Point of Balance (14 page)

Kate

She could only just see the roof from where she was.

The afternoon was fading and a portentous leaden sky glowered over the Evans house. The tightly packed clouds loomed and held their breath.

Special Agent Kate Robson aped them, breathing very slowly and trying to concentrate. She hadn't staked out a house for three years, and when she did she'd had a partner and at least a couple of units' backup from the local force. They always maintained constant radio contact with headquarters, and above all, when they moved in they made damned sure the suspects knew exactly who was hammering on their door.

Since she had begun to guard the First Lady, she had boned up on every scenario in which she could be involved while on duty, by making use of maps, photographs and prior on-site inspections. In the most complex cases they would stage virtual dry runs using powerful software that mocked up each last detail of the sites they were to visit, and they had at least three backup routes. The program even perfectly displayed the insides of buildings, based on blueprints and photos taken by agents on recon weeks before the event.

Kate had never operated this way, with so much left to chance and so few aces up her sleeve. And, what was worse, with her niece's life at stake.

She began to make a mental list of the things she couldn't do but got bogged down. Everything she could think of was out of the question. She had no team or time to set up an undercover action, she couldn't approach the house directly because she didn't know whether the cameras were also aimed outward, she couldn't tell
whether somebody else was watching from a distance . . . She would sooner make a list of what she actually could do.

Her first trump card was that she knew the house. Although she hadn't come by for months, she could find her way around the place blindfolded. Getting in would be relatively simple. To do so without being seen was another matter.

A car drove past and Kate instinctively hunched up in her seat until she realized such a move would make her look more suspicious than sitting still. She drove a black Ford Taurus belonging to the Secret Service fleet, in which she was due to go back to work the day after. The agents used them almost routinely as private cars at the end of their shifts, one of the job's few perks. The “almost” included one tiny detail: no one outside the service could get in the car. Those were strict Secret Service rules, which in effect meant that if you had family, you had to buy yourself another ride.

That was not the case with Kate, for whom “starting a family” was a fuzzy item in her life plan. An unreachable goal, something she longed for but could not see herself pulling off. Like climbing Everest or winning the state lottery.

The spotless Taurus proved the point. If she climbed into her father's Dodge Ram, screws strewn on the carpet got stuck in the soles of her boots. When you rode in Rachel's Prius you could tell without looking you'd have to shake the crumbs loose from the pleats in your pants, because Julia was not exactly a stickler for cleanliness.

Life taints you. Families cramp your style.

She grabbed the disposable Nokia phone she had just bought at ­T-­Mobile, a few blocks away, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter with a cable that had set her back more than the cell. It took a few minutes to charge the battery enough to turn it on. When she did, she texted David on the cell she'd lent him.

AM HERE. WILL KEEP U POSTED.

She scrutinized the house again. It was a lovely four-bedroom ­Colonial-style house, painted light steel blue. There was a grassy slope that partly hid the rear if you came up a quiet side street, like
the one Kate was parked on at the time. From the white picket fence that lined the street to the back door, it was about twenty yards. She swiftly worked out how long it would take to run that far downhill. About four seconds. Four seconds in which she would be exposed to whoever might be watching the house. Not the cameras. If her plan worked, she could zero in unseen but wouldn't have much time.

In Secret Service planning meetings, they assigned a failure rate to riskier options in a scenario, known colloquially as the snafu rate. Any snafu rate above 15 percent was immediately ruled out. Given how little she knew about Julia's kidnappers, her plan's snafu rate was at least 60 percent, which was looking on the bright side.

She gave the steering wheel an angry thump. Every hour that went by lengthened the odds on finding Julia by the deadline. She had to get into that house. There was nothing for it but to gallop ahead with her plan.

All around her, automatic sensors were switching on houses' outdoor illumination to shed pockets of light amid the pale indigo dusk. Kate looked at the time. It would be dark in a few minutes, so it was best to wait.

