Biblical (8 page)

“Better than a penknife …” said Corbin as he handed Macbeth the disposable sterile scalpel he had found in the kit.

“Any tubing?” asked Macbeth as he unwrapped the scalpel, watching his hands move as if they belonged to someone else.

Corbin scrambled through the bag again. “Nope.”

Another tap on the shoulder. This time when Macbeth turned, the sergeant held out a ballpoint pen in his huge hand.

“I hope you know what you’re doing Doc.”

Macbeth took the pen and stripped out the ballpoint and refill, leaving the empty sleeve. Corbin handed him a plastic bottle of sterile water and he sluiced out the pen sleeve, wiping it down with a fresh antiseptic wipe before laying it on the one he had spread out on the ground. As he did so, Macbeth felt as if something indefinable had changed in his environment; a subtle shift in lighting, or air pressure, or a vague scent suddenly carried in the air.
Not now
.

The priest was now wheezing loudly, urgently, his eyes filled with tears.

“Is … it … true? Is … it … true?”

“Easy, Father,” said Corbin, laying his hand on the injured man’s forehead. “We’ll have you breathing easy in a moment.”

Macbeth felt it coming. He always felt it coming, as if his mind had to prepare itself. The feeling he had – that something had shifted in the spectrum of his surroundings – was always the prelude to an episode. He knew it was the stress of the situation that was bringing it on. Stress he no longer felt directly as the episode started to form. He looked across at Corbin’s anxious face, then back down to the patient who would die if he didn’t act decisively. Immediately.

Everything around Macbeth was now harder and brighter and even more sharp-edged, as if his eyes had been refocused beyond the physically possible. He looked out across the Plaza towards the Reflection Pool. Everything sparkled on its black water, the mirrored lights of the Prudential Center, One-Eleven Huntington and the other surrounding buildings becoming dancing diamonds on its surface. He knew that none of it was real. These weren’t real people. The architecture around him didn’t really exist.

He heard Corbin talk to him, his voice sharp and clear, but the words, the syllables, meaningless as language became an absurdly abstract concept.

Macbeth didn’t exist.

He had arrived at the heart of the event; to the place it always took him. To the same absolute, incontrovertible conclusion: he did not exist. Like Corbin, like everyone else, he was a fiction.

He realized in that moment, as he had realized in all of the moments like it before, that there was a reason why he had such a bad memory for biographical events. His were the patchy remembrances of an invented, sketched-out life.

He looked down at hands so totally disconnected from him that he was surprised when they started moving. One hand held the skin of the priest’s chest, exactly at the fifth intercostal space, and pulled it taut between thumb and forefinger while the other made an inch-and-a-half-long incision, cutting deep through the subcutaneous layers. The priest moaned as the hands slid the pen-sleeve tube into the cut.

There was a wet, hissing sound as air and blood syphoned from Mullachy’s chest. Corbin jumped back as the blood splashed onto the flagstones.

“Jesus!” shouted the sergeant. “What the fuck you done? He’s bleeding to death!”

“It’s already spent blood,” Corbin told the cop, and Macbeth realized he could understand language again. “He’s bled it into
his chest cavity already. He could have lost as much as half of his blood supply and you wouldn’t have seen a drop.”

Macbeth heard the priest take a deep, pained breath, then utter a moan, before beginning to breathe more normally.

Mullachy looked up, locking his eyes with Macbeth’s. He grabbed Macbeth’s suit collar and pulled him close. The breathing had eased, but his eyes were no less wild, no less desperate.

“I saw it …” the priest hissed into Macbeth’s face.

“Saw it? Saw what?”

“I saw it,” said Mullachy earnestly. “When he jumped … when he took me with him … he said he would show me. He showed me. I saw it …”

“I don’t—” There was the sound of sirens and Macbeth became aware of the presence of two men in Boston EMS outfits easing in beside him. One of them was black and with the strange detached observance of detail that came with one of his episodes, Macbeth noticed that the service number on his ID shield started with a one, instead of a four, five or six, denoting that he was a fully trained paramedic rather than an EMT.

