Point of Balance (5 page)

5

I screeched to a halt by the curb outside the Marblestone Diner. I tore out of the car berserk, ready to beat up whoever might be inside. I would beat my daughter's whereabouts out of him.

I didn't make it around the corner before someone grabbed me from behind and rammed me against the wall. The rough, faded concrete felt cold against my cheek. But not as cold as the steel somebody jabbed in the back of my head.

“You have been invited to a
very
civilized meeting, doctor,” said a voice with a strong eastern European accent. “Your host begs you to keep your composure.”

I tried to turn around, but the arm pinning me to the wall was too strong to brook any disagreement.

“We can stay as long as it takes to cool our temper, doctor.”

I felt the anger that had bottled up inside me die down, stifled by fear.

“That'll do,” I said.

“Zen I will let you go. Don't turn around. Walk inside and behave.”

The weight on my back was gone and I edged away from the wall. I could sense them, two shadowy figures I had spied out of the corner of my eye when they assaulted me. They didn't seem to follow
me to the doorway, but I obeyed them anyway. They had made it clear that this was no time for heroics.

I didn't spot him on my way in. The diner is L-shaped and he was sitting at the back table, engrossed in his iPad. But when he looked up and our eyes met, I felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me.

Ten minutes before I had been staring into Svetlana Nikolić's lifeless face. But believe me, those cadaver eyes were more alive than the two cold, bright blue stones that stalked me from the back of the joint.

He got up as I came close and held out his hand. I made no move to shake it, but the stranger deflected the snub by turning his gesture into an elegant flourish, pointing to the bench in front of him.

“Please take a seat, Dave. I trust you didn't have too much trouble finding your way.”

The text had copied some directions off Google Maps, but I didn't need them. I knew the Marblestone well. It was close to home and I would swing by every morning to grab coffee before I dropped Julia off at school. Juanita, the waitress on the graveyard shift, always served me. She walked across, notepad in hand, surprised to see me there at two a.m.

“Hi, Dr. Evans. You up early or working late?”

I looked at her in amazement. So normal, so indifferent. I didn't get it. Could she possibly not see something was wrong? No, indeed not. I wanted to make a sign, to appeal for help, but the stranger wouldn't take his eyes off me.

I tried to act normal.

“It's been a long day, Juanita. I'll have coffee, if you don't mind.”

“No one comes here midweek at this time, especially on a night like this,” she said, pointing behind her with a pen. The place was empty, apart from us. “Anything to eat?”

I shook my head. Now that she couldn't help me, I just wanted her to go away as quickly as possible. The man and I weighed each other up in silence.

He was young, closer to thirty than me. He had blond, curly hair and pale, smooth skin. His features might have been chiseled out of marble, and you could have cracked nuts on his jaw. He was decked out in a gray woolen three-piece suit by Field, no tie. The way it hugged his shoulders, it looked made to measure and must have set him back three or four thousand bucks.

I can't say I'm really into clothes—that had been Rachel's department, and was now sorely neglected—but I am a neurosurgeon in a private clinic. I spend my days surrounded by snobs who chat about such things. I am fond of watches, although I can't afford much in that way. And I knew the limited-edition Audemars Piguet on that man's wrist cost more than half a million dollars. It wasn't a showy watch. The expense came with the handmade inside, which had more than three hundred moving parts. But its titanium case and foreign brand name would go unnoticed by anyone who didn't know what a doodad like that was worth, which was the whole idea.

Juanita brought coffee and gave my companion a smile, which he returned, revealing a row of nuclear-white teeth. He reminded me of that Scottish actor who plays Obi Wan in the new
Star Wars
movies.

“
Gracias, señorita linda
,”
*
he said in Spanish.

Juanita blushed at the compliment and slipped behind the counter. The man followed her with his eyes until she was back in place, and fitted the iPad's headphones over his ears.

“The coffee here is excellent, don't you think?” he said, raising his own cup.

His posh accent and appearance, straight out of the pages of
Town & Country
, were unyielding. I could not believe this was the man who had killed Svetlana and sent those texts. I was perplexed but also mad as can be. I balled up my fists under the table.

“Who are you? Did my father-in-law send you?” I said, knowing how absurd the words sounded before they were out of my mouth.

“The hardware dealer? Don't make me laugh, Dave.”

There wasn't a shred of laughter in his corpselike eyes.

“Tell me where my daughter is, or I'll call the cops this second,” I said, raising my voice despite myself.

He leaned over the table slightly and frowned.

