Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  Juanita was back behind the counter, watching American Idol with rapt attention, mouthing the words to the songs on the show. It was too late to see it live, so she must have DVRed it in the hope of having a quiet night. Like the day before, we had the place to ourselves.

  “Maybe she sings like an angel,” I answered.

  “Maybe she does, Dave. But that’s beside the point. The world is full of people with talent who spend their lives hanging on in quiet desperation, trapped in dead-end jobs. Why do some take the subway while others fly Learjets? It’s a matter of character. To really want what we wish for.”

  “Something tells me there’s a point to all your talk. I just don’t see it.”

  “I still have a problem, Dave. I still need somebody to eliminate my target.”

  “But . . . What about Hockstetter?”

  “Hockstetter is not an active part of this operation.”

  My next words were so selfish it shames me even to recall them, but I have sworn to tell my story like it is.

  “Listen, Hockstetter’s your man. He’ll be no loss to the world if he disappears. Lean on him and give me back Julia.”

  “Negative. There is no entry route or time. You’ll have to do it, David. The old-fashioned way. That was the plan from the start.”

  “The plan . . . What plan? No, hang on . . .”

  “Simple, Dave. It was me who told Hockstetter the Patient’s identity. And he called the man in the bow tie from Baltimore and told him he wanted to do the op.”

  I opened my eyes wide and took a few seconds to digest what he’d just told me.

  “What? But . . . Why? Why complicate things that way?”

  White picked up one of the pink sachets of sweetener from a container on one side of the table and fingered it for a while before he answered me.

  “Why did you study neurosurgery, David?”

  The politically correct answer to that question would be “Because I’m interested in the brain, science’s final frontier.” But the sincere answer, the one I’d never admitted to anybody out loud, other than Rachel, was the one White already knew. So I told him.

  “Because it’s the top-dog specialty.”

  “And you have so much to make up for, so much to prove.” He nodded contentedly. “And now that they’ve put you up to the definitive challenge with the definitive patient, I make you lose him . . . I don’t know, David, something tells me even the motivation to save your daughter may falter at the last minute.”

  “That’s absurd, White. I won’t let Julia down,” I hastened to say. But my conscience told me I wasn’t that certain. Hadn’t I let my own wife down because of the job? What was the difference?

  White pointed at me, but to humor rather than accuse me.

  “I dare you to tell me you haven’t tried to think up a way to get me off your back and your daughter returned.”

  I sized him up quietly. Those calm movements, the suave voice . . . I’d seen it before and it betrayed some poisonous notion bubbling behind his blue eyes. I didn’t want to risk riling him up, so I plumped for the truth.

  “It’s true,” I said with a shrug.

  “Aha!” he exclaimed in triumph. “The nearer the operation comes, the more doubts you will have. You will beg, connive, try anything. Drop it, Dave. I’ve thought of everything.”

  “I know that. Believe me, White, if I had come up with a sure plan to get Julia back and put you behind bars, right now I’d be hugging my daughter and you a bar of soap. But I cannot and will not run that risk.”

  “Maybe. But I’m still not convinced you’re on my side. So I want you to earn that operation.”

  His words rang true, but deep inside my intuition told me he was bluffing; it twitched like a stiff and cramped muscle. He wasn’t as almighty or as all-knowing as he would have had me think, and he didn’t have everything worked out. There were variables beyond his control, but his inflated ego declined to own up to it. White would play the part of superior being to the bitter end. Now I could clearly see the cracks in the cage he had locked us both up in. He knew nothing about what Kate was up to and certainly could not have foreseen the Hockstetter deal. Those frailties, small as they were, gave Julia and me a chance I could use against him. But the question was:

  “How?”

  I realized I’d said the last word out loud, but luckily White thought I meant how would we unseat Hockstetter.

  “Use your imagination, Dave. But be quick about it.”

  “And what about your minions? They clocked up too much overtime this month?”

