Point of Balance (11 page)

He laughed and choked on the smoke he was breathing out. He gave a couple of quick, nervous coughs.

“Before, I thought this shit would kill me. But that won't be the case.”

“Probably not.”

He stubbed out the cigarette on an old newspaper covering the desk in the consulting room.

“Doctor, I'm sorry. I know you think I should have had the operation a couple of weeks ago, and this could all have been done otherwise. Believe me, that isn't so.”

But it is so, dumbass. If you had gone ahead then, White wouldn't have kidnapped my daughter
,
I thought.

Instead of speaking out, however, I smiled dumbly.

“I'm not in politics for personal glory but to do the right thing,” he went on. “We've achieved a great deal so far, but there's still a lot more to do. The Kyle-Brogan tax bill, for example. If we pass it, we'll roll back the power of the one percent in the country.”

I wagged my head. Everybody had heard of the Kyle-Brogan bill those last few months. Everybody had their opinion about it, although the
Post
said the draft ran to eight hundred pages and doubted anyone had read it through. It would be a major achievement if it were passed, and make that administration go down in history. But as a doctor I had to raise a very different question.

“And is that worth your life, sir?”

“Good question. It's one I asked my wife the day you and I met at the White House. She—”

His voice quavered and he broke off to contain his emotion.

I am used to patients opening up and pouring their hearts out in the consulting room. They all end up doing so, sooner or later, even the strongest or shyest. Because they need to believe in me, in themselves, in their own chances. They all have stories to tell, something to say, and seeing death up close hastens that need.

My hand, however, won't be any the steadier because they need to live. Nor is it for me to judge, and I do not have the power to change things.

The president forced himself to continue after a while. “She . . . She spent a long time staring out the window without answering. After a while she turned around and looked at me, right here.”

He pointed to his eyes with two fingers.

“She spoke in a calm, collected voice. She said if I really could make a difference, leave the world a better place for our daughters' daughters, then it would be worth the risk. That's why I'm taking these—”

I raised my hand, and he stopped in bewilderment.

“Hold it, sir. Do you realize you repeated yourself?”

“No, I did not,” he said with a squint.

“Yes, you did, sir. Repeat after me: ‘My daughters have a little lamb.' ”

He took a while to answer.

“My daughters daughters have a little lamb.”

“Are you aware you repeated yourself just now?”

“No,” he said. There was terror in his eyes.

“Say
daughters
, please.”

“Daughters daughters.”

“Now split the word into syllables, please.”

“Daugh. Ters,” he said, taking a massive break between the syllables.

“All together, now.”

“Daughters daughters. Please, no more, doctor. It's humiliating.”

A burst of compassion flushed away the resentment I'd been feeling, and for a moment I was ashamed. I had pushed my patient too far.

“Has this happened before, sir?”

The president shook his head, hard. But then he ended with a nod.

“What does it mean?”

“That the tumor's eating into your speech area, sir. In a few days you will lose the ability to speak.”

I felt a squeeze on my forearm. When I looked down I found the most powerful man in the world's big, strong hand clinging to me for dear life. And behind the mask of dignity he maintained despite everything, fear blazed like a bonfire.

“Save me, doctor. Please. I have so much left to do.”

13

When the Secret Service agents dropped me off on Kalorama's blue-blooded paving stones, I blinked in wonderment at the normality. On the surface, nothing had happened; it had all been a bad dream.

But it hadn't been. My ass still stung from the journeys on the car floor; the sleeve of my white coat was still creased from the president's viselike grip.

And Julia was still in the power of a heartless psychopath.

Thinking of White, I took the phone out of my pocket, but there was no need. The screen was lit up, and my heart missed a beat when I saw it. The boring, default blue wallpaper was gone. Instead there was an image I'd deleted two months before because it was too painful to look at. The one with Julia and Rachel sharing strawberry ice cream. There was more of it on Julia's T-shirt than in the cone.

I was shaken up for a moment. That lousy shit could play around with my memories and feelings as if they were chess pieces on a board. He hadn't even had to send me one of his texts but had still grabbed me by the throat with that picture. He was reminding me what was at stake. Like I could stop thinking about it.

I forced my eyes away from Julia's impish grin and Rachel pretending to be annoyed, and saw the time on the phone.

It was four. I would be late for my appointment.

I felt limp; the tiredness had caught up with me. I had eaten and drunk very little in the past twenty-four hours, and a couple of hours' fitful sleep didn't help matters. If I carried on in that state I would run the risk of making a fatal slip, and I could not allow that just then. I wavered between hurrying to my appointment and grabbing a bite to eat, then finally sacrificed a few minutes to drop by my office.

