Point of Balance (16 page)

Kate

When she spied the submachine gun's outline, that settled matters. She realized that until then she hadn't entirely taken David's word for everything. Not because his explanation seemed to come out of left field, for day in, day out, she dealt with potential threats and assassination attempts on the president—more than ten the year before—that the public never got to know about. And not because his tale sounded far-fetched, either. On the contrary, experience had taught her that the simplest and most convincing stories most often turned out to be bull. No, she hadn't quite believed him because she didn't want it to be true.

Be that as it may, the shadow of a stranger showed up in one of the frosted glass panes next to the door. And in his hands, the menacing contours of a gun. There was another guy with him, or at least that's what Kate guessed, for somebody was forcing a key into the lock.

Kate looked on, peeked out of the basement doorway, and for a moment she thought of going upstairs and trying to escape through one of the windows, but she decided that was playing with fire. It would take time to get there and she would have to break through them, as they were very small. The odds that she would give herself away were too high. Nor could she stay in the basement. A few more seconds and she'd be trapped in there, with nowhere to hide.

I can't risk an exit through the basement windows, not without being able to see exactly how many of them are out there waiting.

Instinctively, she climbed the stairs and walked at a crouch into the living room, treading carefully so as not to make any noise. She gently unholstered her gun and held it in combat-ready stance, at
forty-five degrees to the ground. She had to do her utmost to avoid a shoot-out with the interlopers and would use it only as a last resort.

They can't see me here. If they don
't get back, Julia dies. If they find me, Julia dies.

Behind her she heard the front door open. Kate could feel her breathing calm down and settle. The anxiety and doubts that had assailed her dissipated. Her shoulders straightened, her ears pricked up and her pulse beat more slowly but strongly in her neck, a one-armed drummer playing a funeral march.

The only way out is to retrace my steps and vamoose. Without a single goddamned clue. Shit.

She bridged the three-yard gap to the covered balcony. Maybe it wasn't so bad the kidnappers had shown up. If she got out of there unnoticed, she could follow them or, at worst, scribble down their license plate number.

We'll have Julia back asleep this very night in her bed, instead of in some shithole. All I have to do is make it to my car.

She opened the sliding door, slowly, silently. The rail was very stiff, so Kate had no choice but to lay her gun on the floor and shove the panel with both hands. The prowler's heavy footsteps stomped behind her, in the hallway. She opened the door enough to wriggle out, grabbed the gun and closed it behind her. She managed to get away from the panel just as the other guy came into the living room.

Good. Now for the patio door, then that's it. You're home free.

She stole away from the living room door and squatted as she made her way along, with her back to the outside wall. The patio door was only four yards away, at the other end of the porch, which was enclosed by a waist-high wooden partition and six big glass windows.

Whoever was inside abruptly switched on the living room lamp. An oblong of light lit up the space Kate had vacated only seconds before. A man's face appeared outside, looking in through the window from the other side. He shouted in a foreign language.

Shit!

Kate flattened herself against the wall, with no more cover than the shadow of a metal table. She saw that all that saved her from being spotted was the glow of the living room lamp, which had blinded the man outside and given her some shade. She crawled over to the sofa area, realized her body was nudging the chairs over the parquet and prayed they wouldn't notice.

The man inside was also shouting, although not so loudly and in a much deeper voice. He must have given the guy outside an order, because he shifted and headed for the patio door.

Kate shrank down as best she could and kept tight hold of her gun. She could feel a bead of sweat dribbling down her back and slowed her breathing to a minimum. She was scared but not jumpy. Ensconced between the sofa and the wall, she was at the mercy of two or more foes, and with the odds stacked against her. Despite that, the rushing adrenaline made her feel stronger and more alive than she had been in ages.

The footfalls halted next to Kate, and she felt a chill. The heavy was so close she could have reached out and touched him. He partly turned his back to her as he reached for a pack of cigarettes. She plainly heard the cellophane crackle as he opened it, the rustle of his fingertips on the top, loosening a cigarette, and the striking of a match. She smelled the match, the first puff of tobacco, the gun oil. She saw the hard-bitten look on his face, his huge, callused paws covered in latex gloves, the unmistakable squat, oval shape under the submachine gun barrel.

PP-19 Bizon. Russian job. Expensive and seldom seen outside their special forces and very grim criminal elements in eastern Europe. Para­bellum nine-millimeter ammo. Less of an impact than my MP5 but able to unleash a wall of fire: sixty-four rounds per clip, three times the norm.

