Point of Balance (8 page)

Kate

Kate Robson raised an eyebrow when she saw an unknown number come up on-screen. Very few people had her number and they were all stored in her BlackBerry's memory.

She pushed the reject-call button, leaned back in the porch rocking chair, and dug back into the novel she was reading. It was a nice day on the farm, and she didn't feel like wasting it on some goddamned telemarketer.

Like all Secret Service officers, Special Agent Robson never turned the thing off. She was so used to having her days off interrupted after nine years in the service that she didn't bat an eyelid when it happened. While on call, officers had to put up with brutal hours. Consequently in her family albums there was a host of empty chairs in pictures of birthday parties, graduations and other big events.

Kate hadn't known how hard the job would be when she applied to join the Secret Service as she was about to start her third year at Georgetown law school. It had been a patriotic urge that had driven her to fill in the forms a week after the 9/11 attacks. She thought little more of it for months and had almost forgotten about the matter until she received a call from a supervisor asking her to come to an interview.

She went through the long admission process without getting her hopes up, but as the months went by she became more enthused by the idea, precisely because it was so difficult to get in. If there was one way to make Kate Robson relish a challenge, it was to underline its difficulty.

Finally, after an endless broadside of urine tests, lie-detector ses
sions, and fitness and shooting trials, Kate got a call shortly before graduation day.

“You have been admitted to the Secret Service, Robson.”

“May I graduate before I enlist? I'm not one to leave things half done.”

“I'll put you down for the Federal Law Enforcement Center in September. Don't make me regret it,” was the supervisor's terse answer before he hung up.

The ink on Kate's law degree was barely dry before she hit the road in late August 2003 and went to the Criminal Investigators Training Program, the basic training program for all federal law enforcement officers. It was an eleven-hour drive to Glynco, Georgia, and the whole way she was never rid of accusatory looks in the mirror from her father, who had dreamed of a future for his younger daughter as a lawyer and had forced her to enroll in a program she never really liked.

“Look at your sister on an anesthesiologist's wage up in the big city. Do you really want to waste your life working for Uncle Sam?”

Kate didn't argue. It would have been a waste of breath. She had long since given up as lost the ongoing battle over good-looking, wonderful, perfect old Rachel.

She preferred to drown her sorrows in whiskey that night.

Kate simply blew her parents a kiss and drove on.

Fourteen weeks there and another eighteen on the SATP, the special agents Secret Service training program. Eight physically and mentally strenuous months, topped off by a well-attended ceremony and a pittance for a wage. But that was the least of it. The real bonus was wearing a shield that only three hundred other women in the United States were entitled to. She felt like one in a million. And she was.

The BlackBerry rang again and Kate goggled at it, mystified. The morning was too perfect, and she needed to relax.

She stretched out, and her willowy legs glowed under the sun. She had a hard, wiry body, maybe a little below the ideal weight for
someone as tall and with as demanding a job as hers. Her mother shook her head every time she saw her and tried to fill her up with prodigious amounts of meatloaf and stuffed tomatoes. Kate would guiltily try to burn it all off jogging along the stony, overgrown lanes around the Robson farm. The air was so clean and fresh there it wiped away all her woes. She could never get enough of filling her lungs with the smell of Virginia.

She had had precious little occasion to fill them those past nine years. They had assigned her to the Cleveland office when she finished her training, where her duties were above all to fight forgery and fraud. Although the public at large picture the Secret Service as presidential bodyguards, in reality a large part of their job is to crack down on monetary fraud. Cyber scams, printing phony bills, identity theft . . . That was officer Robson's stock in trade, and after arresting her twentieth bartender on charges of cloning a client's credit card, she began to wonder whether she had made the right choice by taking her life and career in that direction.

Then her transfer to Boston came through and Kate was eventually assigned to protecting government personnel, beginning with the Treasury. At first her assignments were few and far between, but little by little her professionalism and unbreakable toughness won her superiors' respect. Officials liked to find themselves in the care of Special Agent Robson, who was as tall as a model and whose powerful figure commanded respect. With her hair pulled in a bun as tight as her lips, she was mystery personified.

It was a mask she liked to cultivate. Her male colleagues indulged in excesses denied to women. A spare tire, one drink too many after a twenty-hour day, a bit of company—paid or otherwise—sneaking into the hotel room . . . Such luxuries were forbidden to female officers, who were under double scrutiny.

