Read Online Point of Balance by J.G. Jurado - Free Book Online Page B

been a happy childhood. That of a spoiled only child, like all New York investment bankers’ children. He had seen more of the servants than his blood relatives, but that was no problem. Nobody had smacked him, abused him or given him major trauma.
    White was just the way he was.
    He was born that way, and there was nothing to be done. He knew that clearly when he was eight, in the park where the au pair took him every afternoon. A little girl fell awkwardly from one of the slides, landed on her left arm and broke it. The end of the fractured bone poked out through her skin and was covered in blood. She howled in pain and stood up. Most of the kids clinched their arms in sympathy.
    White didn’t.
    That day he understood he was a unique and self-reliant being. Human beings have leaky boundaries. They feel other people’s pain, see their emotions affected by those of others. They live their lives connected to the rest by a sort of emotional grapevine.
    White was unburdened by that flaw.
    His total lack of empathy put him a cut above the rest. He could read others’ feelings and interpret them, without those feelings sullying him. That evolutionary step forward was most practical.
    Learning how to make use of this knowledge had been a long hard road. White took years to find out that every human being has a boundary between the comfort zone of their hopes and fears, and the quicksand of their wishes and needs. To achieve a total surrender of the will, you had to push them out of the former without sinking them into the latter.
    Up to the tipping point.
    Everyone had a different personality type. For somebody such as Dr. Evans, violence was no more than a back-page story in the Post , something that did not impinge on the confines of his world. At bottom, human nature is the denial of death, and a committed doctor is the epitome of that denial.
    To get a subject with such strong convictions to resort to violence, you had to burn his bridges, one by one. Steadily, until you forced him to embrace the contradiction between his beliefs and reality. By plotting a road map with pinpoint precision. With someone more unthinking and not as straight as Evans, he would have cut the response time.
    White’s cell phone vibrated on the tabletop. Just like David’s, it was a very exclusive model. It had been modified using state-of-the-art technology, and its signal was protected by a 128-bit encryption key. He didn’t bother to see who was calling. Only one person in the world had his number: his employer.
    â€œIt’s under way.”
    The voice at the other end of the line mumbled a few words in response. White barely listened to him. His eyes were still glued to the monitors.
    He pressed a key to bring the picture back to real time. It looked like the doc was asleep.
    White frowned, bemused. He’d never seen him do such a thing; cling to that sweatshirt that way. He thoughtfully stroked his earlobe and jotted something down on his iPad.
    Tomorrow would be a most interesting day.

8
    When I got to the hospital the morning after, my mind was racing.
    Soon after I received White’s terrifying text, I had fallen asleep. I was pooped. Discovering they had bugged my house with microphones and God knows what else sent shivers down my spine. But after a thirty-six-hour shift and all the emotional rushes that followed, I was too worn down to do a thing about it.
    I was painfully aware when I woke up. As I showered and got dressed, I felt my privacy had been invaded; I felt a pair of dark and dirty eyes spying on me from every corner. I was never much into spy movies or TV shows, but Rachel used to love them. I tried to remember what I had learned from watching Homeland and Person of Interest ,although I’d had only half my mind on them, with the other half buried in a novel or the Journal of Neurosurgery . All I remembered seemed like kids’ stuff or hackneyed.
    I understood all too well why White had