If he catches you, that ruffian can rip you in half.

In the same situation on any regular assignment, she would have stood up, jabbed her gun in the suspect's temple before he knew what was happening and arrested him on the spot. But this was not a
regular assignment, nor could she do it by the book. She could only pray the snooper kept on toward the living room, without turning toward her precarious hiding place. It would take only a flick of the living room light switch to reveal her.

Please. Walk. Walk.

The man lurched and Kate's heart leaped. He didn't turn around, however, and entered the house.

It's now or never.

Kate set off from the other side of the sofa and crawled over to the patio door. The intruder had left it ajar, so she could slip out without a sound. She cringed when her body made contact with the soaking-wet grass but didn't dare get up. She couldn't run to the street, because she didn't know whether anybody else was out there. And there was something far more urgent: she couldn't go without deactivating the jammer, or they'd be on to her.

She crawled to the shed, closed the door behind her and yanked out the jammer's cord to turn it off. Then she saw a text from David, sent twenty minutes before.

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

No shit, Sherlock.

She dropped down between the recycling bin and the lawn mower, and shivered with cold, her clothes dripping with sweat.

20

I was still trying to make sense of White's text when the person I hate most in the world opened my office door.

In all fairness, my daughter's kidnapper and his minions now held that title. But Dr. Alvin Hockstetter had worn the laurels for so long it was hard to bump him down to second place.

I distinctly recall the first time I saw him, in the lecture theater at Johns Hopkins, the best hospital in Baltimore, the country and probably the world, too. It was my first day as a resident, and I was one more among a score of youngsters eager to see His Eminence, the “Pioneer of the Brain,” as
Time
magazine had dubbed him. He was of medium but imposing height, and when he passed me by on his way to the lectern, I felt I was a klutz, all elbows and knees beside what back then I took to be the paragon of elegance.

Alvin Hockstetter had two furled caterpillars for eyebrows, slim fingers at the end of long, sturdy arms, and a belly as prominent as his ego. He bounded up to the dais with an alacrity that belied his plumpness and looked at us from behind an oily smile for a few seconds, until he was sure he had our complete and undivided attention.

He began to speak in a practiced baritone that came from deep inside his chest, and dropped one of the smartest lines I've ever heard.

“You know the difference between God and a neurosurgeon? It's that God knows he isn't a neurosurgeon.”

We all fidgeted in our seats and burst into hesitant and awkward laughter. Some of us had grown up in God-fearing small towns in the heartland, and although we might only have been “kinda sorta” devout, the joke still verged on blasphemy. It was also as accurate a description of a neurosurgeon as they come.

“It's funny, but it's no joke. You are in the holy temple of medicine, the Vatican of hospitals. Neurosurgery is its Sistine Chapel. We, my dear novices, are here to fix God's mistakes.”

He pressed a key on the remote he had concealed in his hand and the screen behind him changed to display an MRI scan of a healthy patient alongside one of a patient with a brain tumor.

“Would one of you be so good as to remind us what angiogenesis is?”

No one raised their hand. We were still too awestruck by Hockstetter to dare. We were a penguin colony on the edge of an ice floe, each trusting the next guy would take the plunge first to see whether there were any sharks.

“Come on, take a shot. We've just weaned you off school; all that learning is still fresh. You, for heaven's sake, put your hand down. We're not in grade school, even if you still smell like diapers.”

“Angiogenesis is the process whereby new blood vessels are formed from preexisting ones,” a tremulous colleague said, and put her hand down.

“Exactly. An essential life process. And cancer's top weapon.”

He changed the presentation display to focus on the healthy patient, except that it now showed a video of the same MRI. It zoomed in and switched to a 3D projection of the neurons. One was darker than those around it.

“There you are, my novices. Your Creator's biggest mistake. A minute, insignificant, damaged cell. Any other in its place would trigger apoptosis—cell death; it would fragment and dissolve into the organism. Nonetheless, the process has failed, and the cell has
decided it won't die off. Not only that, it's begun to replicate itself.”

The dark, mutant cell split into two, then four, then eight. The camera zoomed out to show the tumor's exponential growth.

“This process would halt right away but for angiogenesis, my novices. This astrocytoma would grow a scant couple of millimeters before it would be starved of the oxygen it needs to keep eating and breathing. But this purportedly intelligent design is rife with slipups. Numerous things that ought not to go wrong do go wrong.”