She couldn't help plucking from her wallet a small photo, which she had swiped the day before from her mom's album. It had been taken after a lacrosse game when they were both at high school. As ever, Rachel's uniform was immaculate, while her sister's was a mess of grass and sweat stains. Rachel's smile looked to have been painted by the delicate brushstrokes of an Italian old master; Kate's was a wild animal snarl. Little sis leaned on her stick with her right hand, with her left arm protectively draped over Rachel's shoulder and holding her crosse.

It was ever thus. Born January 4, 1978, Rachel was fated to be the daughter Aura Robson had always wanted. But Jim wanted a son and heir to take after him. So in December that same year a second baby came along, but one born without the longed-for piece of flesh between its legs.

The girl kicked up a storm from the word go, even when she was
in her mother's belly. Complications during labor forced the doctors to give Aura a hysterectomy. When he heard what gender his daughter was and that there would never be a Jimmy Boy Robson, the stern Virginian didn't even wait for them to discharge the baby from Maternity. He drove off and drank the night away in a roadhouse. He didn't get to see his daughter until some friends took him home two days later.

Kate swigged some water from a bottle which had been in the door panel for a couple of days. It had an aftertaste of unwashed laundry and a musty smell that reminded her of the scant affection her father showed her.

Jim, in his way, had come to love the girl they showed him when he was done with his binge. But there was always something holding him back. She would always be the one who had deprived her mother of the energy and life force she should have passed down to their long-awaited son.

Kids, contrary to what grown-ups tend to think, are not dimwits. They have the capacity to grasp complex feelings from early on, and the rift of disappointment as wide as the one Kate's love needed to span, to get through to her father, would be no exception.

How do you compete with a human being who never came into the world, with a notion or a yearning? The obvious answer is: you can't. Despite everything, Kate had grown up determined to be the Robson boy. Her unruliness was a constant pain in the neck for everybody, but it stuck out most in her relationship with Rachel. They had grown up together, as close to each other as two sisters can be. Nevertheless they were complete opposites. Rachel was as calm and quietly beautiful as a mountain lake, while Kate was a fireball. They started school in the same class and little sis became big sis's protector.

It was Kate who swallowed a centipede when Rachel lost a silly childish “dare,” then chickened out. It was Kate who snuck into Mr. Eckmann's room to retake the math test Rachel had flunked. Kate was the one who had stood up for her sister when they were caught playing hooky in sixth grade.

At night they would tell each other secrets from opposite sides of the bedroom they shared, until they fell asleep. Rachel had talked to her about parties, boys and tunes. About how when they both grew up they would live under the same roof and have a pair of adoring husbands. The room smelled of bubblegum, erasers and Mom's cheap moisturizing cream. And one night, when Rachel cried her eyes out and whispered to her sister that Randall Jackson had overstepped the mark while they smooched under the back stairs, Kate didn't think twice. She leaped out of bed, pulled on some boots, sat on her bike in her pajamas and rode around to the Jacksons' house. She threw pebbles at Randall's window and when the groper came out to the porch, she punched out two of his teeth.

Randy's father took Kate home and talked with her parents. There were stern words but Kate sat with her arms crossed on the sofa and kept silent over what had led her to smash in the football team captain's face. Things didn't cool down until a panic-stricken Rachel sloped downstairs in her nightie and spilled the beans.

“I regret my son's behavior and I beg your pardon, Jim. You can bet he'll be duly punished,” Mr. Jackson had said, wringing his hat in shame.

Jim had watched him leave from the doorway without a word. When the sound of the car engine faded into the night, he had turned to Kate and showed her the bike's chain lock she had wrapped around her knuckles before she punched Randy.

“Was there any need for that?”

“He's got twenty-five pounds on me,” Kate had answered with a shrug.

Jim kept his smiles to himself, but Kate knew she'd been right. Now, many years later, as she was about to do the craziest thing ever, her opinion on the matter hadn't changed one bit.

Sure there was a need.

To protect your family you do whatever it takes.

Kate took a deep breath and opened the car door.

18

“When was this?”

“Couple of hours ago.”

Dr. Wong avoided my eyes so I knew right away there was more to it.

“What's up, boss?”

