The Touch Read Online Free Page B

caught her breath, and looked again. What she saw through the eyepiece of the microscope was a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln standing instead of sitting at the Lincoln Memorial. When she stepped back again, her thoughts were racing. And Malcolm was grinning.
    She wasn’t. “Exactly how small is this?” she snapped.
    â€œIt would fit inside the eye of a needle,” Malcolm answered. Still grinning.
    Lara looked back into the eyepiece. To the naked eye the object Malcolm held in the cushioned tweezers was no larger than a period in pica type. In the eyepiece Lincoln was majestic, chiseled as if from granite. There was emotion on the face of the Lincoln sculpture. Even discounting the carving’s super miniaturization, it was a work of art, portraying the noble President having risen to his feet as if in outrage at the world he saw now. “And it’s handmade?” Lara marveled, not quite able to believe what she was seeing.
    â€œNot just that,” she heard Malcolm say beside her. “It’s handmade . . . by a doctor.”
    She backed away from the eyepiece.
    â€œUsing surgical instruments,” Malcolm added.
    She dipped her head once again to the microscope’s eyepiece, to take in the magnificence of the minuscule carving. “A man capable of making this . . .”
    â€œThat’s right. Could do anything.”
    She straightened and faced Malcolm. “What’s the catch? Why isn’t he here already?”
    â€œWe’re checking him out now. But it seems this doctor, this . . .” He glanced to the notes his scouts brought him. “. . . this Andrew Jones? He quit operating. He supervises and teaches now, but he hasn’t cut in two years. We’ll work up a profile on him. Judging from the artistry of his work, this young doctor is deeply thoughtful . . . sensitive . . . a delicate man . . .”

4
    At the moment when the people at Blair Bio-Med in Chicago were trying to divine his softer qualities, the Dr. Jones in question was on a rugby field on the campus of the University of Virginia. The sky was slate gray and blended with the ground, where the previous night’s thin snow merged with the mud into a crusty sludge. Anyone out in this weather had to be crazy.
    And the rugby players seemed just that, scrambling around and banging unpadded bodies in the bitter cold. From a vantage point outside the game, it looked like chaos; from inside the scrum it was, well, chaos—colliding shoulders, banging heads, swinging elbows. A kicking foot punched the ball high into the air; it tumbled through the stony sky and fell into the gnarly arms of a runner, who plunged only a few steps before his opponents dragged him to the ground and the players bunched together again in another scrum, a melee of grunting men, all bloody knees and knuckles.
    The players had no real uniforms; they wore shirts of two basic colors, depending on which team they played for that day, and shorts of any color at all; mostly, that day, the dominant color was mud. None of them had particular team loyalty; when not enough players would show up on a particular day, enough guys would swap sides so they would field even numbers. They did this for fun.
    They shoved each other for a few seconds, until one of them got his foot into the scrum deep enough to rake the ball back to his team’s side, and as the ball tumbled out they scattered into formation, racing down the field shoveling lateral passes from player to player. An especially burly brute caught one of these passes and was charging down the sidelines when a blur—the thoughtful, sensitive, delicate Dr. Jones—streaked into him in a bone-banging collision. Heads bashed; the ball went flying. But nobody worried about the ball because of the impending fight; with several players spread around the ground like train cars in a railroad disaster, the runner’s