Even though my stomach was rumbling, there was a far more important reason to be late: I needed an alibi. My phone, that infernal device, could not go where I was headed, or White would find me out in a second. I put the gadget on my desk while I peeled a couple of twenties out of my billfold. I affected nonchalance as I leaned through the doorway and shouted to the colleague next door that I was off to get something to eat and did she want anything from the snack bar? I hoped my forgetfulness would appear natural as I left the phone behind, shut the door and hot-footed it to the elevator.

“Dr. Evans!” said Carla, the head nurse on the evening shift. “Dr. Wong has repeatedly called looking for you. And Meyer.”

“I'm famished. I haven't got time for this shit now,” I said without turning around.

I could tell without looking she was agog. Carla was a queen bee. One who, when people went to the dining area to heat up what they'd cooked at home, would stare at the one whose plate smelled bad to her, chide them nice and easy, and reduce them to tears. No one ever questioned her.

I disliked Carla, so I tried to treat her with the extreme courtesy I reserve for obnoxious people. My overstepping the mark took her completely unawares, and for a split second her puzzlement made me feel a bit better. It was a momentary and mean relief, which was immediately reversed as I took the elevator down to the sad and lonely snack bar. I wasn't exactly following White's orders to be polite and fly below the radar. Even worse, my boss would chew me out for going AWOL for so long, skipping my rounds with the students and God knows what else.

The sight of the food displayed under the cold fluorescent light was no help. I never ate in the snack bar if I could help it, like most of the St. Clement's staff. That organic residue floating in grease was anything but edible. The one good thing about having a snack bar in a top-notch hospital was that if you had a heart attack after pigging out on the stuff, the coronary unit was just around the corner.

I was doddering and half starved, so I quickly bought a stack of energy bars and a Coke—nothing cooked there, no way—and paid the bored cashier. I smiled at her, trying in part to make amends for my bad temper before with the head nurse, but got nothing in return. No thought seemed to stir behind her bland face.

I didn't use the elevator. The ones on that side of the building went down only if you had a key I did not possess. Instead, I took the stairs right by the newsstand and hurriedly gobbled down one of the granola bars. The sugar flooded my bloodstream and gave me an energy rush I knew I would need. I was very late, so I went headlong down the four flights of stairs, a dumb idea in those stupid hospital clogs. Not a month went by without a colleague winding up in the emergency room after falling downstairs while reading case notes or heedlessly gawking at a cell phone. The edges on those granite steps were worn and chipped after a century and a half of use. The nonslip strips the hospital management insisted on laying down never stayed put but came unstuck and bunched up, making them into sticky traps that caused more accidents than they prevented.

St. Clement's resembles an old Victorian lady. All prim and proper on the outside, with her pretty ivy sprawling over her red brick and plate-glass windows. But on the inside she's an old slut, full of quirks, problems and secrets. The most unspeakable things go on in the subbasement, closed off from the stairs by a door which should be locked but never is. The manager before Meyer was the last to bother enforcing that rule, that I know of. He had a lock fitted and informed all personnel that only cleaners and morgue staff had access. The lock appeared the morning after with
a hole drilled through it, which is apt if we consider the use the horny interns make of the dark passages and discreet nooks in the subbasement.

That manager, a devout Methodist, called for a locksmith and sent around a memo reproaching the vandal who had destroyed hospital property. In his note, he insisted that personnel should behave properly and “refrain from using less-frequented areas of the hospital for untoward purposes, unworthy of the decorum becoming our profession and this venerable institution.” The lock was forced the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. The vandal took a creative turn on the twenty-first night by bringing along a circular saw to cut out a big piece around the lock itself. To everybody's relief—except the locksmith's—the manager abandoned his efforts to keep staff from their nighttime release.

Nobody had bothered to fix the hole in the door. The gaping wooden breach had darkened over time but still had splintered edges, as I found out the hard way when I shoved it with all of my strength. I rubbed my forearm where I had grazed the skin, looked around and tried to remember the way. The morgue was to the right, on the best-known side of the dimly lit maze. Straight ahead were the laundry and the hazardous materials disposal area, a sinister place covered in biological warning signs, which you would have to be crazy to enter. And way beyond on the left were the generators and the boiler room. The graybeards say that through there is the entrance to a second and far bigger subbasement, which has been locked up for eons. If that's true, I don't even want to imagine what horrors may lurk down there. Rats thrive on that floor despite the tons of poison the janitors dump on every corner. If you stand still for a few minutes in the middle of a passageway, you'll hear them squealing and scurrying about in the gaps between the walls and the steamy pipes. But at that moment all I was able to hear was my own panting as I ran along the passages. I took two wrong turns at an intersection but found my way again.

