The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  Chapter 9

  Like most of her kind, Zeta Parkington had learned to leave her patients’ troubles at the office (most of the time). It hadn’t come easily to her, but it had been either that or find another line of work, and so she’d taught herself to do it. Only rarely nowadays was she unable to keep the psychological torments of some wretched soul in her care from intruding on her Monday morning rotating bridge gatherings or her Friday dinners in Issaquah with her thrice-divorced daughter’s latest family. Psychologists should not be allowed to have children, she thought, not for the first time; they all turn out to have a few too many screws loose.

  Bryan Bennett was hardly one of the wretched souls, but in the few days since their session she had found her thoughts straying to him at odd moments, so much so that today with the bridge party at her condo, she’d confounded her partner by absentmindedly fooling around with other suits when any novice would have known to pull trump. She had resolved then and there that she needed to take some time to determine what it was about him that was nagging at her. As was true with most of her resolutions, she was acting on it at the first opportunity.

  The girls (some “girls”; the youngest was sixty-three) had left fifteen minutes earlier, and the living and dining rooms were littered with lipstick-smeared glasses of melting ice, half-filled coffee cups, and plates of leftover cherry cheesecake. All that could wait. For now, she had reheated a mug of coffee in the microwave and carried it out onto her terrace with her first cigarillo of the afternoon (five before noon, five in the afternoon, two in the evening; those were her limits, strictly adhered to). From the twelfth-story terrace she looked across Puget Sound toward Bainbridge Island, or would have had the sound not been shrouded in March’s usual fog. On the other side of the water the Olympics were invisible in the gray pall, but it was nice to know they were there, and after the staleness of the indoors, it was wonderful to feel the clean, cold air flowing down from the glaciers and across six miles of open water, as if directly to her. I am the first person in all of Seattle to breathe this fresh, good air, she liked to tell herself, usually followed by a smaller voice, easily ignored: a lot of good it’s doing you, with you smoking these damn things.

  She lay back in the recliner, got her swollen feet out of their shoes, started on the coffee, and devoted her mind to thoughts of Bryan Bennett.

  What was it about the man that was so intriguing?

  By the time it came to her she had finished the cigarillo and was nursing the last of the coffee with both hands around the mug for warmth. She had been about to get up to bring out a sweater and maybe a little more coffee—with a jot of brandy this time—when the pieces fell suddenly into place.

  He wasn’t sick enough; that was the problem.

  No, not exactly. The problem was that he should have been either in worse shape or in better shape—anything but the middling shape he was in. Assuming that the root of his difficulties was the kidnapping episode when he’d been a kid (exacerbated many years later by the hostage incident in which the two little girls died), what he was suffering from was surely a form of PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder. And in her experience, people’s reactions to traumatic stress—rape, combat, torture, near-death encounters—fell into two general classes. Either—and this was most of them—they put it behind them and moved on, suffering at worst an occasional bad dream, unpleasant association, or bout of melancholy; or else they fell over the precipice entirely, to become loners, haunted through the years by frightening, realistic flashbacks during the day and harrowing nightmares in which they relived the most terrible of their experiences. To greater or lesser degrees they were emotionally numbed, they had marital difficulties, and they had trouble holding on to their jobs. More often than not, heavy drug or alcohol dependence came into the picture.

  There wasn’t much doubt about which class Bryan fit into. He was happy in his marriage and successful in his work, with no drug or alcohol problems to speak of. His occasional reliance on the Xanax was minimal, no cause for concern. And he was untroubled by the two most reliable criteria of PTSD: the nightmares and those sudden, overwhelming flashbacks that could be triggered by a simple knock on the door or the sound of a car starting up. Panic attacks were surely awful things, but they were different from nightmares, and his relatively generalized phobias and aversions were a long way from the debilitating, highly specific hallucinations that went along with PTSD flashbacks. In fact, from what she could tell, he thought only infrequently about either his months of captivity or the shootout in the celery field.