The cells in the display recruited blood vessels, robbed the host organ of its life energy and grew out of control. The attack did not stop with devouring the host organ but spread through the bloodstream to take over other areas: the greatly feared metastasis. That animation was terrifying, even for our hard-boiled minds, which had learned to internalize such matters. Underneath lurked the gut fear that one day what you saw on the screen could happen to you.

“So these dumb cells that wanted to be immortal wind up killing the organism that supported them. That's it, folks.”

Hockstetter tapped another key to end the presentation and the hospital logo was displayed again.

“My dear novices. You have studied for years to grab a pew in this room. So far you've crammed your heads with facts, but your education begins here and now. You will begin to answer the question: what is man?”

There was the odd wary glance, which Hockstetter didn't fail to notice.

“As it's your first day, I'll bow to your unsullied political correctness. Okay, what is a human being?”

“A primate from the hominid family,” a guy in the front row said.

“Not bad, my dear novice. You would surely get great grades in zoology. No, I mean what we really are.”

No one answered. Hockstetter's sarcastic tone cowed us all.

“We are machines full of tubes, engines and valves. And machines must have a purpose.”

“Survival,” somebody piped up.

“Right,” Hockstetter said, and could not have looked more surprised if a cow had just mooed Beethoven's Fifth. “We are all survival machines. Especially in your case, my dear novices. And now, look around you. What do you see?”

“Competitors,” somebody said.

“To paraphrase the great Professor Dawkins, for one survival machine, another unrelated survival machine is mere background, such as a cloud or a rock. All that distinguishes it from the rest is the way each machine reacts, because it has the same innate transcendental mission: to preserve its immortal genes. At any price. Which allows us to charge the insurance companies top dollar and keeps the American public arguing over who should pay rather than why costs are so high.”

Laughter filled the room, the energy shared by accomplices who know they have arrived and are wallowing in it.

“Our brain has only one goal: survival at all costs. And to get there it makes up for all the data it lacks with wishful thinking. Like the existence of an afterlife. For our brain, it is more important to tell a consistent story than a true one. Anybody ever have a tiff with the girlfriend?”

More laughter.

“Then you know what I mean. Questions?” he said with a wide sweeping gesture.

“You mean to say heaven is no more than a defense mechanism for the brain?” a guy spoke up, quite put out.

“The obviousness of that question will earn you several more hours on call.”

The residents clammed up and bowed their heads. I had listened enraptured to the whole sermon, which struck me as being as provocative as it was offensive. I couldn't help but raise my hand.

“If we are merely machines that allow our genes to copy themselves, if our allergies are no more than chemical reactions, and if life was not created for any purpose, then why go on living?”

“Well, I see we have a novice with more than half a brain. What's your name?”

“Evans,” I replied, proud of myself. I didn't know then that he asked my name not to distinguish me but to mark me. He wasn't overly fond of thinkers. All he wanted was obedient, servile ­cohorts.

“Many find these assertions distasteful. It upsets them if you prod them out of their cocoon of willful ignorance. I think that attitude is wholly mistaken. Only when you have no bounds can you live to the full.”

“But then existence is punishment.”

“Think of Sisyphus, the mortal condemned by the Greek gods to roll a huge boulder uphill. As soon as he got to the top, the boulder rolled back down again. And so on, forever. But as Camus would say, I can only imagine Sisyphus to be happy. Because within the bounds of his punishment, there were no gods.”

Murmurs of approval sounded behind me. The way we let Hockstetter's dime-store nihilism dupe us in those early days! We were still wet behind the ears and hadn't read widely or really pondered life. For him it all came down to physicality, but I tell you, there is more to be learned about the human condition in twenty minutes in the emergency room than in twenty months' residency in neurosurgery with Dr. Hockstetter.

“Sadly, within the bounds of your punishment,” he went on, and pointed at us, “there is a God, and that's me.”

“My dear David,” Hockstetter trilled from my office door. “How's tricks?”

“Good afternoon, doctor,” I replied formally, and didn't bother to answer his question. First, because I am very choosy over who I am on first-name terms with, and second because he didn't give a rat's ass. I even found it unpleasant to say his name. Hockstetter. Sounded like somebody clearing his throat.

I was not surprised to see him there. As soon as they told me somebody had edged me out, I knew he was behind it.

