Point of Balance (12 page)

Somewhere in Columbia Heights

Mr. White checked the time in the top right-hand corner of his main monitor and scowled. Dr. Evans had already been gone more than forty minutes, something that totally bucked his normal behavior. Obviously, the whole situation he was immersed in was completely abnormal, but David's personality pattern predicted that in a crisis he would stick even more closely to his routine.

The personality patterns White used to manipulate his subjects consisted of a set of tables and flow charts. After a preliminary study, the subject's patterns were configured using the full range of personality types.

Those tools were infallible. He didn't get them from a psychology manual or anyone else
. He had set them up himself after years of study, of direct observation, and above all with a callous, surgical understanding of human nature. If White had shown his results to the scientific community, they would have hailed him as a genius. At least until somebody asked what methods he had used to reach his conclusions, or what use he put them to.

His total lack of scruples had allowed him to experiment on live subjects. Life upon life had been destroyed in the construction of those diagrams. For White, they were his main reason for living. He lived to modify, tweak and expand them. He had begun to chart personality patterns in the psychology department at Stanford. The classes bored him;
the professors spoke too slowly for him. He had done most of the reading for his degree requirements before he finished his freshman year. He showed his tutor a draft of his first pattern at the start of his sophomore year. He had identified the personality traits of a concrete individual, as well as the factors or triggers that would lead said individual to commit a specific act.

“Emotions are changes which prepare the individual for action,” he told the professor. “If we stir the right emotions in the individual, we can steer his acts from the outside. By remote control, so to speak.”

The professor had gaped at him in horror. He shredded the sheets White had shown him and really lashed out at him.

“
Psychology is not about aberrations of that sort. It is the study of human experience to improve it, not to subject others! This is absurd, useless and barbaric!”

White did not listen to the end. He walked out and left him with the words in his mouth. He had already foreseen that reaction. And much else.

Eleven days later, the professor—a jolly and kind family man, a lover of wine and poetry—killed himself in his living room, in front of his wife and three children. The detectives on the case were stumped: the death made no sense at all. The man had no debts, no drug or gambling problems. They searched for lovers and dirty laundry, without success. Finally they shelved the case, to the vexation of family and friends.

White smiled. He had foreseen that, too. The personality type he had taken to the office was the professor's own. He had spent the following days exploiting the man's weaknesses until he drove him to his death. He wasn't altogether satisfied, though. He had estimated he could make the professor commit suicide inside a week. The delay was doubtless down to small errors in the subject's personality pattern, defects that could be fixed over time. New specimens would be needed for that.

College had nothing to offer him now. He dropped out and traveled around Europe and Asia, to build up his library of personalities and develop his system to control them, to take the most unexpected people to extremes. An Italian bishop, an NGO volunteer in Bombay, a Danish
cloistered nun, a Vietnamese grade school teacher. A Basque terrorist, a Corsican drug runner, a Swedish underground bookie, the madam of the most exclusive brothel in Moscow. They had all been his unwitting subjects, and they had all died by their own hand, or that of others, after they had committed horrendous deeds.

But that would not suffice for White. He wanted to plot the complete map of human will. Not simply to have the definitive remote control, as he justified it to himself. Deep down in the process was a secret yearning to know what made him tick himself. He was a monster, and he knew it. And like all monsters he was prey to his own private loneliness. If he could hold sway over other people's emotions and empathy, perhaps he could understand the things that were missing, the huge void in his own heart, which he could fill only with vanity, by notching up one hit after another.

But for that he needed money. White's parents had at first given way over his “sabbaticals” in Europe, although in the end they got fed up and cut him off. So White had had no option but to hawk his peculiar wares among people even less scrupulous than himself.

His first client was a capo in the Neapolitan Camorra who had been eagerly seeking a certain writer who had published a book about his clan's doings. White told him to slap a million euros on the table, for which he would hand him the writer'
s head. The mobster had laughed, because plenty before White had tried to track down the writer and failed. But as he had nothing to lose, he agreed.

Six weeks later, a uniformed cop entered a bleak restaurant in Naples's dire Scampia neighborhood. He was carrying a blue Samsonite wheelie bag. He went to the back of the joint, where two enormous gorillas stood in his path. He addressed the fat, bald man behind them, who was eating ravioli with fried sage leaves by candlelight.

“Your American friend has entrusted me to give you this. The padlock code is one-six-one,” said the cop, who couldn't help but show his fear.

The mobster waved the cop away. One of the gorillas opened the case and lifted its contents into the flickering light. The capo wrinkled his nose at the smell but tucked back into his ravioli, wolfing it down.
The day after, a numbered account in the Cayman Islands, belonging to a company whose sole shareholder was Mr. White, received a tax-free transfer of a million euros.

He congratulated himself on the operation. He would have preferred to approach the writer and persuade him to give himself up. That would have been a real achievement. But he was still working at his craft, so he had had to resort to taking on two bodyguards and a legal secretary, all of whom were inexorably burned up in the process.

