The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  But maybe I wouldn’t need them. After all, I knew perfectly well that it was all in my mind, that there was nothing real to be afraid of. So what was the worst that could happen?

  Chapter 5

  Client name: GlobalSeas Fisheries, Inc.

  Corp. Headquarters: Hafnargarta 2, Grindavik, Iceland.

  Primary Contact: Baldur Baldursson, President and CEO.

  Odysseus Case Manager: Laura DiMarco, Associate Director.

  Company Précis: GlobalSeas was established in 1974 as Fiskvélar, a small saltfish processor and wholesaler serving Iceland, and later the North Sea market. By 1990, when it changed its name to GlobalSeas, it was supplying seafood and fish to markets throughout Western Europe. Two trawlers are currently operated by the company, and additional purchases are made from dozens of other fishing vessels. Currently, GlobalSeas is also one of Iceland’s main producers of saltfish for domestic consumption. In addition, the company operates extensive halibut- and turbot-farming operations and is at the forefront of research on the genetic modification of Atlantic halibut and arctic char. The original fish-processing factory in Grindavik remains in full operation and serves as the company’s headquarters.

  Pertinent History: As a result of GlobalSeas’ international activities and its pacesetting experimentation in seafood farming and bioengineering, it has been a target of criticism and threats by environmental, anti-globalization, and anarchist organizations, but no overt action against them occurred until last year, when an abduction attempt on the company’s president and CEO, Baldur Baldursson, was made by armed members of an organization calling itself the Verkefniđ Björgum Jörđinni (in English, Project Save the Earth) or VBJ. The attempt . . .

  What?

  I sat up with a jerk. I’d been browsing the GlobalSeas case file in the Odysseus library, a pleasant room overlooking the neat rock walls and well-maintained grounds of the institute. We were located in the wine country near Woodinville, and the building itself had started out as a winery. One of the cellars had been just below what was now the library, so that a rich wine-barrel smell was generally in the air, particularly when the heat was on. Invariably, I found it sleepinducing. Lulled by the aroma and the warmth, along with Laura’s relentlessly passive constructions, I’d been on the verge of drifting off.

  Now I stared at the file, aghast. What had I gotten myself into? An abduction attempt by two armed members? This wasn’t just another ho-hum training program at all, it was . . . I read on.

  The attempt resulted in the shooting deaths of two of the abductors by police. In addition, one police officer was wounded during the hour-long siege. Mr. Baldursson was unhurt, and the remaining abductors escaped. The VBJ is also believed to have been behind an earlier, highly amateurish kidnapping of a Danish baby-food company executive. It is unknown whether the group is still in existence. Our State Department contacts tell us that they have no record of . . .

  Enough. I closed the file, put it back in the secure cabinet, slammed the drawer shut and locked it, and went grimly down the hall to Wally’s office. The sweat was pooling in the small of my back.

  In the reception area, the secretary tried to head me off. “Oh, wait a minute, Bryan. He asked not to be disturbed until—”

  “The hell with that,” I muttered, storming past her.

  When I flung the door open I found Wally at his desk in the center of his plush, linen-paneled office—everybody else, me included, had glass-partitioned, utilitarian little cubicles—with his finger on his wrist and a ruler and penciled graph in front of him.

  His hands disappeared under the desk. “What?” he demanded with a hand-caught-in-the-cookie-jar scowl. Wally was under the delusion that nobody knew that he regularly took his pulse and charted it, recording it sometimes twenty times a day, as part of some outlandish, self-designed health regimen. In fact, it was the frequent subject of jokes.

  “I’ve just been reading the GlobalSeas file,” I said menacingly.

  “Good, it’s about time. You leave pretty soon, don’t you?”

  “Wally, be straight with me. Did you know about this VBJ group and the kidnap attempt?”

  “Well, sure. Sit down already, will you? I hate being loomed over.”