“Hey, Robson, I hear you chicks have to pee every three-quarters of an hour. What you gonna do if Obama shows up when you hit the head?”

“He won't show. He's too busy boning your mother, douchebag.”

That was the usual banter on the training course and for the first few months. She never gave the slightest sign it bothered her, although she often cried herself to sleep and soaked her pillows in tears of rage and frustration. But then word spread that Robson's shooting scores were 100 out of 100.

Bullets are gender neutral.

And at last, after seven years' hard slog, they had assigned her to the Washington office, to form part of the First Lady's security detail. The pride and the adrenaline rush made up for the step-change in stress and fatigue. Every time the First Lady approached the security barriers to press the flesh, Kate strained to scan every face in the crowd. From behind protective mirror shades her eyes examined every stance, every gesture, in search of somebody who did not fit in, for something awry. Some loose, thick clothing on a day that was too hot. A face that was too happy or too sad. Those hands in pockets . . . Always on a knife edge between ensuring she wasn't so overzealous she gave Renaissance (the First Lady's code name) a bad rep and the mission to protect her above all else.

She stood up and began to flex her leg muscles, bend her knees back and forth. She wore a pink T-shirt with a unicorn and rainbow on it, a throwback to her high school days that had been the butt of many jokes when her Secret Service buddies had seen her in it.

The cell rang again.

Kate cussed and broke off her warm-up. Three times in four minutes. Damn, she'd have to tell that jerk he had the wrong number, to stop him from bugging her.

Her annoyance turned to surprise when she heard the voice on the other end of the line. He was the last person she'd expected to call.

“Kate, it's me.”

“David? Why are you calling me on this number?” she asked coldly.

Why are you calling me, period. That's the real question
, she thought.

“I have no time for explanations. I need your help, Kate. Julia needs you.”

10

They were waiting for me two blocks from the hospital and their eyes shot daggers through me as they leaned on a black sedan. There were two of them, respectively dressed in blue and gray. They must have had a photo of me because when Gray Suit saw me, he hurried me up by jabbing his finger at his wrist.

“Nice watch. Is it new?”

“You're late,” he grunted.

“Sorry. Patient almost died on me.”

After I had called Kate and showered, I put on a clean coat and scrubs. When I went to pick up the cell from my locker, the screen blinked twice and went out. I tried to switch it on again, but the button didn't respond.

“Couldn't you have worn something less conspicuous?” one of them said, and pointed to my clothes.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“That's what sucks about saving lives, officer. There's often some blood spilled.”

They swapped glances, plainly pissed off. They had orders to make a discreet pickup, on a quiet street, and the subject turns up looking like a Christmas tree. I'd have felt sorry for them, had I not been frightened to death and scared shitless.

“Okay, get in,” they said, opening the back door. “I think I've got something in the trunk. And for the love of Mike, get that coat off.”

Gray Suit took the wheel. Blue Suit tossed me a marines sweat suit and sat beside me. He didn't seem too worried over the small matter of my wearing no underwear, and I didn't give it much thought myself. I was still obsessed with the way my iPhone had turned itself off. It wasn't the battery, which was almost fully charged. I was sure White was behind it, but why? Had he by chance found out about my call to Kate? And if so, then had I sentenced my daughter to death with my decision?

The questions tortured me, a rabid animal devouring my lungs. It must have shown, because Blue Suit glowered at me and took off his shades.

“Everything okay, doc?”

Those dark eyes pierced me like red-hot needles, seeking out my secrets and turning my soul to rubble. Or that's the way it seemed to my anxious and guilty conscience. I had to restrain myself and put on a brave face. The last thing I needed was for those Secret Service gorillas to tell their superiors the man who was to operate on the big chief was behaving off-the-wall.

“Sure. It's simply that I'm still trying to digest last night's dinner. Too many jalapeños. Might be good if you open a window, officers,” I said, hiding behind verbal diarrhea as I always do when I'm flustered.

You must understand that in my early childhood, I was surrounded by all kinds of bullies. I always thought a gush of hot air would work as a distraction, like ink for a squid. I have an ugly F-shaped scar on my shoulder to prove I was wrong, and a couple of false teeth. Good old Dr. Evans Sr. had to go without a lot of beer to pay for those implants when he adopted me.