“Dave, if you raise your voice once more, I'll have no choice but to give our hostess the same treatment I gave Svetlana,” he said, nodding toward the counter. “We'll have to leave here and resume this conversation in a cramped car, rather than this warm, roomy diner, out of the rain. We'll all lose out, especially Juanita's children. Do I make myself clear?”

He said his piece in a cut-glass tone as devoid of feeling as that of a waiter reciting the day's specials. That ice-cold poise was hideous.

For a second I was lost for words, my throat constricting.

“Well, what do you say?”

“I won't raise my voice.”

He smiled. It wasn't a real smile. There was no light in it, no feeling. His face muscles merely rearranged themselves. Very different from the deceptive and perfectly contrived rictus he had given Juanita. More authentic, too.

“That's more like it, Dave. You may call me Mr. White.”

His hand reached across the table again, and this time I had no choice but to shake it. It was strong and cold to the touch.

“What do you want from me? Money? I don't have much, but it's all yours. Just tell me where Julia is.”

“Dave, Dave, Dave. Do I look like I'm short of cash?”

“No, I guess not.”

“And even so . . . You want to fob me off with a few bucks, like the conscience money you drop into that homeless guy's jar on Kalorama Circle, when you step down from your Lexus?”

I was frozen stiff. Occasionally, we went to a shopping mall where a panhandler in a 76ers cap would bum around with a sign that said “War Vett.” I often gave him change, because I liked him.

“You know nothing about me,” I said, offended.

“You are in error, Dave. I know all about you, more than you
do yourself. I know your every trait, your every feature. You are the orphan who made it. The whiz kid with the Johns Hopkins scholarship. ‘A natural talent for medicine,' the
Pottstown Gazette
said. You've come a long way since you were a newspaper boy in small-town Pennsylvania, haven't you?”

I held my tongue and quietly stirred the coffee I had no intention of drinking. My stomach was churning like a volcano.

“You are the doting but somewhat absent father. The good neighbor. The grieving widower.”

“Knock it off,” I whispered.

“The surgeon with the golden hands. The wisecracking colleague. Your St. Clement's buddies used to call you Wiseass Dave until you returned from your long break after the business over Rachel. Now they call you Spooky Dave, you know. Not to your face, evidently. They whisper it in the locker rooms and by the water cooler. Some anesthesiologists swap shifts when they see they have a long operation with you lined up. It gives them the jitters.”

I knew it, sure. Or at least I suspected. But it is one thing to have an inkling, quite another to hear it from a total stranger who has just kidnapped your daughter. His metallic voice struck home, every word he said a blow to my solar plexus. Stripped of answers, powerless to speak and with no chance to respond with violence, I was putty in that maniac's hands.

“Besides, it's quite to be expected,” he went on. “You haven't exactly been the life and the soul of the party since Rachel killed herself, have you?”

“You leave my wife out of this, asshole,” I grunted.

“Don't try and tell me you're ashamed now. It was such a sweet way to end it all. And those words she wrote you in her farewell letter”—he adopted a repellent falsetto—“ ‘My darling David. We will be together always. Hold on to each of my smiles, and remember me this way . . .' ”

I could take no more and banged my hand on the table, rattling the cups and the cutlery. Even Juanita flashed us a quizzical look,
but dived back into her gossip magazine. Luckily she was too far off to hear us.

White gave her the once-over out of the corner of his eye and then leaned toward me.

“You won't make me repeat my earlier warning, will you, Dave?”

I ignored him. I was too busy crying. I turned to face the wall and hide my tears. I stayed that way for a few minutes.

No one but I knew what was in that note. Rachel had not left it by her body but had mailed it to me the same day she went away. I guess she didn't want the police or anybody else to read those words, which came right from the heart. She had left another run-of-the-mill note to explain why she'd done it, and that was it. I hadn't told a living soul about the letter and kept it at home, under lock and key in my study. To hear those words from that slug's mouth was sacrilege. I felt so used, naked and helpless, that for a few minutes I went to pieces.

When I pulled myself back together, I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and garnered the strength to face him. He smiled, and now the smile was for real.

I knew because it frightened the shit out of me.

“You win, White, you goddamned wacko son of a bitch. So you know it all. You call the shots.”

“Now you're catching on, Dave.”

“What do you want?”

“It's very simple. If your next patient leaves the operating table alive, you will never see your daughter again.”

