Verwandte Artikel zu Point of Balance: A Thriller (Bestselling Medical Thriller)

Point of Balance: A Thriller (Bestselling Medical Thriller) - Softcover

Jurado, J.G.

 
9781476766997: Point of Balance: A Thriller (Bestselling Medical Thriller)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476766991 ISBN 13: 9781476766997
Verlag: Atria Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In this “perfectly balanced, fast-paced, and compelling thriller” (Booklist, starred review), a top neurosurgeon is forced to choose between ending the life of the most important person in America or guaranteeing his own daughter’s horrifying death.

I am no saint, no martyr, no terrorist, no madman, and no murderer…I am a father. That’s my story.

Dr. David Evans is a well-respected brain surgeon at a hospital in Washington, DC, and a devoted father. But soon he is faced with the ultimate dilemma: if his next patient, who must undergo brain surgery, leaves the operating table alive, Dr. Evans’s kidnapped daughter will die at the hands of an implacable psychopath—and he will be forced to watch.

Over the course of fifty-five frantic hours counting down to his choice in the surgery room, Dr. Evans races to hunt down his pursuer and find a way out of this nightmarish predicament. But just how far will he go to save his daughter’s life?

Called “a roller coaster ride of fear and excitement unparalleled in modern fiction” by New York Times bestselling author Katherine Neville, Point of Balance will keep you on the edge of your seat with fast-paced action and raw emotion, as one man faces an impossible moral dilemma that could change the course of history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Juan Gómez-Jurado is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. The Moses Expedition and his prize-winning novels God’s Spy and The Traitor’s Emblem have been published in more than forty countries and have become international bestsellers. Gómez-Jurado lives with his family in Madrid, Spain.

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Point of Balance

1

It all began with Jamaal Carter. If I hadn’t saved him, things might have been very different.

When the pager beeped I rubbed my eyes in anger. It had roused me and I had woken up in a foul mood. Of course, the surroundings didn’t help. The surgeons’ on-call room on the second floor reeked of sweat, feet and sex. Residents are always hornier than a two-peckered billy goat. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a couple of them had been banging away in the top bunk while I snored.

I am a sound sleeper. Rachel always used to tease me and say it would take a crane to get me up. That simply doesn’t apply to the pager: the damned gizmo always succeeds in waking me up on the second beep.

That comes of being a resident for seven years. If you didn’t answer the pager the first time, the chief resident would tear you a new one. And if you couldn’t find a window in which to grab a bit of shut-eye during the thirty-six hours you were on call, then you didn’t last the distance, either. So we surgeons got into the knack of instantly falling asleep while we nurtured a Pavlovian response to the sound of a pager. I had been a staff doctor for four years now and my turns of duty had since been halved, but the conditioning remained.

I grappled under my pillow until I found the gadget. The number 342 flashed up on the LED screen, the Neurosurgery extension. I checked my watch and got really pissed. There were just ­twenty-three minutes left until the end of my shift, and the morning had been hectic, owing to a traffic accident that began in Dupont Circle and ended up on the operating table. I had spent three hours piecing back together a British cultural attaché’s skull. The guy hadn’t even been here two days and had found out the hard way that you exit a stateside roundabout the other way around, compared to London.

The nurses knew I was taking a nap, so if someone had paged me it had to be serious. I called 342, but it was busy, so I decided to hurry over and see what was the matter. I splashed some water on my face at the sink in the back but left the light off. Lately I had avoided mirrors like the plague.

I went out into the corridor. It was twenty to six and the sun was already setting behind the treetops in Rock Creek Park. The light shone through giant panes of glass, creating orangey oblongs across the floor. The year before I would have enjoyed the view, even as I ran to the elevator. But now I didn’t look up from the floor. The man I had turned into did not admire the scenery.