  I stood my ground, leaning forward onto the desk. “You knew there’d been shooting? Killings? ”

  “Of course. That’s precisely why they’re so eager to get you. So?”

  “So why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugged. “I knew you’d look at the file for yourself. You’re a big boy. I trust you to do your homework.”

  “I mean, why didn’t you tell me in the first place?”

  Wally blew out his cheeks in perplexity. “Why would I? What’s to tell? What the hell business do you think we’re in? Bryan, what exactly is your problem?”

  “What’s my problem?” I began, my voice rising. “What is my problem? My problem—”

  I stopped myself. Wally’s confusion was genuine enough. To Wally, I was a reliable, useful analyst and policy wonk among whose oddities happened to be a dislike of travel and of hands-on work. As for kidnappings and killings, they were the meat and potatoes of the institute, pored over in the cubicles and chatted about, even joked about (not by me!) over lunch and coffee. So what exactly was I supposed to tell him now? That the fact that GlobalSeas had been through an abduction attempt changed everything? That the shirt of his “heavy hitter” in these matters was soaked with perspiration at the idea of coming anywhere near them?

  Besides, I’d already given my word, and I couldn’t ask someone else to do it on a few days’ notice. And anyway, they’d made it clear that it had to be me, or no one. There was Lori to think about too; Lori who had bought a new winter outfit, and hiking boots, and a drysuit for kayaking, and who had spent her evenings planning an elaborate, outdoorsy couple of weekends for us, and who was lighting up my own life with her sparkle and anticipation.

  “Never mind,” I said grumpily.

  “Hey, if I thought it would bother you so much, I would have—”

  But I was out the door before he could finish.

  “THAT was a rough one last night, wasn’t it?” Lori asked a few mornings later, over lox, cream cheese and toasted bagels, and the Seattle Times.

  I’d been shocked awake by one of my more spectacular panic attacks in the middle of the night. Lori had sat up with me until the Xanax had taken hold and I could stop the humiliating cowering and shaking that goes along with them—I mean, talk about wimpy!—and lie down and sleep again. We had said little; there wasn’t much to say. Of course, Lori had tried many times to understand what was happening inside my head when one of these things hit, but, aside from the fact that you’re not in the mood for communicating at the time, it’s not the sort of thing you can explain to anybody else anyway. You had to be there to appreciate it.

  “Oh, not that rough,” I said with a smile. “I’d give it a seven on a scale of one to ten. Sorry about waking you up. Did you get back to sleep at all?”

  “Oh, sure, you know me.”

  She went back to her bagel and her reading, but I could see that she was barely skimming the paper, that she had something on her mind and was deciding whether it was better to bring it up or let it lie. I even saw the firm little nod of her chin when she came to her decision.

  She put down the newspaper. “I’m worried about you, Bryan.”

  “Lori, I’ve been having these things for years, you know that. They come and go. In cycles. This time around, they’ve been a little hairier than usual, that’s all. They’ll pass, they always do. I’m fine, really.”

  “It’s the third night in a row you’ve had one. When was the last time that happened?”

  I thought for a moment. “A long time ago. Three years, maybe?”

  “Try five. So the question is, what’s bringing them on? I think it’s got to be because this Iceland thing is worrying you.”

  I went on tranquilly spreading cream cheese on a bagel,
but she’d struck home. When I’d first decided to accept the assignment I’d felt good about it, as if finally determining to take on my old bugaboos had made me stronger; as if, by standing up and facing them, perhaps I had them on the run at last. That was the way the psychologists said it worked, and I figured maybe it was true.

  Then, three days ago, I’d read the case file. And three nights ago, the attacks had started again.

  I responded with a shrug. “Maybe. Hard to say. Sometimes they just seem to come for no reason, you know that.”

  “Not three nights in a row. That’s stress, Bryan, and you know it.”

  “I do not know it. Lori, honest to God, I am not stressed about this. There’s nothing to be stressed about.” I hadn’t told Lori about the file, and I didn’t intend to. Maybe after we got back home.