I gawked at him, petrified. Now it all fell into place. Why this White character, who looked to be made of money, had set up such a well-oiled and well-timed plan. He didn't want Julia or to take what little money we had. But the ransom was monstrous, unthinkable. The price was the life of the man I was due to operate on in two days' time.

To save my daughter, I had to kill the president of the United States.

6

“So that's it. You're a terrorist.”

White shook his head and clicked his tongue, as though he found the term distasteful.

“That would require an ideology and beliefs, Dave, of which I am bereft. No, my friend, I'm an outsourcer, although that doesn't exactly fit the bill, either.”

His eyes shone and he waved his hands about to stress each word. Everyone likes to talk shop. For the vain, self-centered White, it must have been sheer torture that he couldn't shout about his feats from the rooftops.

“Let us say I am a specialist in social engineering. A client comes to me with a problem, and I fix it.”

“B-but . . . ,” I stammered. “I'm not a murderer. Go look for a soldier, a mercenary, or someone who knows about weapons.”

“The cracked lone gunman is so 1960s . . . It's a tired old trick and we've used it too often. No, Dave, that is not my style. Any two-bit hoodlum with three bullets and telescopic sights could set up that kind of hack job. I mean to say, it would turn out badly. In all likelihood with the gunman shackled to a chair and bleating out—shall we say—unseemly remarks about his employers' identities. And let's not even talk about tanking stock markets, social unrest,
rising international tension . . . Our country is already in a bad way. A new scandal would tear it asunder. We're patriots and we can't have that, now, can we, Dave?”

“No, of course not,” I replied automatically.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. At that moment, the strains of Joan Baez's “Hush Little Baby” faded away and her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” struck up. I cannot tell whether that was happenstance or whether White had set it up, as he had everything else in the whole sordid affair, down to the last detail.

“Nevertheless, my dear doctor, death by natural causes would be perfectly acceptable. The great man checks into the hospital Friday, in complete secrecy. No one knows about his life-threatening illness. He receives the best treatment but dies on the operating table. A brave, tall and dark neurosurgeon faces the cameras. He's a self-made man, an all-American hero, an example to us all. He breaks the news with tears in his eyes, and the country weeps with him. The vice president takes the oath of office, also in tears, that very night, so help me God. The nation is in mourning Saturday, then Sunday the newspapers are full of praise for the new commander in chief, whom 47.3 percent of the population couldn't have named two days earlier. By the time Wall Street opens on Monday, everything is back on track. Factories belch smoke, moms take their kids to school and bake apple pie. The free world is safe. God bless America.”

He clutched his chest in an affected imitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. In that diner, decorated 1950s style in red, white and blue, his patter sounded unreal and demented, but nonetheless entirely plausible. I felt sick to my stomach and gulped as I took in the enormity of the mess I was mixed up in.

“You're crazy, White,” I muttered.

“You surmise most incorrectly,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “I am in fact a thoroughly rational and well-balanced person, who is fully cognizant of the outcome of his actions, and the costs and benefits entailed therein. Are you, Dave?”

He stared at me long and hard, while he slowly massaged his temples, to gauge the impact of his threat.

Every fiber in my body was screaming to get the hell out of there and away from that psycho. But I couldn't.

“What do you want me to do? I can't kill him just like that!” I said in an effort to defend myself, to gain time, to explain how impossible it was to do as he wanted. “It won't be so easy. There'll be eyes everywhere, watching my every move. At least two other neuro­surgeons will be with me, as well as an anesthesiologist and two nurses. There'll be cameras recording everything, and half the Secret Service peeping from behind the operating lights.”

“Details, details,” he said, stretching out his hands, palms upward; seemingly these were petty concerns. “Leave that to me. I'll tell you how Thursday night. I'm sure it will be to your liking.”

He spoke with overpowering certainty. He knew he had me by the balls. But like the cornered animal I was, I tried to lash out.

“Damn it, White, you can't ask me to kill a human being. I am sworn never to harm anybody. I'm a doctor, for Chrissakes.”

He sighed, as if taking pains to be reasonable.

“See here, Dave. I'm a very patient man, believe me. I appreciate your qualms in this matter. I would rather have taken a different approach, offered you a chunk of money and counted on your willing participation, as I have with other collaborators. It hasn't been so simple with you. You're straight. Your career's at stake and you're compromising the moral strictures by which you have lived your whole life. That I can respect. Nevertheless, allow me to remind you of something.”

He drew the iPad closer. It was on the tabletop, in an upmarket Louis Vuitton case. He raised the cover and shielded his hands as he typed for a moment. A couple of seconds later, he lowered the cover and turned the contraption around.