Blue Suit nodded slowly, not convinced.

“Doctor, I now have to ask you to do something uncomfortable.”

I peered at him in surprise.

“You don't often hear that from a Secret Service agent. Sounds more like my proctologist.”

“I need you to lie down on the car floor, for security reasons. The way to the meeting place is classified, and you do not have clearance to know its location.”

“I already know where the White House is, officer. It's that big place on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Doc, we ain't going to the White House.”

“I don't care where we're headed. You will not lay me on the floor like a goddamned mat.”

The driver pulled the car over and Blue Suit moved from the backseat to the front. They did not repeat the order, they merely sat there and waited. To them, I wasn't there.

Although pride made my blood boil, I had little wiggle room to argue in. I had arranged to see Kate at four at St. Clement's and could not be late. So I reluctantly hunkered down on the floor and the car started off again.

I wondered whether it was very far to the secret location. And if so, what if I were late for my meeting with Kate? Would I dare call her again and put Julia at risk?

I was getting more and more uneasy and decided to put such thoughts out of my mind as there was nothing I could do about it just then. I tried to think myself back to calmness by calling to mind the first time I had met my patient three weeks before, with no idea of the can of worms I was getting myself into . . .

11

If only I had given the little man in the bow tie a more modest answer . . . That was another of the key turning points in my life, but I was too full of adrenaline at the time to notice. I had just come from a complicated operation to remove a lipoma the size of a golf ball and was relishing one of those moments swollen with godhead we neurosurgeons sometimes have and don't talk about. You walk on sunshine along the corridors on your way to give the relatives the good news, an almighty being with the gift of life. Two things alone kept me going after Rachel's death: love of Julia and that fleeting and awesome feeling of power. Now that it's all over, I must confess with shame that I nurtured the latter more than the former. Another entry on my list of regrets.

I had finished talking to the family and was about ready to take a slide when the little man in the bow tie knocked on my ­consulting-room door. He had wizened skin, tortoiseshell glasses astride a hook nose and an unmistakable professorial air.

“Dr. Evans, may I have a word? I don't have an appointment.”

He gave me a business card with a university logo , which I am not at liberty to disclose. I invited him to sit down and we had a little polite chitchat before he could bring himself to get down to brass tacks.

“I would like you to take a quick look at this MRI scan, if you would be so kind,” he said, and opened an expensive leather briefcase to hand me a dog-eared envelope.

I withdrew four large transparencies and put them on the viewbox. I frowned at the sight of the lumpy gray blotch in which I recognized the shape of my oldest and worst enemy.

“Frontoparietal glioblastoma multiforme. A real son of a bitch, it would appear. What's its growth rate?”

“Check the dates. The four were taken two days apart.”

I carefully ordered them by the numbers under the name.

“Who's the patient?”

“The husband of a former student of mine. A brilliant and exceptional woman.”

“And the physician?”

“I would rather not say. You see, she needs a second opinion and was unable to come to speak to you.”

I studied the scan for a good while. She needed a second opinion, all right. She wanted somebody to tell her it was all a mistake, that the cancer that was going to kill her husband was no more than a screwup by the machine, or that it was being reabsorbed, or there was some experimental treatment in Switzerland that would kiss it and make it better.

But there were no screwups, no reabsorption and no miracle cures. It was thank you and good night.

“Well, whoever this R. Wade may be, he is lucky, if you can call it that. The growth doesn't appear to be especially quick. Unfortunately the good news ends there. He'll likely lose his speech faculty within a couple of months. And he'll be dead inside a year.”

The little man calmly wiped his glasses on a silk handkerchief that matched his bow tie. In all likelihood, he had already heard this many times before. He folded the handkerchief very carefully and tucked it into his lapel pocket. He blinked shortsightedly a couple of times, put on his glasses and looked me in the eye.

“Would you operate on him?”

And that is where I blew it.

“Of course. Although it will be high-risk and the results far from spectacular. I couldn't buy him much time.”

“What about the speech faculty?”

“I believe, and this is no more than a conditional estimate, that the part of the tumor located between the Wernicke's and Broca's areas can be removed.”

“Conditional upon?”

“Upon seeing the patient, studying his symptoms and following proper procedure. I understand you want to do a friend a favor, but this is no way to go about it.”

He calmly nodded in agreement. It was what he'd expected to hear.

