Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  She let go of the hook, flexed her knees and rolled over as she hit the ground, but even so that was not enough to absorb the shock from the fall. She heard a crack and felt a flash of pain run up her right leg.

  Something’s broken. Shit, that hurts.

  But now wasn’t the time for diagnoses. She struggled to her feet and limped to the barn’s north corner. She seized the MP5, changed the magazine and took a peep around the edge. Ten feet away, smoking a cigarette with a smirk on his face and a gun aimed casually at the door, was one of the kidnappers. It was the bald guy who had passed by her on David’s porch. Kate gave him no warning, didn’t ask him to raise his hands, not this time. She aimed, fired and blew his head off in half a second.

  She heard something behind her.

  She didn’t get to turn around, nor did she know what hit her or hear the shots. She was floored suddenly, and there was blood pumping out of an arm she couldn’t move. A bullet had wounded her. She was vaguely aware several more had hit her in the back, but it seemed the vest had done its job and stopped them. Or at least they didn’t hurt as much as that big hole in her forearm.

  The MP5 was beneath her, rendered useless. All she had left was the pistol. Still in a crouch, she grabbed it with her left hand, drew it, spun around and fired, as she had in thousands of drills over the years.

  Her aggressor stared at her in disbelief. The bullet had hit him in the stomach and tunneled its way right through. Kate didn’t make the mistake he had and kept firing until she emptied the clip, without missing a shot. The Serb fell to his knees and wobbled before he keeled over to go the way of all flesh.

  Maybe I haven’t had a life. Perhaps this is what I was waiting for, Kate thought.

  She didn’t stop. Howling in pain, she stood up, somehow took off her leather jacket, and pulled it over her head before going into the blazing barn. The hay bales were all aflame and had turned the place into an inferno that had reached the rafters. In no time the whole thing would come crashing down on top of the rat hole with Julia in it.

  Gasping for air, Kate crawled her way into the middle of the barn. She couldn’t see, her eyes were streaming and her limbs were racked with pain. She groped along and probed the floor, now covered in glowing ash from the burning hay bales.

  Her fingers stumbled across a metallic object. A round piece of iron, fastened to something belowground.

  The ring.

  She pulled at it, but it didn’t budge. She had to stand up and heave with all her strength. Then the trampled dirt on top of the trapdoor swiftly gave way, throwing Kate onto her back. She got up in time to see a dozen dark shapes scuttling out of the pit.

  She peered in and there was Julia. She was covered in blood and there were bite marks on her face and arms. Her hair was tangled, her pajamas in rags, her skin plastered in dirt and sweat. But she was alive.

  Julia reached up and Kate lugged her out of the hole, barely noticing her weight. She ran to the door, cradling Julia in her arms, while behind them the flaming rafters began to split and fall. They escaped from the barn just in time, and their limbs intertwined as they rolled on the grass.

  There they lay in each other’s arms for several minutes, sobbing in silence until they got their breath back. Julia still clutched a long, narrow piece of wood.

  “They came after me, Auntie Kate. This is all I had to protect me. I pulled it off the wall.”

  “You did great, baby.”

  “Take me to Mommy, Auntie Kate. She’ll be worried.”

  Kate burst into tears again. She kissed Julia’s forehead tenderly and, without letting go of her, pulled out her phone and punched in a number.”

  “It’s okay, honeybunch. You’ll be home soon.”

  34

  I raised my eyes to the balcony, forceps in hand, and looked for White.

  You got what you wanted, I thought. So gloat, you pig.

  But as I was on the verge of placing the wafer on the area where I’d operated, something made me halt. White was there, third person on the left in the row of seats, but unlike the others, he wasn’t looking at me but at his lap. He was checking out his iPad. And when he raised his head again, surprise was writ large on his face. Rage. Fear. Defeat.

  I could read it in his eyes as clearly as if I were monitoring his tablet.

  Kate’s there. Kate’s done it.

  I lifted my hand to my mask and lowered it. I wanted him to see me smile in defiance over what I was about to do.

  Quite simply, I loosened the forceps and dropped the wafer on the floor.

  “Dr. Evans?” the nurse said, confused.

  On the balcony, White frantically tapped away on his iPad, then stood up. I heard him say something to McKenna and open the door. And then I was starkly aware he could still do a great deal of harm, in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine. But I couldn’t tell ­McKenna the truth. At that moment, like the naive idiot I was, I still thought I could worm my way out of trouble.

  “Watch it, David. You’ve just trashed a thousand bucks,” Dr. Wong said.

  “Well, here goes another three grand,” I said, snatching the Gliadel pouch from her hands and upending it.

  “That is not funny, David.”

  I went over to the nurse, grabbed the other pouch, ripped it open and emptied that, too. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Listen, Stephanie. I have reason to believe these two bags were not operative. Would you be so kind as to order two new ones from Pharmacy and close up the patient for me? I’m exhausted and am going to get some rest.”

  And leaving everybody openmouthed, I ran out of the theater.

  I tore off my apron and gloves and flung them into the ­toxic-waste container in the theater annex. White had left the observation room before I quit the theater, so he wouldn’t know I was after him. That was what I wanted.

