Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  She pushed the door open enough for her to slip through. Inside it smelled of dung and rotting straw, a thick, hard stench that stung her nostrils. The place had two floors. The upper one had a window fitted with a pulley, while hay bales lined the walls of the lower one. Somebody had improvised a table by laying a thick, green tarp on one of the bales, which was covered in cell phones, guns, electronics and communications gear. And snoring on a chair behind it all, with his head dangling back, was a tall, bearded man dressed in a white shirt, boots and dungarees. Thousands of specks of dust shimmered in a shaft of daylight, which shone through the first-floor window and hit him in the face.

  Something must have caught the man’s attention, because in a tick he stopped snoring, blinked a few times and looked toward the door, and Kate.

  “Freeze, asshole,” she said, aiming at him.

  The bearded guy sat up and screwed his eyes into a cruel squint.

  “Hands up, real slow, and on your feet.”

  He complied. Kate could see great big sweat stains under his armpits as he raised his hands. She wondered whether he was one of the ones who had drilled holes into Vlatko Papić’s head in Baltimore.

  “I’m going to walk over,” she said. “When I say so, you will walk toward me and away from the table. Don’t even think about looking dow—”

  She didn’t finish her sentence. A gleam in the man’s eye, a slight shrug of his shoulders put Kate on her guard. They weren’t alone. There was somebody else, behind her, somebody about to attack. She ducked as a reflex action, dug one knee in the ground and toppled forward.

  Not a second too soon. The bearded man jumped aside and threw himself on the hay bales, while a gun barrel took his place and poked into the shaft of light. There was a flash and a bang. A dozen bullets rent the air, right where Kate had been standing a moment before, then tore into the barn door.

  In the dazzling light she couldn’t see who had taken the shot or where he was. Kate fired at a shadow where the flash had come from, without thinking or aiming. She merely pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. A creak and a thud could be heard.

  I got him. I got him.

  “Whoa! Easy!” the man with the beard shouted. He cowered on the ground and had both his hands on his head.

  She stood upright, with her gun aimed at him all the while, then moved over to where the light no longer dazzled her eyes. It took just one look for her to see the gunman was dead. One of the MP5’s bullets had hit him in the eye and ripped off half his face. She turned back to the bearded guy.

  “Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about it, damn it.”

  The other guy had raised himself a little and his fingers held the handle of a pistol that had been sitting on top of the tarp. The barrel was aimed at Kate. His whole body was tense. He hadn’t yet gotten to his knees, but he needed only to get a good grip on the gun and he’d be in firing position.

  “Put your hands down. Now,” she said. Her voice trembled in the middle of the now, making her sound like a nervous teenager.

  Perhaps that was what encouraged the bearded man to give it a try, to close his fist and squeeze the trigger. The shot missed her, a yard overhead. But hers didn’t. The first entered his right armpit, slicing through his axillary artery and also blowing his arm clean off. That shot alone would have been enough to make him bleed to death in a minute, but he didn’t have time to die that way. The second bullet smashed through his rib cage, opened up a great gash in his flesh and dragged his lungs out through a hole twice as wide as the entry wound. The man tried to scream, but all that issued from his mouth was a gurgle of blood before he tumbled to the ground.

  What a fool, Kate thought, to think he was faster than a speeding bullet.

  She took a couple of paces toward him, to make certain he was no longer a threat. Blood gushed from the man’s arm wound and seeped into the black, fertile dirt beneath him.

  I have never killed anybody before, Kate said to herself. And then the previous night’s events pricked her conscience. By my own hand, that is.

  Shouts came from outside. The firefight had only lasted a few seconds but had made one hell of a noise. The shots must have been heard all over the valley.

  On top of the table, and coming from the bearded man’s belt and somewhere below the first gunman’s body, there was a click and a commanding voice spoke in an alien tongue.

  Here they come.

  She slung the MP5 over her shoulder, went across to the bearded man and snatched the pistol from his defunct fingers. She aimed at the laptops and boxes of electronic gear on the table and emptied the clip into them, fanning out the shots. The bullets raked over everything, turning thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment into smoking, worthless scrap.

  So much for evidence. But maybe this will screw up their comms and buy us some more time.

  She looked around anxiously and went back to mapping out the place in her head, as she had been doing before she was rudely interrupted by the shoot-out with the two scumbags. The barn had two big doors, one at each end. In between were the rows of hay bales, with a ten-foot-wide passageway down the middle. A ladder led to the hayloft, and that was it.

  Julia. Where are you?

  She had no time to look for her. The dead men’s comrades would be there in no time to find out what was up. They’d be doubly dangerous with their military experience, albeit more predictable. They would regroup and attack from one of the doors, or from both at the same time.

  Up. You must go up.

  She dropped the pistol and climbed up the ladder. She ran to the window, which was a couple of yards from the ladder. Mounted on the window frame was the jib of a crane used to hoist the hay bales. She peeked outside and what she saw quickly confirmed her worst fears. There were three of them, at least as far as she could tell, and they were running over to the barn from the farmhouse.

