Point of Balance (15 page)

Kate

Night had fallen over Silver Spring. A light drizzle sprayed droplets on Kate's back while she searched through the trunk for a canvas bag the size of a vanity case.

She put it under her jacket, where she had also secreted the holster for her SIG Sauer P229. She crossed the street and calmly strolled along the sidewalk like the girl next door coming home after a long day. She lolloped past the house, discreetly checked nobody was around and hopped over the white picket fence.

Heading for the little backyard shed, she ran down the slope until she reached the wall at the bottom. The grass was drenched with rain, and she nearly slipped on the last stretch. She came to a halt with her shoulder pummeled against the plastic framework. The outdoor lights had not come on, because the Evanses were environmentally friendly. They used no timers or sensors, but turned them on manually when they were home. Even so, Kate cast a dim shadow on the lawn in the faint glow from the neighbors' yard. The house next door was quite far off, and there was little chance they'd seen her trespass on her brother-in-law's property. But they might spot her now and call the cops, who'd send around a patrol car. In which case the kidnappers would think David had called them. That could not happen.

I have to open this right now.

The shed was padlocked, but with some imported crap bought at Home Depot rather than a good old Master Lock. Her father would have had a fit had he seen it. Kate took five seconds flat to pick the lock with the clip off a pen. One advantage of having a hardware salesman for a father.

She closed the door behind her on her way in but didn't turn
on the light. Instead, she grabbed a little flashlight to see her way around. She pushed aside a sack of fertilizer and found the automatic irrigation hose. The Evanses had an electric sprinkler, which they plugged into a socket in the shed. She unplugged the sprinkler and took the canvas bag from inside her jacket. She unzipped it and withdrew a small gray device, fitted with three antennas and a variable transformer. It was a standard signal jammer installed in temporary residences or cars when protecting people at risk from car bombings. It blocked any radio frequency signal within a fifty-yard radius. Radios, cell phones, GPS, the works. For the president they used a special SUV packed with sophisticated apparatus that set up a bubble for a two-hundred-yard radius around the presidential motorcade. The only signals that could get through were from authorized personnel's phones and Secret Service comms.

Kate placed the jammer's antennas upright, changed the voltage setting from 120 to 110, plugged it in and eagerly waited for the six LEDs to change from flashing orange to a steady lime green. She looked at her service BlackBerry and the newly bought Nokia phone. Both displayed “NO SERVICE.” That blocker was way cruder than the barrage-jammer SUV, but it did the job.

She switched off the flashlight, opened the shed door a crack and looked at the house. Unless her intuition failed her, White's cameras had to be connected to a SIM card to beam images directly. A pro wouldn't hook them up to the victim's own Internet connection, because detecting them would be a piece of cake and the upload speed would depend on the service provider. Kate could easily have checked it out if she had the hidden-device scanner she used at the agency, but hers had broken down the week before and the techs had yet to send her a replacement.

It was double or nothing. The kidnappers would know something was up by now. They would be looking at monitors full of white noise and wondering what had brought that about. And even though they knew David was at the hospital, it was only a matter of time before they sent somebody around.

She would have a few minutes, tops.

“Heigh-ho, let's go!” she whispered, as she always did before going on assignment. The mantra bucked her up and doubled as a spell to ward off bad luck.

She opened the door and ran toward the house. She reached the back wall in a few strides. She crouched by the ivy-covered wall and rooted around in the bougainvillea patch for the false stone, where David had told her he kept the back door key. She couldn't find it in the dark, but before she went any farther, she tried the door handle and it opened first time.

So typical of David
, Kate thought.
They'd have had no trouble filling your house with mikes, I bet.

The back door led to a covered porch with a couple of sofas facing each other on a parquet floor, where the Evanses would play backgammon of an evening while Julia pattered around the yard.

That's where it had happened. The night Rachel had worked late and Kate had one drink too many.

Kate looked away. Merely conjuring up the memory made her feel guilty. He had been a complete gentleman and had never brought it up, but things had never been the same again between them.

She opened the patio door and went into the living room. She couldn't help looking at the mantelpiece. Rachel and David's wedding photo was the same as the one in her folks' sitting room. Kate had been to weddings and seen her fair share of brides. They always insisted on being the MCs and belles of their own ball. But not her sister, who had eyes only for her newly wedded husband.

David had green eyes and blue-black hair. Hair to sing about, Rachel had said. In the last few months his temples had gone gray, and lines wrinkled his strong, gaunt face. David had aged five years overnight when his wife died. On the face of it, she was his only link to happiness.

You loved her
,
Kate thought, and felt as if she was about to burst into tears.
You truly loved her, which makes it all the harder to forgive
you, David. I wish somebody would look at me the way you two looked at each other. If I had someone to love like that, I wouldn't let anything happen to them.