“What do you mean, ‘what's up'?” Meyer interrupted with a guffaw like a rusty old saw cutting wood. “Do you really need to ask? Look, Dr. Evans, we take you in here, we give you a berth at St. Clement's and the chance to prove you can be a top doctor. All that despite your, um, record.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

Meyer opened a drawer and flung a red file down on his desk, one of the ones they cooked up in Human Resources to run the hospital. I didn't need to look at the name on the edge to know it was mine. He was just the kind of rat to dredge up the subject at such a time.

“Ah, ‘record.' That's executive lingo for ‘past events I can rake over and use against you.' I guess you're not about to refer to my success rate in surgery.”

Meyer blinked several times, amazed.

“I know about the problems you had in Johns Hopkins with the head of neurosurgery, but—”

“No you don't.”

Meyer's blinks became a sickly grin, a pair of monkeys deftly pulling at the corners of his mouth. He was rarely interrupted and could not brook outright contradiction.

“Excuse me?”

“I don't know what you've got on paper, but believe me, it won't even come close to the truth. I had no problem with Dr. Hockstetter; he has a problem with humankind. In any case, I don't see what that's got to do with anything.”

The manager paused and then started again. He's one of those who, if you butt in, repeats his whole argument from the top, in case you might have forgotten what he said six seconds before.

“I'm up to speed on the problems you had at Johns Hopkins with the neurosurgery chief, but my predecessor chose to overlook them. Normally, that sort of disaster would have put your career back a couple of years, had you fixing up cow punchers' heads in North Dakota or someplace. Instead, St. Clement's gave you a break. We let you start over. My predecessor could see you had potential, sure. But potential counts for nothing without proper supervision and a guiding hand.”

“Are you insinuating it's my fault we missed our shot to operate on the Patient, Meyer?”

“It is, though, isn't it? We've had no trouble in all the time since they first came to us. Then today up you pounce, go missing for hours to see him, and lo and behold, we get a call from the White House to tell us St. Clement's is no longer the hospital of choice. You're the only one who's been in contact with them, so you're the only one who could have dropped the ball.”

I could not believe this. Was he jealous?

“Is that what's eating you? That you didn't get to see the president? You didn't miss much.”

“Potential is nothing without teamwork. And you are not a team player, Evans. You squander hospital resources, you find any old loophole to take the patients' side. Most especially if they don't
have a dime. Like that gangbanger the paramedics dumped on the emergency room yesterday.”

Stephanie glanced at me then and raised her almost invisible eyebrows, her way of saying “Told you so.” The hospital's star patient of the decade had slipped away, a one-off chance to get in the history books. Now that that had gone south, they needed a scapegoat. It mattered little that it was because of me the president had approached them in the first place. What mattered was who put him off.

Meyer despised me in his cold and trite way, but for him such sentiments could take a backseat as long as he got what he wanted. He would have to explain this away to the hospital board, and now he had the excuse and someone to point the finger at: the spendthrift doctor. Any stick would do to beat me with, and the nearest one he had was the Jamaal Carter case.

“I treated a human being, Meyer.”

“At high cost. I don't run a charity, and this foolishness does not pay your salary.”

“No, my salary comes out of the six-figure bills you hit the clients with—after I've saved their lives, that is.”

Meyer leaned forward, his face livid with anger.

“You think you're the only talented doctor on the block? There's hordes of brats out there who can crimp an aneurysm as well as you and who know which side their bread's buttered on! You cost this hospital good money, Evans, and you know it! We've put up with your fooling around these past months because, after all, you've lost your wife and . . .”

I couldn't hold myself back when I heard that. I burned up inside with rage, which overcame my natural shyness and willingness to talk things over, a flamethrower burning down a paper wall. I put both hands on his desk and brought my face to within inches of his.

“You listen to me, Meyer. If you mix my wife up in this again, I swear to God I'll make you swallow your teeth.”

“David, back off!” Stephanie shouted, getting up.

“He threatened me! You heard him, right? You're a witness!”

“And I'll do it again. He mentions my wife once more, I don't care if I end up prescribing Tylenol in Alaska. I'll break his face.”

Meyer would not back down to start with. His mind was working full speed; I could almost hear him think. After a few moments he swallowed, sat back and raised his hands in a sign of appeasement.