But for all that, White was happy. He had found a way to meld his passion with satisfying his material needs. For the first two years he had to nose out clients, but as time went by and results came in, they ended up waiting in line for his discreet, costly but very effective services. He was sought after not only by criminals but also by the shadiest branches of intelligence agencies across the world. White took extreme care with the latter and always kept a triple firewall between the client and himself. Many of the straw men he sent into the field were tortured and bumped off in his clients
' fruitless efforts to uncover a contractor's identity.

White cared little about that. His sole concern was to be able to pick and choose his contracts, depending on whether they allowed him to enhance his diagrams and hone his tools.

He had come to make those tools infallible . . . until now.

White opened the iPad app that controlled his sound system and played his favorite tune, the one he listened to time and again, compulsively, while he plotted his subjects' patterns—Leonard Cohen's “The Future.
” The singer's warm, hoarse and silky voice boomed out from the speakers.

White hummed quietly as he switched from the app to the photo album and clicked on the David Evans file. It held more than a thousand snaps, all taken between the day he had agreed to operate on the president and that very morning. White cracked a devious smile when he noticed that some had even picked up the Secret Service detectives who had tailed David to make sure he was kosher. If only they knew.

He checked out the last photo taken, a screengrab from a camera planted in an electric socket in the kitchen. In it David thoughtfully
gazed at the empty booster seat before him, the chair in which he sat his daughter every morning. Everything had gone according to plan until then. He had had to break contact for the time David spent with the target, but that, although irksome, was inevitable. All tracking systems were up and running again.

But there was nothing to track. The neurosurgeon had left his cell on his office desk and had now been absent for forty-seven minutes.

The pattern indicated he wouldn't normally be gone that long. The pattern indicated he would never be without his cell.

Unquestionably, those were normal acts, in another person, in another situation. But not in this one, not with David. The pattern said not, and the pattern was always right.

“Was I wrong about you, David? Will we have to play hardball?”

He glanced at the screen that monitored the inside of the cubbyhole where they were holding Julia Evans. The girl was sitting down, rocking back and forth, her eyes glued to a spot on the wall in front of her.

“You need control, David. Control and stimulus.”

White reached for his phone and called one of his minions.

“It's me. I have a creeping suspicion something is up. I need you to go to the snack bar and cast an eye on our doctor friend.”

15

We let a couple of minutes go by in silence to allow Kate to cool down. I made no apologies, no excuses, for involving her, nor did I bemoan the unfairness of what life had thrown at us. Even if, at whatever price, we managed to save Julia, everything had already gone to pot. I would be expelled by the Board of Physicians and Kate from the Secret Service. If we didn't land ourselves in jail. We had conspired to commit the felony of concealment, which in Kate's case would also entail high treason.

And nevertheless, to feel sorry about it was no use. White had happened to us, like a cancer or a storm on the high seas. To think,
Why me?
—top of the self-pity charts—was ludicrous. Kate could accuse me all she wanted, but I had no choice. And neither did she.

We had to protect Julia above all else.

When Kate had collected herself enough to look me in the face again, something had changed inside her. It was a subtle change and I wouldn't have caught on had I not been expecting it. But it was there, hidden behind her eyes, although I couldn't put a finger on what it was exactly just yet.

Nor did I have time. Kate began to talk in a cold, professional voice. Once she had processed what she was letting herself in for, the part of her brain set aside for such matters took over. She asked me
for dates, places, details. She made no note of what I said, because there could be no record of what I told her. She merely committed it all to memory.

“David, I want you to understand something,” she told me. “I have received basic training as a federal agent, specifically for the Secret Service, but I have no experience in dealing with kidnappings.”

“Don't call on anybody else, Kate. Promise me.”

“That's the problem, David. I'm all alone. This will not end well.”

“You have a better idea? You trust anybody enough to tell them the score without the whole of Washington knowing within the hour?”

She studied the toes of her shoes and sought the answer we had both known to begin with.

“No. This is too big. Whoever unmasks it will be made. And Julia will simply be a footnote in their report. I can't count on anybody.”

“I can help you,” I broke in.

“No, you can't. You're the girl's father, you have no training, and if they see me near you they'll suspect in a jiffy. We cannot rule out that one of them is watching you.”

“Not only that. They have done something to my phone. They listen in on my calls, and I think they can even hear what I'm saying. And they can send me texts from screen alerts.”

“A remote operator must have overridden the handset.” She nodded thoughtfully. “That way the kidnappers don't need to plant a homing device, listening gear and security cameras on the subject. Your iPhone does all that for them. They must have the hands-free mike, the camera and the GPS chip permanently activated. Shit, they don't even have to bother fitting batteries. The guy they're spying on kindly recharges the battery every night.”

“Now that you mention it, lately my battery's been running down a lot sooner.”

“Because of all the apps they run without you knowing. Cocksuckers . . .”

