The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  “It’s worked for plenty of others, Bryan. Give it a try. If you find you can’t tolerate it—which, to be perfectly frank, happens with some people—you can always quit, and you won’t be any worse off than you are right now. But remember, I’ll be right there to help you when you need it. In fact, I’ll give you a magic mantra right this minute to help you through any attack you do have, just two words: self-limiting. Just keep saying it yourself. Let me hear you say it.”

  “Self-limiting.” I smiled. “Okay. We’ll start . . . but not until I get back.”

  “Good enough.” She stubbed out her cigarillo and got to her feet. “Come on into the file room. I’ll give you some reading material in the meantime.”

  Chapter 7

  In the restaurant Brim in the harborside village of Grindavik, a sober, working community of fishermen, jetties, cranes, and fish-processing plants some thirty-five miles from the bustling capital of Reykjavik, the aproned, housewifely woman behind the counter had taken the man’s money, 1,200 krona, and pointed him to the buffet table. She had then forgotten about him, which was what most people did after encountering him. He was easy to forget: in his mid-forties, five-eleven or so, stockily built, with limp, mouse-brown hair and a bland, squarish, unremarkable face. Spare in speech, unassuming in manner, keeping to himself, there was nothing about him that would attract the notice of others.

  Had they taken a closer look, however, they might have seen something troubling in the blank expression and the milky, gray-blue eyes: a deadness, a cold detachment, indifferent and unfeeling. He was, in fact, a psychopath; officially certified by a court-appointed psychiatrist as having psychopathic personality disorder. Not the raving-lunatic kind, or the glib, charming, crazy, serial-killer psychopathic personality of the movies, no—it had never occurred to him to eat anybody’s liver—but more than enough unsettling: an inability to feel empathy for others, a nonexistent conscience; a strong sense of entitlement; and, just below his unreadable surface, a vengeful, simmering, souleating sense of the “humiliations” visited on him by others.

  He took his tray to an inconspicuous corner table near a window and sat down to eat: a thin fish soup, sautéed haddock (the only entrée available), boiled potatoes, and cold mixed vegetables. If salt, pepper, or any flavorings at all had been added to the food, he was unable to detect them. But this seemed to be standard in Iceland. Strange, he thought. One would think that it would be the cold countries that had the spicy, hot foods, and the warm countries that went for the bland ones, but in his experience of travel, which was considerable, it was the other way around.

  Still, the saltshaker was available and the haddock was fresh, and so he ate, steadily and without complaint. Food was little more than fuel to him. While he chewed, his eyes wandered, apparently absently, to the activities taking place at the loading dock of the GlobalSeas fish-processing plant almost directly across Hafnagarta, the two-lane street that ran the length of the town, right on down to the docks. Occasionally he would glance at his watch or jot something down in the notepad at his elbow.

  “Eleven-thirty . . .” he said to himself. “Now.” And as if on cue, a white refrigerator truck turned onto Hafnargarta a hundred yards up the block, bringing a smile to the man’s face. On its side, in an arc of Gothic lettering, was the word Saegreifinn—Sea Baron. This was a Reykjavik seafood wholesaler, and the truck had come to pick up its semiweekly load of saltfish, which would go to local restaurants. As he watched, the electrically operated gate in the ten-foot chain-link fence that surrounded the plant rolled open—the man pressed the start button on the watch’s stopwatch function—and the truck pulled in, turned around, and deftly backed up to one of the three loading bays; the only one with its corrugated metal door rolled up and open. A forklift stood by waiting with a pallet of crated salted fish. Once the truck’s rear door was open, the forklift operator levered the pallet into it. Then, while the truck driver pulled down the door and locked it, the forklift operator went to a wall telephone and spoke a few words.

  In the restaurant, the man pressed the stop button and looked down. Four minutes, twenty seconds had passed since the gate had opened. Good. Excellent. He jotted it down in the notepad.