In the elevator I almost bumped into Jerry Gonzales, a male nurse on my team who was wheeling a gurney. I cracked a shy smile and greeted him with a nod. He was a stocky guy and had to move over to let me in. If there’s one thing two straight men hate, it’s bumping into each other in an elevator, especially when they haven’t showered for many an hour, which we hadn’t.

“Hey, Doc Evans, thanks for the book you lent me the other day. I have it in my locker. I’ll give it right back to you.”

“That’s okay, Jerry, you can keep it,” I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. “I don’t read much anymore.”

There was an awkward silence. Time was, we would have busted each other’s chops or swapped wisecracks. But that was before.

I could almost hear him bite back the words on the tip of his tongue. Good. I can’t stand sympathy.

“You got that gangbanger?” he said at last.

“That why they paged me?”

“They had a shootout down at Barry Farm. It’s been on the news for hours,” he said, pointing to his ear, which always had an earphone stuck in it. “Seven dead and a bunch of wounded. A turf war.”

“So why didn’t they take them to MedStar?”

Jerry shrugged his shoulders and stepped out of my way.

I came out of the elevator on the fourth floor, for the neurosurgery unit. St. Clement’s is a small, private and extremely expensive hospital. Even most people who live in Washington have never heard of it. Nestling on the south side of Rock Creek Park, near the Taft Bridge, it’s a very swanky place. Its client base lives in Kalorama, mainly foreigners and senior embassy officials—people with no health insurance whose governments grudgingly pony up for the humongous bills. The area is not at all accessible and you likely won’t have come across St. Clement’s, either, on your way through the neighborhood. You don’t find that massive Victorian redbrick building unless you really want to.

To my dismay, the hospital’s mission was not to support public service, either. The shareholders liked to keep costs low and revenues high. But fortunately, in common with all US hospitals, it was required by law to treat any emergency case that landed on its doorstep. This is how I crossed paths with Jamaal Carter.

He was in the middle of the corridor, outside the nurses’ station. A police officer and two paramedics were standing by, their uniforms dripping with blood. His bodily fluids had daubed dark, ominous stains on the reflective patches. The paramedics were shaken and spoke in hushed tones. Considering what they had to cope with in their line of work, some very bad shit must have been going down.

One of the emergency interns hovered next to the gurney, with a suitably earnest look on her face. She must have been new; I didn’t know her.

“Are you the neurosurgeon?” she asked when she saw me roll up.

“No, I’m the plumber, but they lent me this cute white coat so’s my overalls don’t get dirty.”

She looked all flustered, so I winked to let her know it was a joke. She tittered nervously. It’s always good to lighten up with the new kids. The residents usually treat them like some dog shit they’ve stepped in, so a scrap of humanity is manna from heaven.

She pointed to the kid on the gurney.

“His BP’s one hundred over sixty, pulse rate’s eighty-nine. He’s stable, but there’s a very nasty T-Five–level gunshot wound.”

I leaned over him. The gangbanger lay facedown. He wore sagging pants and a blue Washington Wizards jacket. Somebody had cut it open with scissors to treat a light injury to his right arm, which was covered in tattoos. The other arm was handcuffed to the gurney.

Most of the jacket’s back was missing. Right where the team’s emblem should have been, someone had ripped out a wide expanse of cloth. In its place was an exit wound, which was seeping blood. The bullet had lodged against his spine, between the shoulder blades. His readings were stable, his life was not in danger, but the injury could well have damaged his nervous system.

The gangbanger groaned a little and I crouched to look at his face. He had delicate features and was doped up. I brushed his cheek to attract his attention.

“Dude, what’s your name?”

I had to repeat the question several times before I could get him to answer me.

“Jamaal. Jamaal Carter.”

“Hey, Jamaal, we can fix you up, but you need to work with me, okay? Can you wiggle your toes there for me?”

I took off his big-ticket Nike shoes, which would have been shiny white before the shootout but were now a dirty crimson. His toes would not move. I dug a pen tip into...

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Verlag
Atria Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476766991
ISBN 13 
9781476766997
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
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Verantwortliche Person
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