  “That would be too easy. You have to get your hands dirty, David, or the whole exercise will be pointless.”

  “I don’t know if I’m up to it. This isn’t like throwing an operation. I have no clue what to do.”

  “You’ll think of something.”

  That was a blind alley. Maybe White had lied about my swell-headed old boss’s involvement being his idea, but he had certainly seized on it to force me to fight for the operation and the chance to save Julia’s life. I hadn’t seen her for almost twenty-four hours, and the pain of missing her was eating away at my hope. I needed to know she was okay.

  “I want to see her.”

  White shook his head.

  “Negative. Maybe as a prize for removing Dr. Hockstetter from the equation.”

  “I told you I want to see her.”

  By way of an answer, the psychopath merely stared at me with his shark’s eyes. I held his gaze for an instant before I looked at the iPad on the table next to him.

  “You’re thinking of snatching it from me, aren’t you, Dave? It would be so easy, a pushover. You simply have to reach out and it’s all yours. You’re taller than me, your shoulders are wider. There would be nothing to it.”

  I could feel the palms of my hands tingle while the device that monitored the pit Julia was in grew in my mind’s eye. I made an imperceptible move toward it.

  “I’ll burst the bubble of your fantasy, Dave. This marvel is protected by three passwords. If you enter just one of them incorrectly, the data will be erased instantly. But not before sending a signal to a place you know. You want me to tell you about the mechanism that signal activates?”

  “No, not really,” I said in a voice as dry and hoarse as a barrel of nails.

  “I’ll show you all the same. It’ll be instructive and motivational. Also, you did ask to see your daughter, didn’t you? Maybe I was a bit unkind to deny you that small mercy.”

  He lifted the iPad’s cover to shield the screen from my sight and keyed in something. When he turned the device around, there was the same interface he’d shown me the day before.

  “Watch carefully, David.”

  He pushed a button. The image went from black to relaying the live video feed from inside the cavity. Julia was in the corner, digging her fingers into the pit wall. Every now and again she turned and dropped something on the floor. It took me a few seconds to realize she was taking the biggest pebbles from the dirt for some kind of game. I was surprised my daughter was up for playing at a time like that. Julia was a very sensitive girl who could get all wound up over nothing.

  “The human mind is adaptable, Dave,” White said, reading my mind. “When you transport it from a safe context to a baleful one, at first it goes into shock. But in time, it tries to fit in with the new situation; it redefines the new context as safe to minimize the trauma. But naturally, new challenges can always surface to make everything harder.”

  He pushed another button.

  A little whir and then a click sounded in the iPad’s speakers. Julia seemed to hear it, too, because she turned to where the sound came from, to the left of where she kneeled, offscreen, and squinted to try to see through the glow of the lights.

  All of a sudden there was a gut-wrenching, earsplitting, inhuman sound.
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br />   The image lagged behind the sound, and it took me a couple of seconds to realize it was my daughter who had let forth that shriek of sheer terror. She backed up and kept on shrieking.

  “What are you doing to her, you son of a bitch?” I said as I jumped up. I clenched my fists, hard. But I didn’t get all the way up. A huge mitt pushed my shoulder down. The same cutthroat I had seen that afternoon in the hospital had sneaked up behind me. I hadn’t seen him come in. Making sure Juanita couldn’t see, he drew a gun and held it against my neck.

  “No tricks, eh, doctor?” he said. It wasn’t the same guy as the night before. This one had a much thicker accent, and he sounded high-strung, as well as aggressive.

  I tried to turn around, but the gun barrel poked my jugular vein even harder. The brawler’s hand might have been made of concrete, the way it anchored me to the chair.

  “Quiet. Watch video.”

  Helpless, I could only obey.

  On the iPad’s screen, Julia had huddled up against the wall. On the floor, in the middle of the pit, was a dark, long shape.

  “Rattus norvegicus. An interesting animal. Length ten inches, weight one pound five ounces, long and sharp teeth,” White said.