  Now his attention shifted to the structure attached kitty-corner to the warehouse. This was a two-floored, metal-sided building without windows but with an outside staircase that led from the loading bay up to a door on the upper floor; the only opening in the wall. Behind this door, he knew, was the office of GlobalSeas’ CEO, Baldur Baldursson. As expected, the door opened—the man pressed the start button again—and Baldursson, in shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, trotted down the steps. A few moments’ kibitzing with the forklift operator and the truck driver while he signed the manifest, and then back up he trotted. The door closed behind him.

  Another glance at the watch. Baldursson had been outside for fifty-four seconds. This was the fourth time he’d observed the CEO’s appearance for the Saegreifinn pickup, and there had been hardly any variation in the amount of time he was exposed. Forty-eight seconds was the shortest; one minute, thirty seconds the longest. Now, as the truck left the grounds, the forklift operator pressed a keypad at the loading dock and the gate rolled slowly closed behind it. It had been open a total of eight minutes and ten seconds, also about the usual. Most important, this made four out of four times Baldursson had come out alone—no bodyguard—to sign the manifest, standing there in plain view with the gate wide open. Was it simple carelessness? Stupidity? A sense, even after what had happened last year, of invulnerability? A desperate need, if only for a few seconds twice a week, to be on his own for a while? To take a risk? After all, no one can be on guard every minute of every day. Besides, with Baldursson exposed for such a short time—and not really that out in the open, but well within the compound—right at the loading entrance to the building, a good fifty yards from the street—what could happen?

  Plenty, the man thought, getting up to pour himself another cup of coffee. Icelandic food was a disaster, but when it came to coffee, there he had to give them credit. Their coffee was unfailingly excellent: dark, richly bitter, velvety. Of course, they practically lived on the stuff. Reykjavik must have had more coffeehouses per square block than Seattle did.

  When he’d drained the cup, he got up again, pulled on his inexpensive gray quilted parka and knitted watch cap, also gray, and, having paid when he entered, left with a barely perceptible nod of thanks to the woman behind the counter. The woman nodded back without really seeing him.

  He then strolled the two blocks to the gas station that served as Grindavik’s bus terminal, arriving five minutes before the twicedaily bus to Reykjavik pulled in. A dozen others were waiting, and he boarded in the middle of the crowd and took a seat halfway back.

  By the time he walked out of the Reykjavik bus terminal forty-five minutes later, his presence on the bus would already be forgotten. Or rather, it would never have been noticed in the first place.

  IT was not because of financial considerations that the quiet man in the gray quilted parka and knitted cap had traveled from Grindavik to Reykjavik by bus. Had he wished, he could easily have afforded the most luxurious limousine service in Iceland. It was his custom to use public transportation when on business, regardless of the inconvenience or discomfort. In a pinch he would take a taxi, but only in a pinch. Rental cars, never. The fewer times he signed whatever name he was using, the less often he had to show one of his driver’s licenses or passports, and the fewer people he came into one-to-one contact with, the better.

  The man’s name was George Henry Camano, but to the world at large he was known as “Paris,” and in the more sensationally oriented media he was said to be “a vicious killer,” a “master of disguise,” and “an ardent revolutionary.” He considered none of them to be close to the truth.

  It was the “vicious killer” label that got his goat the most. The “killer” part, well, that he had no problem with, but vicious? As if he w
ere some kind of slavering, mindless, wild beast? No, that was uncalled for, and it hurt him deeply. It was true that in the last half-dozen years circumstances had required eliminating four of his hostages, but never once had it been mindless. Always it had been done out of necessity. Or at least there had been a rational purpose. Or at least there had been some point to it. Once it had been simple expedience (the captive had gotten too much information out of his simpleminded guards to be allowed to live), but for the others there had been more to it than that: retribution, justice, belated punishment. Simply put, some people just plain didn’t deserve to live, and in having removed them from this earth he took not only pleasure but pride.

