Point of Balance (22 page)

25

Our brain is an amazing machine. It processes eleven million bits of information per second, of which fifty are on a conscious level.

In the exact same second in which I leaped out from behind the car, I could discern the nine bits that counted, as clearly as when somebody presses
PAUSE
on an HD television.

I saw Hockstetter thumbing a text message on his cell. I could tell it was an iPhone by the colors on the screen. He was obviously so absorbed that he wouldn't have heard me even if I'd come from behind the pillar. I could see every detail of the intricate arabesque pattern on his impeccably pressed and knotted tie. His glasses straddled the bridge of his nose. His eyes opened in surprise and fear when he saw the gun barrel aimed at his head. He was clean shaven, although there was a smidgen of foam under his left ear.

“What the hell is this?”

“A stickup, asshole,” I answered, straining my voice to speak from the throat. It sounds easy when you hear Christian Bale do it, but my words came out all puny and laughable, like somebody was tightening a rope around my windpipe. I tried to sound fearsome but came across as pathetic.

I took another two steps toward him. He was standing right next to the driver's door. I saw him glance at the handle, but he had the
cell phone in one hand and his briefcase in the other. I could not allow him to open the door and get in.

“What do you want? You won't take my car, right?”

I took one more step and noticed the front fender next to my right leg.

“Do I look like your bitch? I have the gun, you obey.”

Hockstetter took a step back and held his hands up.

“Cool it, cool it. I'll give you my wallet.”

I moved around the front of the Porsche, keeping the gun aimed at him.

“You'll give me what I want. Turn around.”

“Yes, yes. Whatever you say. But don't shoot.”

Two more steps. I was homing in. It was now or never.

“I said—”

I didn't get to finish the sentence. Hockstetter leaned to one side and hit me with the briefcase, using it like a mallet. The brass-­reinforced edge hit me in the arm and made me drop the gun.

“Like hell you're going to take my car, you lousy punk!”

He swung his arm back and hit me with the briefcase again. I dodged it by a hair and aimed a kick at him which went very wide. My foot connected with the edge of the door and dented the bodywork.

“My Cayenne!” Hockstetter wailed.

He tried to swipe at me once more, but I managed to duck and the briefcase went over my head. The metal dials on the combination lock drew sparks as they grazed the pillar and the briefcase clicked open, scattering the contents in a whirl of papers and X-rays. I recognized them in a beat. The leader of the free world's medical file now blanketed the floor of a grungy parking lot, but at that moment neither of us cared overmuch.

Now that he'd lost his blunt instrument, Hockstetter was defenseless. We both had the same idea at the same time: there was a nine-millimeter on the floor. We dived into the shadow cast by the pillar and scrabbled around where it had fallen, all arms and
legs as we growled and panted. He got a hand on the handle and I on the barrel. We struggled for a few seconds. Although I was taller and ten years younger, the fat pig was strong, and he was furious. He elbowed me square in the ribs, which made me gasp. The blow buffeted the gun and it went off with a deafening bang.

Luckily, the shot went well clear of us.

My former boss tried to bite my wrist, but I leaned on his throat with my forearm to keep his pearly whites at bay. His face was flushed with the effort while I could barely breathe under my mask. Whoever came out on top in that tussle would win the day.

And I, against all odds, was losing.

My fingers relaxed their grip and slid over his sweaty skin. And the Glock's muzzle was turning inexorably toward my face. Hockstetter cackled in triumph. He was within inches of blowing my head off. For a split second, I thought how cruelly ironic it would be that I, who had removed so many bullets from brains, would wind up with one pancaking mine.

No.

I snatched away the forearm with which I was squashing his neck. Hockstetter was suddenly let loose and his momentum carried him forward. He was momentarily stunned and I took advantage of that to elbow him in the throat. He abruptly dropped the gun and grabbed his neck with both hands, fighting for breath. I got tight hold of the gun and rolled out of range of his feet, with which he was trying to kick me.

I got up and aimed the Glock at him. What a genius I turned out to be, what a well-laid plan. I had thought the gun would make that arrogant bastard cower and quickly put him in his place. Evidently, the pistol had turned out not to be the magic wand we see in the movies, making people your slaves the instant you wave it at them. And Hockstetter had shown tremendous guts. The credit wasn't all his, of course. In cases of extreme stress, our reptilian brain—the deepest and most primitive part of our gray matter—reacts with a
fight-or-flight reflex. Fittingly, the guy had turned into the survival machine he liked to crow about.

I tried to get my breath back. The Cayenne was lopsided now. The bullet had punctured a front tire. Hockstetter lay on the floor and filled his lungs eagerly and noisily, so at least my elbow hadn't broken his windpipe. I did not want to become a murderer.