  “I think maybe the whole thing was a bad idea, maybe we—”

  “Absolutely not. We . . . are . . . going,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I’m looking forward to it. I am. Really.” I picked up the paper, searching for something to change the topic.

  She pushed it down with the flat of her hand, so she could look into my face. “Well, then, maybe it’s time for you to see someone. I mean it, Bryan. You don’t know what you looked like last night. You looked . . . you looked . . . Bryan I was scared.”

  “I tried seeing someone once, you know that. He was crazier than I was.”

  But Lori wouldn’t be put off. “That was six years ago. There have been a lot of developments since then.”

  “Lori, I’m sorry. Psychiatry is not for me. You know I just don’t buy all this endless regurgitation—”

  “All right, then what about psychology? Remember that psychologist you were telling me about, the emeritus from the U—Zeta Something?”

  “Zeta Parkington.”

  “Yes. What about talking to her? Her specialty is anxiety, isn’t it? You said you liked her. Why don’t you give her a call, make an appointment?”

  “Aw, Lori, don’t push me into it. I don’t want—”

  “Why not? Give me a reason.”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. It’s just . . . I don’t know.”

  “Oh, that’s a great reason.”

  “Lori, we’re leaving next week. She’s not going to cure me by then.”

  “So? It’ll take a little longer. At least maybe you’ll be on your way. Come on, let me hear a real reason.”

  I sighed. In the morning after a panic attack I was usually calm—maybe drained is a better word—almost to the point of somnolence, but along with it often went a shattered, empty feeling, as if I were disconnected from my body. Other people, even Lori, seemed out of focus and unreal. I felt fragile and vulnerable; minor work problems were unscalable obstacles; trivial decisions unmanned me; I was incapable of arguing a point.

  “You’re taking unfair advantage of me,” I grumbled. “You know the way—”

  “You’re being evasive. Come on.” She rapped the table. “Reason.”

  “I just—”

  “You don’t have one, do you?”

  “I—okay, all right, I’ll call her. All right? Are you satisfied?”

  “Today?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can—”

  She put on her fiercest mock scowl and leaned threateningly toward me. “Today?”

  When Lori does that, I’m a goner. It’s not fair, really. She’s just so damn cute, it’s impossible to resist. “Today, yes,” I said.

  “All right, then. I’m satisfied.”

  I shook out my section of the paper with a rattle and started reading again. “Jeez.” I wasn’t angry, of course, just a little grumpy about giving in, even though I knew she was right.

  A minute later her hand reached across the table and covered mine. “Bryan?”

  But I was still making my point. I shook out the paper again and kept reading.

  “Bryan? Come on, honey, look at me.”

  I lowered the paper and met her eyes. Whatever the situation, I’m always glad to meet Lori’s eyes. They are wonderful, a deep chestnut with flecks of amber and gold. It’s like looking deep into the interior of a sun-dappled forest. It’s impossible to get tired of looking into them.

  She was smiling. “You know you’re not mad at me.”

  “Well . . . not very.”

  “And you know that the only reason I get pushy like that is because I care so much about you. I love you, Bryan.”

  Well, that melted what reserve I had left, which wasn’t much. The smile I’d been keeping in check could no longer be held back. “I know, sweetheart, and believe me, I appreciate it.” I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed the back of it. “I love you too. And I think seeing Zeta is a good idea.” I was feeling a lot better, a lot more grounded, than I had a few minutes ago. The woman had that effect on me.

  “Still,” she said, sipping her coffee and looking at me, her head tilted, her chin on her fist. “I think I’m coming around to thinking Wally’s got a point. You are a hard case.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “A head case is more like it,” I said.