  A master of disguise? That was even more laughable. For one thing, he rarely found disguise necessary, having solved the problem of invisibility some years earlier. He had gone to Dr. Reuben Girard, a respected plastic surgeon in Virginia, a man who assisted the FBI in altering the appearance of turncoat gangsters who were entering the witness protection program and wished to keep their identities and whereabouts secret from their old colleagues. Dr. Girard, as it happened, pursued a vastly more profitable sideline as well: altering the appearance of gangsters who wished to keep their identities and whereabouts secret from the FBI.

  Camano’s request to the surgeon wasn’t the usual plea to be made unrecognizable. Instead he asked to be “smoothed,” to have any features that might conceivably be “distinctive” made as undistinctive as possible. His aim was to look as ordinary, as average, as a person could be made to look, and Girard had obliged. It was easy work, since Camano’s face was quite ordinary to begin with. The underlying skeletal structure was left as it was, but the curling tops of his ears had been made less prominent, the pitted acne scars on his cheeks erased, a couple of irregular teeth replaced, and the slightly off-center nose, the result of a deviated septum, straightened. Camano had taken care of his black hair himself, dying it a dull, mousey brown. That had been it, and it didn’t really change his appearance that much, in the sense that anyone who’d known him before would have had no trouble recognizing him afterward.

  But that wasn’t the point. Unlike the witness protection people, it wasn’t old acquaintances he was hiding from, it was new ones. And to strangers Henry Camano was now Everyman, Mr. John Q. Public, the kind of guy you saw but didn’t really see a hundred times a day on the bus, in the street, in the Safeway. Once in a while a passerby would stop him with a query: “Say, aren’t you the guy that was in that old episode of Seinfeld (or Boston Legal, or House)?” But it was never the same show, the same bit part, the same actor. It wasn’t only that he didn’t really look like anybody in particular, it was that he reminded people, vaguely, of just about everybody.

  And as for the “ardent revolutionary” label, it was too absurd even to discuss. He wasn’t ardent—indeed, he prized coolness and forethought among his most useful virtues—and he certainly wasn’t a revolutionary.

  Basically, what he was, as he saw it, was a businessman much like any other businessman, an entrepreneur providing a service for a fee in a volatile and demanding market.

  His business happened to be kidnapping for ransom. This, as he saw it, was in itself neither good nor bad (an interest in moral philosophy was not among those self-claimed virtues), but rather an expression of the application of certain basic economic principles. If you were searching for a textbook example of the free market at its purest and most uncluttered level, how could you come up with anything better than the exchange of a hostage for an amount of money agreed to solely by the parties concerned and no one else, without any outside strictures or interference?

  George Camano had organized more successful abductions for profit than anyone else in the world. In so doing, he had built up a certain amount of fame, if you could call it fame when nobody knew what your name was; when no one had any idea of what you looked like, other than from two fuzzy photos that Interpol had been circulating to police departments without success for years (no wonder, since neither of them was of you); when half the people who have heard of you doubt your existence; and when your most successful operations were private matters unknown to the police or the press and thus ipso facto unknown to the general public—but every unsolved, high-profile kidnapping on the face of the globe was assumed to have been your handiwork.

  Being a realist when it came to his actual abilities, he was aware that he didn’t have the daring or the cunning that was attributed to him. What he did have was a system, and the system was organized on the need-to-know principle.

  First, he never worked in the United States, his home country; he accepted only foreign jobs. He would hire out to plan and oversee the kidnapping of a specified individual (never more than one) and to have him (never a her; a female hostage was asking for trouble) held captive for the time necessary, but not to exceed one week, if at all possible. Four to five days was the time he shot for, after which tensions and differences between the captors built up to too high a level, along with developing relationships with the captive. The result was a precipitous increase in the risks and a decline in the prospects of full success.