But that is precisely why you're here, isn't it? So you can kill somebody tomorrow
,
a voice said inside my head.

For my daughter. I'm doing all this for Julia
,
I answered back.

“On your feet, loser. Gimme the fucking wallet. Gimme the cash.”

Hockstetter made a deep-throated sound and tried to crawl away to the car. I came up behind him and he planted a kick right on my shin. I shook my leg a few times to stop myself from crying out.

If I had been an honest-to-God mugger, I'd have shot him. Hell, I was tempted to shoot him anyway.

I'll teach you, asshole.

He already had one hand on a door handle. He was on his knees, trying to stand up, with his legs apart and his back to me. I swung my leg back, as I did when I was about to kick Julia's soccer ball. Just like the kick-arounds we used to have in the backyard, until it was too dark to see the ball and Rachel would call out for the third time that dinner was ready.

I took the kick.

At times it's so cool to be a neurosurgeon. To know in wondrous detail the effect a blow to the testicles has on the central nervous system, to know the pain is equivalent to having twenty bones broken at once, and to look forward to the violent reactions to the trauma . . . but that's mere data. Except when you apply it to a poor excuse for a human being such as Hockstetter.

My former boss hung on to the door handle and instinctively—or inadvertently—he managed to open the door. Then time stopped as the pain washing over him flowed and ebbed, then gave him back
control over his motor system. He slumped against the side of the Porsche and tried to shout, but all that sallied from his lips was a bleat:

“Help.”

“You don't get it, do you, dumbass? I own you and I want your dough. Just hand it the fuck over.”

I crouched down and probed inside his jacket until I felt a familiar lump on the right. I grabbed his wallet and put it in my pocket.

“See? How hard was that?”

He didn't answer, too busy grabbing his groin, with his eyes and teeth shut so tight you'd think he wanted them to meet halfway.

“You've got what you were after, now leave me alone,” he groaned.

But I hadn't gone there to take his wallet. The whole performance had been no more than a cover for what I really meant to do.

“No. You need to be taught a lesson and I'm going to give you one, asswipe.”

I aimed the gun at his head. His determination must have been in shreds after the kick, because this time he just opened his eyes wide and turned to crawl inside the open door. He leaned on the door sill and tried to get up.

That's the ticket.

At that exact moment I placed my heel in the middle of the Porsche's door and shoved it with all my might.

Hockstetter's loud scream didn't quite drown out the crunching sound the fingers on his right hand made as they were broken. I stopped pushing at the door and let him loose. He raised his hand to his face, with a look of complete terror and disbelief. His index, middle and ring fingers were at an odd angle to his palm, and stuck out in the opposite of the direction they were supposed to.

I took one look at the state he was in, then ran off, his yells following me, echoing off the ramp as I left the crime scene. I tore off the ski mask when I reached the floor above, where I had left the Lexus. I saw a car about to leave and for a second feared its driver might have heard the shot or the scream, and called the cops.

Shit. The phone.

I had been so stupid that I hadn't taken Hockstetter's cell off him, and he'd lose no time in calling 911, if he wasn't doing so already. Gasping for breath, I reached my car and sat behind the wheel.

I took off the sweat suit top and changed into my shirt. I gave myself just enough time to do up a couple of buttons and started up the engine. When I got to the booth by the exit, I tried not to look at the attendant, but he was riveted by something in front of him, a newspaper or magazine, and there were headphones stuck over his ears. On my way in I had paid for the whole day up front, with unlimited access, so I simply put my ticket in the machine. The barrier rose right away.

“Just a minute, sir. You can't leave.”

The attendant waved at me. I looked out, at the ramp and the sunny street. I could not stay there a second longer. I was about to ignore him and hit the gas, but he came out of the booth and tapped the window a couple of times with one of his knuckles. He had thick, strong fingers and the folds of his skin were flabby.

“Could you unlock the doors, please?”

I wondered whether he'd noticed I was wearing sweat suit bottoms and not suit pants. Whether he would remember my face, whether he would note down the Lexus's license plate number.

“What's the matter?” I said, as I pressed the central locking button.

The attendant opened the back door on my side. Astonished and terror stricken, I turned around, but I couldn't see what he was doing. He closed it again right away.

“There you go. Your jacket was caught up in the door, sir.”

I thanked him and took off up the ramp and out to freedom.

When I reached street level, I could hear the police sirens wailing.

Somewhere in Columbia Heights

Mr. White leaned back in his chair, exhilarated. He'd had very little trouble hacking into the server at the security company that monitored the cameras in the parking lot. Nonetheless, stopping it from reconnecting them had taken several minutes of frantic and exhausting typing. He had scarcely been able to pay attention to David, busy as he was preventing the monitors in the attendant's booth from showing him what was really happening on level three.