I got to the boiler room door with my tongue hanging out and
a stitch in my side. While I tried to get my breath back, with my hands on my knees, I heard a voice behind me.

“You're late, David.”

There was Kate, in a leather jacket and jeans. She was leaning against the wall, her arms folded. She stared at me with her dark, deep, sharp eyes. A mare's eyes in a cat's face: eyes that see too much. The strong, straight jaw jutted out at me. She was worn out and pissed, to mention merely what was on the surface. The wellspring of feelings that had simmered since Rachel's death, and even beforehand, was too complicated. I knew it, and she knew I knew it, which made everything even knottier and all the more wearing. We had kept our distance since then, and she had seen Julia only on the few occasions we met at my in-laws' place. That also hurt, because they thought the world of each other. They were equally unbridled, affectionate and carefree.

“I'm sorry, Kate. Really I am,” I said, with a lump in my throat—due in part to the rush and in part to the shit storm that was about to erupt.

She nodded slowly, thinking I meant for turning up late. Nothing farther from the truth.

“Well, David? What the hell is so important you have to drag me all the way from Virginia?”

I took a deep breath and braced myself for her reaction.

Because as soon as I opened my mouth, I would ruin her life.

14

“Julia's been kidnapped.”

Kate's astonishment was palpable. She stepped away from the wall and toward me.

“What are you talking about? You sure?”

“Completely,” I said, staring at her. I wanted to pick my words carefully.

“When?”

“Last night, between nine and eleven.”

“Damn it, and you haven't told the cops yet? The FBI has to get moving as soon as possible, David!” She took her cell from her pocket and began to dial. “I have a friend there—”

I grabbed her arm to stop her.

“No, Kate. They've told me not to.”

“That's what they always say, damn it. If it were up to them . . . Shit, we have to get on the horn right now.”

“I can't, Kate.”

She pulled away from me and clicked on the phone again. There was a note of distress in her voice I had never heard before, and the words fled from her mouth in despair.

“The first few hours are crucial! And you have to gather together all the cash you can. They told you yet how much they want?”

“They don't want money, Kate. And you can't tell anybody.”

“There's no coverage down here.” She hoisted the phone up and shook it, that useless gesture we all make to try to increase the size of the magic bars on the screen that connect us to the rest of the world. “We have to go up and call as soon as possible.”

“I know there's no coverage, Kate. That's why I've brought you down here, where nobody can see or hear us.”

She stopped waving her phone around and turned her head toward me, very slowly. She narrowed her eyes and at that moment I realized how unbelievably paranoid I sounded and how suspicious my acts had been in the last few hours.

“David, is this true? Has something happened to Julia, something you want to tell me?”

I would not be the first overwrought widower to lose his head and do something awful, something drastic and unforgivable. Many manic-depressives take their families with them.

“No, Kate, it's just that . . .”

“David, where's Julia?”

I took a few seconds to answer. And when I did it was in the worst possible way.

“I . . . this is all my fault, Kate. I hope you can forgive me,” I said, reaching out to her.

Kate reached out, too, but instead of taking my hand she twisted my wrist and followed through to turn me around and flatten my face against the wall. She was seven inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than me, but she subdued me in the space of a second. I didn't try to turn around because I wanted to convince her I hadn't flipped, although it would make no difference what I tried. She had my arm in a lock and could dislocate my shoulder with a slight push.

“Tell me where she is or I swear to God I'll break your arm. I mean it.”

She forced my arm and I gasped in pain.

“They've snatched her, Kate. Let me go, for fuck's sake! We won't help her this way!”

We stood still for a never-ending second. I could hear the rats bustling inches from my face and the waste gurgling in the drainpipes. The wall smelled of whitewash and damp.

Finally she let me go and backed away a little.

“Turn around.”

I obeyed, rubbing my shoulder and head where they had touched the wall. She stood very close, examining my face and scrutinizing it for signs that I was lying. She was too near, and, strange as it may seem, that made me feel more uncomfortable than the hammer lock she had held me in before. My mouth had gummed up and I had acid breath, so I tried to breathe through my nose until she backed off altogether.

“I'm sorry, David. Guess I overdid things.”

“You believe me now?”

Kate put her hands on her hips and kept her eyes on me.