“That tell you anything about them?”

Kate bit her lips, worried.

“For starters, that they're very good. And they really know their shit. You say your cell switched off before the agents picked you up?”

“It didn't go out in a normal way. The screen went all weird on me.”

“I don't know how they did it, but I do know why. A set of electronic countermeasures surrounds the president. Some are public knowledge, such as the frequency hoppers which stop anyone from setting off a bomb by remote control when the presidential motorcade drives by. And others are classified, including a gadget which scans a room for surveillance devices. That's why they switched off the cell, because otherwise we'd have been wise to them.”

“So there is something screwy about it.”

“If I could lay my hands on that phone and take it to my buddies at Computer Crime, we'd know far more about these guys in a matter of hours. Hacking into that sort of device is very hard work. Only a few people in the world are up to such a job, and it can't be done without leaving a trace. But taking your cell with me is out of the question. Unless . . .”

“What?”

“It would be useful for me to know if you lost sight of your phone for some length of time recently, if you've had it serviced or something.”

I thought back for a moment, racking my brains.

“About a couple of weeks ago, I woke up one morning and my phone would not switch on. I called Apple and they sent me a new one that day. I restored it from backup and thought no more of it.”

“They didn't tamper with your phone, then. You remember the messenger?”

“No, because . . .” I slapped my thigh in frustration when I realized I'd been duped. “It was Svetlana who signed for the package.”

“Cool it, David.”

“What do you mean, cool it? I gave that woman a home! I left my daughter in her care, for God's sake!”

“It's not as if you ever paid much attention to what went on in your own home, did you?” she said, unable to hold back.

The gibe jolted me. There, it was out. The conversation we had never had but was always brewing between us. All she had wanted to say—and I had ducked—floated in the five feet of dingy passageway in which we were ensconced, a slashing and forbidding, black-winged bird. It preyed on the underbelly of the words, and gorged on my guilt and remorse. We had to face up to it, sooner or later. But this was not the time.

“Go on, blame me for that too, why don't you, if it makes you feel better? But sarcasm won't bring your sister back. Or Svetlana. They killed one of their own, needlessly. Ruthlessly. What won't they do to my daughter, who's in their way?”

Kate huffed and turned aside. Finally she opted to change the subject.

“This morning, when you woke up . . . Did you go down to the basement?”

I shook my head. “To see if the body was still there? No, I didn't have the balls,” I admitted, ashamed.

“There's no way they'll have left the corpse down there. If they took that much trouble to clean her room, it was for a reason.”

“The nanny's the one link to White.”

“Exactly. So they weren't about to gift us a whole body. By trying so hard to eliminate clues, they've marked out the trail for us.”

“Via Svetlana?”

“I need to follow her tracks. At some stage they'll lead us to White or his mob.”

“How will you go about that?”

“I have to go to your house, David.”

My heart leaped when I heard that. The almost sleepless night I had spent agonizing over what my next move would be, how to get Julia back without committing murder, had left its mark. After I
got White's text in which he made it plain he'd heard me whisper, I was scared of my own shadow at home. I was sure they had planted cameras and God knows what else in there, and that way they could tell if I so much as farted.

“Kate, there are cameras in my house. White made me double sure of that when he called this morning. He could see me, and if you walk in he'll know we've spoken. And Julia will be dead.”

“Think about it, David. We have exactly two leads that can take us to White. The phone's too risky. All we have left is to ferret out some clue about Svetlana in your house.”

“It's very dicey,” I said, refusing to yield, although I knew she was right.

“It's the only way. I'll have to get in somehow. But you're right about one thing: we can't see each other again until this is over.”

“And how do we keep in touch?”

“Not by using that disposable cell you pilfered from the gangbanger, no way. You'll have to take my personal one,” she said, fiddling with a somewhat outdated BlackBerry. “I've muted it and disabled the vibration, although the screen still lights up when somebody calls. You'll have to take good care with this so White doesn't catch wind of it. Hide it well and check it now and then.”

“What'll you use to call me?”

“I'll buy another cell this evening,” she said, and handed me the BlackBerry. When I took it, she clamped her hand on my wrist and burrowed her eyes into me.

“One more thing, David. Out of respect for my sister's memory and because I love Julia heart and soul, I'll help you bring her home again. But let me make something very clear. I don't know what'll go down between now and Friday, but one thing's for sure. Come what may, I won't let White blackmail you. If we don't have Julia back by the deadline, I'll make a call and they'll pull you from the operation. Got that?”

Her voice was cold, glassy and as sharp as an icy dagger in the ribs. I wanted to argue, appeal to kin and our shared responsibility
for my daughter. But I knew I had already asked her to go way beyond the call of duty. And right then I needed to gain time, above all. So all I said was:

“Roger.”

Then she relaxed her grip and I felt terribly uneasy, because at last I had pinpointed the change I had seen in Kate's eyes.

I was no longer a relative who had let her down.

Now I was a suspect.