On display was a black rectangle that took up three-quarters of the screen. Underneath were three rows of gray blobs with no visible labels. That was it.

I couldn't see why he wanted to show me all that. I gave him a baffled look.

“Oh, by all means. Let there be light.”

He tapped three of the blobs in quick succession and the black rectangle swiftly turned white. I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the brightness. So did the lens on the other side of the screen. And then I got the picture.

It was a webcast, showing some sort of room, hewn out of solid ground. A few untreated wooden props kept the whole shaky construction from caving in. The walls oozed dampness and shone with a sickly glow under the blindingly bright lights. The picture, in HD, displayed every painful detail.

The dugout was small. It must have measured a scant five feet tall by ten feet wide. How come I worked that out so quickly?

Because I know how tall my daughter is.

Groveling in the middle of the pit was Julia. She had her SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas on, with the dark blue pants and the garish yellow top many parents have come to hate. Only the yellow was spattered with dirt, and what looked suspiciously akin to dried blood. She was barefoot, apart from a lone sock on her right foot.

She cradled her knees with one hand while using the other to try to shield her eyes from the harsh glare cast by the halogen lamps. Her gorgeous blond hair was matted and sweaty. Tears streaked from her little blue eyes and made runnels in her dirt-encrusted cheeks. The lights had woken her up and she was dazed, helpless and frightened out of her wits. She opened her mouth but no sound came from it.

“Well now, it seems the feed is muted. Allow me, please,” he said in a voice as toneless as that of a RadioShack attendant showing a customer a plasma TV.

He gave the iPad another two taps.

The piercing shriek that came from the speakers tore me apart. It was a halting, confused cry. The volume was very low, but an ice pick couldn't have split my eardrums more.

I clenched my fists.

“You're a smart man, doctor,” White said, reading in my eyes what I had in mind. “Don't do anything foolish.”

Slowly, I unwound my fists. They were the sole part of my body that wasn't as taut as a guitar string.

“The cubbyhole is underground, in a hermetically sealed room. Six oxygen tanks provide the air supply,” White went on. “They hold twenty-one thousand, three hundred forty-five liters in all. At five liters a minute, that's exactly enough for a girl of her weight to breathe until six p.m. on Friday.”

“Does . . . does she have food?”

“Dave, please. What do you take me for, a monster?” he said, crestfallen. To all appearances my query had deeply hurt him. “Her heat, hydration, food and hygiene needs have all been taken care of. She'll be a mite uncomfortable, unfortunately, but she'll be fine. Until the deadline, that is. After that, her well-being depends wholly and entirely on you.”

“You do realize what it is you are asking me to do?”

“Naturally, Dave. My employer expects me to perform a neat, quality job for him.”

“Then he'll discard the tools.”

“No. That would be most unwise. After the demise of our commander in chief, you will be in the limelight and you wouldn't be able to justify the girl's absence for long. Julia will be home by the weekend and then we shall forget each other's existence.”

I didn't believe that for one second but kept my thoughts to myself.

“I still don't understand how you expect me to pull this off,” I said, shaking my head.

“Leave the details to me, Dave. You keep up appearances and don't let your feelings show. Regain your, er, well-known sense of humor. Now go home and have a think about our talk. You'll receive instructions in due course.”

I lifted a finger to call Juanita. She dropped the check on the table.

“You weren't his first choice. Your patient's, that is,” he said when she went away. “But you were mine.”

I stood up to leave.

“Why me?”

He appeared to be confounded. I don't think he saw that one coming.

“You could have picked anyone else,” I continued. “An anesthesiologist, a nurse. Why me?”

He seemed to muse on the question for an instant, studying his perfectly manicured nails at the end of his long, delicate fingers.

Surgeon's hands
, I thought.

“Oh, because you know, Dave,” he said airily. “You know death comes to us all and it is acceptable. And because you also know how hard it is to live with the guilt of not having gone the extra mile. What's unacceptable is remorse, a bitter cup we drink from day after day.”

I think I ground my teeth and winced after that last barb. I knew that if I stayed there under his icy gaze, I would burst into tears again, and I didn't want to give that vermin the satisfaction of belittling me once more.

I made my way toward the door, but his voice halted me.

“Haven't you forgotten something?”

“Like what?”

I turned back to him, slowly. White smiled and proffered the note Juanita had just brought.

“Pick up the tab, will you, Dave? And don't forget the tip.”