  Bryan Bennett, in other words, was hardly any worse off than your run-of-the-mill neurotic, which left Zeta with an intriguing question: If he was fragile enough to still be bothered so many years after the original incident with his rather pedestrian range of neuroses, how had he withstood his fifty-eight days in a dungeon without really crumbling? Or ask its converse, and the question was no less provocative: If he was mentally and emotionally sound enough to withstand those two terrible months without turning into an emotional puddle, how was it that years later he’d fallen victim to his set of commonplace but troublesome neuroses? Either way it didn’t add up, at least not on the surface.

  But underneath the surface? Well, maybe it did, after all. This could turn into something interesting, she thought. She sat quietly for another minute, then shivered in the chill and went inside. She dialed the number of the departmental secretary they still allowed her as an emeritus at the U and requested a few hours of graduate research assistant time over the next few days. A little research in the U’s library stacks was in order, and she thought she knew just where to look.

  EVERY job, George Henry Camano had learned through the years, had a fly in the ointment somewhere, no matter how straightforward it was made to seem on the surface. In this case, it was one huge monster fly: the client organization. The VBJ, the Verkefniđ Something Something. This was a pretty hard crew to take seriously, and not only because they had no more members than they did letters in their acronym. It went considerably beyond that.

  The first thing that had caught his eye in their “citizens’ command center” (a swishy apartment in an unabashedly upper-middle class section of Reykjavik, toward which he was now walking) had been two big quotations, clipped from cheap newsletters, highlighted with yellow marker, and taped to the wall.

  Property is theft.

  The substitution of the proletarian for the bourgeois state cannot be accomplished without a violent revolution.

  Lenin and Proudhon. Mr. Communist and Mr. Anarchist. Camano had come close to laughing, not just at the flyblown slogans themselves, but at the murky thinking that went into taping both of them up. Which were they, anarchists or Marxists? Did they honestly think the two systems—if you could call anarchism a system—could peacefully coexist? Yes, they did, subscribing to a muzzy concept called anarcho-communism. It made no sense to Camano. How did they suppose real anarchists felt about submitting to a “state,” whether proletarian or bourgeois, liberal or reactionary? What did they imagine dedicated Marxists thought about the “self-organized” social revolution that was the cornerstone of anarchism?

  Not that he was interested enough to ask. Long ago, during his student years, Camano himself had been an ardent revolutionary, a fiery young Marxist-Leninist, an adoring disciple of Marcuse and Guillen. But by the time he was twenty the windy rhetoric had worn him down. All they had to do was keep it up, he’d finally told his “comrades,” and in the end they wouldn’t have to shoot the capitalists; they’d all have been bored to death. Soon afterward he had become an only slightly less fervent anarchist. That had lasted until he realized he was surrounded by addled juveniles who might just as well have been walking around with loser tattooed on their foreheads. If there had been anti-corporatists or eco-fanatics back then, he probably would have given them a shot too. But then his great epiphany had come: There was money to be made from these airheads, real money. Since then he’d been more concerned wi
th efficiency and cost-effectiveness than with the depredations of the global capitalist monoculture. Oh, there’d been a setback or two early on, but he had learned what he could from them and put them behind him. And he had prospered.

  The VBJ had come into existence two years earlier as an off-the-wall group of five University of Iceland graduate students, acolytes at the altar of a middle-aged professor of sociology, Magnus Halldórsson. Decidedly uncharismatic at the lectern—disorganized and stammering and given to swallowing his words—Halldórsson was a tiger when it came to writing incendiary tracts, and it was his prose that had given the movement its impetus.

  At first, meeting periodically in one or another of the students’ apartments, in the spirit of irreverent fun they had called themselves, in English, the Free Radicals. But things changed early on in what had started out as one more stunt that was supposed to end in nothing worse than a yogurt pie in the face of the CEO of a baby-food company that used biologically engineered meat in its products. Somehow, without meaning to, they’d wound up with the executive in their possession. Having no idea what to do with him or how to do it (their original goal had been nothing more than to get the pie-in-the-face picture into the papers), they had ended up more or less inadvertently extorting a million-and-a-half dollars from his parent company in Denmark. The whole affair had been handled privately; no one outside of the company had even known that there had been a kidnapping.