“I believe Julia's gone and it wasn't you. But I think there's something you're not telling me, David.”

“I'll tell you on one condition. I want you to hear me out. If afterwards you still want to call the Feds, I won't stop you.”

She thought it over for a second and nodded.

“Shoot.”

So I did.

I began with Jamaal Carter's operation. I told her how I had come home to an empty house. And how there was a strong smell of bleach in Svetlana's room.

“They've done that to wipe away any sign of her. Any trace of DNA, or blood if there was a struggle.”

“No, there wasn't. She's dead.”

“She hadn't been in your house long, had she? She must have been in cahoots with the kidnappers.”

I nodded and explained how I had driven like hell to Kate's folks' place in Falmouth, how I had crossed swords with Jim and he'd come after my car in the rain.

“He had a cold this morning and was out of sorts. I should have
known it was your fault. You're the only one I know who can get him that worked up.”

“That's what Rachel always said.”

There was a gravelike silence and Kate turned away.

“Tell me about that text you got.”

“It summoned me to meet somebody at a diner I drop in to every day. And there he was.”

I paused and gulped. I was about to tell somebody his name for the first time. Everything I had told Kate had already broken the ground rules he had laid out. But somehow, to say his name aloud seemed like the real sin, even in the depths of the St. Clement's subbasement.

“Mr. White.”

I described him in full detail, him and his henchmen. Or at least what I remembered about them, which wasn't much. But it seemed what I knew about the head honcho didn't amount to much, either.

“His appearance is too common, David. Unless he's got a police record, without a photo or real name, the description's no use. Why the hell did he want to meet you face-to-face? That is not the usual way.”

I talked to her about the conversation with White. His refined and cold-blooded voice. His sharklike eyes and contained expression. The iPad with which he monitored the coop where they were holding Julia.

“And after he showed it to me . . . he told me what they wanted.”

Kate, who listened carefully with her head to one side, tapping her foot on the floor, stopped dead. Her eyes were wide open and there was terror in them.

“David . . . What have they asked you for, David?”

I told her.

“No.”

She stepped back into the passageway.

“Kate.”

“No,” she repeated, and shook her head. “I have to inform the head of my detail. We have to put the president out of harm's way this second.”

“You can't, Kate. If you do, they'll kill Julia.”

“David, I'm a Secret Service agent! There's a plot to assassinate the president, for God's sake! And I've got the freakin' assassin right in front of me!”

“She's your niece, Kate. She's only seven.”

She stood stock still for a couple of seconds. Then she took a deep breath, turned her back on me, bent over and puked on the floor out of sheer tension. She leaned her arm against the wall and retched a few times while the vomit splattered the instep on her heeled leather boots.

I watched her from afar while I tried to get hold of myself, and felt the sorrow and rage that afflicted her. I couldn't console her, although I wanted to come close and hug her, body and soul, but it would have been counterproductive. One of the first things I learned as a doctor is that there are many more ways to hinder people than help them. Sad and cynical as it sounds, there's less chance of screwing up if you do nothing.

Despite that, and because I'm a jerk, I put my hand on her shoulder. Kate shook herself loose, roughly, then I stepped back. Just as well I did.

A deep sympathy for her bowled me over. I know precisely what it's like to hear something that turns your world upside down. Your heart misses a beat, because your body reacts before your mind. But the world doesn't stop simply because your heart does; after a second or so it carries on beating and the information reaches your brain. If you're smart—which Kate was, and then some—then what you're told becomes a jolt of electricity that lights up a bulb in your head. The light unveils a dark room full of nightmares, a room which has always been there but you never dared go in. You will no longer lead your life in the comfortable living room where you used to put your feet up before a crackling fire. No, your life will now run its course in
a slimy, gloomy cell. And there are more shadows behind the walls, shadows you dare not name.

Nothing will be the same again, which is unacceptable.

So you deny it. You assail the information every which way. If it is undeniable, your mind searches for ways to keep you in the living room, out of the dismal cell. Why do you think they always give news of fatal accidents in person? You'd be amazed how often a cop has to stop someone from shooting themselves seconds after telling them their wife or husband won't be coming home that night, or any other.

When you know there's no choice, when you know the new reality won't budge, your body reacts again, a second time. Kate's did so by bending over and throwing up. When she straightened up, she banged on the pipes a few times, made them ring in an echo of her own frustration, and then cussed until she'd gotten enough anger out of her system to be able to talk.

Then she leaned against the wall and faced me, in tears.

“Damn you, Dave. Damn you for making me choose.”