  As part of the system, Camano alone would be responsible for planning and execution and would use only his own handpicked people for the abduction, and then a separate set for the subsequent detention. The kidnappers would not know where the prisoner was to be held, and the captors would not know whom the kidnappers had been. The client—that is, the individual or group that was paying him—would be told next to nothing: not where or when the abduction would take place, not where the captive was being kept, not who Camano’s henchmen were. Most important, once the project was initiated, they would not know where Camano himself was or have any face-to-face contact with him. Disposable cellular phones only.

  Because what they didn’t know they wouldn’t be able to tell the police in the event that things went wrong and they were picked up. Or, in the far more likely event that things went right, they wouldn’t be able to prattle anything important to their girlfriends; nothing that would get him in trouble, at any rate.

  It was safer for the clients too. There would be no traceable connection between them and the kidnapping. And since they knew nothing, there was nothing for them to inadvertently reveal. As for Camano, none would know his real name either. If the police ever found out about the mysterious man who had engineered everything, which did happen now and then, he would be long gone, thousands of miles away, back home in the States.

  This was the system, elegantly simple in concept, complex and tricky in execution, with which he had organized and managed thirteen kidnappings for ransom in the last six years. In that time, eleven ransoms had been paid, and only one person, one of his hired kidnappers, had even been brought to trial, and that case had been thrown out on the first day. Which was why Paris could command the fees that he did. Camano himself, it goes without saying, had never been arrested, detained, or even questioned.

  At least that was the way the system was supposed to work, and the way it did work most of the time. But sometimes the conditions required changes, and the conditions in Iceland had required the most drastic changes yet. The problem was, the damn place had almost no serious crime and no competent criminals. Thieves and rapists, yes—Icelanders were human, after all, and some things just went with the territory—and even the occasional murderer; an average of three homicides a year in the whole country. There were plenty of pothead protester types who went around banging pans and metal spoons in front of the Parliament building, or throwing green yogurt on “corporate polluters” or the police, but they had nobody he would call professionals—grown-ups—to whom he could feel comfortable delegating the sensitive tasks that were required. Or if they did exist, he had no idea where to locate them. If any kind of criminal underworld network existed, he hadn’t been able to find it.

  So this job had to be approached differently. The clients themselves would have to handle everything: the kidnapping itself as well as the e
nsuing captivity. And since the client here was an organization consisting of exactly three people, not enough for twenty-four-hour guarding, and in any case not reliable enough to trust on their own, Camano himself would have to be there on site, a first for him. That made everything hugely more problematic, and he was charging accordingly. He had, in fact, turned them down when they offered his usual fee of $250,000, turned them down again at $300,000, and yet again at $400,000. But when they offered $500,000—half a million dollars—it was too much to resist. He’d even squeezed them for an additional hundred thousand before accepting. But he was deeply apprehensive. He was, for all intents and purposes, abandoning the system that had served him so well.

  But there was one absolutely crucial element that wouldn’t change: Beyond providing direction, Camano would have nothing personally to do with the ransom, not arranging for it with the payees, and certainly not picking it up, matters of which he washed his hands. He was able to operate on this inscribed-in-concrete principle because he dealt only with clients who could provide his fee up front. Oh, they would pay him out of the anticipated ransom? No deal. And he stuck with it. Camano got his money in the form of two payments: a standard initial $100,000 nonreturnable advance, which was already in his possession, and a negotiated final payment—in this case, $500,000. This had been placed in a numbered escrow account in a Cayman Islands bank last month, to be released to him on successful completion of the job.

  And he knew just where that money was going too. The advance was already gone, spent to finish paying for his third home, a small but charming stone country house on the French Riviera, on the hillside above Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. And the coming half million, every dollar of it, had been promised to a yacht broker just up the coast in Monaco, who was holding Callisto, a glorious, beautifully refurbished, sixty-five-foot Jongert cruising sailboat, for him. A buy like that didn’t come along very often, and then only if you could pay for it outright. He had lusted after such a boat for years, and he wanted—needed—this one the way most people needed oxygen. A boat like that—in a place like that—signified that a man had made a success of himself, that he had arrived.