“Thank you very much, Dr. Evans. You have been most kind.”

The morning after, my boss called me into her office. My consulting room is usually spick-and-span, a habit my adoptive father inculcated in me by example and many a night without dinner. Stephanie's desk was a jungle of papers, medical magazines and job reports. She sat barricaded behind that mound of paper and rattled her teeth with a pen.

“We're off to see Meyer,” she said, standing up as soon as she saw me.

“The prince of darkness? What in heaven's name
is going on here, Stephanie?”

“You tell me.”

I had to trot to keep pace with her on the way to the elevator. Although she has short legs, my boss moved them at great speed when she was angry, and just then she was seething. She had no clue what was up, and if there's one thing my boss hated, it was being out of the loop.

We went up to the floor, the one with carpets, rubber plants, patchouli air freshener and Kenny G's sax as mood music. I seldom went there but always asked myself the same question: how could anybody stand working for more than a couple of hours under that
combination without going mental? The plain answer is: they can't. All hospital execs are deranged and devote every living minute to making our work more efficient and prices more competitive. By “efficient” I mean cheap, and by “competitive,” obscenely exorbitant.

Meyer's secretary ushered us in, and he was waiting for us behind a mahogany desk big enough to play tennis on. Robert Meyer was the classic product of an Ivy League MBA program, full of himself and of bright ideas that went down great in the annual report but bombed in the operating theater. You want to know when health care went to hell in a handbasket in this country? When they took doctors out of management and put bean counters such as Meyer in charge. Ask yourselves why an MRI scan costs one quarter in France of what it does in the home of the brave.

“Dr. Wong, Dr. Evans. Please come in. David, I believe you've already met . . .”

Beside him was the little man in the bow tie, who shook my hand shyly. After the introductions, the visitor explained which patient he represented.

“He wants you to operate on him, David.”

They all gawked at me: Stephanie in perplexity and with envy verging on hatred, Meyer with towering greed, mentally calculating how much he would milk out of that tremendous stroke of luck, and the little man in calm expectation.

I felt faint. Luckily I was sitting down, or I might have fallen over somewhat unprofessionally.

“Why me?”

“He will tell you everything. Naturally the whole process entails some inconvenient security and confidentiality measures.”

“We will gladly embrace them,” Meyer hastened to say. “Right, David?”

I can tell when I'm being given an order and was too shocked to quibble.

“Of course.”

“Well said. Dr. Evans is our big star.”

He bared an enormous row of teeth and slapped me on the back, twice, perfectly camouflaging the fact we cannot stand each other. He thought I was a loose cannon and a bleeding heart. I think I've made my thoughts clear.

“So could you see him today?”

“Is he . . . is he here?” I asked stupidly.

The little man in the bow tie grinned at my innocence.

“As I have said, Dr. Evans, there will be certain extraordinary measures.”

An hour later I entered the White House by the servants' entrance for the first time.

It is a strange and unreal feeling to have the world's most important man ask you for help, and all the more so when you have to slink in to avoid prying eyes, like a thief in the night.

“All the journalists are in the press conference, but just in case, we will take you along a slightly unorthodox route,” the agent beside me said.

We crossed a courtyard and a well-lit service corridor. Then another courtyard flooded with the smell of good cooking and the noise of food being prepared, up to a room with palms planted in big alabaster pots. We had crossed paths on the way with some of the maintenance staff and uniformed guards, but nobody else.

“Wait a minute,” the agent said.

He popped his head through one side door, then another. Finally we went along a gigantic corridor fitted with wall-to-wall gold-trimmed red carpets. We passed by a door with a brass plate inlaid with black letters saying “Doctor's Office,” although we didn't stop there, but at the following door.

“This is the Map Room,” the man said curtly. “We'll wait here.”

Although the room was full of chairs, I remained standing in the middle. The agent stood by the door, legs astride, his bull neck pointing skyward. The strong silent pose I had seen in a thousand movies, and I wondered whether he was simply imitating the way he thought an agent was meant to stand or whether it came naturally.

I was tempted to ask but kept quiet. Before Rachel died I used to try to raise a smile out of those I met. A joke, a funny story, a wisecrack. She would see me make an effort with waiters, receptionists and cab drivers, and award points depending on the scale of difficulty and attainment. Believe me, that was a high-stakes game in Washington. I know nowhere else in the world where people have turned rudeness into an art form.