  Chapter 6

  I’d first met Zeta Parkington at a University of Washington function and then had run into her a few times at the Starbucks on University Way when I showed up there for some caffeinated fortitude on the two days a week that I taught at the U. Zeta was in her seventies, a bluff, straight-talking, chain-smoking emeritus professor of clinical psychology who favored boxy black granny dresses and kept her stiff gray hair chopped off just below the ears. I’d taken to her right away, even trusted her to the extent of telling her a little about my problems over lattes one day, once I learned that her specialty was anxiety disorders. Zeta had said she’d be glad to try to help if I liked, and to come and see her anytime; an unrepentant smoker, she had given up her practice a few years earlier, the day a state law was passed prohibiting smoking in “adult care facilities.” However, she still kept her old office right around the corner, just off campus, on Forty-fifth Street, and I was more than welcome to come in for a session or two, as long as I promised not to report her to the authorities if she smoked. I’d give it some thought, I’d replied, and I’d meant it at the time. Still, that had been months ago, and there it had lain.

  Until today.

  Zeta’s office was like the woman herself, forthright and unpretentious. What you saw was what you got. There were a couple of framed diplomas on the pale yellow walls, along with a Nature Conservancy calendar and a movie-lobby placard from Casablanca, signed by Sydney Greenstreet; nothing else. There was a plain, serviceable industrial carpet and a simple, standard-issue metal desk with an old-fashioned, leather-cornered blotter on it, and two side chairs, and over by the window a couple of marginally more comfortable armchairs and a coffee table. It was in the armchairs that we’d been sitting for the last forty minutes, during which I had talked steadily and Zeta had listened, mostly to my story of the hostage shootout and its aftermath. As for my childhood kidnapping, I’d spared myself a detailed description by giving her a copy of the narrative I’d written for Dr. Benson.

  While she read it to the accompaniment of an occasional murmur or commiserative shake of her head, my mind drifted for the first time in years to my life immediately following the kidnapping. After the corrective surgery on my toe, I had returned home to the compound near Istanbul where the company’s management staff was housed, and found that everything had changed. My mother and father were broken people, financially and emotionally. Dad, once a big, jovial man always joshing with me—a friendly jab in the ribs, a funny face made by sticking his glasses in his mouth to poke out his cheeks—seemed to fold in on himself and visibly shrink. He had always been a ready drinker from the moment he got home in the evening, but now I could smell it on his breath in the morning, and the bourbon that had made him pink-faced and twinkle-eyed in past years, a sort of beardless Santa Claus, now turned him sullen and reclusive.

  Before, Mom had been the more energetic and adv
enturous of the two, the one who most encouraged my independence, but now she sniped and fretted at me when I was even momentarily out of her sight. Making things infinitely worse, there was a polio epidemic in Istanbul that year and my brother Richard caught it and died just a few months later. After that, she spent almost all of her time in the apartment murmuring and shaking her head over her private thoughts. Sometimes she forgot to make dinner or to turn on the lights in the late afternoon. I worried that she was going crazy.

  The strain took its predictable toll on job and family. Before the project was completed, my debt-laden, grieving, increasingly incompetent father was demoted to crew chief, then fired altogether. My parents’ marriage disintegrated, first into mutual repugnance and blame, then separation, then, not long after they returned home to Pasadena, to divorce. A few weeks before it became final, dad was killed when his Ford Fairlane sideswiped a garbage truck on San Gabriel Boulevard. His blood alcohol level was 0.28. You can imagine the load of guilt that lay on my six-year-old shoulders. No one ever said to me that all of this was on account of me, but no one had to say it.

  I was eight when mom remarried and things really turned around. From then on I lived a blissfully unremarkable childhood; my stepfather was a generous, quiet, older man, grateful for the opportunity to nurture a second family. He was more step-grandfather than stepfather to me, but there had been genuine love there. Mom was happy too, I think. It lasted twelve good years, and then he died. Mom died a couple of years later.

  “Well, that all explains a lot,” Zeta said with a sigh as she put the narrative down. “Tell me, do you and your brother ever talk about it?”