“What we got?” asked the black guy. Macbeth stared at him blankly, noticing he had a beard of black stubble strips, separated by shaved bands, giving the impression of a tilled field. Cornrows. Why did he do that? thought Macbeth. Why do people do that? Whenever he was in this state of detachment, Macbeth found the tiny orthodoxies of everyday life bizarre; inexplicable.

“What we got?” repeated the paramedic from under a frown. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?”

Macbeth nodded. The world started to make sense again, to settle into its accepted groove, and he knew the episode was ending. Still, his own voice sounded alien to him as, with the emotional content of a weather report, he ran through the facts.

“One fatality on impact: the jumper. He took the priest with him. Father Mullachy doesn’t seem to have significant head or neck injuries but he’s suffered a major high-energy thoracic trauma with multiple costal fractures and costochondral separation. I heard crepitus during palpation. Reduced breath sounds on the right and significant tension hemopneumothorax, causing tachypnea and subcutaneous emphysema around the neck, which I’ve eased with an improvised chest tube. Suspected additional subpulmonic pleural effusion. Other significant injuries include an ilium wing fracture and probably other pelvic damage.”

“Okay, we got it from here,’ said the paramedic. The EMS men put a cervical collar on the priest and placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Holding him as rigidly as they could, the paramedics eased him off of the other man’s body and rolled him onto his side, slipping the long spine board beneath him and strapping him to it.

As Macbeth viewed it all, he still felt detached from everything that was happening, the lack of feeling from his episode lingering. He watched as the EMS crew ratcheted up the gurney. The young priest looked at Macbeth, his earnest, pleading eyes now glossed with tears.

“What kept you?” the younger cop asked the paramedics.

“The traffic was crazy. Backed up all the way here. Couldn’t get moving, even with the sirens and lights. Don’t ask me why the traffic got snarled up this time of night.”

Macbeth looked up at the night sky.

“It’s a full moon …” he said. “That’s why …”

Hoberman knew little about military ranks, but he knew enough to recognize that the eagle on the officer’s epaulette marked him as a full-bird colonel, just as the Asclepian Staff at the center of his Air Force wings identified him as a doctor.

“Hi, Professor Hoberman. Thanks for coming at such short notice and at such an ungodly hour. I’m Jack Ward, Director of the White House Medical Office and Personal Physician to the President.”

Hoberman nodded, a little lost for words. He stood with the Air Force doctor in front of a rustic chimney breast of rough-hewn rock that formed the centerpiece of what was, basically, a sprawling wooden cabin. Their surroundings were purposefully bucolic and homey, and had the feel of some upscale but out-of-date summer camp. The name Naval Support Facility Thurmont certainly did not fit with them, which was why they were unofficially but much better known as Camp David.

Bundy and Ryerson had shown Hoberman from the helipad to the Aspen Lodge, the President’s quarters, and Ward dismissed them with a “Thanks guys.”

Once they were alone, Ward shook Hoberman’s hand with what the psychiatrist imagined was military firmness. Maybe, he thought, they had drills in handshaking at West Point or Maxwell or Colorado Springs or wherever the hell these people learned to do things like use the right fork or kill people with a paperclip. Ward was annoyingly, predictably, stereotypically
handsome, lean and athletic-looking. It also felt to Hoberman that the President’s doctor was a foot taller than he was. On the strength of this evidence, Hoberman decided not to equivocate and hate the guy from the outset.

“I guess you know why you’re here.” Ward nodded to the black-bound dossier in Hoberman’s hand. “Please, Professor Hoberman … take a seat.”

He sat in a club chair that swallowed him up and Ward sat opposite, his expression suddenly serious.

“I take it I don’t need to explain the sensitivity of the material you have just read.”

“No, you sure don’t,” said Hoberman. “Who else knows about this?”

“The President approached me directly and I compiled the dossier myself. So the answer is, at this time, only three people: you, me and the President.”

“Why me?”

“I’ve read several of your papers, particularly on stimulant psychosis and therapeutic psychotomimetics – and I was very impressed with your book on sensory deprivation-induced delusions. Given what you’ve read in the dossier, I’m sure you can see why you were the obvious choice.”

