Point of Balance (30 page)

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 believe 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.”

“Ma'am, I'm a father. A maniac had my daughter. You, more than anybody, must understand why I did it.”

“And you knew full well where your duty lay.”

“Yes, ma'am. I had to save your husband. And isn't that exactly what I did?”

She hung up without another word. I gave the phone back to
McKenna, who stared at me with such hatred that I was grateful there were bars between us. A sad amateur like me had trampled his professional pride into the dirt. I almost felt sorry for the guy. Almost.

“You won't last a week in the joint, doc. I've got friends inside who would all love to shank you for a half pack of Camels.”

Scrub that. I didn't feel sorry for him at all.

“Hey, McKenna. Does that mean you take back your apology?”

His footfalls as he charged off like a furious elephant were music to my ears.

It turns out that crime doesn't pay, but saving your patient from a tumor does. In the end, they didn't lock me up in Cell Block D at the Leavenworth pen. My attorney informed me that the White House had pulled strings to keep me apart from most of the prison population, a move which earned their approval ratings a couple of points in the blue states but lost them eight in the red states. It is said they weighed up the idea of a pardon, but voters wouldn't stand for it. I'm still the man many Americans love to hate.

I'm lucky they didn't put me in a special wing either, with the pedophiles and rapists. I think that call by the First Lady earned me some brownie points. I've done my time here, on death row. Where I've avoided getting a knife in the guts, but where the mental torture has been much tougher. That's why cons hate solitary.

The weirdest thing is that I've been doing time for longer than he would have lived had I not operated on him. That's gratitude for you, from those on high.

And what's to become of me? I don't know.

It's infinitely harder to start afresh than to let yourself go under. My life, as I knew it, was wrecked within a week by an unscrupulous psychopath. I haven't seen my daughter since the trial, when she hugged me good-bye.

“Thanks, Daddy.”

She said no more, and she didn't have to.

We chat on the phone for ten minutes every three days, the
most they'll allow me. Basically, I do the talking; I read her stories and tell her about her mother. She hasn't been very talkative since the goings-on, but Jim and Aura are doing what they can about that with lots of Virginia tomatoes and occasional trips to the fair. They've ended up looking after Julia. I'm glad somebody got what they wanted out of all this mess. And frankly, after what my little girl's been through, my in-laws' plan to spoil her sounds good to me.

With a little help from Kate.

Kate, logically, was busted out of the Secret Service. Her statement of the facts was exhaustive and spared none of the gory details, and from the start she took the blame. The attorney's office didn't file charges, after weighing up her impeccable service record and her heroic action at the Rappahannock farm. But she couldn't avoid getting expelled, or dodge the shaming looks from her colleagues.

I can remember her still, taking the stand, with her left hand on the Bible because her right hand was still in a sling, testifying how she had tracked down Svetlana's boyfriend's address just in time to see some shady individuals leaving, whom she decided to follow. When I think of her driving through the night, facing that gang alone and unmasked, my heart aches in gratitude for the huge sacrifice she made.

The Maryland Board of Physicians revoked my license. Never again will I be able to practice medicine in the United States, but these hands were made for healing. I do not plan to use them for anything other than surgery. So I guess I'll collect the advance royalties for this book, take Julia and go to some other country, warmer climes where I can be of help. Both of us have earned the right to forget and start over.

And before you think of berating me, as many others have done, for accepting an offer from a major publishing house and writing my story to try to retrieve something from all this, may I remind you that it was your curiosity that made you want to buy the book in the first place. Unless you've ripped it off from the Internet. In that case, you owe me for all the hours of entertainment you've had, buddy.

I'm done. The jailers will come shortly for me, to escort me from
death row. It's just that I, as opposed to the other inmates here, will walk the other way, out of darkness and into light and freedom. Soon the gates will swing open, I'll be out on the street and Julia will be there, waiting for me. Will she have a smile on her face? Will she run into my arms, or will I have to go and lift her up, hug her and swear up and down that never again will we be parted?

And most importantly, will the years have changed her, or will she still have the same deep, innocent stare and electric-blue eyes she gets from her mother, the love of my life?

I'll leave you now. I can hear them coming.

I'll find out soon enough.

Acknowledgments

I have so many people to thank.

To Antonia Kerrigan and her team: Lola, Hilde, Victor . . . Thanks for spreading the word.

To Martin Roberts, who has translated this book flawlessly and with consummate skill.

To Rodrigo Pedrosa, a great neurosurgeon and good friend, for setting me straight on medical matters and providing a great deal of help. And Rachel, his lovely wife, an anesthesiologist, for filling me in on suicide methods. Any medical errors there may be in this book are all theirs. Just kidding.

To Manuel Soutiño and Manel Loureiro, for their patience in reading through the manuscript again and again—as ever—to soothe my anxiety while I worked on it. I love you.

To all the dream team at Atria Books: Judith Curr, Johanna Castillo, Ben Lee . . . and all the rest whom I cannot name here but who have done so much for my books.

To my children, whose love has been the inspiration for this novel and to whom I dedicate the book, even if they cannot read it just yet. For you I would kill all the presidents in the world. Twice over.

To Catuxa, the best partner a writer could have. Thanks for being there.

And to you, dear reader, thanks again for making my books a success in forty countries and making this storyteller's dreams come true. Best wishes to you all, and I have one last favor to ask. If you have enjoyed the book, please write and tell me about it:

[email protected]

twitter.com/juangomezjurado

Photograph © Guadalupe de la Vallina

J.G. Jurado is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author.
The Moses Expedition
and his prize-winning novels
God's Spy
and
The Traitor's Emblem
have been published in more than forty countries and have become international bestsellers. Jurado lives with his family in Madrid, Spain.