  But other people soon did. Kidnapping for ransom was unheard of in Iceland, and the thrilling news had quickly run through the coffeehouse grapevine that served the substantial community of disaffected Reykjavik youth. Here was something real, not just more high-flown, airy locutions or silly pies in the face, but something that made a difference . The escapade brought the Free Radicals thirty new members, with cells in three of the island’s districts, and they had earnestly set about the job of rescuing the planet, renaming themselves accordingly: Verkefniđ Björgum Jörđinni—Project Save the Earth. Humor, especially self-deprecating humor, was now a thing of the past.

  But their first serious undertaking had been a catastrophe: a slipshod attempt to kidnap Baldursson, the GlobalSeas CEO, in which two of their members had been killed and a police officer wounded. This was a bit too real for most of them. The chapters vanished, the new recruits melted away, and half the founding members as well.

  Now, only these three were left, and Camano wasn’t too crazy about any of them. The professor himself, Magnus, was still aboard, but he was the weak sister of the crew. Yes, he had propounded the anarcho-communist gobbledygook that was the underpinning—in Camano’s view, the decidedly wobbly underpinning—of the VBJ. “Willing submission to authority is the root cause of the earth’s ongoing destruction,” blah, blah, blah. This and other gems were taped to the wall too, but these days Magnus wasn’t propounding very much or doing anything else that was vaguely useful either. He was a disgraced ex-professor now, and keeping a low profile.

  Within half an hour of meeting him, Camano had him pegged. He was well acquainted with the type: It was one thing to sputter on about class struggle and capitalism-induced ecosystem degradation at his computer with a jelly Danish and a cup of coffee at his side, but getting involved in the brawl at ground level, that was something else altogether. Magnus Halldórsson was a weak, unhappy man, dismayed at what he had wrought and desperately wondering how the hell he was going to get out of it without getting himself either killed or arrested.

  Camano didn’t know and hadn’t asked to what purpose they planned to put the ransom money, but he was willing to bet that if Magnus got his hands on any or all of it, he—and it—would never be seen again.

  Once upon a time, but not anymore, the mercurial, unreliable Stig Trygvasson had been one of those worshipful acolytes, and although he’d long ago stopped admiring the man—contempt was closer to the mark now—he still held deeply to his old professor’s “teachings.” Magnus had spent his life preaching the virtues of an anarcho-communist-libertarian world; Stig actually lived in it. A furtive, squinchy-eyed thirty-year-old, feverish and reptilian, Stig scared the hell out of Camano. He was trouble waiting to happen, a grenade ready to explode, a loose cannon if ever there was one. Put a black beard on him and he could be the wild-eyed anarchist in the old political cartoons, about to lob a black, fuse-sputtering bomb at one societal institution or another (“Patriotism,” “Government,” “Capitalism”). Camano had so far handled him with kid gloves, but it was a tricky situation. He had not the least doubt that Stig would come to a bad end; he just didn’t want to be around when it happened.

  The third member was the lone female, Gullveig Válisdóttir, which wasn’t really her name. She’d been born Dagnyár Eyjólfsdóttir, Camano knew. Gullveig Válisdóttir was a nom de guerre she’d picked for herself: Gullveig, Norse goddess of war and rebirth, Váli, god of vengeance. Personally, Camano liked Dagnyár better, but he was in no position to object to fake names. At this moment, the three passports in the left inside pocket of his parka had three different names on them.

  Gullveig was a question mark. He couldn’t figure out what she was doing there, and he suspected that she wasn’t sure either. Although she readily mouthed the platitudes of the feminist/anarchist/communist /eco-nut role she’d constructed for herself, he sensed her heart—and maybe her mind—wasn’t in it. His impression was that what had kept her in the group had more to do with inertia than with enthusiasm. She reminded him of the plain-Jane coeds back home who had hung around the foreign students’ clubs because no one looked at them twice at the regular frats and social clubs. The fact that she had had an affair with Magnus and was now sleeping with Stig (after a period of overlap) did nothing to increase his confidence in her judgment. Or in theirs: Gullveig was a slow, dumpy, moon-faced girl who eschewed makeup, wore great galumphing combat boots, and probably didn’t shave her armpits (although that he didn’t know and hoped never to know).