Next to the wedding pic was a framed photo of David and Julia. They were in a park. She sat on his shoulders while he had his mouth wide open with a silly look on his face, as he pretended to bite her knee. Julia was splitting her sides laughing.

But he's a great father who can give Julia more hugs and kisses in a day than Dad used to give us in a whole year. Absentminded and a bit of a mess, though. True, he could spend more time with his daughter. What father couldn't nowadays? But when they're together there
's nothing else in the world. Julia gazes at him in endless wonder. And David tries. He learns the name of each TV character by heart; he tells her stories. All in his clumsy way, but he really tries to bond with her.

She came away from the mantelpiece and wagged her head. Too many conflicting feelings plucked at her heartstrings in all directions at once.

I have to quit feeling this way. Come on, stay focused, Kate. We have to find traces of her. Fallback options, clues.

“I need to know what she was like, David. I need a photo.”

“I don't have any,” he'd answered. “I took the odd one last week with her in it, while she played with Julia, but I hadn't downloaded it to my computer yet.”

“We need to think of some way you can send it to me by phone.”

“I wish, but my iPhone's photo gallery has been deleted. It was the first thing I thought to check last night when I still thought she was the one who had snatched Julia.”

Kate crossed the living room and the kitchen to come to Svetlana's room. The smell of bleach still floated over every surface. David was not exaggerating when he said they must have scrubbed down the length and breadth of that room. She checked the bed, the chest, took the drawers out of it and looked underneath. She examined the floor in the fitted wardrobe, the desk and the wastepaper basket.

Empty.

Like everything else.

She tried to picture Svetlana in that room: asleep, studying—or pretending to, lying in bed, planning her next move. How to win over a family bereaved by Rachel's death. Had the kidnappers threatened her, or had she done it for money?

Well, Svetlana, you reap what you sow. This is all that's left of you now: a whiff of bleach.

She walked to the hallway, where the basement door was concealed below the staircase that led upward. She carefully aimed the flashlight at the floor to make sure she didn't trip up on her way down the creaky wooden steps but kept the beam away from the windows. She didn't want to turn on any lamps that might alert the kidnappers somebody else was home.

She glanced toward the back wall. The bikes were on the rack rather than blocking the way, and Svetlana's corpse was gone. There was nothing in the place where David said he'd seen the body the night before, apart from the smell of bleach again. She dabbed at the wall with her fingers. The old paintwork looked damp and was peeling away from the spot where they must have propped up the body.

Just then a rectangle of light shone through the narrow basement windows. Kate cocked her head to one side, listened and was immediately on the alert. The car didn't drive by, as a couple had done in the short while she'd been down there. The wheels halted only yards away. Somebody killed the engine and footsteps could be heard on the pavement.

It was them.

19

The cell began to ring before I was back in the office. I picked up the phone as I shut the door and leaned against it.

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“Dave, right now I'm having a hard time believing you,” White said in a voice as devoid of feeling as an answering machine. It made my skin turn cold. “You've had a one-on-one with the Patient all afternoon and now this happens.”

“Listen, you already heard the ruckus with my bosses. I don't know what's at the bottom of it; they've told me nothing. I'm as surprised as you are.”

“I don't care. You are now a dud, Dave, and I am an incredibly pragmatic man. So . . .”

He hung up.

As quick, easy and neat as that. That's how thin the dividing line was between Julia and death: a click on a cell.

I was transfixed, unable to move. In a few minutes I had gone from fear to astonishment, from astonishment to rage and from rage back to fear. That emotional white-knuckle ride wreaked havoc with my nerves. I wondered whether it was all part of White's plan to rope me in and entangle even more in his scheming. I was a pinball launched up a slippery slope, in permanent danger of falling. I
could score the odd point but had no freedom of movement. That click hammered home the certainty that it didn't matter what I did or how far gone I was in that game: sooner or later, the ball would fall into the drain.

White would never let us out alive.

Pinballs have one built-in property, however: flippers and bumpers won't destroy them. To save my daughter I had to be ready to roll with the punches. As long as the ball stayed in play, Kate would have a chance to find Julia.

He'd hung up, but I knew White was still there, listening.

“Wait, wait, please,” I heard myself plead. “I know I can make it work. I can fix it if you help me.”

I kept quiet and waited. White took more than a minute to call back, but the cell finally rang again.

“What do you want, Dave?”

“If I call the White House switchboard, it'll take me hours to get through to the chief of medical staff. And he may not want to take the call. I need his direct line.”

“And what do I gain?”

“We're tight, White. I'm sure you don't have the time or means to set up another . . . operation, or whatever you call it.”

A keyboard clicked in the background. A few seconds later he gave me two numbers, for a landline and a cell.

