“Down’s—how and … I mean . . .” Andrea said, squeezing her husband’s hand.
“Look, the odds are very much in your favor, like a hundred to one or so, and those are betting odds. Before you worry about it, the smart thing is to find out if there’s anything to worry about at all, okay?”
“Right now?” Pat asked for his wife.
Dr. North stood. “Yes, I have the time right now.”
“Why don’t you take a little walk, Pat?” Special Agent Price-O’Day suggested to her husband. She managed to keep her dignity intact, which didn’t surprise her husband.
“Okay, honey.” A kiss, and he watched her leave. It was not a good moment for the career FBI agent. His wife was pregnant, but now he had to wonder if the pregnancy was a good one or not. If not—then what? He was an Irish Catholic, and his church forbade abortion as murder, and murders were things he’d investigated—and even witnessed once. Ten minutes later, he’d killed the two terrorists responsible for it. That day still came back to him in perverse dreams, despite the heroism he’d displayed and the kudos he’d received for all of it.
But now, he was afraid. Andrea had been a fine stepmother for his little Megan, and both he and she wanted nothing in all the world more than this news—if it was, really, good news. It would probably take an hour, and he knew he couldn’t spend it sitting down in a doctor’s outer office full of pregnant women reading old copies of People and US Weekly. But where to go? Whom to see?
Okay. He stood and walked out, and decided to head over to the Maumenee Building. It ought not be too hard to find. And it wasn’t.
Roy Altman was the telltale. The big former paratrooper who headed the SURGEON detail didn’t stand in one place like a potted plant, but rather circulated around, not unlike a lion in a medium-sized cage, always checking, looking with highly trained and experienced eyes for something that wasn’t quite right. He spotted O’Day in the elevator lobby and waved.
“Hey, Pat! What’s happening?” All the rivalry between the FBI and the USSS stopped well short of this point. O’Day had saved the life of sandbox and avenged the deaths of three of Altman’s fellow agents, including Roy’s old friend, Don Russell, who’d died like a man, gun in hand and three dead assassins in front of him. O’Day had finished Don’s work.
“My wife’s over being checked out,” the FBI inspector answered.
“Nothing serious?” Altman asked.
“Routine,” Pat responded, and Altman caught the scent of a lie, but not an important one.
“Is she around? While I’m here, I thought I’d stop over and say hi.”
“In her office.” Altman waved. “Straight down, second on the right.”
“Thanks.”
“Bureau guy coming back to see SURGEON,” he said into his lapel mike.
“Roger,” another agent responded.
O’Day found the office door and knocked.
“Come in,” the female voice inside said. Then she looked up. “Oh, Pat, how are you?”
“No complaints, just happened to be in the neighborhood, and—”
“Did Andrea see Madge?” Cathy Ryan asked. FLOTUS had helped make the appointment, of course.
“Yeah, and the little box doodad has a plus sign in it,” Pat reported.
“Great!” Then Professor Ryan paused. “Oh, you’re worried about something.” In addition to being an eye doctor, she knew trouble when she saw it.
“Dr. North is doing an amniocentesis. Any idea how long it takes?”
“When did it start?”
“Right about now, I think.”
Cathy knew the problem. “Give it an hour. Madge is very good, and very careful in her procedures. They tap into the uterus and withdraw some of the amniotic fluid. That will give them some of the tissue from the embryo, and then they examine the chromosomes. She’ll have the lab people standing by. Madge is senior staff, and when she talks, people listen.”
“She seems pretty competent.”
“She’s a wonderful doc. She’s my OB. You’re worried about Down’s, right?”
A nod. “Yep.”
“Nothing you can do but wait.”
“Dr. Ryan, I’m—”
“My name’s Cathy, Pat. We’re friends, remember?” There was nothing like saving the life of a woman’s child to get on her permanent good side.
“Okay, Cathy. Yeah, I’m scared. It’s not—I mean, Andrea’s a cop, too, but—”
“But being good with a gun or just being tough doesn’t help much right now, does it?”