  Bad idea, you jerks. You don’t all run together when there’s a shooter nearby.

  She had only a couple of seconds before she would lose her line of sight, but she needed no more. She aimed eighteen inches in front of the last man and fired. White’s foot soldier, a thin young man, went down with a splotch of crimson in the middle of his gray sweater. The others were now out of sight, sheltered by the building.

  Now they have the upper hand. One will come from each end. They know I’m up here. They have walkie-talkies to get their act together. And even if they don’t, they only have to speak Serbian for me not to know what on earth they’re up to.

  The loft was very narrow and there were inch-wide gaps between the floorboards. There was nothing to shield her, nor was there anywhere to hide. And if she lay down flat she could cover only one of the two doors.

  I’m a sitting duck up here. And if I try to go down the ladder, I’ll be a sitting duck that can’t fire back.

  While she tried to decide which door to aim at, she saw the one on the right open a little. She fired twice at it, then rolled over and fired to the left, just to confuse them and make them believe she was not alone. But it was futile. The door planks were very thick and the bullets could not burrow through them. And the attackers had a much more evil plan in mind. There was the sound of breaking glass and columns of flames shot up on either side of the barn, making quick work of the dry hay.

  Molotov cocktails. I hadn’t thought of that. The cunning sons of bitches.

  This scenario wasn’t covered in any Secret Service handbook. There isn’t a book in the world that can tell you what to do when you’re alone, trapped in a hayloft and surrounded by enemies covering your escape routes with automatic weapons.

  Kate could hear squealing. Faint and muffled, but unmistakable. She looked below and amid the smoke she could see a patch in the middle of the barn that was a different color, with a metal ring to one side of it. Then she knew what the mound of dirt was doing outside.
/>   Julia was buried alive down there.

  “Julia, baby! Don’t worry, it’s Auntie Kate!”

  “Rats! Rats!”

  And there’s no book in the world that can tell you how to deal with that situation while rats are eating your niece alive.

  33

  An operating theater where a craniotomy has just been performed has a particular smell to it. Quite apart from the disinfectant, the chemicals and your own sweat. It’s the odor of sawn bones and blood. When you fill your nostrils, you realize you have breathed in part of the patient, who is now part of you. It’s a bond that will be with you forever. It may sound sick, even horrific, which is why we surgeons shy away from talking about it. But that doesn’t make it any less real.

  The president was seated and fully conscious. Once the painful job of removing the skull flap was complete, we had woken him up. Dr. Wong had drilled four holes in his cranium and slotted into them a device known as a Mayfield skull clamp, which would stop the Patient’s head from budging so much as a hairbreadth.

  I stood in front of him, so he could see me. Although it was hard for him to recognize me, shrouded as I was in a surgical apron, with a mask and glasses fitted with surgical eye loupes. But he certainly recognized the tiger embroidered on my cap.

  “Dr. Evans, what a surprise!”

  Sedation brings out the comedian in some patients. That makes it much more fun. Normally there are peals of laughter all around, but today there was no such mirth. Everybody was tense, expectant.

  “Sir, Dr. Wong has enabled access to the area where your tumor lies. We will now place a monitor in front of you showing pictures and words. It is very important that you read those words aloud and describe the pictures as they appear. That way I can use a stimulator to distinguish between healthy tissue and the tumor.”

  I had just gotten into position when the operating theater’s phone rang. My heart leaped. For a moment, I dreamed it would be Kate, telling me she had found Julia already.

  “It was the neuropathologist,” said the nurse who had answered. “We sent him tissue samples. He confirms the diagnosis: it’s glioblastoma multiforme.”

  “Right you are,” I said, masking my disappointment.

  I peered into the president’s brain, ready to do battle with my deadliest foe. There it was, half-hidden in the brain tissue. Nobody but an expert could tell the difference. GBM is invisible at first sight, and that’s where its strength lies. It is identical to the tissue around it; it’s just that it’s immortal and the host organism can’t stop it.

  I prodded a finger into an area that I knew was clean. The brain has the same texture as toothpaste when you’ve left the cap off the tube for a while. Slightly rubbery, weak but hardy.

  “Did you feel that, Mr. President?”

  “I can feel nothing. But for some reason I can’t stop thinking about a dog I once had,” he said in surprise.

  “There are no nerve endings in the brain, sir. Nothing I do will hurt you. But manipulating it does lead to unexpected results. I have probably stimulated that memory by applying pressure.”

  I kept on prodding my way around, using my hands to find out what was what. I wanted to get a feel for the healthy tissue. Then I moved to the problem area and prodded again, very slowly. I could feel the tumor under the rubber of my glove. It had a softer feel and was a slightly different color.

  “Nimbus.”

  The nurse handed me a long, black, two-pronged instrument. That gizmo was used to give tiny electric shocks, to stimulate the patient’s brain.

  “Start reading, Mr. President.”

  “Dog. A boy throwing a ball.”