  He was a few yards ahead of me. I looked out into the corridor and saw him get into the elevator, nodding to the Secret Service men as he went. They had been briefed to stop people from getting in, not to prevent them from getting out, so they didn’t move a muscle. I ducked back into the annex, where he couldn’t see me, and when the elevator doors were shut, rather than running after him I went to my room, opened the door and reached for my white coat. Kate’s cell phone and my car keys were in the pocket. At a brisk pace but acting as if all was well, I went to the elevator and pressed the DOWN button.

  I was not going to let him get away. Not merely because of what he could do to us that minute, but because of what he might do in the future. And that was how I made the biggest blunder of my life. To set the record straight a little, I must say that I was unaware of the overall situation, nor did I know that at the time I was getting into the elevator, Kate was lurching along a crane boom, fifteen feet up in the air.

  Then again, to be frank, I wanted White for myself, not in ­Mc­Kenna’s hands. I wanted to make him pay for Svetlana, for Juanita, for my daughter.

  I hit the button for the garage. White had said he’d driven over, so that was where he would head, not the entrance hall. I held off stamping my feet in impatience until the doors were closed and I was out of sight of the stone-faced agents watching the elevator. When they opened again, I ran to my car, I started the engine and with a screech of tires I hurtled toward the exit.

  White was putting his ticket in the box that raises the barrier when my car turned the corner, right behind him. I saw him look up and see me in the rearview mirror. He took off and got under the barrier with inches to spare. I lost vital seconds stopping to dig out my employee pass. By the time I got out, he was a couple of blocks away. He was driving a black Lincoln, which were a dime a dozen in this goddamned city, and I nearly lost him when he took the Sixteenth Street turnoff. I headed south on a hunch and spotted him a few blocks later, fifty yards ahead of me. I almost crashed into a bus as I ran a red light to g
et close to him, but at the next light he pulled away again. He turned onto K Street and I gained some ground at the next light. I had him within a few car lengths of me. When he took the Key Bridge turnoff, I knew my chance had come. He would have no escape from me there. I fought my way past the three cars between us, then overtook him on the left side. I spun the wheel to swerve in front of him and slammed on the brakes at the same time. I could feel the rubber sticking to the surface as the car skidded across the freeway. The Lexus cut off White’s Lincoln and nosed it toward the concrete barrier.

  White had no option but to hit the brakes.

  I reached under the seat, pulled out the Glock I had threatened Hockstetter with, and aimed it at him. The drivers who were now stuck behind him banged on their horns like crazy, until they saw the gun. The nearest got out of their cars and ran pell-mell the other way, scared senseless.

  I walked up to White’s window.

  “Get out. Now.”

  White opened the door and got out, with his hands in the air. One of them was holding his iPad.

  And he was smiling.

  “So much for the guy who never fought.”

  “Don’t move, asshole. Tell me where my daughter is.”

  White ignored me and strode over to the walkway. He leaped over the barrier and approached the steel handrail, then drew back his hand back and hurled his iPad into the Potomac. I saw it arc through the air—with the Louis Vuitton cover flapping, like the world’s most expensive bird—and disappear.

  I went after him, feeling stupid. Why did everybody ignore me whenever I brandished a pistol?

  “I hope whoever you’ve sent is better than my gang, Dave. I really do. They’ll have to get a move on to save your daughter from the rats.”

  I came closer still, aiming at him constantly. He was calm and collected, and looked over the handrail, toward the White House.

  “I was so close. Oh well, I’ll get there next time.”

  “Who was it, White? Who hired you?”

  He turned around and looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time. Then he looked at the gun and squinted.

  “Well, I could kill you right now, Dave. If I don’t, it’s because I still have uses for you. I need you to take the rap for everything.”

  “That won’t happen, White. You’re going down and they’ll throw away the key.”

  He smiled again.

  “You’ve been a worthy opponent. Maybe someday I’ll come back for you. Perhaps by then you’ll have learned how to flip the safety catch.”

  Feeling like an even bigger fool, I bent my arm to look for the safety catch on the side of the gun. A catch that Glocks totally lack, by the way. White had pulled one over on me, again.

  When I looked back up, White had climbed onto the handrail. Before I could stop him, he joined his hands and dived into the Potomac.

  Epilogue

  Dr. Evans’s Diary

  Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past five years, you’ll know what happened next.

  Moments after White jumped, I got a text from Kate. I climbed back into the car, made headway on the bridge and drove over to the Virginia side. The cops were on my tail almost right away and the TV networks were soon airing the chase live. But the Lexus had a full tank and the cops had a long way to go before I had to stop and they could catch me. I was in search of my daughter, with my foot down hard and wearing a grin from ear to ear. All I wanted was to hug her again, and nothing and nobody was going to get in my way. I think the CNN chopper’s camera filmed me running from the car like a scalded cat and over to the girls. Kate, wounded as she was, hadn’t let go of Julia’s hand for a second.

  You may also have seen the YouTube video of what happened on the bridge. The guy who filmed it with his cell phone had smoker’s hands and was as fidgety as a frightened puppy. He was standing so far off that you can only just see me pointing a gun at somebody hidden by a car. Then something can be seen falling, a noise can be heard, that’s all.