  The rat was acting strangely. It didn’t move, its snout pointed straight at Julia’s bare foot. My daughter, her arms stretched out, had stopped shrieking and looked at the repugnant vermin with her eyes wide open.

  “They don’t usually attack humans. Unless, that is, they have been starved for days and shut up in an acrylic cage with microscopic perforations. Your daughter’s smell all this time must have driven it crazy.”

  The rat scurried across the ground and flung itself at Julia, but she twisted away just in time, turning her back to the camera. The move unbalanced her and the rat ran over to sink its disgusting yellow teeth into my daughter’s skin. I tried to wrest myself free again, but the goon merely dug the gun deeper into my throat, squeezing my windpipe.

  “Leave her alone, asshole. She’s only seven, you son of a bitch.”

  The ox made me lean over, with my face almost against the tabletop, until the screen filled my eyes. A drop of sweat rolled down my nose and fell onto the iPad’s screen, creating a pixelated rainbow.

  “Hush, Dave, you’ll miss it,” White said. “This sure beats the National Geographic Channel.

  Julia rolled aside at the last moment, but the rat had meanwhile snagged itself on her pajama leg. Julia shrieked again, stood up and shook her leg, but the rat held tight and would not abandon its prey. With a snarl which sounded even beastlier than the rat that was attacking her, Julia flailed her foot in the air. That tore apart the cotton legging, and the rodent thudded into the wall, fell onto its back and waved its claws in the air. Julia gave it no time to right itself, but stepped forward and stamped her right foot on the dark, verminous body.

  Once, twice, three times you’re out.

  There was a dense and unpleasant silence, and then my daughter turned around and her face came into view. Her eyes were glowing like hot coals under the lights, and she had twisted her mouth into a savage, primeval grimace. She didn’t look like my Julia but the offspring of some ancient race, born in a dark age.

  Then the spell broke and the poor girl burst into tears. She sobbed and limped off to the other end of the trap, as far as possible from the bloody pulp the rat had turned into.

  “Well done! A truly remarkable defense and a most interesting experiment, one I’ve been wanting to conduct for years,” White said, truly overjoyed.

  It was sickening.

  The tough released my shoulder and took the gun from my neck. I sat up in my seat and wheezed.

  “You see that, Dave? Yesterday, she was a terrified little girl, two minutes ago a helpless victim. But when the occasion called for it she was capable of doing the unthinkable. The mind is flexible, I told you. Let that be an example to you.”

  I didn’t answer. I looked again at the iPad, which was now displaying its lock screen. That instrument held control over my little girl’s life and death. I couldn’t take it from him, no way. I shuddered to recall how Julia had limped back to her corner. The rat had surely sunk its infected teeth into the sole of her foot before it died, or could have punctured her skin when she squashed its chest cavity. If so, the risk of catching hantavirus or rabies was very high. I tried to remember how long the incubation period for those diseases was, but my mind drew a blank. There was room for one thing alone in there, and that was hatred.

  Pure, total and unadulterated hatred for the man in front of me.

  “If you pull another stunt like that, I’ll kill you, White,” I whispered. “If it’s the last thing I do.”

  The psychopath shook his head knowingly.

  “I have more rats, fifty or so. All as desperate and hungry as that one, Dave. If you dare screw with me, if the cops get me, if you leave your cell behind on your desk again . . . I’ll lift the acrylic hatch that keeps them separate from your daughter. And the system will automatically e-mail a video file to her grandparents with the subject line ‘Look what a fine mess Daddy got me into.’ ”

  Kate

  The first thing she did when she woke up was look at the timer on her cell.

  28:06:03.

  Twelve wasted hours, and I haven’t found out shit.

