicting feelings plucked at her heartstrings in all directions at once.

  I have to quit feeling this way. Come on, stay focused, Kate. We have to find traces of her. Fallback options, clues.

  “I need to know what she was like, David. I need a photo.”

  “I don’t have any,” he’d answered. “I took the odd one last week with her in it, while she played with Julia, but I hadn’t downloaded it to my computer yet.”

  “We need to think of some way you can send it to me by phone.”

  “I wish, but my iPhone’s photo gallery has been deleted. It was the first thing I thought to check last night when I still thought she was the one who had snatched Julia.”

  Kate crossed the living room and the kitchen to come to Svetlana’s room. The smell of bleach still floated over every surface. David was not exaggerating when he said they must have scrubbed down the length and breadth of that room. She checked the bed, the chest, took the drawers out of it and looked underneath. She examined the floor in the fitted wardrobe, the desk and the wastepaper basket.

  Empty.

  Like everything else.

  She tried to picture Svetlana in that room: asleep, studying—or pretending to, lying in bed, planning her next move. How to win over a family bereaved by Rachel’s death. Had the kidnappers threatened her, or had she done it for money?

  Well, Svetlana, you reap what you sow. This is all that’s left of you now: a whiff of bleach.

  She walked to the hallway, where the basement door was concealed below the staircase that led upward. She carefully aimed the flashlight at the floor to make sure she didn’t trip up on her way down the creaky wooden steps but kept the beam away from the windows. She didn’t want to turn on any lamps that might alert the kidnappers somebody else was home.

  She glanced toward the back wall. The bikes were on the rack rather than blocking the way, and Svetlana’s corpse was gone. There was nothing in the place where David said he’d seen the body the night before, apart from the smell of bleach again. She dabbed at the wall with her fingers. The old paintwork looked damp and was peeling away from the spot where they must have propped up the body.

  Just then a rectangle of light shone through the narrow basement windows. Kate cocked her head to one side, listened and was immediately on the alert. The car didn’t drive by, as a couple had done in the short while she’d been down there. The wheels halted only yards away. Somebody killed the engine and footsteps could be heard on the pavement.

  It was them.

  19

  The cell began to ring before I was back in the office. I picked up the phone as I shut the door and leaned against it.

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Dave, right now I’m having a hard time believing you,” White said in a voice as devoid of feeling as an answering machine. It made my skin turn cold. “You’ve had a one-on-one with the Patient all afternoon and now this happens.”

  “Listen, you already heard the ruckus with my bosses. I don’t know what’s at the bottom of it; they’ve told me nothing. I’m as surprised as you are.”

  “I don’t care. You are now a dud, Dave, and I am an incredibly pragmatic man. So . . .”

  He hung up.

  As quick, easy and neat as that. That’s how thin the dividing line was between Julia and death: a click on a cell.

  I was transfixed, unable to move. In a few minutes I had gone from fear to astonishment, from astonishment to rage and from rage back to fear. That emotional white-knuckle ride wreaked havoc with my nerves. I wondered whether it was all part of White’s plan to rope me in and entangle even more in his scheming. I was a pinball launch
ed up a slippery slope, in permanent danger of falling. I could score the odd point but had no freedom of movement. That click hammered home the certainty that it didn’t matter what I did or how far gone I was in that game: sooner or later, the ball would fall into the drain.

  White would never let us out alive.

  Pinballs have one built-in property, however: flippers and bumpers won’t destroy them. To save my daughter I had to be ready to roll with the punches. As long as the ball stayed in play, Kate would have a chance to find Julia.

  He’d hung up, but I knew White was still there, listening.

  “Wait, wait, please,” I heard myself plead. “I know I can make it work. I can fix it if you help me.”

  I kept quiet and waited. White took more than a minute to call back, but the cell finally rang again.

  “What do you want, Dave?”

  “If I call the White House switchboard, it’ll take me hours to get through to the chief of medical staff. And he may not want to take the call. I need his direct line.”

  “And what do I gain?”

  “We’re tight, White. I’m sure you don’t have the time or means to set up another . . . operation, or whatever you call it.”

  A keyboard clicked in the background. A few seconds later he gave me two numbers, for a landline and a cell.

  “Don’t call from your handset. Use your office line. Got that?”

  There was something in the signal, then, something they could trace if I dialed an official line like the White House. I wondered whether the electronic countermeasures could do more than detect that White had tapped my line. Maybe even detect where the signal led.

  “Okay,” I answered.

  “And another thing, David . . . There wouldn’t be anybody at your home, would there?”

  Shit. White obviously suspects something is up. What have you done, Kate?