  “Very good, keep going. Don’t stop.”

  When you locate the tumor, you have to use the right tool for the job.

  “Cavitron.”

  Now the nurse gave me an implement with a steel nozzle, linked by a pipe to a three-foot-high machine. That instrument, with a name that sounded like something straight out of Transformers, was my own private machine gun. A device which emits ultrasonic waves, fragments tissue and sucks it away. But the Cavitron can’t tell the difference between healthy tissue and tumor. You need a steady hand—and totally accurate hand-eye coordination—in order not to probe one millimeter more than needed and fry the patient’s brain in the process. And a blob must not look like a tumor to you when it is in fact brain, because then . . .

  “Potato, potato, potato.”

  . . . then the patient gets stuck with a word that will become the sum total of their vocabulary for the rest of their miserable life.

  I drew back the aspirator tip just in time. It had been a close call. The operating lights were very bright, so I was getting hotter and hotter. Sweat began to cloud my vision.

  “Well, it’s not there. Thanks, sir,” I said offhandedly.

  I turned to the nurse.

  “Turn up the air-con.”

  “Dave, the patient’s temperature . . . ,” Sharon Kendall objected.

  “Put a few thermal wraps on his chest and legs if need be. But I have to cool down right now.”

  We carried on for quite a while, with no noise in the theater other than the sucking of the aspirator, the monitor’s constant pinging and the president’s voice, monotonously reciting the things he saw flitting across the screen.

  All of a sudden he stopped.

  “I’m bushed.”

  It always happens. Even though they cannot move, the process upsets the brain’s chemical balance and spurs a feeling of terrible fatigue.

  “Don’t give up, sir. We must go on. Just think that each word you say means one more day to enjoy with your daughters.”

  From then on, I lost all track of time. I do that whenever I think hard, and never in my life had I thought as hard as I was doing right then. I drew a door inside my head and went through it, leaving all my cares behind. Somewhere Kate was trying to save my daughter’s life. When I had finished what I was doing, I would have to give in to White’s blackmail, if she should have failed, or even if she hadn’t, because I had no way of knowing and didn’t want to run any risks. But in the meantime, this was the operation I’d spent my whole life preparing for. And for everything I held sacred, I was going to get it right.

  I kept on prodding, questioning, sucking.

  “That’s it, then, we’re done. I can’t remove any more. What do you say, Mr. President? Will that do, or should I take some more off?”

  The president laughed out loud. A short and tired but genuine laugh.

  “There was a barber near the Wrigley Building who always used to say the same thing. What do your colleagues think?”

  I took off my glasses with the eye loupes and stepped back. Dr. Wong inspected the work area and mumbled in approval.

  “I agree. There’s no more tumor tissue to be seen. A bang-up job, Dr. Evans. Do you agree, gentlemen?”

  The observers’ voices could be heard over the intercom.

  “You’ve been outstanding, Dr. Evans,” Lowers said. “I feel honored to have seen the operation for myself. Dr. Hockstetter?”

  There was an awkward silence, but in the end even Hockstetter had to concede.

  “Good work, Evans,” he said grudgingly.

  “Marvelous. I can’t wait to see the final result,” White said.

  Of course you can’t, I thought.

  “Good. Just one more thing before we close up. Nurse, the Gliadel,” Wong said.

  The nurse went to the second drawer down on the instrument trolley, took out the pouches and gave one to Dr. Wong. She pulled at the corner flap and tore the aluminum packet open. She grabbed some tweezers, picked out one of the patches and handed it to me.

  “Here you are, David.”

  I stared at the poisonous wafer. I had only to put it in place and White’s demands would be met, my daughter would
be safe. Nobody would ever be the wiser.

  I took up the forceps and readied myself to kill the president of the United States of America.

  Kate

  There wasn’t a second to lose. Heading toward the lower floor and the doors meant certain death. If the flames didn’t do away with her, then either of the two henchmen loitering outside would. Waiting was agony, not only for her, but for the little girl. She had to get Julia out of that deathtrap before the vermin feasted on her.

  She had only one shot left. She turned around, ran to the window and stepped into the void. She gained a foothold on the jib, which groaned under her weight. There was a fifteen-foot drop. If that wasn’t enough to break her neck, then the Serbs would finish the job.

  Come on. Don’t look down.

  She put her other foot on top of the jib. Now her whole weight bore down on it. She had to wave her arms about to keep her balance and was in danger of falling off.

  I can’t. I can’t.

  Then all of a sudden Rachel was down there, like that time thirty years earlier. They were both little girls again, and Rachel was bawling at the top of her lungs for Kate to get down from that branch before it snapped.

  Move, you dork. Move!

  She took one step. Another. Then a third.

  She got to the end. Never mind her lingering fear of heights, never mind the smoke and flames that began to spill through the window she had just left behind. She could feel the jib wobbling perilously as she crouched, kneeled down, then reached out into the void. At the last second, her fingers got a good grip on the hook that hung from the pulley. Gravity did the rest and she descended at full speed.