  Fortunately, judgment was a nonissue. This operation would not depend on Gullveig’s judgment, or Magnus, or even Stig, who was the de facto leader, or at least the de facto mover, of the bunch. It was Camano who was directing the show, and from the very first of their dealings he had made it crystal clear that he wanted no suggestions, no creative ideas, nothing but unflagging adherence to the plan he would lay down. That was the only way he operated; take it or leave it.

  They’d taken it. It had been only a few weeks after the Baldursson catastrophe that they’d had the good sense to contact him for their next try, using the last of their baby-food money to recruit him. When he learned that it was GlobalSeas they wanted to go after again, he’d advised choosing another target—weren’t there any other local companies that were raping the environment or exploiting the working class that they could hit? But no. As they saw it, GlobalSeas had been responsible for the two deaths of their members (they were wrong; they were the ones who had bungled the operation from the beginning), and now it was once again Baldursson they wanted. Camano had accepted the commission in the end, once he was certain that they didn’t have a messy, dicey assassination in mind, but merely another ransom extortion.

  And that was a state of affairs that he knew how to manage better than anyone else in the world.

  Chapter 10

  Everything was going just fine; couldn’t have been better. GlobalSeas had booked the Hilton’s ninth-floor Executive Lounge to hold the seminar, so my morning commute to work was a twenty-yard walk down the hall from our room. Coffee, pastries, and soft drinks were set up for us each morning, the tables and chairs were comfortable and informal, and the attendees were receptive and friendly.

  It was Thursday morning now—I’d made it past the halfway point, and I was still flying high. There had been only one shaky moment, and that had been more laughable than disturbing. On Sunday night there had been a reception and cocktail party in the famous Ice Bar at the Restaurant Reykjavik, a big old yellow warehouse of a place down near the docks. The entire bar—that is, t
he room itself—is made out of ice, ostensibly from the glaciers: walls, counter, pedestal tables, chairs (they’re covered with furs), even the glasses. Bottles of vodka are stored in recessions in the walls. (Vodka, unlike wine and other spirits, doesn’t freeze or turn to a gel.) Illumination is by way of spooky blue lights that shine through the ice from the other side. The place is kept at a steady twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit, so at the door they hand you a quilted parka and a pair of gloves, plus a healthy jigger of Brennevín to get your furnace going, which it most certainly does. Brennevín is a Scandinavian schnapps made from fermented potato pulp and flavored with caraway. Unfortunately, it tastes about the way it sounds, but it does turn up your temperature. The Icelanders call it the “Black Death.”

  The whole thing is hokey but fun, or would have been fun, except that the room is only about twelve by twelve, and low-ceilinged to boot, and with a dozen people already crammed into its dim blue interior, it wasn’t for me. I’d taken one look, handed back my parka and gloves (too late to give back the Brennevín), and headed the other way.

  “I don’t think this is my kind of place,” I’d said to Lori, and we’d both laughed.

  Other than that, there had been no problems. I’d fretted about the possibility of panicking right out in public, if something sensitive came up once the training itself got under way, but no such thing had happened. So far it had been a snap; I was enjoying myself. Of course, it was the easy, abstract part of the program we’d been through: contingency planning, security measures, that kind of thing. I’d covered the establishment of corporate policies and crisis committees; the following of simple precautionary rules of life at home and in the office—avoiding personal and family publicity, keeping an eye out for cars that passed more than once in the neighborhood, not accepting telephone requests to go someplace unless you were sure of the caller’s identity; and the taking of defensive steps when on the road: not stopping at the same gas station more than a couple of times in a row, taking care not to be boxed in by two vehicles (especially vans or trucks), not getting into the first taxi in line or the one that comes up to the curb where you’re standing, and so on. Special watchfulness on the way to or from work is paramount, since that’s when something like ninety-eight percent of all kidnappings happen.