“Not worth a damn,” Inspector O’Day confirmed quietly. He was about as used to being frightened as he was of flying the Space Shuttle, but potential danger to his wife and/or kid—kids now, maybe—the kind of danger in which he was utterly helpless—well, that was one of the buttons a capricious Fate could push while she laughed.
“The odds are way in your favor,” Cathy told him.
“Yeah, Dr. North said so … but…”
“Yeah. And Andrea’s younger than I am.”
O’Day looked down at the floor, feeling like a total fucking wimp. More than once in his life, he’d faced down armed men—criminals with violent pasts—and intimidated them into surrender. Once in his life he’d had to use his Smith & Wesson 1076 automatic in anger, and both times he’d double-tapped the heads of the terrorists, sending them off to Allah—so they’d probably believed—to answer for the murder of the innocent woman. It hadn’t been easy, exactly, but neither had it been all that hard. The endless hours of practice had made it nearly as routine as the working of his service automatic. But this wasn’t danger to himself. He could deal with that. The worst danger, he was just learning, was to those you loved.
“Pat, it’s okay to be scared. John Wayne was just an actor, remember?”
But that was it. The code of manhood to which most Americans subscribed was that of the Duke, and that code did not allow fear. In truth it was about as realistic as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but foolish or not, there it was.
“I’m not used to it.”
Cathy Ryan understood. Most doctors did. When she’d been a straight ophthalmic SURGEON, before specializing in lasers, she’d seen the patients and the patients’ families, the former in pain, but trying to be brave, the latter just scared. You tried to repair the problems of one and assuage the fears of the other. Neither task was easy. The one was just skill and professionalism; the other involved showing them that, although this was a horrid emergency which they’d never experienced before, for Cathy Ryan, M.D., FACS, it was just another day at the office. She was the Pro from Dover. She could handle it. SURGEON was blessed with the demeanor that inspired confidence in all she met.
But even that didn’t apply here. Though Madge North was a gifted physician, she was testing for a predetermined condition. Maybe someday it could be fixed—genetic therapy offered that hope, ten years or so down the line—but not today. Madge could merely determine what already was. Madge had great hands, and a good eye, but the rest of it was in God’s hands, and God had already decided one way or the other. It was just a matter of finding out what His decision had been.
“This is when a smoke comes in handy,” the inspector observed, with a grimacing smirk.
“You smoke?”
He shook his head. “Gave it up a long time ago.”
“You should tell Jack.”
The FBI agent looked up. “I didn’t know he smokes.”
“He bums them off his secretary every so often, the wimp,” Cathy told the FBI agent, with almost a laugh. “I’m not supposed to know.”
“That’s very tolerant for a doc.”
“His life’s hard enough, and it’s only a couple a day, and he doesn’t do it around the kids, or Andrea’d have to shoot me for ripping his face off.”
“You know,” O’Day said, looking down again and speaking from the cowboy boots he liked to wear under his blue FBI suit, “if it comes back that it’s a Down’s kid, what the hell do we do then?”
“That’s not an easy choice.”
“Hell, under the law I don’t get a choice. I don’t even have a say in it, do I?”
“No, you don’t.” Cathy didn’t venture that this was an inequity. The law was firm on the point. The woman—in this case, the wife— alone could choose to continue the pregnancy or terminate it. Cathy knew her husband’s views on abortion. Her own views were not quite identical, but she did regard that choice as distasteful. “Pat, why are you borrowing trouble?”
“It’s not under my control.”
Like most men, Cathy saw, Pat O’Day was a control freak. She could understand that, because so was she. It came from using instruments to change the world to suit her wishes. But this was an extreme case. This tough guy was deeply frightened. He really ought not to be, but it was a question of the unknown for him. She knew the odds, and they were actually pretty good, but he was not a doctor, and all men, even the tough ones, she saw, feared the unknown. Well, it wasn’t the first time she’d baby-sat an adult who needed his hand held—and this one had saved Katie’s life.