Hoberman shrugged. “There are others equally qualified …”

Ward shook his head. “No there’s not. This is highly sensitive and could not be more important to national security and we need the best brains on it. There were only two choices as far as I was concerned: yourself and John Macbeth, but Dr Macbeth is currently involved in research work in Copenhagen, Denmark.”

Hoberman nodded, dismissing the thought that Ward’s confidence in him didn’t extend to him working out that the Copenhagen to which he referred was the capital of Denmark and not the one in Idaho.

“I can see why you thought of John too.” He paused, considering what he had read in the dossier as the government
helicopter had swept over the dark Maryland landscape. “What’s your take on it, Colonel Ward?”

“I have been the President’s personal physician for three years. You get to know a person pretty well in that period. Physically, President Yates is in tip-top condition for a woman of her age; and psychologically, she possesses a very down-to-earth, practical and calm personality. I can also state that there has been absolutely no record of mental illness or instability. I’ve gone through her entire family history: no indicators of any genetic predisposition to psychiatric conditions.”

“Mmm …” Hoberman paused, framing his next question carefully. “President Yates has a reputation for – how can I put it? – for
profound
religious belief. Some may say worryingly profound.”

“I don’t see …”

“One man’s godly zeal is another man’s religiomania.”

“President Yates has her faith, yes, Professor Hoberman. But, as I said, she is also a very
grounded
person. Her God is not one who manifests himself, or others, through visions. She is deeply concerned about what she has experienced. But there’s more …”

Ward crossed the room to a sideboard and lifted a black attaché case identical to the one Bundy had had in the helicopter. While Ward fetched the case, Hoberman looked out through the large sliding glass doors. Dawn was beginning to push gray fingers through the Camp David trees and he could see the outline of a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a diving board at the far end. He reflected for a moment on all of those who had sat where he was sitting, looking out at the pool as dawn broke, discussing in measured but urgent tones landing men on the moon, missiles on their way to Cuba, convention center break-ins, a wall coming down in Germany, towers crashing to the ground in downtown New York …

“This is a report by the White House Security Office …”
Ward handed Hoberman a document from the case. “It relates to video surveillance of some of the main corridors and hallways in the White House. On more than one occasion, the President’s behavior has caused security alerts. Basically, President Yates has behaved as if something or someone out of sight has caused her concern or alarm.”

“And when the security people arrive, there’s no one there?”

“Exactly. I have to tell you that the President has not always been alone during these episodes. Four members of staff have been present when Mrs Yates has been distressed by something only she would appear to have been able to see. Because no one other than you and I has been privy to the nature of these episodes, I’m concerned that rumors may begin to circulate and questions be asked about the President’s state of mind. About her fitness for office.”

“I have to say, Colonel Ward, that if President Yates has been subject to the delusional episodes described in the dossier you sent, then my professional opinion would tend to come down on the side of at least a hiatus while she’s fully psych-assessed. I’m sure there are mechanisms for the Vice President temporarily taking over the reins without any kind of
official
transfer.”

“I would agree,” said Ward, reaching for a second document in the case, “if we were dealing with the President and the President alone.”

“I don’t—”

“These
episodes
,” Ward interrupted, “to which the President has been subject … well, to be frank, they’re not isolated. This is a confidential report on the airliner crash in Michigan last month. There are transcripts of the conversations between the pilot and co-pilot and between the cabin and air traffic control. You’ll see some of the concerns raised by the investigating officer. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are running the investigation.”

“This is relevant?” asked Hoberman, flicking through the pages.

“Read it at your leisure and judge for yourself. It’s one of several instances of people seeing things that weren’t there. More than you would normally expect, and the people involved otherwise not prone to delusional disorders.”

“So what is it you expect from me?” asked Hoberman. “I mean specifically?”

“To begin with a professional opinion, obviously. But I’d like you to consider staying on here for a few days. If, as I suspect, we are dealing with something broader than the President’s experiences, I would appreciate you heading a task force to get to the bottom of it.”