  She thought of her niece, of how every breath she took brought her closer to death, as she used up the oxygen supply to the burrow where they held her. Kate’s mind, her conscious mind, took control of her breathing, and for a couple of minutes she could think of nothing else but filling her lungs and expelling air.. When she was a little girl she used to play that trick on Rachel. She would tell her not to think about breathing, or else she might stop and die. Rachel would take fright and breathe faster and faster until she got dizzy, to her mother’s annoyance.

  All this is my fault.

  Kate stirred, trying as much to get her stiff muscles to move again as to shake off that sinking feeling she had. She was naked but for underwear. The rest of her clothes, which stank of sweat and were covered in grass stains, lay jumbled up by the foot of the bed. She had dropped off to sleep for a couple of hours but her body clock had woken her up at almost five in the morning, as it did every day. Her shift started at six, but that day she wasn’t going to show up, for the first time in eleven years on the job.

  She didn’t turn on the lights to go to the kitchen. She liked to walk in the dark and the scant space between her bedroom and the fridge was sparsely furnished. She never cooked, because she figured dirtying pots and pans was too much hassle for one lone diner. Just as well, because the pathetic countertop had barely enough room for a coffeemaker and the contents of the wastepaper basket she had taken from the Evans place. She turned on the coffeemaker and pored over the scraps of paper again, with the dripping sound that heralded caffeine for sole company. Something was hidden in there, she knew. But she had to find it.

  I’m the one who started it all.

  The apartment was on North Randolph, a flat, undistinguished street with as little personality as the rest of Arlington. Paying $2,500 a month for a bed, sofa and forty-two-inch TV struck Kate as more of a felony than many she’d had to investigate. But the building came with a garage, and it was a godsend not having to find a parking space when she got back from work, or having to get the Metro at five in the morning. She earned close to six figures a year, so she could afford it, but for Kate it wasn’t about the money so much as common sense. As she had grown up on a farm, the tiny space choked her like a blouse that was three sizes too small. But, frankly, she’d inherited some of old Jim Robson’s selective and manic stinginess, although she wouldn’t own up to that, even under torture.

  If only she hadn’t spoken to the First Lady about David.

  She’d broken all the rules by doing so but thought she was doing a good turn. They were on board the presiden
tial limousine, affectionately nicknamed the Beast by the Secret Service, on their way to opening an exhibition at the Smithsonian. The First Lady was talking on the phone in back. Usually she adopted a normal tone of voice in the presence of Secret Service agents, as they all did after a few months. The agents were so reserved their charges tended to treat them like empty vessels. What went in one ear appeared to go out the other.

  “I know, Martin. But that’s not the point,” she had said in a low voice, while Kate kept an eye on the traffic from the passenger seat. It was only the next sentence that made her prick up her ears.

  “I don’t need a good brain surgeon, I need one I can trust. You’ll have to approach them one by one: Colchie, Hockstetter, Evans . . .”

  Right then Kate had turned around without meaning to. Not much, only a few inches.

  But the movement did not go unheeded by the First Lady, who pushed the button that raised the glass panel separating the driver’s compartment from the passengers. Kate cussed herself for being such an oaf but didn’t get to do so for long. A few seconds later the car halted outside the museum and Kate had to get out and run the gauntlet of camera flashes and wildly cheering supporters.

  That very afternoon, the First Lady had sent for her. She was by the tennis court, watching her daughters play, her arms folded as she gazed into the distance, miles away. Kate discreetly cleared her throat to bring her back to earth.

  “Agent Robson,” she said earnestly, by way of a greeting.

  “Ma’am.”

  “In the limousine before, you overheard a private conversation.”

  Kate didn’t answer.

  “I don’t need to remind you that to reveal any inside information would lead to immediate expulsion from the agency, and possibly to criminal charges,” her boss added.

  “Ma’am, if you still doubt the loyalty of the Secret Service, then you have learned nothing in all these years,” Kate said.

  Her tone was polite, the words flashing. Decades of full-time politics had taught the First Lady to take such digs in her stride. But that wasn’t a regular day, nor was it a regular issue. Her shoulders shuddered, although it was hot.