Although he was an expert hacker, White's skill had its limits. The system had detected his break-in and had tried to bump him out, a loose end the Secret Service might uncover and which would doubtless spark their curiosity. Luckily his employer had provided him with not only the technology to monitor David's cell phone but access to the most powerful software in the world. White clicked on an icon on the screen, which opened to reveal a window with two more icons. The first showed a bald eagle spreading its wings above a globe. In the other, a polygon sheathed a block of glass with refracted light passing through it.

ENTER USERNAME AND PASSWORD TO LOG IN TO PRISM

White entered the combination, then the system requested another authentication code. He unlocked a drawer, reached inside for a token
with a liquid crystal display and then keyed in the number it showed, one which changed every few minutes.

He pressed
ENTER
and the program started up.

A couple of seconds later, a drop-down menu appeared on the screen. He selected
REMOTE ACCESS
and entered the name of the security company. Within a couple of minutes he had the security codes to breach its defenses and access its servers. The owner had noted them down in a text file, which he had sent himself and which was lying in an e-mail folder.

“You should be more careful, buster. Or somebody might just do something like this.”

A few more keystrokes and White had remotely deleted the system data. Not only from that afternoon in DC but from every place the company guarded up and down the country, in order to cover his tracks. It would look like a system failure and set them back millions of dollars.

“We
've saved your ass again, doc,” he said, switching his attention back to the monitor relaying images from the hidden camera in Dave's car's dashboard. The doctor's eyes looked startled on the screen, and his jaw was clenched as he drove back to the hospital.

He was not responding as predicted, which truly perturbed White. In the last few hours, his much-vaunted self-confidence had taken a severe knock. There were big bags under his eyes and his skin was ashen and dull.

Thanks to PRISM, finding Hockstetter's whereabouts and setting up a window for David to act in had been kid's stuff, but until the last second there was uncertainty hanging over the outcome, given that unforeseen twist. If they caught his puppet, his plan was all washed up. White would miss out on a fat fee for doing away with the president—
$25 million, no less. But he wouldn't lose any sleep over that.

If he didn't kill the president, White would have failed for the first time in his life. And that was simply not possible.

It had nearly happened once before, in Turkey, months ago. A chain of unintended consequences had led the subject, an attaché at the Russian embassy, to jump from the fifty-first floor of the İşbank Tower eight minutes ahead of schedule. White himself had had to remove the docu
ments the client had requested, which had truly bothered him. He liked to keep a close eye on things, not take part.

But there had never been so much at stake as in this present operation, and never had he lost so much control.

Now that the brain surgeon had gotten away from the garage and no longer needed him, White could allow himself a quick breather. Although he had not let the garage attendant's screens display what was happening, the cameras had been recording it. White had projected a ten-second loop of clean footage on the screens, while he stored the real sequence on his own hard drive.

He now played it back on his own screen and studied David's moves. There was no sound, but that was not necessary. The brain surgeon, with his mask on, had been transformed into something more. Bungling and amateurish, but determined and violent.

Brutal, even.

White congratulated himself and smiled. He would have given anything to have seen things for himself, in place of that blurred, tiny video.

He sent the file to a remote server, with carefully programmed instructions on what to do with it the day after. His concerns had withered away as if by magic. The little hiccup in his plan had merely confirmed that the subject was ideal for the mission and had furnished him with valuable research material, which would help him to perfect his behavioral model for the doctor's rare personality.

It was also the definitive tool for destroying David Evans.

The phone interrupted his musings. He'd been expecting this call. His employer monitored his every access to PRISM and must have seen something was up.

“No sweat,” White said when he answered.

“I saw what happened. You were on the verge of fucking the whole thing up,” a steely voice retorted.

“Have I ever let you down, sir?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“This time it's different,” the other man finally replied.

“Isn't the free world's salvation at stake? The home of the brave in peril?”

“
What's at stake is this country's power. I won't let that asshole in a tie endanger what it's taken so many years to set up.”

“Consider him dead.”

“He'd better be. Else I'
d say the same for you.”

White snorted in disdain. “If you can find me, that is.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your firewalls, your security measures, your expendable middlemen. All that ain't worth a flying fuck, son. We know where you are. We know how many bottles you drink of that shit you've got in the fridge. We even know you're scratching your cheek right now.”

White drew his hand away from his face and looked around.

“That's right,” the voice on the other end said. “Not so much fun now that the boot's on the other foot, eh, son? Now you just concentrate on getting that stumbling block out of my way.”

“Yes, sir, General, sir,” White replied with a strained smile.