Rachel would have given me top score for that agent. But she was no longer with us and I had lost the will to play, so all I did was shoot the breeze. My surroundings overwhelmed me. Wood, silver, satin. Everything about the place was designed to overawe visitors.

My hosts overawed me for a long while, at the end of which a bald, broad-shouldered sixtysomething man with firm callused hands entered the room.

“Captain Hastings, chief of the White House medical staff. This way, Dr. Evans.”

I followed him through the adjoining door and into a small lobby with two doors. The first led to two consulting rooms which the doctor showed off to me. In the second one, which was next to his office, an old chart with a diagram of the heart and lungs in vertical section that was hung up over a stretcher caught my eye, and I walked across to examine it.

“You like it?” Hastings said in a friendly voice.

“There was one exactly like it in my father's consulting room. I know, because it had the same typo on the subclavian vein.”

Hastings smiled and rapped the mistake twice with a long bony finger.

“A memento of happier days. More straightforward and more humane.”

I nodded. I liked that guy. He reminded me very much of the old Dr. Evans. Right then I missed him dearly.

“What's your specialty, Captain?”

“Internal medicine. It's been an essential job requirement for years.”

“Are you in the army?”

“Navy. Each of the five services provides a doctor to the eighteen acres.”

Seeing my puzzled look, he hastened to add:

“It's the term of endearment we use for the complex,” he said, pointing all around him. “Come, let's make ourselves comfortable.”

“Are you in sole charge of this?” I asked, surprised to see the place so empty.

“Not at all. I have ordered the rest of the staff to take part in an emergency drill this morning. I wanted you and me to talk alone.”

“Anyone would think you were all ashamed of me, Dr. Hastings.”

We sat in a large but chock-full office. A mahogany desk wedged between bookcases with heaps of books took up the middle of the room, lit up by the daylight pouring in from the Rose Garden. But a smiling skeleton hanging from an old hat rack stole the show.

“That's Fritz. We go way back, to the days when I started off. I won him playing poker with a medical orderly in Pearl Harbor, who in turn had won him off his boss in Korea. He swore blind it was the remains of a Nazi killed in Berlin at the end of the war.”

“And you believe that?”

“He's too short.”

“They also had short Nazis. At least one of them,” I said, raising my right arm in an unmistakable imitation.

Hastings pulled a sly smile.

“Well, that would be poetic justice. Adolf's bones hanging from a hat rack in the White House!”

We both had a good laugh.

“I'm glad you have a sense of humor, Dr. Evans. It's a trait we greatly appreciate in the service, despite everything they say. Without it, a job like this would never get done.”

“A lot of burning the midnight oil, I guess.”

“And then some. When I tell people what I do the first thing I hear are sighs of envy. People think it's all parties, travel and power. But the reality is much harsher. We live for and by this administra
tion, Dr. Evans. We go with the patient to the asshole of the world, Shitistan, and make sure he sleeps, drinks bottled water, that the heat doesn't get the better of him in the middle of the day's fourth speech. And all in eighteen-hour shifts, sorting out all the migraines and sprained ankles that can befall the rogues' gallery of political staff and journalists. And always, always, we fear the inevitable, the moment when somebody in the crowd will stand up, revolver in hand, and make our worst nightmares come true.”

“Inevitable, you say?”

“Among the Secret Service there's an old saying about assassinating the president: it's not ‘if' but ‘when.' ”

“Jeez, they won't be getting any medals for optimism.”

“It's their way of preparing for the worst. So far we've been lucky. Remember the grenade they threw at the last guy?”

I nodded. The Texan was at a rally and the device landed at the foot of his podium but did not go off.

“Well, that's one of dozens of threats dealt with every day that we don't talk about, as long as they're kept hush-hush,” Hastings added, his face drawn. “Luck will run out sooner or later. We live on borrowed time and merely struggle to ensure it doesn't happen on our watch.”

There was an awkward silence. We both had to broach the topic, but Hastings couldn't bring himself to do it, so I made the first move.

“Why am I here?”

“You're here against my better judgment, Dr. Evans,” the medic said, looking me in the eyes with an expression that mixed distaste with apology. “The president's health care has always been the services' prerogative. If it were up to me, the chief surgeon at the National Military Medical Center in Bethesda would treat the patient.”