  That recording was what saved me. Although the prosecutors did all they could to deny it, the truth is that somebody was in the car, and it wasn’t Dr. Ravensdale. “Coincidentally” the hard disks in St. Clement’s security system all crashed the very moment White ran out of the observation deck. There isn’t a single picture of him anywhere.

  Nothing.

  In White’s absence, with no signs of his employer and all his hatchet men killed on the farm, the only one left to carry the can was yours truly, so the press and the attorney’s office threw the book at me. Svetlana’s body turned up at the farm, and they found bits of my skin and blood under her fingernails. That asshole White must have put them there that Wednesday night. Remember when I told you I had woken up with deep scratches on my forearm that I was at a loss to explain? Well, now we know. It terrifies me to think that while I was sleeping like a log in my living room, the Serbs smuggled the girl’s body into my house, scratched my skin with her dead fingernails and put me in the frame for her murder. Fortunately my defense attorney got me off that charge, owing to the timing of those scratches. Many witnesses had seen my bare and injury-free forearms on Wednesday morning, while the forensics proved Svetlana had been dead for longer than that. White had certainly planned to kill me after the operation in some way that would implicate me even more in Svetlana’s death. Luckily, it never came to that, but it gives me the creeps just thinking of it.

  Our house fire didn’t help much, either. All the cameras and surveillance gear behind the walls went up in flames. White must have planted incendiary bombs and fire accelerant, and set them off before he ran out. We cannot tell what commands he tapped into his iPad when he saw me drop the Gliadel wafers on the floor, beyond the one that opened the rat cages. But I bet anything you like one of them was set to burn my house down.

  The firefighters said it was the quickest and hottest fire they had ever seen. The house was already a fiery furnace when they got there, and within the hour there were only cinders left. They had their work cut out just to keep the blaze from spreading to the neighbors’ houses.

  We lost everything. Our home, our belongings, our memories. What hurt me most was losing Rachel’s farewell letter and her college sweatshirt. Julia, her cuddly toys and photo with her mom, the same one I had on my phone display and my bedside table. She always looked at it before she went to sleep. It was lucky that I had digital copies of all our photos. We salvaged that much.

  My cell phone also caught fire, by the way. Not as dramatically as the house did. A nurse could smell burning in my room and saw smoke coming from inside my doctor’s bag. She bravely put it out with an extinguisher, but the cops could find nothing but a puddle of plastic and aluminum.

  What did not catch fire was my laptop, which wasn’t at home where I’d left it but in my consulting room, buried under case files. Inside the Secret Service found dozens of e-mails—which I’d never written—sent from my account, plotting the assassination in conjunction with far-right groups in eastern Europe.

  So they accused me of conspiracy to commit murder, and you all know that the trial by media condemned me from day one. This country never had the chance to try Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley was found to be insane . . . But I was sitting pretty for the media circus to chew me up and spit me out. The affluent, crazy, WASP terrorist brain surgeon. I was the perfect hate figure for a whole nation.

  Nobody believed the story I told from the word go, the same one I’ve just told you.

  Many still think Mr. White is a fabrication. They never found his body in the Potomac. They found no fingerprints in the car, only a couple of blond hairs that would make a great DNA sample but will not be much use without any comparative data. But at least I’ll know what to look for when I hear of a mysterious death. I’ll know he’s out there, and so will you.

  I hear there are even web forums for amateur investigators who believ
e every word of my story and are looking for traces of Mr. White everywhere, not only in every news story but in the past, too, even back to November 22, 1963. Back then, White wasn’t even a sparkle in his father’s eye, so don’t sweat it, guys.

  Someone who didn’t stop sweating it was the US attorney. If White’s plans had worked out as he intended, I would have been done for, I’m sure. I never believed for a second that he hadn’t planned on putting all the blame on me. Maybe I’m mistaken and all the incriminating proof against me was no more than a diversionary tactic to be used in an emergency, like the ink spread by a panic-stricken octopus. But I don’t think so.

  Luckily things didn’t quite work out for him. If I hadn’t been alive to defend myself, if I had wound up dead, the courts would have promptly found me guilty, end of story. My attorney fought tooth and nail, however, and we had Kate and Julia’s testimony on our side, so he got most of the charges dropped. Most, but not all. Obstruction of justice, conspiracy to make an attempt on the president’s life and some other stuff still stood. You must have seen the trial on TV. When I was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in a supermax, half the public gallery began to whistle while the other half burst into applause.

  When I heard the sentence, I was thunderstruck. I could not fathom the unfairness of it all. My family and I had already paid in blood and great pain, and that we did not deserve. They threw me in a cell in the courthouse, where I awaited my final transfer to prison.

  And then a massive guy with a red goatee, in a dark suit and shades, came along and handed me a cell phone between the bars. I put it to my ear and was blown away to hear the First Lady’s voice.

  “Dr. Evans, just answer me one thing, honestly. Can you do that?”

  She sounded tense, furious and drained.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you want to kill him?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You took those bags of poison into the operating theater. You gave in to blackmail. You betrayed my trust and the whole nation’s.”