He came over to my desk. We didn't shake hands, nor did I get up to welcome him.

“Great to catch up after all these years. I'm thrilled to see you've settled into your new, um, position,” he said, and looked around. “Very commodious. You guys obviously live large. Nice work if you can get it.”

Meaning: your office is bigger than mine because yours is an inferior, undemanding hospital. I wasn't about to let such a heavy-handed opening unsettle me.

“Well, it's to you I owe the great good fortune of being here. Don't think I don't appreciate it.”

“My dear ex-novice, the sages say rancor is hatred that stretches into eternity. It's an insane way to live. Above all when we bear in mind it was your mistakes with Mrs. Desmond that got you fired.”

I smiled, slowly and sadly. Oftentimes I had gone over in my head how I could get him back for what he'd done to me. He and I alone, no consequences. And now that I could, I didn't feel like it, didn't have the energy.

“You know perfectly well what happened to Mrs. Desmond, Dr. Hockstetter. You screwed up, in front of six others. They were all too intimidated to second-guess you.”

It had been a lengthy operation on a middle-aged woman with a multiple myeloma on her spine. I had been on the job eight months, and by then the differences between Hockstetter and me were irreconcilable. It wasn't merely that we saw surgery, medicine and even life from diametrically opposed standpoints, but that we simply couldn't stand the sight of each other. Any resident in any field must build character by taking the knocks that come with the job, even humiliation doled out by superiors. But there are limits.

He had tried to throw me off the program three times, but his golden opportunity didn't come knocking until Mrs. Desmond's op. It was I who prepared the area for surgery and exposed the spine, ready to remove the tumor. It was he who overdid it with an inaccurate incision—most unlike him, it must be said—which left
the patient hemiplegic. Guess who Hockstetter blamed, amid my colleagues' thunderous silence?

I wanted the whole business to go to court, to force those who were there to tell all, but that asshole Hockstetter persuaded Mrs. Desmond not to sue, because she would destroy an inexperienced young man's career. The poor woman was so grateful her life had been saved that she didn't mind spending the rest of it in a wheelchair. The disciplinary board wasn't so lenient. It wouldn't do to besmirch their star surgeon's fame, so they had my ass in a sling.

Luckily, the former St. Clement's manager was familiar with Hockstetter's wiles and let me finish my residency there. What was set to be a few months' trial became a long-term contract. I didn't come off too badly, all told. Hockstetter was a great surgeon, 99 percent of the time, but when he messed up, he did so in a big way, so it suited him to have throwaway residents at hand. A bunch of others who'd worked with that skunk had been fall guys for his ham-­fistedness, but they hadn't landed on their feet. One of my classmates gave up medicine after Hockstetter slapped her with a malpractice suit. She now runs a vacuum cleaner store in a mall on the outskirts of Augusta.

“Poor David. Are you still ridiculously in denial?”

“Someday, one of those kids you use for cannon fodder won't take the fall. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

Hockstetter smiled, but it wasn't one of those “Look what your dog's doing on my lawn” pouts he used to pull years before. He had now perfected the look and turned it into a poster-boy smile.

“I'm afraid this isn't the occasion for chitchat, my dear ex-novice. I've come out of professional courtesy to take on the transfer of a certain patient's records.”

“You've come to rub my nose in it, doctor. Be honest for once. It won't kill you. Probably.”

His smile wobbled slightly. Then he leaned his head back to pretend I'd offended him.

“David, I've come to you in good faith, instead of asking you
to FedEx me the case history. I would like to smooth things over. Maybe I wasn't the greatest boss in the world, but you've had time to lick your wounds, haven't you?”

I would have liked to hit him with some witty repartee along the lines of “Good thing you didn't treat them,” or “Tell Mrs. Desmond that,” but at that moment I didn't have the luxury of time to think up one-liners. So I confined myself to slapping the Patient's file down, with the flash drive on top, and crossed my arms. I was itching to ask him how he'd talked the First Lady into switching surgeons but didn't dare show unseemly interest. Nevertheless I needed to know. What was White's plan really? And where did I fit into it all? If he truly wanted Hockstetter to operate on the president, why take Julia? Was White blackmailing him, too? If so, it certainly didn't look that way.

“Here you go. Just tell me one thing. Will you operate at Bethesda?” I finally dared to ask.

Hockstetter shrugged while he leafed through the Patient's case history.