“All right, all right. No need to fly off the handle. We can talk this over like civilized people.”

I nodded my head and took my hands away from the table but did not believe him for one second. We had both gone too far, and things would not stop there, no way. The consequences for me would be harsh as soon as I stepped away and Meyer no longer feared for his skin. But right then I couldn't have cared less about my future at St. Clement's, at least not as long as it lasted until nine o'clock Friday morning.

I had to toss him a bone. Something he could gnaw on to buy me time. For all that Meyer made me sick, I needed to avoid a showdown with him and to put off payback time for a few days.

“I know exactly what you want, Meyer.”

“I want the best for this hospital.”

“No. You want to be on TV. You want your press conference Friday afternoon. You want to break the news to America. You want your fifteen seconds of prime time.”

He looked at me, speechless. I'd hit the nail on the head, and we both knew it, although he'd never say so out loud. For the drab, second-rate pen pusher he was, a junior who had never earned his stripes, that would be a dream come true. A TV appearance was the Holy Grail for nonentities.

“I can fix it,” I added. “I don't know what went on this afternoon, but I can get back the Patient's trust.”

“It was the White House chief of medical staff who called. Name of Hastings. I spoke to him,” Dr. Wong said.

“Hastings wanted me to operate at Bethesda. I refused,” I said with a withering look at Meyer, to see what he thought now of my
lack of team spirit. He said nothing. It was no use; he had made his mind up about me, and to be fair he was not far off the mark. But I could still make him think I gave a damn. “The First Lady took it up with her husband and everything was fine. She's the key.”

“Can you go over Hastings's head and get through to the president?”

“I think so.”

Meyer pressed his hands together under his chin and smiled. He must have been pondering what suit he'd wear for the press conference.

“Fix it. Get him operated on in my hospital and we'll be square, Evans. But if you don't come up with the goods, I'm afraid you'll be up before the board.”

I felt like quitting there and then so the operation would never go ahead at St. Clement's. Or better still, like jumping across Meyer's desk and knocking that smug look off his face, but I couldn't afford to do that.

He'd given me what I was after, so I nodded and walked away.

“Evans, wait!”

Dr. Wong ran out along the corridor after me. I didn't stop, although it was hard to leave my boss behind, even as pissed off as I was.

“That asshole flayed me alive in there, and I can't say you stuck up for me.”

“He's right, Evans. I told you the board had complained about your approach to pro bono ops. You could have eased off the gas a little. You can't always shoot from the hip.”

She was right. They'd warned me several times, but that didn't mean Meyer wasn't a greedy, soulless shit. Sure, I hadn't helped matters. I normally made quite free with resources, but I had really gone overboard since Rachel's death. My guilt complex was a huge lodestone skewing my moral compass.

“I dropped my guard once, and look what happened.”

“Saving a few poor suckers won't bring back your wife, Evans.
There's no wrongs to right. We all saw her, strolling along the corridors without a care, no sign she was sick. I was in a few ops with her myself right before she was diagnosed, hour after hour on foot, but she was as focused and sharp as ever. Nobody could have seen it coming.”

She may truly have thought that, but her words rang hollow, a bid to make it up to me after she'd let me down before the manager. Also, if St. Clement's took the operation back, she would get in on the act. With me in the theater, of course. And giving interviews all evening.

All at once, everybody wanted a piece of the Patient. They had scented blood in the water, and were circling around and baring their teeth. I think until then I hadn't quite appreciated the First Lady's concern over picking the right surgeon for the job. She had wanted to avoid exactly such antics, which made her decision to pull me out at that stage of the game even more baffling.

“Thank you, Dr. Wong,” I said without a backward look. “You can go back to practicing your smile in the mirror with Meyer. They say blue looks best on TV.”

I reached the elevator and rapped the button three or four times until the doors opened. I couldn't wait to get well clear of the executive suite.

“Evans, I've got you pegged,” she said behind me as the elevator doors closed. “You're an awesome doctor but naive and headstrong. Don't blow it now that you're so close. Think of your daughter when you make that call.”

If only you knew
.