“Don't call from your handset. Use your office line. Got that?”

There was something in the signal, then, something they could trace if I dialed an official line like the White House. I wondered whether the electronic countermeasures could do more than detect that White had tapped my line. Maybe even detect where the signal led.

“Okay,” I answered.

“And another thing, David . . . There wouldn't be anybody at your home, would there?”

Shit. White obviously suspects something is up. What have you done, Kate?

“What? No, of course not.”

“Great, then there's nothing to worry about, is there?” he said with fake jollity. “You've got ten minutes to convince Hastings and get your patient back. Otherwise, we're through.”

He hung up again.

I dawdled over my next move. Should I try to warn Kate or go ahead with White's orders?

It would be stupid to get in touch with her right away. White will surely be watching, listening, keeping a closer eye on me than ever. I can't let it show I know my house has been broken into
, I thought.

I dialed Hastings's cell, but it went to voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message and called his landline. I let it ring until it went through to the switchboard.

It'
s really late. What if he's gone home for the day, won't be back till tomorrow and turns off his cell until then? No, that's impossible, no doctor would do that. There must be some other reason.

I dialed again. Finally, somebody picked up.

“Medical staff. Hastings speaking.”

“Captain Hastings, David Evans here.”

“Dr. Evans?” He sounded surprised, and a little guilty. “How did you get this number?”

Good question. From a psycho killer who wants me to whack your boss.

“I Googled it. Tell me, what's the problem?”

“Didn't . . . Didn't your bosses tell you?”

“Yes, they told me I got the chop. The decent thing would have been for you to inform me personally, Captain.”

“I'm sorry, Dr. Evans. I didn't think it through.”

And into the bargain you avoided the hassle of giving me the bad news yourself.

“Sincerely, I am at a loss. Would you care to explain why?”

“I am not authorized to disclose details of my patient's decision to you, doctor.”

“You went to a lot of trouble to get me to the White House
and persuaded me to take on a patient and an operation I wanted nothing to do with. And now they cut me loose with no more than a phone call.”

“Doctor, please. You must understand my position. I shouldn't even be taking this call.”

“And I shouldn't have been a mile underground this afternoon.”

The captain snapped to attention. I could hear him square his shoulders.

“If you mean to reveal such knowledge acquired in the course of professional practice, that would be a breach of ethics. And a dereliction of duty to your country, too, Dr. Evans.”

“I'm not about to reveal anything, Captain, I'm not a moron. I'm simply reminding you I've already gone beyond the call. I'm asking you for the same professional courtesy.”

Hastings uttered a long sigh.

“Fair's fair. I'll tell you what happened if you promise me a favor. I need the MRI scan you did for the president today. I believe you have it.”

“Be right with you.”

I had the Patient's scan in a flash drive in my pocket. The request allowed me to sift through my pockets and put Kate's cell in my top desk drawer while I pretended to look for the drive. White might have planted a camera in my office, so I had to take good care. I tried to thumb a message at top speed on the BlackBerry. I had only a few seconds.

“Dr. Evans? Are you there?”

“Yes, yes, one second.”

“I have to run, Evans.”

WATCH OUT. I THINK THEY KNOW SOMEBODY'S IN MY HOUSE. DAVID.

“Wait, I'm looking for it.”

I hit the
SEND
button, withdrew my hand from the drawer and fought back the urge to sigh in relief. I hoped the message would help put Kate on her guard, although she already knew her presence
there would raise suspicion. The thought of what my sister-in-law might be having to endure drove me crazy, but at that juncture, I had Hastings to consider.

“Now I've got it, Captain,” I went on, pretending to have found the drive at last. “I'll gladly send it over with the rest of the case notes.”

“No need, I sent the surgeon over to pick it up an hour ago, he should be with you shortly. I must ask for your cooperation, Dr. Evans.”

“Sure. Just tell me what happened.”

“The First Lady changed her mind. She spoke to another doctor who convinced her he was the best bet.”

“What do you mean? But she said—”

“You have a daughter, right? What would you do if she were ill?”

“I would do the best I could for her. Whatever it took,” I said, after a pause.

“Well, that's what's happened.”

“I want to talk to the First Lady,” I said, my voice a little too strained.

“The First Lady is at an official reception for the French prime minister. She can't talk.”

“But if I could just—”

Hastings cut me short. “Listen here, Dr. Evans. The family has made its choice and there is nothing you can do about it. Take it like a professional.”

And without further ado, he hung up.

I could not believe it. They had hung me out to dry, without even giving me a chance to defend myself. I was stunned, but the surprise I felt was nothing compared to what was waiting for me when I read White's next text.

GOOD JOB, DAVE. IT'S ALL GOING ACCORDING TO PLAN.